I realized soon that a cleric was instrumental to survival, and rushing a lot of squishy apprentice footmen was not a good idea, so I rushed the cleric! I found that I can get a cleric in Hard mode, unmodded (I have @BrunoSupremo 's Easy mod, which I used for practice, then normal, and then finally in Hard mode! I might be able to get it a bit earlier, but a lot of thinking, pausing and shuffling of jobs needed. I also want to point out I did not buy any of the mats (like leather, which would make it quicker, but unreliable that the merchant will sell it).
So, can you, without mods or “helping it along” via tricks, get a cleric faster?
I took a day off of work to try this. I am that kind of nerd.
Get a lot of flower plants next to your camp even if you hearthlings have to walk pretty far and do nothing else in the meantime.
Harvest them as they bloom, even if you have to use the harvest tool over and over again.
Using the herbalist staff as start item is recommend but you have to pray for a trader to give/sell you some leather.
Starting with the trappers knife instead of the herbalist staff can be faster if you do not get visited by any trader who sells you leather.
I tried that, was getting a cleric by day 7 or 8. Not 5. Are you saying
you have gotten to cleric faster, or as fast by harvesting flowers? I’d be
interested in your results.
Day 7 or 8 is pretty fast but I think you can get a cleric faster if you are lucky and get the leather trader early.
I did not really pay attention but I am sure that you can get the cleric on day 6 or 5.
Good starting position, luck with flowers and traders, some high intelligent herbalist and you will have a cleric pretty fast.
So you need to start with a trappers knife as you will get the herbalist level 2 before you see any traders.
And a person with 6 mind to be your cleric.
Next you just do the standard planes start for a hardmode game, focusing on the brightbells over silkweed and berries.
Once all the plants have been moved closer all you need to do then is to promote a weaver and make one spindle of thread and then one bolt of leather, you have the furs from the trapper.
Then wait till your herbalist is level 2 and promote.
You’ll probably have to fight off a single raid with just a footman but that is fine.
Since we’re getting into hard mode discussion here:
Most has been said, flowers to the base, spam potions and so on. You want to make sure that your cleric has very high spirit stats instead of high mind stats.
The potions and a herbalist usually work for a few days, which is enough to level your herbalist. By that time, you’d most likely have pelts from killing wolves or bought those from travellers. Get a weaver and finish the cleric process.
well they didn’t specify that the cleric had to be useful they just specified a cleric, therefore the quickest you can get one would be one with a mind of 6 because then they gain experience faster. I say useful but any cleric will do the job, one with high spirit is just marginally better.
In fact if you had a 6,1,6 or a 6,2,5 then you would have a decent cleric just as fast.
I just came here to say @groms was right, I tried it that way, and got one in 3 days, just in time for the first combat… Could have done it faster probably.
So it was not as impressive, my original post, as I thought. But I learned something and am having fun.
If I had not asked, I would not have learned. I still think getting the trappers knife feels kind of sneaky, but it is totally fair as a current part of the game, of course. Now I want to do it again, try to beat my time but get a cleric with a spirit higher than 2
To rush a cleric, you want a hearthling with a Mind and Spirit of 6 each – that way, they’ll heal more and thus get slightly more XP whenever they help another hearthling out.
Spamming the cheapest tonics is the best way to grind levels, since the time cost of more expensive medicinal supplies isn’t offset by a high enough experience gain – in other words, you gain the XP faster overall even though they have to make more potions that way.
As for quick leather, I’d agree on taking the trapper’s knife rather than an herbalist’s staff – your Carpenter will be making one of those before the end of the first day, and at that point your other hearthlings will still be dragging flowers across the map lol.
Also, once you have your Herbalist you want to start playing aggressively with your soldiers. Doing that will concentrate the damage onto the soldiers rather than letting monsters go after your civilians, so your Herbalist will only have a few charges to look after but they’ll get heaps of XP/practice from those charges. This saves time walking back and forth between patients, so you get more healing in a given time than you would if the damage was spread over more hearthlings.
From what I have seen, herbalists don’t actually get any experience from healing people only from crafting stuff, I could be wrong but I haven’t seen a herbalist gain exp from healing. Or if they do it isn’t noticeable/ is applied to there exp bar at a weird time when I haven’t been watching it.
