Going Medieval stole my heart with a large, cursed hole

Going Medieval, the Middle Ages-themed colony sim, has finally left early access after five years of tinkering. It's changed a great deal since I first played it, when I already thought it was brilliant. Back then, it struck me as an easy-to-recommend RimWorld-like, but now it's just as evocative of the devilishly complex Dwarf Fortress. I still think it's brilliant.

With that out of the way, let's talk cellars.

I had a vision when I started my playthrough of Going Medieval 1.0. A simple vision for a simple man. I wanted to build a castle. A big castle with stalwart walls, a few towers, maybe even a moat. Something where, if you encountered it, you'd be like "Yes, this certainly is a castle."

Maybe you'd expect me to start with the walls. That makes sense. But you'd be dead wrong. Setting vanity aside, I decided to begin with the part of the castle that most people never see. Because, frankly, it's a little boring. I started with a cellar. Starting at the bottom felt practical if not glamorous, and with summer about to kick off, quickly rotting all the food in my outdoor storage yard, I needed a cool place to house all my delicious meat.

The pits

Digging a big hole doesn't sound too complicated, but it quickly became obvious I had bitten off more than I could chew. My colony was only one season old and contained a grand total of four people. I'd tasked one of them (Redmund, more on him later) with the very important job of researching new medieval tech—effectively forcing him to spend all his waking moments writing chronicles.

How Going Medieval handles research, I should add, is incredibly novel. See, research is a tangible thing here. When you put your smarty-pants settlers to work at one of your research tables, they're not simply filling up a bar. They are studying and writing, producing texts of different qualities that must then be stored.

These books effectively work like currency, and each new discovery has a specific requirement—a different mix of chronicles, textbooks and theses. This means you need to protect your knowledge. If a fire destroys your library and you lose all your books, your scholars will need to replace them all before more new research can be conducted. It makes research less abstract, as well as capturing just how fleeting knowledge was in the years before the printing press was invented.

Anyway, back to the hole! The other three settlers were on digging duty, but they also needed to take breaks to hunt, work in the fields, cook meals, look after our burgeoning stable of critters and craft summer-appropriate attire. Progress, then, was slow.

Like RimWorld, Going Medieval gives you a lot of power when it comes to prioritising tasks and creating schedules, allowing you to automate the day-to-day busywork instead of commanding your settlers directly (which you can still do, if you need to). In this way, I was able to create the perfect rota, ensuring someone was always digging, and none of the other critical chores were going ignored. But the hole was still taking forever to complete.

My eyes were too big for my belly. To be honest, I knew this right away, but it was only after five days of constant digging that I accepted defeat. I shrunk the area I'd marked for the hole. Some people may call it cowardice, but after another five days I had a pretty big hole that was ready to become a cellar. Cowardice pays.

Bedridden

The cellar would have a twin purpose, I decided. It would be my primary storage area, protecting my goods from the weather, and a dungeon. But since I didn't have any prisoners but did, occasionally, have injured citizens, I turned the dungeon into a makeshift infirmary. And for a time things were great. The castle had its foundations, we had an abundance of food, and with less digging to do my minions could enhance the nascent medieval colony in other ways. Then Redmund went a bit weird.

Redmund was, until this point, the GOAT. He wasn't just the group's greatest scholar; he was also an accomplished swordsman. A true leader. Unfortunately, he was slightly injured in a battle against raiders, defending his friends who were standing on a raised platform, while he sliced and diced enemies at the bottom of the stairs. The injury was minor, but his recovery triggered his weird obsession with convalescence.

Most characters have activities they love or hate, and for some reason Redmund really, really, really loved recovering from illness and injury. Even after making a quick recovery, he would spend all day lying in the temporary infirmary, having a wonderful time. Occasionally he'd grab some food, or do a tiny bit of research when I forced him to, but he'd always just be moments away from climbing back down the hole and going to bed.

The obsession was so powerful I could think of no other solution other than to destroy the bed. Which actually worked perfectly. Redmund went back to normal, only venturing into the cellar to grab supplies. Life continued. But then the rats arrived.

Unlike RimWorld's man-eating critters, Going Medieval's ferocious animals don't make a beeline straight for your settlement. Indeed, most of the time, when a fox or a wolf gets aggro, they just take it out on other animals, sticking to the traditional food chain. But this rat invasion was a unique event, perhaps spurred on by the large supply of meat (slowly rotting) in my cellar.

The rats burst into my cursed hole without warning, skittering out of some hidden subterranean rat kingdom, and immediately started eating all of my food. Their thirst for meat did not stop at slabs of beef or carcasses, though. A baby goat I was training foolishly walked down the stairs to the cellar to look for some hay (this was before I built a pen for them), and was promptly devoured by the swarm.

Rodent riot

I had to draft the whole settlement to defend the cellar. Going Medieval's brawls are a little messy and hard to follow, though they are usually a bit more brisk than RimWorld's. Some of the rats escaped to the surface, so I ended up trying to navigate this brawl across multiple layers, which, honestly, was a giant pain in the arse. My armed citizens did, at least, dispatch the pestilent beasties rapidly. I left their bodies in the storage area—they stole my food, so now they were food. This is justice.

By this point, I'd started to properly work on the castle. The kilns were working 24/7 spitting out clay bricks, and most of my peasant pals were whiling away their days digging up clay and chopping down trees to satisfy the huge demand for resources. These big construction projects sit in a sweet spot: they feel like monumental tasks, but they can be undertaken very early on in a playthrough. With only five people to boss around, I actually made speedy progress, though I did forget to feed the animals. RIP Barry the cow—gone too soon.

I'd stopped thinking about the cellar. I had bigger concerns. But the cellar was not done with me yet. One more curveball was coming my way.

A couple of years ago, long after I tried out the early access build, Going Medieval got really into water. Prior to that, there wasn't any water. The introduction of this most vital of liquids came with a whole bunch of rules and new mechanics—including the ability to create dams and water traps, so you could flood corridors to take out invading foes. Extremely cool. Flooding was also introduced. Less cool, for me specifically, and my cursed hole.

See, I hadn't bothered to build walls in my cellar. Why should I, when dirt did the job perfectly? And for about two years of in-game time, this was totally fine. Until, tragically, it was not. I was getting really into beekeeping when I got the alert. My cellar was now a gross swimming pool. Ground water had seeped in through the soil, flooding my storage area and the infirmary/dungeon, forcing me to leave my bees and get wet.

Holes were dug. Makeshift drains created. And, of course, new wooden walls were in order, which required a complete redesign of the cellar. At one point I removed the stairs because I needed to place them somewhere else, not realising three people were hanging out in the cellar. There wasn't any wood in the stockpile, either, so they couldn't build a way out. Eventually their topside friends came to help, but it got a bit dicey for a second.

Truly, the most cursed hole in all of medieval England. Hull Pot's got nothing on my cellar.

Holy hole

I did not, when this misadventure began, expect to spend so much time worrying about a big pit. And I haven't even mentioned the time raiders trapped a sick old man down there. He lived, I should note. The raiders did not. I spent so much time tinkering with it, though, and overcoming so many obstacles it threw in my way, that it became the centrepiece of my jaunt back to the Middle Ages. And despite all the swearing it elicited, I had a cracking time.

Thankfully, I think I've got the hole under control. There's also a proper castle sitting on top of it now. As for my next project, I'm going to erect a great big bloody cathedral to give my peasants a nice dose of religion. And you know what cathedrals need, right? Yep, crypts. Time to dig another cursed hole.