Amassing a varied network of resources is an essential part of Civilization 7. That said, the game’s tutorials leave some big gaps in how resources actually work. Acquiring resources for your settlements is one thing, though Civilization 7 throws up several instances where you can’t slot them – and doesn’t tell you why.
Below, we’ve broken down everything you need to know about resources in Civilization 7, including tips on how they work, how to get them, the circumstances under which they work correctly, and how to fix issues where the game won’t let you slot items to towns and cities.
How to get resources in Civilization 7
You have to actually obtain resources before you can slot them, and Civilization 7 gives you a few methods to get them:
- Establish a settlement in the best location
- Create trade routes
- Conquer other settlements
Let’s break those down a bit.
Image: Firaxis/2K via sbjelectronics
The first way is establishing a settlement near enough to a resource node so that the town or city limits encompass it. Doing so automatically adds the resources to your network, and as your settlement grows, any additional resources that get caught up in your settlement’s area of influence will also become available.
The other method involves creating trade routes with the merchant unit. Each merchant can establish one route to another civilization’s city, and you get any resources that city has nearby for a small sum of Gold each turn – but only nearby resources. Anything that city imports for itself is out of your reach. The amount of gold you pay depends on how many resources the target city has, but you can expect between eight and 12 Gold per route, per turn in most cases. Civilization 7 doesn’t let you cancel trade routes, so these transactions are permanent.
Building a strong and varied supply of your own resources attracts merchants from other civilizations as well and helps balance the flow of gold leaving and entering your coffers.
The final way is conquering other settlements, which adds their goods to your pool of available city and bonus resources. If you keep the city, it’s a good idea to leave any happiness resources where they are until unrest dies down and you can construct happiness buildings there. Otherwise, the level of unhappiness might cause the settlement to defect or drag your surplus happiness down across the empire.
All types of resources in Civilization 7
Resources are items that offer bonuses, either for specific yields in the settlement where you allocate them or for your civilization more broadly. Civilization 7 uses little pictures of the source to show which tile they’re on, like a little horse picture or a jar of spices, and you can hover over it to see what benefits it offers.
Some increase Food production, which helps settlements grow more quickly. Others increase Production or add a small Gold multiplier to a settlement’s output, and a few provide bonus Happiness, which is an excellent way to offset unrest in newly acquired settlements or if things just go sour unexpectedly.
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Civilization 7 divides its resources into three types — city, bonus, and empire — with a fourth, factory, that emerges during the Modern Age. As the name suggests, city resources are only for cities, so you can’t slot them into towns. You can allocate bonus resources to any city or town connected to your trade network, though. That’s vague Civilization 7-speak for a settlement on a continent where you have at least one trade route or a coastal settlement with a port.
Empire resources are things such as marble, gold, or tea. Their benefits apply across your civilization, perks such as additional damage for cavalry troops or extra gold, and you don’t have to allocate them.
Most bonus resources from the exploration age turn into factory resources in the modern age, including chocolate, fruit, and cotton. You can only allocate factory resources in a city that has a factory, which is a process in itself. Civilization 7 lets you build factories only in settlements with a rail station that are also connected to your capital. Most towns and cities in your civilization automatically have roads connecting them after you have a trade route established, but if your network has gaps, create a merchant unit and use their “build road” command to lay a rail line between two settlements with a rail station.
Image: Firaxis/2K via sbjelectronics
You can only slot one factory resource into a city with a factory, regardless of where it is or how big the city is. Factory resources are helpful to have, whether you’re pursuing an Economic victory or not, since they provide more specialized bonuses — citrus contributes to naval production, for example — or perks that resources didn’t offer in earlier ages, including increased science yields.
For more, see our full list of all resources in Civilization 7.
How to slot resources on a city in Civilization 7
Select the icon with the leaf symbol to open the resource menu. There, pick which resource you want, and decide which settlement you think should have it. The resource screen shows each settlement’s current yield outputs, so use those numbers to inform your decision. If your capital already has 80 production but you’re struggling to make gold, for example, it might be worth slotting bonus production resources into a town with the growth specialization instead, since production converts to gold in those settlements.
Civilization 7 always throws up a leaf icon notification in the bottom right when you obtain a new resource, so there’s no chance of accidentally missing it.
How to increase resource slots in Civilization 7
Civilization 7 is a bit murky about which settlements get how many slots and what you can do to boost their number of available resource slots. The only surefire way to do it is to add camels as a resource, which increases the number of slots by two in the settlement where the camel is – or one, technically, since the camel takes up a slot. Camels are a city resource, so this method won’t work for towns. It’s also not available in the modern age, when camels stop existing as a resource.
Aside from your capital city, which ends up with multiple resource slots as the game progresses, most towns will have between one and three slots, while cities get three to five. Growth capacity seems to be how Civilization 7 determines the number of slots, rather than trade routes or available resources. For example, in several games, our cities with populations over 40 that generated food over 80 had four or five resource slots, while those with populations of 30 or so had fewer.
Why won’t it let me slot resources?
Image: Firaxis/2K via sbjelectronics
If Civilization 7 won’t let you slot a city or bonus resource to a settlement, and you’re not trying to stuff a city resource into a town, the issue is almost always the result of that settlement having no connection to an existing trade route. It might be on an island, surrounded by rival civilizations, or just further out than where your merchants currently travel.
The easiest way to fix that is to purchase or create a merchant unit and establish a trade route to the settlement closest to the town or city where you’re having the trouble. If the settlement has access to navigable water, you should be able to bypass the merchant solution by just building a port.
Empire resources show up as resource nodes on the map like any other, but they apply to your entire civilization and require no management. You can hover over them at the top of the resource screen to see what they do, but you can’t move them around. Factory resources are only for settlements with a factory, but if you can’t slot those in a city with a factory, check your rail network. There’s a good chance a settlement between the factory city and your capital doesn’t have a rail station, or the game forgot to build a road between it and your capital.
For more Civilization 7 guides, see how to set up trade routes, how to reach distant lands, and how to use treasure fleets. Plus, here’s our leaders tier list and a list of all resources.
