are small glades worth it?

[Miles Teg]

you take a hostility hit with the smaller glades. sure they do not have danger, but they usually have little resources at best. I feel the only real good thing you can get is some farm grounds. At this point I mostly just go around them or ignore them unless I really need something specific at the end of the run.

[Fire]

Afaik it's the standard behaviour of high prestige players (and not only them), for sure I open small small glades only as a despearate move when I've got very bad luck with nodes and I'm in dire need of food or when I can see the content and that small glade contain exactly what I need (or when I have the watchtower modifier, but that makes the run ridiculously easy anyway).
One way I can see of making them more worthwhile is them having more events of some kind, up to about a 50% on average.

[Miles Teg]

that is what I was thinking, small glades feel like they need some type of resource increase or little to no hostility increase. as I increase difficulty, they become more of a trap that is always a mistake to use. Was counter intuitive to start, not being flagged as a danger, but ended up being the worst thing to open in the map as a whole.

[Samseng Yik]

I always open small glade, but only few of them that adjacent to starting area.
If I going for archaeology, then yes I will open more to reach it.

Because once I got some basic resource, big glades worth my time more for the event and the big resource node

[GeminiEclipse]

If you're on the lower difficulties, the ones below viceroy, then they are fine to open. I'm not sure I would say they are worth it. More like they aren't a punishment.

[PlayerEmers]

not worth unless you have a conerstone to see their content so you only open what you truly need

[LotusBlade]

Well, you have to consider it this way: small glade give +15 threat, big glade gives +30. Is it worth opening 2 small ones or 1 big??? And here comes main problem - many big glades have rewards that reduces threat (like -50) or gives permanent +1-4 resolve. 4 resolve is equal to 100 hostility reduction. So most of the time they do pay for themself, atleast on average. And if you know glade content before opening, it is even better.

And small ones just punish you. The only reason opening them would be having some sort of scout outpost to see content of small glades permanently. Then it could be benefical to go for farm plots, ores, coal or archeology.

[Bukkfrig]

Between opening them and not opening there's not much of a clear winner. I usually open 1-3 of them in Year 1, including on Prestige difficulties, but I wouldn't say you're making a huge play mistake by not opening them. However they're not as bad as some people make out.

Pros

Small resource nodes - In the late prestige levels, you are less likely to find and perhaps less likely to prioritise taking gathering camps, making it more likely that large resource nodes in Dangerous Glades just can't be utilized.

Efficient gathering - It is unlikely that your starting glade has enough nodes to properly set up supply of fabric and bricks. For example, opening a regular glade may give you flax when you have been relying on plant fiber from trees. Or may give you clay or sea marrow when you had been relying on the extra production bonus for clay from flax. If you have lizards but not humans you might want to switch to a newly discovered meat node over the vegetable node that you started with, or vice versa. Resources in regular glades may be located closer to your main warehouse than resources in the larger, Dangerous Glades, which may require additional warehouses to gather efficiently.

Geysers - These are more powerful than the basic Rain Collector for several reasons: they don't use your Parts, they produce significantly faster so less manpower used (often just one worker is assigned and only for part of the year), and you can sometimes lean into specific strategies like food strategies if you have Drizzle water, or Crystalized Dew production if you have Storm Water, or if you don't have good building material recipes you might want to just just run rain engines year-round in your multiple crude workstations.

Encampments - There are those who don't like too many extra people, but I'm of the opinion that every worker can basically always outproduce their upkeep costs, and especially in the early game I'm looking for as many people as possible. Runs where I'm not able to find many extra people progress noticably slower. One of the barriers to opening Dangerous Glades in the first year is the lack of manpower to dedicate to the glade events. Can count as a glade event towards an order.

Fertile Soil - Potentially allows you to set up farms in time to sow in Year 2 rather than waiting for Year 3. One extra harvest is significant if you're planning to win by, say, Year 5, and you're only going to see 2-4 harvests total.

Space - Space for building hearths or houses etc that you didn't have to clear. My games tend to be shorter (in game Years compared to what I see in online playthroughs), and so I cut down fewer trees in total, normally not clearing large tracts of land, but rather building in the pockets of the glades.

Small caches - These count as glade events for orders and you may get orders to open caches. These aren't normally super relevant, but can be if your caravan or early order turn-ins gave an unusually high amount of tools.

Cons

Hostility - 15 hostility. For every three regular glades you opened (45 hostility), you would need to reassign two woodcutters (48 hostility) during the storm if the same hostility level is to be maintained. It doesn't mean they stop working, they just do another job during that time. The rainpunk updates have given us more options to deal with low resolve. The storm is not normally a time when you expect to be making reputation from high resolve, and so having an extra hostility level sometimes doesn't have much impact (any resolve level above 0 is okay).

[DG]

The initial assessment is right. Avoid small glades unless you see a reason to open one and yes there are a variety of peculiar reasons to open a specific small glade at a specific time.

[ACS36]

Rarely worth it. Depends on what cornerstones you have. For the most part it's best to avoid small glades.

Also, asking to buff them doesn't make sense either. It would only serve to make the game easier than it all ready is, and it's really easy once you get the core mechanics down. Think of small glades as obstacles to thwart the players ability to reach the larger glades and you'll see they're balanced as they are.

[koboldlord]

I open them when I need food or when I have an order that I want to cash in quickly which requires a lot of glades. Occasionally I also do one early if it is close to my hearth and I need to open it for aesthetic reasons, because I don't want the border jank intruding into my space. But only the first two reasons are valid gameplay reasons.

If I happen to stack up a bunch of perks that give a bonus for opening glades, then yeah I'll start opening them. If I get 20 pottery and it's my only source of containers, or 10 tools and I can't make them otherwise, then it's worth the hostility hit.

Ultimately every source of hostility adds up. Opening three small glades now will require you to burn an extra log throughout the storm for probably the rest of the game, and that's a lot of fuel.

[sycoman2]

One thing id add to what others have said is timed orders.
Set your wood cutters to avoid glades unless marked, let them clear around small glades.
If you get a timed order with a desirable reward that needs x glades open in a small amount of time you will be ready.

[Erunaraina]

Small Glades do feel weak to me. Unless I have a Cornerstone that encourages me to open Glades, an Order which asks me to open Glades, or if I am running out of Food or space to build: I generally prefer not to open ANY Glades at all until the mid-game - at which point I begin to prioritize opening Dangerous Glades continually one after the other.

[guardianslade]

I can say that during my runs at viceroy or higher I won't open them at all. The gain just does not feel worth the increase in hostility. I even had one where my valley was almost entirely open, camps set to not open glades and all the trees were cut down, the landscape filled with unopened small glades. The fix to me would be to reduce hostility a lot, down to something like 5, and even then, that might be too much. They could add a new additional perk tree to spend the special resource on to take that 5 even down further, to something like 2 or even zero. I kinda feel like small glades should just be a tiny bonus. Not a hazard that you have to avoid.
Another way to look at it, if a small is 15 and large is 30, then it should have at least half the amount of the large. Most I open have maybe 20% or less of a large. It just does not make sense to open them. Heck we could call them "safe" glades, totally free, no hostility. I just don't really see a reason not to.

[Lorska]

I think the main issue with small glades is that they are simply too unreliable.
The pool of things that compete with each other is simply too large to make it worth on average.
That doesn't mean it can't be worth, just that on average you won't find what you need.

I've had games where I was looking for fertile soil or caches and found nothing in 5+ glades. Compare that to the bigger ones that guarantee an event and a medium or bigger cache.

[Fingeris]

Would be better if small glades didn't increase hostility at all...