The time is 2:35pm, March 28, 2022. I played The Settlers on my Amiga 500 for one hour. It was fun and engaging to play.
The last time I played The Settlers was on May 2, 1996 (so says my diary) more than twenty five years ago. I had to look up longplay videos of The Settlers on YouTube to figure out how the gameplay worked.
A Cinematic Settlers Intro
The Settlers was a medieval simulator created in 1993 by Blue Byte Software.
The intro movie sequence mesmerized me as a child. The intro begins with a lone knight on horseback whose horse trots through scenic forest landscapes. The lush forest backdrop coupled with a knight on horseback trotting on stone paths back to his home castle sparked one’s imagination.
Kids bearing clubs and strangely anachronistic shirts and shorts run through the village streets, creating a homely ambience for the viewer to be absorbed in. After the Amiga 500 floppy disk drive spends precious seconds loading, the lone knight can be seen trotting through the village once the kids have disappeared off screen.
The Settlers portrays a real sense of community, with a cut scene to the blacksmith. It is here that you get a sense of the gameplay involved in The Settlers.
Scenes like the castle scene as the drawbridge descends to allow the lone knight on horseback to trot through is a scene that certainly inspired countless new graphic designers to learn to ply the trade. The intro ends with the lone knight snugly inside the castle, as the drawbridge closes behind him. The sense is that he is back home.
Game Preferences
Once the intro concludes, the game preferences screen loads. A new player has two options; a series of fifty missions against computer controlled opponents, or a random map, where you are able to choose up to three opponents, human opponents, computer opponents, or both.
There are also choices for map size. However, I found on the Amiga 500 with 1 megabyte of total memory that the game randomly crashes if more than one opponent has been chosen.
Beginning – Game Controls
Beginning The Settlers, you are shown to a random spot on the world map.
Hold the right mouse button and move the mouse wheel to navigate around the world map. Left click on the map will place a dotted hexagon shape over the terrain, with a flag as one dot. Depending on the terrain type, four options will be available; cannot build, build road only, build small building, build large (or small) building.
 Cannot Build |  Build Roads |  Build Small Buildings |  Build Large (or Small) Buildings |
Placing A Home Castle
The castle is the most important building in the game. All resources created by your settlers are stockpiled in the castle. The population of settlers can also be grown from within the home castle over time.
To build your home castle, click on the “castle, sickle & shovel” bottom leftmost icon in the toolbar at the bottom of the game screen over a location on the map which allows the construction of large buildings.
Building Road Networks
One game element that would really confuse beginners to The Settlers is why nothing happens once you click on a building to build. How do the required supplies of wood, stone and iron make their way to the site?
It could take a few minutes to discover that paths need to be designed from the home castle to the new site. To do this, click on the blue home castle flag. A new “hut, sickle & shovel” option will appear in the bottom leftmost icon in the toolbar at the bottom of the game screen.
Clicking on the icon will reveal a network of paths. A rectangle with yellow/orange diagonal stripes indicates that no path is able to be dug there. The rectangles where paths can be dug will have various shapes, with a flat green (flat land) to ascending pink (mountain) or ascending light green (hill). These various levels take the sim a shorter or longer interval to traverse.
Once you have created a path from the home castle to a new site location, your settlers can begin to travel between the home castle and the site locations using the shortest route between paths.
To begin with, the settlers will deliver supplies to the site location. Once all the building supplies have arrived, a builder will leave the home castle en-route to the site. Once the builder has arrived, the building will be constructed. Finally, if a settler is available, they will be converted to the type of person the new building requires. This new unit will travel to the new building, where they will wait for the required resources to be delivered in order to work.
Gameplay On The Settlers
With modern PCs you can hover over something with the mouse and see a tool tip. There were no tooltips back in those days. You had to decipher what a picture is supposed to mean.
Buildings In The Settlers
Looking at all these pictures of buildings that can be built, it can be difficult to guess the correlation between the buildings.
I see some metal sticking out of one building graphic and assume this building is an obvious blacksmith. I couldn’t figure out which one was a farm. It took me some time to figure out the game.
Here is a breakdown of the buildings available in The Settlers.
Small Buildings
- Stonecutter
- Guard Room (Military B.)
- Woodcutter
- Forester
- Fisherman
- Windmill
- Boatyard
Large Buildings (screen one)
- Butcher
- Armourer
- Steelworker
- Saw Mill
- Bakery
- Goldsmith
Large Buildings (screen two)
- Toolmaker
- Farmer (Corn)
- Stock/Warehouse
- Farmer (Pigs)
- Watch Tower (Military)
- Garrisson (Military)
Mines
- Stone Mine
- Coal Mine
- Ore Mine
- Gold Mine
Crash Course Game Strategies
This Settlers Tutorial is intended to be more of a crash course to get you started as quickly as possible with a basic gameplay refresher so that you can develop your strategy in The Settlers that much easier.
Build Fishing Huts
Some tips to keep in mind. To begin the game, build a few fisherman huts. Fish are the easiest resource that requires no other buildings in the supply chain. Fish can be directly provided as sustenance to all four types of miners. Corn (wheat) on the other hand needs to go through four phases in the supply chain before it is offered as sustenance to miners. Catch fish as soon as possible until you have had a chance to build other buildings in the supply chain.
Make Use Of The Geologist
It is easy to forget that a mining prospector is available in The Settlers. His main job is to conduct ground analysis. The prospector can conduct analysis on any point in the world map, as long as a flag icon appears in the middle of the hexagon-shaped cursor.
Click on the “prospector & three mines” bottom second leftmost icon in the toolbar at the bottom of the game screen. A basic ground analysis will reveal how much gold, iron, coal or stone deposits are in that location.
The best use of the prospector is in the mountain areas. To use the prospector to analyze a mountain site for gold, iron, coal and stone deposits, first place a flag in the mountain area to be analyzed. This should send a prospector out to analyze the terrain. This will provide analysis of the quantity of mineral deposits underneath that mountainous terrain.
One hour playing The Settlers was all my LG VHS/DVD recorder could handle before it was out of space. I was able to burn a 4-hour Game Tape, my fourth Amiga 500 game tape this year.
I uploaded The Settlers tutorial for other retro gamers to be able to relive The Settlers, watch a piece of history for the first time in their lives, or perhaps encourage others to dust off their own Amiga computer and play The Settlers for themselves.
Diary Of A Mad Chaos is a daily diary written from March 1996 until today, of which individual books and book series have been created, namely “The Lost Years” an exploration of young, entwined love, the “Wubao In China (猎艳奇缘)” book series which provides an extensive comparative analysis of the cultural differences between Eastern and Western societies, and the book titled “Foreigner (华人)” an exploration of race relations in Australia.
