Goblin Camp is set in a forest that’s more or less based on the kind of woods we have in Finland and elsewhere in Northern Europe. The reason this kind of terrain looks the way it does is actually quite simple: it’s the ice age.

A little over a hundred thousand years ago, the Earth started cooling and entered the Last Glacial Period. Massive sheets of ice covered nearly all of Northern Europe. Here in Finland, the bedrock is mostly very close to the surface, and as the glaciers expanded, they scoured away nearly all of the soil, leaving just the bedrock covered with ice.

Incidentally, this means that if there were humans living around here before the Last Glacial Period, we have no idea who they were or what they did, because pretty much all possible evidence will have been destroyed by the ice. There’s a heated argument over a place in Finland called Wolf Cave, which some people think shows signs of pre-glacial human activity, and some people don’t.

As it got warmer, the glaciers melted and receded. The meltwater flowed from the glaciers, usually into the ocean, carving rivers through the landscape. If the glaciers disappeared completely,rainwater would still gather in these river beds. So in a sense, the river in a Goblin Camp map is a glacial landform.

Because the bedrock is quite close to the surface, river valleys are rarely very deep, so the rivers are prone to flooding in the spring, when the snow that’s gathered over the winter begins to melt. Sometimes this is exacerbated by dams of ice forming in rivers, so that when the dam collapses, a huge pulse of floodwater travels downstream.

As the glaciers receded, they dumped all the soil they’d torn up back on the bedrock, and this is pretty much what made the landscape we live in today. The glaciers didn’t melt back at a steady rate, though; sometimes they stopped, even for long times. Whenever a glacier would stop, it would still deposit rocks and earth, forming a giant pile called a terminal moraine. If the glacier then later withdraws, the moraine is left behind as a ridge. One of southern Finland’s most prominent geographical features is the Salpausselkä ridge, a terminal moraine from the last ice age.

This is why maps in Goblin Camp feature a long ridge running across the map, at more or less a right angle to the river: this represents a terminal moraine. They’re handy places to put up raven statues, by the way, since their fog-clearing radius is bigger when they’re placed higher.

During the ice age, the sea level was much lower because so much water was frozen in the glaciers. However, the sheer weight of the ice pressed the ground down, so much that the bedrock in Finland is still rebounding today. Water would also sometimes form huge lakes before breaking through to the ocean. This means that many areas that are now dry land were then underwater.

The soil dumped by glaciers, known as glacial till, is mostly a mix of sand, clay and rocks, where sand tends to dominate. As anyone who’s done any digging in Finland can tell you, there’s a lot of rocks! This is why you can build stone tools in Goblin Camp without any sources of stone: rocks are readily available.

When glacial till spends a substantial amount of time underwater, the water sweeps away most of the lighter sand and leaves behind the clay. You could say that soil that’s been underwater long has been more efficiently sorted. For this reason, the more fertile clay soils are mostly found lower down, while the ridges, for example, tend to be almost exclusively sand, with more clay deeper down. The story of Finnish farming starts with slash-and-burn farming on sandy soils and later moves to the lower, heavier clay lands when plowing technology advances.

Some lovely glacial landforms we added to Goblin Camp recently are ponds. Glacial ponds, also known as kettles, are formed when pieces of ice shear away from the glacier and are left behind. The block of ice gets covered with sediment, and as it melts away into the subsoil, it leaves behind a hole in the ground. Usually this will fill with rainwater, creating a cute little pond.

As you can see, the landscape in Goblin Camp represents our attempt at creating terrain marked by glaciation. Our map generator simulates how the glacier carves up the land, what features are left in its wake, and how the forest and vegetation grow. And we’re not done yet: stay tuned for the Earth Update, where we’ll add more glacial landforms and the exploitable resources they give your goblins! Until then, happy camping.

Now that the Farming Update is out, it’s a good time to take a comprehensive look at how to feed your goblins.

One of the basic facts of Goblin Camp is that your goblins need food. They’ll eat if left to their own devices, but to make sure that your goblins get regular and balanced meals, it’s good to build kitchens.

While eating any food at all will keep goblins on their feet, if they don’t get all the necessary nutrients, they’ll suffer penalties to their stats.

The nutrients are protein, fat and fiber. In addition, goblins also need a little bit of fresh food in their meals, or they’ll suffer from scurvy. Kitchens will automatically prepare meals with all available nutrients.

To fulfill your goblins’ dietary needs, there are a variety of food sources that can be exploited in Goblin Camp.

Gathering

A food source that’s always available to a camp is gathering. Historically, this was by far the most important food source for people before the invention of farming. Mushrooms are a good source of fiber, and many useful plants grow in the forest and can be harvested for food: hazelnuts, blackcurrants, raspberries and apples are all available in the woods around the camp.

The meadows by the river are swept by floodwaters most years, which stops trees from growing there and makes them absolute treasure troves for goblin gatherers. If you want to get a head start on farming, meadows are a very good place to find stinging nettles! You can even find wild turnips and rye in the woods, especially around ruins.

You can gather different foods in Goblin Camp by finding the plants you want to harvest on the map. The food items will then show up in the Stock Manager, and if you order more of them, the goblins will try to find them around the camp and maintain a stock of them at all times.

Fishing

Another food source of great antiquity is fishing. Early settlements were almost invariably by lakes or rivers, for drinking water, ease of transport and very importantly, food. Fish and other marine life were vital and plentiful resources.

Fishing is available to your goblins from the very beginning of the game. To start fishing, build a fisher-goblin’s shack, and a fishing workshop to make fishing spears and fish traps. Each fisher shack will provide fishing jobs for one goblin, and each fishing trap will occasionally catch a fish. The map has a fishing number, which represents the amount of fish your goblins can catch without upsetting the local ecosystem: if your catch exceeds the fishing number, it will drop and only recover very slowly – and only if you stop overfishing!

Animal meat

If your goblins or your crops get attacked by wild animals, and your goblins manage to kill some of them, their corpses can be butchered into meat.

Animal meat is an excellent addition of protein to your goblins’ diet, but it isn’t a reliable food source. Both fish and meat can be smoked to make them last longer.

Farming

A small camp can get by entirely on gathering and fishing, but to support larger populations reliably, your goblins will need access to one of the most transformative inventions in history: farming. Your goblins can start farming once you discover seeds: this unlocks the Farming technology and lets you build farm plots. Seeds can be found in wild plants on the map, and in ruins.

Initially, your goblins can only farm the lighter sandy soils on the map, and will deplete the fertility of the tiles they farm. Slash-and-burn cultivation allows the burning of trees and bushes to create ashes, which will enhance the fertility of the soil. The Farming Update added several new technologies that make farming even more productive and sustainable, extending it to clay soils and adding fertilizers. This allows you to permanently farm large fields and feed a larger camp with well over a hundred inhabitants.

Turnips are the simplest food crop, as they provide directly edible food. Nettle plants need to be processed at a nettle building, after which they provide both edible leaves and nettle stems, which can be retted into fiber and processed on into thread and cloth. Rye seeds need to be ground in a mill to make flour, and baked into bread. Flax isn’t an edible plant at all, but provides fine fibers that can be made into thread.

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Ideally, all these food sources complement each other, and provide your goblins with a healthy and varied diet. Now that there’s a fairly robust system for feeding goblins, we’re looking forward to providing more for them to do in our next updates. Until then, happy camping!