The first thing you’ll encounter in MOM after creating your initial staff is the fact that you’re trapped beneath the Fog. In order to start the game, you’ll need to get above ground, and you can do this through your first ritual.

Clicking on the Mana Font will allow you to perform two rituals. The first (and only one avalable at this point) is to push the Fog back a little bit. Later, once you have at least one student and a few more resources, you can repel the Fog a greater distance.

This UI design comes up a few times. Here, you are asked to assign a variable number of NPCs, identified by the glowing sigils on the floor. There will be two types of sigils: one can only accept staff members, and the other can accept either students or staff members. NPCs can be dragged from the sidebar and placed on the sigil to satisfy the situation, and once the ritual is complete, that NPC will gain XP as shown. The right-hand sidebar will list who is participating and the benefits they will gain. It may also list other benefits or detriments that will result in completing the task. Finally, each activity has an amount of time needed to complete the task. This simple, initial repelling of the Fog only takes 5 minutes, but later, it can take longer.

The User Interface

With the Fog opened up, the staff will move above ground, and the building can begin. But first, check out the UI.

Notifications

In the upper-left, you will see information that you need to know. This will provide popups leading to Codex entries, so while the game doesn’t slap you with tutorials, it does at least provide context for when you should be looking for information. It will also inform you of emergency events (highlighted in red), NPC effects like revealing quirks, and if you have any idle staff.

Roster

At the top of the screen we have the school’s roster. You can get a quick overview of everyone in the school, their level, and elemental attunement. Clicking once on the portrait will select that NPC, and double clicking will move the camera to their location.

Hovering over the portrait will display a quick overview of the NPC including their species and position, level and current XP, HP, mana, and current conviction, their wand type, and their elemental stats.

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Wait, Who is Blair?

Every game starts with one dead staff member.

This ghost provides another set of hands that can do pretty much everything that any other staff member can do, with a few benefits. For one, they don’t need sleep. For another, they can reach areas that might be inaccessible to corporeal staff, like construction areas currently without stairs, or roofs. Ghosts don’t have any particular elemental priority and cannot advance.

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School Stats

Continuing clockwise, we have the school stats. When starting out, the school can only have a maximum of 21 NPCs, with each element represented up to three times (primary elemental attunement). This can be increased through relics.

The panel also lists inventory that the school currently has on hand. Each time you build a station, furniture, storage, or similar, it will be listed here for record keeping and easy scroll-to access. Below that is a list of anything that can be found on the school grounds in its natural state (i.e. as of yet unharvested). When multiples are listed, repeated clicking will scroll the viewport to each instance of that item.

The resources panel will present in two ways. The first is the new view. This provides a list of all resources as they are discovered, along with how many you have on hand. The second view is the categorized view. You can clear the list of new materials using the link at bottom of the stack. There is also an edit link that opens a panel which allows you to select which categories and/or materials to include in the list, as well as a means of enabling or disabling the new panel.

Population and Views

The lower right has controls for scheduling NPCs, managing their relics, and viewing a log of what has been displayed in the notification section if you missed something or need a refresher. It also includes different “heat maps” of various areas of the school for important information like lighting, cleanliness, and pathing.

Since each of these is important, we’ll go over them in another post.

Time Controls and Calendar

At the center bottom we have our time controls. You can force-pause the action in response to certain events, and that’s configurable in the settings. There are also buttons for screenshot mode, Codex, and the settings panel.

The calendar displays the current day since the founding of the school and each block on the meter represents one hour of in-game time. Dark blocks represent night and the light blocks represent…well…daytime. As some rituals require a period of time to cast, this is important to know: some rituals need to be performed at a specific time of day, and some gain benefits or detriments depending on when they are enacted.

At the end is a count-down to when the Fog will envelop the school. This is only under current conditions. Performing the repelling ritual at the Mana Stone will allow you to keep the Fog at bay. This number represents how many days you have until the Fog overtakes everything if you do nothing.

Actions and Detailed Info Panels

Finally, in the lower left we have the actions bar and selected item info panel popup. Like the population and views bar, the actions bar will get its own post.

Whenever something or someone is selected, their details will appear here. In the above example, I’ve selected Prof. Phillip. We see his stats as well as his current objectives. Below that we have some buttons that…wait for it…we’ll cover later on.

What To Do First

Harvest wood and stone

You will need stone and wood to start building. As mentioned in the first article, staff members with high Nature and Earth skills are best at these tasks, although anyone can perform them. You can select trees and surface rock by clicking on them and pressing C to chop trees and M to mine rocks. Double clicking on any resource will select all of that type of resource within the viewport, which makes mass-harvesting easier.

Note: Overharvesting might seem like a good idea, but eventually it will start to rain. During rainstorms, any loose materials on the ground suffer degradation and may vanish. The best way to start before being able to put materials in chests is to only harvest what you need.

Also note: You don’t need to tell NPCs to haul items. When a job needs resources, NPCs will go out to the grounds to collect the harvested items that are needed.

Build your first room(s)

To start, you’ll want to build an area where you can create two rooms: a dorm for your staff, and a place to put the Arcane Secretary — the device used for researching.

At this point I wouldn’t worry too much about satisfying keywords for rooms. There isn’t enough space and chances are good that the building will undergo renovations over time. Some might be simple to accomplish, like skewed, but some room requirements need a specific set of dimensions that cannot be accommodated by the starting foundation.

Furnish the rooms

Finally, you’ll need three cots for your living staff, and the Arcane Secretary for research.

Of particular note is the Arcane Secretary. You can build in the room where the Mana Stone is located. I don’t know if there are important strategies for or against doing this, but putting the research station in the room with the Mana Stone would free up an above-ground room for other uses.

In the next post, we’ll go over the act of building and furnishing our first few rooms.

Series Navigation

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