Controls

For all of the time in the previous section about the learning curve for banished, you might be a little surprised to find out that the controls for the game are actually really easy to pick up, especially if you have played any of the other city builders. Your camera controls can be controlled completely with your mouse or with the keyboard. You can move around using WASD or by moving your mouse to the edges of the screen. Clicking the scroll wheel down and moving your mouse left or right allows you to turn the camera to get a different angle to see around trees or buildings, you can do the same on your keyboard with Q and E as well. Scrolling in with the scroll wheel will zoom you in, pressing insert and delete on your keyboard will do the same thing. 

While in game most of what you will do you will find in the menu system down in the bottom right. They have set the F keys to open up each menu if you prefer keyboard shortcuts and then once you have a specific menu open you can select the items using the number keys. Personally I prefer to stick with the mouse when navigating the menu. Each option has an easy to understand icon to make them easy to find and if you have any questions mousing over the buttons will give you more details.

The tools and reports section will help you find out more about your game. You can open up a few reports that show vital information like the event log and the general information box. I would highly recommend moving those and the professions boxes to someplace on your screen and keeping them open all of the time. Without them it is hard to know what it going on at any point in time. I would prefer that they start out open from the beginning, but I do love that you can adjust and configure the UI to what works best for you. If you want you can even open up information boxes on settlers or buildings and pin them to your screen as well to keep a closer eye on things.