Early game tips!

[76561199159591380]

I'm wondering, does anyone have any great tips for those starting their new cosy universe?
What materials/actions/research would you suggest prioritising and why?

[Scott McGregor]

dont forget to utilise your "Transmogrifier" at the start start, to help get your tool industry up and running
research "Repair" and repair the power generator before you start building the Metalwork buildings - they will need power to operate efficiently

[Ghibi]

Keeping islands under 60 peeps ensures they're happy with minimal effort, letting you have time to research more advanced commodities before scaling up ^^

[Scott McGregor]

early game cleaners will only clean pollution up to lightly polluted, not get rid of it entirely.
you need to research Chemicals and upgrade your cleaners to get them to clean up the pollution all the way back to pristine beautiful land again <3
(so dont worry about pollution too much early game - you will be able to get rid of it all eventually)

[kroneus]

1. When you start to install lifts look for a cliff that allows you to install 3-5 lifts, if you like to keep your traffic organized without having traffic jams.

2. I like to get the school/foundains fairly quickly regarding the science thingy.

3. Overall aim for the very top right corner in your science book to offer whales food instead of your planet.

4. Wood generated power is great for the start. Most likely you can skip oil and jump directly to renewable energies.

5. When you start to colonize new planets always use your idle time to keep building and launching more space transport ships. They'll peacefully flow around your planet and wait for orders.

6. 2x wood cutter is more than enough for start/middle and most likely end game on your starting island.

7. Boats are super fast/cheap to build. So in my opinion it really doesn't matter where you place your harbors.

8. I like to have one centralized island for science. You can transfer red,green, ... science points to different islands or planets.

9. You can build more than 1 science/exploration house (idk the correct word, not playing the version on english) to gather science points faster. But don't forget to erase them once you gathered all points on the island to get some space back. :)

[Takeda Jin]

You can tessellate 3 houses, 2 fields, and 1 well to optimally boost production of food and housing of peeps. Ensure the 3 houses are touching each other, place the 2 fields beside the houses ensuring they are touching each other, place the well so that it is touching both fields. Can be run any direction, just pivot at the well if you need to make turns.

[kroneus]

1. Place your complete "dirty" industry on the mountains to keep the polution central.

2. To reduce the unhappiness it's suuuper to work with fountains. Place them close to the mountains. If you're super lucky you have small canyons (1x2 or 1x3) in the mountain. Build a lift and place 1-2 fountains in it. You can eliminate most negative effects like dirty roads or darkness. Check for unhappy spots with the overlay O+5 (shortcut).

[Panfilo]

Originally posted by Takeda Jin:

You can tessellate 3 houses, 2 fields, and 1 well to optimally boost production of food and housing of peeps. Ensure the 3 houses are touching each other, place the 2 fields beside the houses ensuring they are touching each other, place the well so that it is touching both fields. Can be run any direction, just pivot at the well if you need to make turns.

Wow thank you for this! I just noticed some buildings get bonuses for being next to other buildings.

[viel_asis]

Note: I have been playing only on the first planet so far (started several times to polish production chains and building layouts), so all the tips below are valid for this part of the game on the default difficulty, but may be not as effective for other planets\difficulty settings.

1. You don't really need a lot of wells. Two of them per island is enough. Later Peeps will switch to drinking tea and smoothie. You will need water occasionally, so it's good to keep some storage, also in case your smoothie production line goes down.
2. Don't explore ancient ruins on your first planet until discovering all available techs. Then exploring may give you a spaceflight tech, which is normally not available until colonizing another planet. (I'm not sure if it always give the same tech, I encountered this once accidentally, didn't try to repeat yet.)
3. You don't really need all possible bonuses for all buildings. Production bonuses are important for products that are constantly being consuming, like food, drink, clothes. Production bonuses for building materials, like metal and stone are not very important, because construction in most cases may wait a bit longer without causing problems. Storage bonuses like +1 and +2 compared with warehouse storage space look too tiny to care.
4. Reserve space in warehouses next to production building for the produced goods to shorten the delivery chain.
5. I favor housing and clothes techs over steel, meals and smoothies, because cloth removes the penalty for hot\cold weather, and upgrading huts to houses saves time, space and materials.

[graphixela]

A good one is peeps move resources eight at a time in a wheelbarrow. Unless you're maxing out a ship, requesting 16 makes more sense than 15 or 17.

[Srikandi]

Don't forget you don't have to build EVERYTHING on your latest island... anything you can get from an earlier one via trade, you probably should.

This can be critical in two scenarios regarding tools specifically. 1) to get tools to your second island so you can get going with development, research shipping on Island 2 and then build ships and ship tools from Island 1. 2) to get tools to your second planet, research spaceflight on Planet 2 and then build a spaceport and ship tools from Planet 1!

[viel_asis]

On the highest difficulty, all the islands are highly polluted at first. My approach is to build minimal settlement on the first island, trying to keep as much forest as possible, than wait until all the pollution around forests is gone, then continue building. On the next islands I do the same - colonize, build minimal settlement and wait for the pollution to go out, speeding up this process by building cleaners aroun the island.
Also I repeated the trick with the ancient ruin: saved it for the time when all available researches were complete on the first planet, got a spacecraft technology from exploring the ruins, and was able to build a new trading spaceshift before landing to the new planet to speed up establishing the first space trading route.

[hellkayt]

how do i get the peeps on the damn ship?

[Partybecher]

I have built 2 ports and selected the goods I need in both ports. But my ships are not moving. They remain empty and do not leave the port. Even though I have set them to auto. There are enough goods. But somehow the ships are not being loaded.
Please explain to me step by step how to set up the transport of goods