The 500

[Garney]

My sixth play through. First was fine and easy, no problems, got the survival monument. Then had to get the other two monuments for those achievements. Failed twice to lack of water in the desert and lack of herbs when the poison smacked me hardcore. Lowered my difficulty for this monster of a task, the final achievement...

500 villagers balancing precariously on a rocklizardpuppy's back

https://steamcommunity.com/id/garnetbelial/screenshot/2232158066576484638/
https://steamcommunity.com/id/garnetbelial/screenshot/2232158066576483333/

At first 3 scavengers was enough for me, but I found myself trying to scramble behind Onbu to grab what I wanted, so I built two more. Now I can forage forward.

I would have touted the effectiveness of air well automatic upgrade early game, but late game I destroyed them all and rebuilt with the funnel upgrade. Invaluable, and you've got bodies to spare anyway.

Fishing can not keep up in any way, shape, or form with feeding this many villagers. Reclaimed that space.

The 100 villager game is very different.
At 200 villagers you cruise with enough unemployed to really manage everything.
Over 250 and you run into shortage after shortage until you've got it set and you're cruising the world map at 4x speed just dodging storms and picking up every nomad you can, wishing there was 10x speed most of the time.

[Garney]

My annoyances:
- Onbu not listening when he needs to take TWO WHOLE STEPS to the safe place to sleep, so you have to wait for him to have a tiny nappu before he can move so he can have his sleep properly or else use herbs galore.
- Poison really hurts, like no warning at all, even on 'low' toxicity areas.
- Storms are brutal. Onbu barely sticks his head into a storm and half my village is gone.

[Bobywan]

I did this before the ocean biome and struggled to find enough land to feed that many villagers.
In the end, I set all my farmers to plant only and manually harvested the crops with the so many idle workers you have by the end.

[Garney]

I had set a bunch of work posts around with harvester workers, but I still had to manually click in a pinch to get them to do anything. Also annoying.

[Asphe]

Advanced Funnel has another benefit you may already know. Otherwise, next time you're in-game, just click on the worker assigned... watch what they do. You don't always need a Worker Hut for this.

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Fishing only works in the Oceans. Try Aquafarms which can also grow Kelp to feed Onbu. Just need to watch the temperatures as it can get expensive if you didn't notice it got too cold/hot. I'd still keep a Fishery on paw... in case you need to restock ^_^

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Invest in a Laboratory & Injector

[Garney]

That advanced funnel is super nice once you've got the iron for it. Auto collection was causing me so many problems midgame that I was actively avoiding deserts. Afterward destroying everything and rebuilding to advanced funnels, I could handle desserts with no problem.

I tried having a fisher and water collection feed into two aquafarms producing fish, but it just wasn't keeping up. The fish were gone and I just didn't have the space available for adding more. It was easier to add more kitchens.

Didn't see the need for the lab and injector, and didn't have the room to play around with those. Onbu was more than fine, it was the people I was struggling to keep healthy.

[Asphe]

The Lab/Injector is a bit of a 'get out of windstorm/toxic cloud' ticket but you probably won't need it without any Hostilities toggled on. Maybe later when other things get added to the game

[Bobywan]

Originally posted by Asphe:

The Lab/Injector is a bit of a 'get out of windstorm/toxic cloud' ticket but you probably won't need it without any Hostilities toggled on. Maybe later when other things get added to the game

Also to keep Onbu awake in ocean biomes. I lost my first game ever the first time I entered in the ocean with not enough rest.

[McAlexander79]

Originally posted by Garney:

Over 250 and you run into shortage after shortage until you've got it set and you're cruising the world map at 4x speed just dodging storms and picking up every nomad you can, wishing there was 10x speed most of the time.

Sae here. Today i come over 300 and its a little bit boring to wait and wait for and handful settlers and nothing to do - just walking around nd fix some things.
The gap 200 to 500 is soooo long and boring....

[LUKEbiechu]

Originally posted by McAlexander79:

Originally posted by Garney:

Over 250 and you run into shortage after shortage until you've got it set and you're cruising the world map at 4x speed just dodging storms and picking up every nomad you can, wishing there was 10x speed most of the time.

Sae here. Today i come over 300 and its a little bit boring to wait and wait for and handful settlers and nothing to do - just walking around nd fix some things.
The gap 200 to 500 is soooo long and boring....

Exactly. It is clearly visible that the core gameplay is balanced around reaching day 100. One could argue, that getting 200 villagers is also fine as it is the ultimate test of the player's management skills. But after that .... every building is discovered so research mechanic is simply gone, the settlement is pretty much self reliant on resources just from the scavenging hunt, so the player's role is to just sit and click another expedition spots, and from time to time changing Onbu's direction.

As much as I appreciate the free roam possibility for everyone to do the endless run up to their preferences, the 500 settlers achievement is just redundant gind fest.

[Markus [Stray Fawn Studio Dev]]

Hi LUKEbiechu

Thanks for the post. Yes, we're aware of the grindy-ness of the 500 settlers achievement. We plan to go over all achievements before the 1.0 launch and will properly rebalance them.

We're soon launching a big balancing update to the main branch soon (currently on testing branch), which we will further refine until 1.0. Therefore it's too early for us to change the achievements at this point.

Thanks for your patience and discussion.

Cheers,
Markus

[Bobywan]

I did this achievement way back when it was introduced, so the game was quite different at the time. It was already grindy but it also started to get challenging from a food point of view too because you have limited green area for farms and it takes a lot of them tobfeed 500 people.