Basics

About the game
From the official website, Founder's Fortune is a "creative colony simulation game" with the tagline Craft tools, build a home and protect your people. Guide your colonists by commanding them directly or assigning them job priorities, and generally taking care of them. Collect resources and increase your colony's wealth, build amenities for your colonists to use, engage in trade and war with the natives.

Colonists
see main article: Colonist

Colonists are the citizens of your colony and the backbone of your workforce. You start the game with 2 of them, with the option to re-roll their traits before generating the map. Building a bonfire is one of the first things you should do, as it is the only way to attract more people to your colony other than raising children.

They have moods, needs, expectations, and wishes.

Moods
The mood bar indicates how happy the colonist is currently. Additionally, on the rightmost panel you can see the list of moodlets the colonist is experiencing (e.g. enjoyed sitting by the campfire, was insulted by someone else, successfully won a fight). A colonist in a low mood is in danger of revolting, where they will refuse to do work for an entire day and just laze around.

Needs
These are the basic requirements for each colonist, such as hunger and stamina. They will attempt to refill them automatically: a hungry colonist will eat, and a tired colonist will go to sleep. Note that you can toggle "combat mode" to temporarily override a colonist's autonomy in order to force them to deal with enemies - they will ignore their needs so long as they are in combat mode. It is possible to drive them to exhaustion this way (they will receive a temporary negative moodlet), so make sure to toggle off combat mode when you are done fighting.

Expectations
These are quality of life requirements that each colonist expects. For example early in the game they may be content with eating raw food, but later on they will demand cooked food. How well you are meeting their expectations are indicated by the background color for each one, from green (met), to yellow and red (not met).

Note that the colony bonfire will only attract new people once you have met the expectations for all your current colonists. At the beginning of the game or each time a new colonist arrives, the expectations are increased. This means you will not automatically get a steady influx of new arrivals - you have to make sure your current people are happy before more think of joining.

Wishes
Finally, each colonist has two active wishes. These are optional requirements such as wanting to own a wardrobe in their bedroom, or to tell another colonist a joke. With every wish you fulfill, that colonist's Satisfaction meter is raised until it becomes full, where it resets while adding a bonus Rewards point. These points can be spent on removing negative traits that the colonist came with or, more importantly, buying additional positive traits.

It is possible to dismiss a wish (by clicking on the 'X' cancel icon on the top right corner of the wish) - for example, if you know the wish will take a long time to fulfill (behind several research items). This will cause the colonist to generate a new wish, the same as when a wish is fulfilled. However, they will get a negative moodlet for having a wish denied.

Resources
see main article: Resources

Most of your time will be spent harvesting resources on the map, as chopping trees for wood and mining for stone will be your main activities. Your colonists can also plant and grow crops for food, and build various types of storage to accommodate all those resources you are gathering and processing.

Trade
Additionally, traders will periodically stop by your colony so it is useful to have a surplus of items to trade. Finally, it is possible to interact with non-hostile Tiki Goblins and trade with them.

Conflict
Each map you generate will come with a number of different Tiki Goblin settlements, ranging from small 2-hut outposts to 6+ hut villages. At the start they are also randomly assigned a disposition towards your colony, from friendly, neutral, to hostile. Occasionally you will receive a popup demanding tribute from one of the settlements (disguised as "asking for help" if they are friendly). Rejecting their demands will result in a negative relationship modifier and the spawning of a war party, who will travel to attack your colony.

See also: Tiki Goblins

There are also random events, such as the trader showing up asking for help defending against pirates. (Note that if you build very close to the shoreline it may result in issues with those pirates spawning inside your buildings.)