The Settlers Online starts out familiarly for anyone who’s played a Settlers PC game. You begin with an untouched, newly found piece of land. The Mayor’s House has already been built, presumably with resources brought across on the boats. The first thing you need is wood, so you build a fir wood cutter to start cutting down trees. Next you build a sawmill to convert the logs into planks that can be used to build with. You’ll also need to build a forester to ensure you don’t completely use up the forest without replanting. Each of these buildings takes a few minutes to build so you can do quite a bit of waiting around as they complete. If you want to you can pay 2 crystal to complete each building instantaneously. Crystal can be bought with real currency, so this is how the free-to-play game is intending to extract revenue from players.

Continue reading El33tonline’s hands-on preview of The Settlers Online.