Greetings newcomer! You’re probably looking through this forum in an attempt to find strategies or, simply put, a way to make your town succeed and thrive! Well, look no further! This forum is all about helping newcomers (We don’t bite here, I promise!) get to know the game and how to get better at it! To start things off, here a few pointers that you should ABSOLUTELY prioritize within the first few days of creating your town.
(NOTE: This is mostly based off of if you’re playing with the Ascendency, I may edit this for Rayya’s children in the future.)
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Walls, you’ll need them.
Having walls encompass your entire town (Or cliffs) is something you should attempt to achieve ASAP!!! Due to the fact that enemies cannot break walls (As of yet), this results in an impenetrable barrier that makes sure your hearthlings stay safe even when the worst is just outside! To explain why this works, you must understand the way that the AI spawns units. There is a certain range around a “hearthling presence” (Anywhere with buildings you built or a constant hearthling presence.) where enemies will not spawn, by building a wall around your town, you make it so that the hearthling’s “presence” is encompassed entirely by a wall, so the enemy spawns outside of the wall (Don’t make the wall too far away from the next structure or the enemy will be able to spawn between the wall and the rest of your town.). Using this simple and inexpensive method (Should only cost you about 7-14 wood, depending on where your town is located.), you can prevent the enemy from getting to you entirely! This becomes especially helpful late game when your army is on one side of the town and monsters are attacking from the opposite (You don’t want Leah Umbro to get hurt, don’t you?)! To sum it up, build walls around your town, it helps a lot.
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Did we talk about where you should place your town? We didn’t? Oh…
Where you plan on placing your town is without a doubt one of the most important aspects of the game! There are several things you’ll want to take into consideration when deciding where to place your banner:
- Are there choke points for the enemy that you can block off or make easier to defend? Does it have cliffs surrounding it?
- Do you have easy access to minerals? (I.e. A mountain)
- Does the area have plenty of trees and wildlife?
- Is it not at the corner of the map or on the edge?
If the location you are choosing meets all of these questions, it is most likely a good choice to settle!
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What’s that? You need to feed your hearthlings?! Oh come on!
While it may seem obvious, your hearthlings, as hard as it is to believe, do need to eat. There are a few ways you can get food, listed here:
- Trading (Certain merchants offer food I believe.)
- Farming (As versatile as they are, don’t just feed them radishes, carrots, and pumpkins!)
- In the Wild (Berry bushes spawn randomly on the map, and you can harvest them for berries!)
Always make sure that your food never drops to zero, if it does, something is wrong, very very wrong.
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Did someone say HOEDOWN TIME?! Yes, yes someone did.
Farmers are without a doubt, one of the primary sources of food in Stonehearth. Within the first 5 days of founding your town, you should have your carpenter create a hoe and promote a worker to a farmer. I’d recommend having at least 4 fields of - Unfortunately- radishes, pumpkins, and carrots total (1 Radish, 1 Carrot, 1 Pumpkin, then one more of any of those.). This will help you get food very quickly since even the gluttons can’t beat the output! It will make it easy to get more hearthlings since it will allow you to get more food over time to meet the ever-increasing daily check-up to see if you qualify for another hearthling! To summarize this section, get more farmers and fields, and enjoy the hoedown time!
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XP Farming, yes, even Stonehearth has a form of it.
Your crafters are an invaluable asset to early game and late game. It’s a good idea to always keep them working to ensure they continuously gain XP so, in case you need them later on, you can build that Shepard’s Staff you always wanted! A crafter with no work to do is the meaning of wasted potential. Always have them do something, even if it doesn’t benefit you with what they’re crafting. For example, I always have my herbalist maintain 99 healing tonics, no I don’t really need that much medical assistance. But it makes sure that my herbalist is always doing something even when I leave her alone for days on end.
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Wait? You wanted strategies? For military dominance? Alright then…
In terms of your military, you should ALWAYS have some wooden swords in reserve in case you need the extra military assistance, not too long ago, you used to have a “militia”, where it pretty much drafted everyone into the military upon alerting the town that a golem has entered the area. Nowadays this is no more, so this is the runner-up to that! Footmen do much better in combat than a traditional smack of the hammer from a worker. Now, in terms of military composition, early game (First week) (This is if you’re playing normal mode), you want 2 footmen armed with mauls, shields, and maybe cloth armour if you can trade for it. Mid-game (Second Week to Halfway through the third week), you want to add 1-2 clerics to assist those footmen. Clerics are, with no doubt, the all-time most valuable unit in an army, their ability to heal the troops whilst still in battle, buffing units from their mere presence, and overall awesomeness (I’m totally not a cleric myself) make them the real backbone of an army. Late game (Anything beyond Mid-game) you should have added at least 1 more footman and a knight, and progressively increase your army (For every 3 new hearthlings you get, you should have another person in the military).
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Can we all agree that death is bad? I think we can.
The last thing you want is for a person in your military to die, for anyone to die as a matter of fact. If a person in your military is taking all of the damage and you think they might not be able to pull through, there’s nothing wrong with falling back! Of course, if it’s just one person, and you know the rest of the army can take them, just withdraw them from the battle (Put them in a different party and move them next to the cleric or just back to the town if you don’t have one, but why wouldn’t you?). If a hearthling (Non-military) is too much of a hothead to refrain from attacking the enemy, then I’m afraid that that is between him and the enemy huh?
- This is getting long isn’t it? Well let’s just throw a few tips in this section.
- The engineer is more powerful than you’d think, consider investing in him.
- Always have a mine up and running, never let them complete it! Who needs sleep anyway?!
- Don’t run out of storage space, seriously, just don’t.
- Keep an eye on all of your hearthlings, maybe do periodic checks to see where they are, sometimes hearthlings can absent-mindedly trap themselves whilst building something or mining! Should this happen, a ladder is almost always able to get them out of their sticky situation. (After long enough of them being trapped, you will get a notification saying that <Character’s name> is in critical condition, but don’t let it come to that!)
QnA:
Is it possible to remove the tree layer?
Unfortunately, you cannot make the tree layer invisible without removing most likely what you wanted to see in the first place! Sorry, but those trees are going to annoy you whilst watching that intense Varanus battle!
Is it possible to mark multiple loots at once?
Yes, it is completely possible, just like the harvest tool, you just click and drag over the area you wish to “loot” using the loot tool (Under the same tab as the harvest tool!). (There is an auto loot setting under the gameplay tab in settings if you don’t want to take the time to do it at all!)
Is there a way to manually order an individual hearthling to go a certain point?
Partially, you can only do this with the military, putting the army man in a party of his own can allow you to manually move him anywhere you want. There as of now is no way to tell non-military hearthlings what to do, however (Man, they’re all hotheads!).
Is there a way to see what path hearthlings are taking?
Yes, by going to the gameplay tab in settings, there is a checkbox that says “Show Hearthling Paths”, just click it and you should be able to see where they are going!
Small tips and tricks:
- You can move wild plants just as you would furniture, so make sure to move them close to your town. No need for your workers to travel all the way down the mountain for berries!
- Do NOT keep your military assigned to their job at all times. They will literally starve trying to protect your town if you keep them assigned for too long!
I hope this proved helpful to you in your quest for greatness and pure awesomeness! If you have any questions or comments about this guide feel free to let me know down below! Thanks for reading and have a great time playing Stonehearth!
And did I mention that I have a Discord server? I didn’t? Well, here’s the link!
Also, feel free to friend me on steam!
https://steamcommunity.com/id/48294032423234242/