Against the Storm is a game about surviving in an unforgiving, hostile environment. The world is literally trying to kill your villagers. In order to survive and even flourish in the world, here are a few tips for you.
Don’t be afraid of Dangerous Grove, but be prepared
A central mechanic of Against the Storm is cutting through treelines to open ways into groves. Through this, you can more quickly grow your buildable area while also exposing more resources.
Your typical grove is a small pocket of land, but larger ones come with a price. Named Dangerous and Forbidden groves, each one carries a random risk. Forbidden Groves are normally more severe, but both should be treated with care. However, if you want to quickly rack up reputation and complete your expedition, you won’t want to avoid them for long. Don’t be afraid of them.
The consequences of cutting through to a Dangerous or Forbidden grove vary. Usually, you’ll open an event that needs to be dealt with, like a pest infestation, a monster, or a malfunctioning piece of technology. You’ll want to deal with these quickly since after a certain amount of time, they’ll activate a negative modifier on your village.
Grove events are dealt with by spending specified resources and assigning villagers to carry out the job. You always have two choices on how you deal with events, and each one will result in a different reward. Some of the rewards are tempting, but you’ll have to decide if you have the capacity to fill their requirements in time. For example, if you don’t have enough of a resource for a particular reward, you’ll need to judge if you can produce enough before the event activates. If not, go for the solution that you can afford.
Don’t discount the comfort of your villagers
You gain a reputation in a variety of ways in Against the Storm. Completing Glade Events or Orders are the most obvious ways to pump up your reputation, but there’s another you should aim for: your citizens’ comfort.
Each species of villager has a comfort threshold that, after you push past, will result in gradual gains to your reputation over time. It might be easiest just to ensure that your villagers are comfortable enough not to abandon your settlement, but passive reputation gain is the quickest way to complete your expedition. Ensure that your villagers have complex food, clothing, and services that they can take advantage of to satisfy their needs and start filling your reputation bar.
Don’t test the Queen’s patience
The Scorched Queen is the only thing standing between the remnants of civilization and complete destruction, but she won’t tolerate dawdling.
SimCity may have set up Citybuilder fans with the idea that there are no restrictions or time limits, but Against the Storm isn’t like that. If you become too complacent and bogged down with details, the Scorched Queen will get fed up and end your expedition. This is shown in the red bar on your bottom HUD.
Impatience can be driven down by building reputation. Ideally, the growth of your reputation will always exceed the growth of the Queen’s Impatience. That means you will need to keep competing Glade Events or Orders to maintain a constant gain of reputation. If you need a quick boost, it’s time to open those supply crates scattered throughout the glades and send them back to the City.
Don’t lose track of the Queen’s Impatience. Taking your eyes off of it could leave you scrambling to appease her just enough so she doesn’t shut down your whole operation.
Build warehouses close to production hubs
It’s easy to overlook the importance of warehouses, but if you don’t make use of them, a great deal of your villagers’ time is going to be spent walking across the map to your main one.
While you’re building your settlement, you’re most likely going to wind up with your housing surrounding your hearth, with your production buildings sprawling outwards in all directions. After all, resources aren’t going to just be conveniently located close to your main warehouse.
Whenever you find yourself with a number of resource harvesters, workshops, and other production facilities in one single area, make sure you place a warehouse among them. Villagers will then use that warehouse to drop off and pick up resources rather than traipse all the way to your central one. In a way, you can use warehouses to warp resources across the map.
If you run out of parts, bulldoze something
At the beginning of an expedition in Against the Storm, you’re allotted a large number of a resource called Parts. These can be pretty difficult to get more of, but they’re used by basically every production building. Even if you want to build a new woodcutter camp, you’re going to need parts to do so.
There’s a possibility that you might spend a bunch of parts to quickly extract a specific resource, but when you come across a new one that you need, you have no parts to build it with. If this happens, the quickest way is to bulldoze a production building to regain the parts that you spent on it. In this way, you can take focus away from resources you might have an abundance of so you can concentrate on getting something more important.
Build a trading post
It will take a long time before your colony can produce everything it needs. You’ll need blueprints for buildings, and you’ll need to find the resources out in the wild. In order to make sure you can get what you need when you need it, consider building a trade post. They’re cheap buildings but will allow you to trade with traveling merchants.
Merchants will buy and sell a variety of products and resources that you can use to supply your colony. For example, if you weren’t lucky enough to get the plans to a lumber mill near the start of construction, you might find yourself with a dearth of planks. This can be a pretty major setback that can be solved by a merchant.
Likewise, you can trade resources that you’re over-producing for resources that you need, or even amber, Against the Storm’s central currency. You can then spend your currency on resources, or you can use them to buy blueprints and cornerstones from the merchants. Doing so can help get your colony become self-sufficient sooner.
