Aska 101 - How do you ensure the founding of a succesful Viking village?

[Severian]

Hey, everybody! I would like us to use this thread to establish a sort of bucketlist for new players who are struggling with Aska's learning curve (like myself) during the first year or so.
Since most of the advice I could find online was at least four months old, and the game still changes a lot, I think it would be good to have this thread as an up-to-date guide.

I'll start - and feel free to correct me, in the comments!:
1) Wave to the Ymir!
2) Gather twenty or so mussels and about fourty rope from fiber you get from Reeds, as well as about 5 stone blades and sticks to make a hatchet, pickaxe, hammer and hoe.
3) Instead of building right there, between the forest's edge and the sea, explore your island, spamming the resource discovery key (z), in order to find a large, glowing rock face. The game will tell you you have found an unexplored cave. This will become your iron mine. Build your base reasonably close to it.
4) ... and so on. You get it. Your help would be appreciated!

What I am struggling with, in particular, is settler AI. The ones assigned to resource gathering buildings just never seem to do their jobs as diligently as I would expect - if they're doing it at all. It doesn't help that they can only be assigned one very specific job.
I haven't reached winter, yet, opting to start over several times, instead, and I expect I am not the only one who is struggling to find their feet. If experienced players could help out with e.g. a couple of Dos and Don'ts, and which buildings they would build in which order and by which day, I think that would help a lot.

[ThunderfulPaige | Community]

This is a super cool idea and a great post <3

[RequiemsRose]

There do seem to be multiple valid approaches to gameplay so im not sure id say there is a set timeline for construction, but admittedly it's a lot easier to handle winter fully clothed and well stocked than it is to huddle around campfires getting sick every time you have to go murder a rabbit because you ran out of food again.

-I prioritize the workshop first (which means gatherer, wood cutter, and stone cutter go up immediately even if i cant staff them yet)

-I like to keep my population relatively low going into the first winter so i have fewer people to feed, house, and clothe while i lack most village infrastructure (and it seems events like blood moon arent quite as intense with lower populations) but the barracks goes up early and gets filled fast to. I may have 3 warriors in a population of 7 at times (would not recommend for everyone, lots of personal grind with that little delegation of tasks).

-Flags, flags everywhere...mostly the gatherer and building resource flags (not so much the woodcutter, move them where you want them, as you need them...they just nuke any tree they have the ability to cut within their range so a limited range can be better for them). Mind the murder biomes though, while villagers will flee like the road runner when encountering enemies it's best not to perpetually tempt fate.

-Manage priorities so you don't have to spend as much time managing people. The AI is both simple, and complex. A lot is going on behind the scenes but what the player actually sees makes villagers seem completely stupid sometimes. Yes, some of that is that it's an early access game still fine-tuning systems but a lot of it can also be managed or offset in a nearly "set it and forget it" manner if done well. The annoying one to figure out is production chains and warehouse setup, warehouse workers especially are intrusive little thieves if you don't take the time to plan out your warehouse and their restrictions. Still working on fine-tuning my own preferences for that, but have at least figured out things like my warehouse worker should be banned from my workshop or they will constantly argue with the crafter about resources, and inversely most my settlement except the cook should be banned from the raw food storage so they dont decimate my berry stockpile because it was more convenient than grabbing a stew lol.

[cdog]

I have two tips:

You can build extra beds in the cottages, easily 6, maybe more, It does lower housing satisfaction, but housing 6 villagers in a cottage instead of 2 is worth it!

The cookstation is waaaay better than the BBQ. You have to cook a recipe yourself first before you can add it as a task for the AI. Just cook 4 of anything with a full water tank and you will learn the recipe. I think you can cook everything in there, mussels, meat, berries, onions etc.

[casa06885]

in my cottages i build 4 beds, two partitions, a table, two armor. I was thinking about writing a guide for this subject. I wrote one on AI
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3365666037
I have a way that i always start my first viking village that has been very easy and keeps the smolkrs away without any torches, cause lets face it the wood ones get turned off and don't work in wet weather.