The Wandering Village – Starting Tips

Starting Tips for Beginners

Village Location

First of: Always build your main village around the center on onbu’s back. the main use for this is for a toxic cloud event. The infected plants spawn everywhere and if your village is too far in the front or back your people will not clear all of them fast enough leading to a patch that gets too infected. Also don’t build the decontamination centers they aren’t necessary and you can use the resources better for something else. Gradually build dirt roads tothe places where you are cutting a big patch of wood and berries or mining stone, helps transporting it back and later with a toxic cloud.

When A Toxic Cloud Hits

Disable any non necessary building (wood cutter, stone cutter, mushroom farm, onbu horn, research/scavenger/herbfarm if it looks bad/you feel you’re too slow. look for the infected trees and bushes, don’t forget to inspect your farms, set them to harvest and priority 3. check onbus entire back again in a minute if something seems to be spreading in case you missed one. it helps having non dense forests so if you feel you can spare the manpower cut some lines everywhere to lighten it up before the storm starts.

Mega Infection

A giant unclearable patch isn’t necessarily run ending. i had the 3rd of back being a single giant infection for half the demo in one run and it’s not really a problem. as soon as you feel you can’t clear everything to get rid of the infection completely start cutting all the plants between the infection and your village. after that it spreads very slowly. you can try removing i with decontamination buildings but you will need 8-10 people free.

Different Biomes + Dealing With Mega Infection

Different biomes have different toxicity/infection rates and population. the jungle biome has the most food but also the highest infection rate and te lowest amoun of people. the mountains have low food, medium infection, lots of stone and iron and the highest amount of people. if you want more people go there. suprisingly the desert can also be useful. it has no food/water generation, medium amount of people BUT it has low infection rate, meaning people get less sick and the infection spreads more slowly. if you want to get rid of that giant infection patch this is the place. depending on your situation you can use your herb farmers and mushroom farmers as decontaminatior too since you want your water getting used for your food producing farms.

Buildings

You don’t want too many people in buildings. only put one in the kitchen, stone cutter and wood cutter unless you have a bunch of resources (+20 exception with raw food) and really want a building or processed food is getting low but usually one person will yield enough for whatever you need.

Onbu Feeding

This also goes for the onbu feeding. use 2 people on mushrooms no person in cooking and disable the feeding trebuchet. once you have 40-60 mushrooms disable your mushroom farm and enable the onbu kitchen. once that is processed disable the kitchen. that will last for quite a while and when onbu gets hungry enable the trebuchet, feed him and disable it again. start the mushroom farm again if you have no or one food ball left. build all these things near the head+ a small stockpile if you want (disable every resource in the stockpile except mushrooms and food ball).

How Many People Should I Have?

Get as many people as you can. i know this will seem counter intuitive. haven’t i been struggling with food with 20-30 people and now i should get more? yes the best run i had with 50 people (lucky with pickups) and food becomes oddly less of an issue. i had over 100 food with no blood pudding and steadily growing (and over 1000 with it more on that later) so how is it possible?

Build Order

When you start build 8 tents, leave room for 4 more, then build a research building (one is honestly enough people say use 2 for the 150% but thats 2 people working at 50% capacity and if you need those then it’s more of a luxury. like i used one building most of the time and 2 if all my food resources were good) pick the kitchen, build a wood and stone cutter, build the kitchen as soon as you can. one thing i haven’t noticed is you can switch what food is getting cooked in my first playthrough. switch it berries-musli and gather the bushes near your village.

You can put two people in the kitchen at the start since you want them too only eat the musli, switch to 1 after a while or clear all the berries and disable the kitchen. build a beet farm and put 2-3 people in. build 1-2 workers huts, sent 5 to general, the other 2 to general/transport (transport will bring resources lying around to the base, water from the wells to the water towers otherwise they stay mostly empty) once you have around 20-30 people build a SECOND beet farm and put 2-3 people in. some say berry bush farms are great since you don’t need water them but they are abysmal in terms of food production compared to a farm+ kitchen. while you struggle with 3 on a farm and 3 on a berry farm, you will bleed beet soup out of your nose if you just build that second farm instead. if your good on wood and stone harvest the berrie bushes and turn it into musli for more food variety.

I just left a great berry spot (around 13-14 bushes in reach) open for when i had 50 people since you’ll need 3 food types and that’s the only way right now if you don’t want blood pudding. you can just use 1 kitchen and switch to what raw food you currently have more or build a 2nd out of convenience and have one on musi and one on beet soup., switching the musli kitchen to soup when you have no berries and lots of raw beets. if you can make sure your kitchen changes enough raw food into cooked food this will be enough.

Warehouse

Leaviing space for a ware house is a nice to have. it should be central to the village near the herb farm, wood cutter, stone cutter, doctor and onbu doctor. disable mushrooms and onbu food

Pantries

1 or 2 is enough they should be near kitchens and food farms.

How Big Should My Farms Be And How Much Water?

If you are in the jungle biome beet and wheat farms with 3 people will need around 32 squares 45-50 if you switch to desert mountains (but honestly the smaller ones are fine, just expand if you feel food could get tough). build 1 or 2 pantries once you start getting surpluses, you want 3 air wells in your village near the farms and water towers and one air well/water tower next to your mushroom farm.

Doctors+Herbs

Despite the game trying to nudge you to get it it’s not really that important. if you look in the large map you sometimes see people on the road that will join you. there are always 2 that are scripted, the first batch are just free people, the second one will be sick people. tats when you will need a doctor. after you build your first farm (or 2nd) build the herb farm. only one is necessary in the beginning but you can put two if you want a bigger stockpile. research the doctors hut at latest when you see that 2nd group on the road, put 1-2 doctors in and once everyone is cured disable the doctors building again. you only need permanent doctors once you have gone through your first spore cloud, before that your people won’t get sick naturally.

Research

Keep an eye out when research finishes in the log in the bottom left or if you notice yellow flags there. the game will always recommend you 2 technologies, but you can open the big technology tree and pick what you want. there is no super strict way how you go about, whatever you feel you need is usually right.

I personally like getting stone huts after the kitchen, it makes expanding your people so much more convenient and build 2 stone huts in the 2 free spots you left open the gradually replace the tents if no building necessarily needs it, then research the horn (but don’t build it) and build the scavenger hut. once you have 20-30 people i like to research wheat and switch one of the 2 farsm to wheat production for the food variety bonus. build the mill once i have some wheat grown (it will take a while since they will clear all the beet patches first) and build the bakery once i have a bit of flower and disable it if no flower is available.

Pet Command

Once you have bee through your first spore cloud onbu will get sick and need treatment at some point. you will need to research the onbu doctor (comes after regular doctor. after that you can get the pet command tech and let me tell you it. is. amazing. it will increase trust and you can spam it after 2 to 3rounds onbu will listen to basically every commands. meaning you can tell onbu to lay around and wait. you can let him stay at one spot pretty much permanently, pet him 1 or 2 times and when he stands up just tell him t lay down again. so you can look for a nice jungle/mountain spot and just park there with no worries. research the entire tech tree, build stone roads in your entire village and from the back to the top, fill your entire stockpile with all the wood stone and food and herbs.

Fill 1000 water into water towers making deserts meaningless. you can get pretty much infinite food fast if you build a 3rd farm (or 1 berry farm) build a blood pump (or 4) and suck onbu dry to 1% health and have 300 buckets of food that can be turned into 750 blood puddings. onbus health will regenerate if he is in good shap (not hungry low pioson and not tired) one blood pump won’t hurt him that much, just suck hi until he has 95% stop the machine and he will heal pretty quick. alternatively if you have lots of herbs (if you have 50 ppl you can have 3 or even 6 on making herbs) 20 herbs will give onbu back 20% health. that is a ginormous amount of food with very little herbs.

I also learned you can’t accidentaly kill him by over-sucking so yay? you will run out of available stone so will need the deep drill unfortunately but it hurts onbu way less than the pump (or you can decide to move again and scavenge on the map, wait a couple of days so stone spawns on the mud) it’s important you don’t forget to pet onbu whenever the command finishes otherwise onbu will really not like you.

Screenshots

Here is a setup I had with the 50 people:

A bit later after I played aroud with all the buildings: