You are DAVE-37, a time travelling robot in 10th century with one goal: make more paperclips. There’s only one problem:

Robots don’t have opposable thumbs.

YOU’LL NEED TO USE MIND CONTROL
If you can’t do something yourself, brainwash someone else to do it. Use DAVE-37’s mind control abilities to brainwash Vikings into making paperclips.

MAKE VIKINGS BUILD COMPLEX SUPPLY CHAINS
Like your mother always said: paperclips don’t grow on trees. In fact, they don’t grow at all. They’re made. By Vikings. But in order to make those paperclips, you’ll need your vikings to gather raw materials like iron and wood to construct buildings that turn those resources into other, more different resources.

MAKE VIKINGS MAKE VIKINGS MAKE PAPERCLIPS
If you’re going to make lots of paperclips, you’re going to need a lot of help. While brainwashing vikings one-by-one can be fun and entertaining, to really get things humming along you’ll need to get vikings to get other vikings to do stuff. Like one of those multi-level-marketing schemes.

Get vikings to build control towers and give them a list of commands to give other vikings who happen to walk near. Set up complex chains of commands with multiple control towers to get loops of work so you can focus on other stuff. Like brainwashing more vikings.

MAKE VIKINGS BUILD YOUR VAST PAPERCLIP EMPIRE
Once you’ve scraped one region clean of all usable resources and converted them into paperclips, you’ll need to expand to new and exciting areas, with new resources and biomes and most importantly – more unsuspecting vikings to recruit into your paperclip making machine.

MAKE VIKINGS PREVENT VIKINGS FROM ESCAPING
Confusingly, vikings don’t like being brainwashed. So you’ll need to keep them busy with their tasks so they don’t wander off or worse; free other vikings from their brainwashing. Build fences, surveillance towers, tripwires and more to keep your vikings in place and on task.

MAKE VIKINGS SUPRESS RIOTS AND UPRISINGS
The longer vikings are brainwashed, the madder they get when they break free. And when vikings get mad, they liberate other vikings, break stuff, and set your hard-earned work on fire (rude, really). Feed them, ply them with alcohol and give them nice places to rest, or research new mind control technology to quiet them down en-masse.