What's your best player survival tip? Help us with the new website!

I’ve been playing the game for about 10 hours now, and every time my village would gather some decent amount of gold, some pesky goblin would keep stealing it. So I carved a rather large cave into the mountainside and made a stockpile for all my valuables, blocking it off with a stonewall and reinforced door.

So my advice: Make sure you don’t let your gold lying out in the open, goblins could swoop down at any moment.

6 Likes

firstly, wlecome to the discourse @Brochy

secondly love the advice :thumbsup:

seeing as you edited it out ive decided to also edit it out :wink:

3 Likes

Hehe, mighty sorry about that :sweat_smile: I’ll get it changed quickly

1 Like
  1. Always strike a balance. Don’t upgrade all your Hearthlings to the more elaborate classes. Try to keep at least 4 workers for the early parts of the game.

  2. Suggested Starting Build
    Find an area near natural food sources to start.
    1 Carpenter
    1 Trapper
    1 Farmer
    4 Workers
    Between Gathering resources, building houses, beds from your carpenter, and food/supplies from your trapper and farmer, new Hearthlings will be flooding to your town in no time.

4 Likes

focus on your food supply first, beds work just as well outdoors

3 Likes

As you probably know, there are some relevant things here:

Also a lot of silliness. Hopefully this thread can stay a bit more serious.

If you start on a foothill, use the terrain to your advantage - fences are nice defenses for narrow ledges.
Mountains are highly defensible, but hard to live in - for now, found your settlement farther down.
In the plains, lakes are a nice substitute for moats or trenches, though those can help too.

4 Likes

Ya, of course we know about that thread… but it was also many Alphas ago. Now that things are a bit more, um, sophisticated, I’m sure that there are things you’ve discovered recently that would be applicable.

2 Likes

I would have to say make a farmer as early as you can. That way you can keep a steady flow of food going and moral will be high

4 Likes

With one farmer and a few small farms, there is little risk of starvation. Being unprepared for hostiles will get you killed. So make sure to do a few things to avoid becoming someone’s dinner:

  1. Check the stats of your initial hearthlings to find the ones with the most hitpoints. Use those with the most for your melee units so they can stay in the fight long enough to win. This makes a huge difference in bigger battles. I start with 2 even though it means that I start of just a little slower.

  2. The easiest weapon and armor upgrades help quite a bit early game. Right now you really don’t need the mason for much except for unlocking the tools for blacksmith and the stone weapon you can make at level one. Don’t be afraid to make a mason just just long enough grab the tools and a make a few cheap weapons, then make the mason your blacksmith or weaver until you have more hearthlings. Don’t forget to make the wooden shield with the carpenter, as the carpenter levels up without any effort. You can’t buy metal armor today, but it is fairly easy to buy the cloth variety early in game so you should do so.

  3. Don’t waste time with bronze unless you absolutely can’t find any iron. Iron is better and you only have to collect one type of resource instead of 2. I made another post about bronze, but I’ll admit I expected more people to agree with me. Your experience may vary. This would be easy to fix in game, so my recommendation may change.

  4. Learn how to control your melee units with the party commands. It is the only way you can make them retreat that I know of.

  5. Because if item #3, new players should consider starting in foothills near a mountain. You can find lots of plants and animals nearby and usually have easy access to iron. One farmer and one trapper can take care of the food in the beginning (no risk of starvation), so I ignore food resources on the map.

  6. Don’t panic when the goblin with the fancy hat shows up - the quest doesn’t start until you talk to him. If you’ve identified who is going to fight for you, you can activate them and them them equip before you open the dialogue. You can also stall by agreeing to the demands if you need to buy a few hours of time.

6 Likes

Don’t (for now - I imagine spawning logic may be adjusted in the future to make this less of an issue) place your standard down too close to a lake or cliff. Cliff is recoverable by the cunning use of ladders (though a bit of a waste of time to have to deal with), but I made the mistake of placing my standard down right by the edge of a lake (“yay, lakeside property,” she thought… Famous last words!) and ended up with two Hearthlings and a trapper’s knife spawning in the drink. NOT recommended.

Also don’t start a bazillion building projects at once. You’ll just end up with a bunch of pathetic-looking low walls all over the place. :wink:

2 Likes

Upgrade the Hearthlings with the lowest number of body (1-4) into Carpenters, Farmers and other occupations, but keep the ones with a body of 5 or 6 to make into Footmen. Also, don’t let your valuables and food lying around for goblins to destroy or steal.

At the start of your campaign, make sure you have a bed for every Hearthling and promote atleast 1, I prefer 2, Hearthling into a farmer and 1 into a Footman. This way you can start to farm early at an accelerated pace, all under the protection of your Footman. To add; I personally like it to just craft 2 Farmer’s Hoe’s, 8 Mean Beds and then just craft 20 shields or something of the likes of that to sell to the first vendor to come wandering into my hamlet, just to boost my economy very early on. Using this “strategy” I always meet the goals for the first Daily Update and thus you get your first additional Hearthling.

I would love to have some feedback on this strat, maybe some tips and suggestions for improvement.

Thank you :smile:

ive noticed that people have been suggesting high body for footmen, but you should also make sure they have a high courage, that way they will actually fight the monsters and not run away :smile:

so for a tip, “make sure your footmen have a high amount of HP so they can take more hits, but also make sure they have high courage so they can fight more fearsome monsters.”

5 Likes

here are my tips:

  1. always make beds for hearthlings and place them asap. they wont get the debuff that makes them slower and keeps them happy.

  2. farmers should have high body stat. makes them faster. and farmers dont build. so if you have stuff they need to collect and its far from camp. they might end up alone against undead.

  3. its a good idea to have at least 2 footmen.for a couple of reasons:

  • if one dies you still have a backup that has xp.
  • footmen are useally the first on scene and get focussed. if 2 are on scene one guy doesnt take all the damage. its shared.
  • sometimes footmen dont notice someone is under attack because they are on the other side of the camp. with 2 this chance is much much smaller.
  • 2 footmen can take almost anything early game if you give them shields and stone mauls. so you dont have to go into town defence mode and waste xp for your footmen,
  1. explore your surroundings on day one. there are no threats on day one and it makes it easier to spot enemies.

  2. trapper fields work better if they are left undisturbed. place them somewhere you are not building nearby.

  3. if a enemy campaign starts check if you dont have trapper fields or pastures nearby. the trapper wont go further than the field but sheep spawn around the pasture so you might get unlucky and it spawns in front of the enemy and your shepherd will go to it and might die

  4. never forget doors on buildings

  5. alwasy over produce food, better be safe than sorry.

  6. dont change jobs around to much. there is a penalty. they lose all xp to the next lvl and current levels make it harder to gain levels in other proffesions.

  7. maintain 3 treads, 4 cloth, and 2 leather and you dont have to worry about those reasources anymore. and can craft on without crafters( weaver, carpenter and blachsmith) getting stuck on waiting for resources.

  8. you can dig down anywhere and if you go deep enough find ores.

  9. at night its the best time to see if anyone is stuck somewhere because a bed is empty.

  10. sheep will run away if the pasture is not enclosed.

  11. there is an option to put hearthlings into parties and direct them. i suggest you use it.

  12. if you have the resources, give your millitary better equipment.

  13. crafters with high mind stat give a better chance for fine quality

6 Likes
  1. Generally settling near a small patch of berries(6 or so plants) is good enough to last you till 9 or so hearthlings.

  2. Set your hearthling with the highest movement speed to be your initial trapper as it will net you more resources.

  3. Don’t rush, masons and blacksmith can wait, the worse thing you can do is over-promote your hearthlings and be left with 1-2 workers for the base city foundation.

  4. Make a carpenter early, mostly for making beds, tables,chairs(less food consumption or high morale?l) and for a farmer’s hoe and maybe a wooden sword.

  5. Create 3 10x10 plots of soil with carrots, turnips and pumpkins to begin, this will get you a good base food supply alongside your trapper(can swap out turnips for corn,preferably after 1 harvest)

  6. If you don’t wanna have to deal with footmen… then don’t, just set up walls to keep invaders out, or settle in a valley and don’t build ladders up till you’re prepared. Wandering goblin parties can totally ruin a fun time if you’re not prepared.

  7. Build extra tables to sell for gold to buy upgraded worker’s clothing early on as it will increase their spped

  8. DON’T SETTLE ON MOUNTAIN PEAKS, OR MOUNTAINS EVEN
    There is hardly any valid reason to ever settle on a mountain peak, unless you want to build a system of ladders for farmers/trappers to transport food up and down the mountain(since you can’t create farms/trapping areas on rock) unless you know what you’re doing, your hearthlings will starve and your hearthlings will die

3 Likes

Villages and buildings can be fun to build and design, but right now they are quiet glitchy and cannot be removed. Your best bet to start out is to build a cave village. Example:

8 Likes

Sometimes, though, those can have even more glitches. Also, not everyone will want to build underground, though more power to those who do!

1 Like

N!

The ‘N’ key switches from a 4×4 mining block to a single block.

Try making a set of stairs down into a deep mine using only 4×4 blocks. Yeah, doesn’t happen… You end up reloading because everyone falls in a hole they can’t get out of.

I also always use 10×10 farm plots. One of each food type and two of silkweed. Two farmers handle it well.

However, to save space you might get the same amount of crop rows from a 9×9. Because they skip rows, not tested though.

3 Likes

Fights are almost only about the numbers of footmen and their gear so far, so to handle all implemented hostiles so far keep a stockpile of practice swords and some gear.

Assuming you have the promotion items, you can easily switch from other jobs to footmen whenever a fight occur. Never fight with a numerical disadvantage. Add some nearby gear as well and permanent footmen are unnecessary.

Just remember that changing jobs resets leveling progress, so don’t change people close to level up for higher levels (3+).

well this is eventually going to be implemented other then just the N key, so perhaps not the best tip :wink:

While footmen are nice to have around, don’t underestimate the power of a militia - carpenters and trappers are pretty nicely armed.

2 Likes