Against the Storm

• If it's not something that you can grow on fertile soil or derived from it, you'll run out of it eventually.

• Demolishing buildings returns 100% of the resources used for the construction.

• Camps can be moved for free. It can cost a bit to move other buildings, but it's instant.

• Poor logistics will kill you. As an example, if your cooks have to trudge across a fourth of the map to grab raw food from storage, they're spending more time walking back and forth than they are cooking. It's no wonder why you're running out of food.

• All warehouses are linked. Plop down small warehouses next your distant camps and farms and the goods put inside are instantly available at your starting warehouse, which you should be surrounding with buildings that refine basic resources into more advanced ones.

• Trade is vital. Not all resources are available on all maps, and some things, like Parts, you can rarely make yourself. You've got to trade to get what you can't produce locally. It's not a bad plan to start looking for a means to make packs of trade or luxury goods as soon as you've got your food and fuel sorted out.

• The larger a happy racial population is, the faster you gain reputation from it. Please your most populous races first, if you can.

• There is no real penalty for losing a game. Don't stress too much.

• While you're never forced to do so, the metagame structure sort of expects you to move up in difficulty as you win more games and get more upgrades. Try bumping the difficulty next game if you're winning comfortably.

• When you're still learning, keep an eye on the Forest Hostility meter and what makes it go up and down. On lower difficulties Hostility is barely a threat and grows much more slowly, so it's easy to forget about it. On higher difficulties it will kill you. Managing Hostility is key to winning on higher difficulties, so learning its ins and outs early on is very helpful.

• It can seem tempting to open the "safe" glades first, but Small Glades are almost never worth the Hostility they generate unless it's super-early or you have an Order to open glades of any type. If you need to expand or are in need of resources, open a Dangerous one.

• Remember that higher Impatience makes Hostility go down. There are times when it can be worthwhile to force-call a trader, or wait to turn in an Order or a Reputation-gaining event, to keep yourself under a Hostility threshold.

• When you start dealing with Blightrot, you only need one Purging Fire per cyst. This is never spelled out anywhere.

• The firekeeper assigned at your initial hearth gives a bonus based on their race, described when you mouseover their profile after assigning them. Humans slow the queen's impatience build-up, beavers reduce hearth fuel consumption, lizards give a small global resolve bonus, harpies increase item carrying capacity and foxes reduce hostility by an amount based on how many glades were opened up. Harpies are the most generically useful, but expect to shuffle firekeepers around mid-game based on situation.

• Most recipes in this game are flexible with ingredients, but biscuits and pies will specifically need flour. You can't produce flour on your own unless you pick a building that can make it during one of the blueprint choices, so keep that in mind when sorting out food.

• This is one of those games I would say to never stop poking at the UI, there's a lot of info and stuff going on but not every tool gets explained. Some useful ones:
  • For which resources are on a given map, the overworld map will show it on the Conditions tab for the left side panel. While managing the town, it'll be shown in the Esc. menu and mousing over the little icon next to the portrait when picking blueprints will show it too.
  • Holding ALT will show assigned workers and racial bonuses for every building and let you swap them around more easily. Scroll wheel will change the race being assigned with left click and right-click empties the slot.
  • The book in the upper right is the recipes tab. This'll let you browse recipes you have access to, so you can do things like set global limits on goods you don't need an infinite number of or manage production buildings without having to find the building on the map first.