Mind Over Magic – First 15 Days Survival Guide

This guide will show you everything you need to do for your first 15 days in Mind Over Magic.

Preface

Hey, I’ve had a few tries at starting this game, and it was confusing each time. So, I decided to make a quick guide about my first experiences. I want to help new players figure out what to do at the beginning, so they don’t have to restart as much as I did 🙂

I’m still learning the ropes, and this guide is a work in progress. I might change it as I discover more. There aren’t many guides out there for beginners, so I thought sharing what I’ve learned is better than nothing. Just remember, I’m playing on relentless mode, so if you’re on forgiving mode, the starting setup might be a bit different, but the main ideas should still apply.

Initial Mages

In relentless mode, when you kick off a new game, you get to pick two mages to start with. What I think is super important here is the HP stat. Try to max that out because mages with low HP might take a couple of unlucky hits in those early underschool battles, and if one bites the dust too soon, it can mess up your game big time.

Apart from that, keep an eye on useful medals. I particularly like the one that boosts your mage’s conviction every time they do a haul task. Early on, when you don’t have a lot of recreational options, conviction can become a headache. So, fixing up the conviction each time your mage hauls something is a simple way to handle this in the early game.

Initial Layout

For the first floor, make sure it’s 5 walls high to fit a wand crafting machine and a research machine. They can share the same room since both benefit from the workshop room bonus. Right next to that, create a classroom with a training stone. This lower level should also be 5 walls high, and you can use a floor as a roof. Connect to it via a stairway in your workshop.

Move on to the second floor, where you can extend the roof over the outer wall’s edge a bit, utilizing the full width available. Create a skewed room on the outer edge with at least 6 cots; this serves as a sleeping room. The sleeping room bonus is crucial early on, allowing your mages to do more work each day when you can’t hire new ones yet. To get the bonus, your outer wall should be 7 walls high, and the inside wall should be 4 walls high. Connect them with a skewed roof, and it’ll count as a sleeping room.

Initial Research

Here’s some advice: kick off your research as soon as you can. Use your ghost mage for this because they don’t need to sleep and can research during the night. At the start, focus on berry farming as your top priority, followed by the cooking pot research. After that, go for the basic rituals; you’ll need them to hire more mages.

Getting your food supply rolling is crucial early on because food is the main bottleneck. Also, you’ll need berries for the fog-repelling ritual, and you definitely don’t want to run out when the fog is at your doorstep.

Once the cooking pot research is done, set up a kitchen on your second floor, next to the sleeping room. It can have a flat roof, and make it wide enough for another stairway to the next level.

After that, you’ve got choices. I prefer researching for the kitchen room bonus (check tooltips for room bonuses) and then go for the dining room. Another vital research is the gramophone; it can help your mages regain conviction.

The next big one is the medical bed. Make sure to mine at least 24 iron early on because you’ll need 12 per medical bed. Get two medical beds up as soon as possible. Avoid fighting in the underschool before setting these up, or your mages might suffer breakdowns from injuries, and you won’t have a way to cure them!

Initial Recruits

If you’ve got a sleeping room with 6 cots, aim to educate three students simultaneously. Have one of your mages focus on teaching above everything else to speed up their training. For the first three students, the wands you give them aren’t crucial; the goal is to get them fully trained quickly, let them graduate, and receive 6 adept scrolls.

Now, for the second group of students, equip two of them with lightning wands. You need two staff members with lightning skill level 3 to enroll gifted students. Once this group is fully trained, hire both lightning students as new staff members. After that, exclusively recruit gifted students.

Initial Underschool battles

I’ll say it again: don’t dive into underschool battles until you’ve got at least two medical beds ready to go. Once your mages lose just one HP, they’ll feel the pain and quickly experience breakdowns if there’s no medical bed to treat them after the fight.

As for wands in those early fights, it doesn’t matter much; the opponents are pretty weak, so any wand will do. Personally, I’ve found fire wands and dark wands to be the most effective, but that might just be a matter of preference.

Your goal is to do just enough battles to get the arcane scrolls needed for early research progression. Going overboard doesn’t help because your initial students will be subpar and have a low stat cap. You won’t want to keep them as staff members anyway. Save the heavy fighting for when you unlock better wands through research and have the setup ready to hire only gifted students.

Final Thoughts

I hope these starting tips make your beginning smooth, so you won’t need to restart too much. I might add more to this guide later, but for now, this should carry you through the initial 15-20 days with fewer hiccups. Anyway, if you’re one of those players who are getting those annoying random crashes, check out our Mind Over Magic troubleshooting guide.