Some tips?

[Mysterio28]

Just started playing a few days ago and am finding it quite hard, even on the first campaign which is supposed to be easy. Maybe I'm just either working too slow or not focusing on progressing through the right tree techs properly. I'm on my second attempt and have harvested most of my worlds resources and I'm still not close to unlocking the ability to make mithril weapons to deal with the guardians and the invasions are becoming too much for me. Any tips on what I should do to make my life a bit easier?

[stylez]

For your initial base, use the underground instead of trying to build above-ground; use hatches (only requires wood) instead of doors (requires wood + iron for the lock). Saves a lot of time and resources. Also realize that the backwall of the underground counts towards your shelter, so feel free to strip mine everything. You have a chance for extra drops (coins, skill books, grains, etc) for each block you mine, so it only makes sense to mine everything in sight.

Complete Tasks/Quests ASAP for free exp and items. Especially the easy ones like collect 10 stone, collect 10 sand, collect 10 iron, etc. As soon as you unlock the first tier of food, look for a patch of wheat somewhere on the map, portal to it, and harvest it to get the "Farming" quest without actually having to grow your own wheat.

When you level up, your mana is refilled 100% for free. Keep an eye on your experience bar and, just before you level up, dump all your mana. Examples: a long-lived portal somewhere far away from your stockpile that has a lot of resources to gather, using magic light to scout around the map to find ore deposits, or spamming magic forest for extra wood when you eventually unlock it.

You can break down (most) unneeded items by dragging them into the crafting output box and clicking the anvil. The game starts you out with 3 "Beware" signs. Break these down immediately, and start your dwarf out by mining stone. You'll be able to get an axe & pickaxe faster than if you had to wait for the dwarf to chop down a tree or two. Dwarves also generally start out with useless hats that you can break down into useful craftables like glass or fabric, or basic resources like needles or feathers. http://i.imgur.com/hd5NBQ8.gifv

Spend your first 2 or 3 pieces of gold on buckets and begin collecting water as early as possible. Every time it rains, grab the puddles from the ground. Meanwhile, focus on tech'ing toward the Advanced Iron Working category to get yourself fast access to iron axe and iron pickaxe. Use the previously mentioned magic light scouting to find iron ore.

For the ice world, you can find water underground, or melt snow by placing it underground. But for a long-term, automatic solution, build an underground pool: http://i.imgur.com/gCcoWgM.png. As the snow falls in that location, it falls underground and immediately becomes water.

Mithril isn't necessary to kill the guardians, it just makes it a bit easier. Craft a bunch of healing potions and use them on your dwarves while attacking the guardians. Just before you go off to fight a guardian, craft a handful of Ice potions so your mages can freeze the guardian, scaling back some of his damage output.

Don't rely on only your dwarves for defending against the waves. Make use of various defensive structures available to you. Traps to damage them on their approach, fences to slow them down, spikes to hold them at bay while your dwarves attack from behind the spikes, arrow/tesla towers, etc.

[Mysterio28]

Heya thanks for all the tips. Been doing some research on the game to try and get a better understanding on what I should be focusing on early on. And your tips are very helpful as well. I did eventually manage to finish the first campaign but stuck on the second on (the snowy one) at the moment. So I'll try putting some of your tips into action as well as everything else I've read up on. It's a pretty nice game, just takes me a bit of time to get used to these sandbox type games.

[roguelovex]

A really good strategy for killing guardians is to have a LOT of health potions and use them very often when fighting the guardians. You can actually kill them with crappy armor that way. plus, it's 3 potions for 1 gold, and each potion heals the dwarf for a third of their health. To use them, go to the equip screen or press E, then select the dwarf you want to use it on and then just use the potion.

[Mysterio28]

Sounds like that could be handy, but I never ended up having that much gold really. Ended up spending a lot of it on wool because I can never find enough sheep for them. I'm taking it, along with the frontal blocks, I should also be mining the back walls of everything too? Usually I would only mine the back wall if it had some type of ore in it but I guess I could try going all out and mine everything.

[Faerador]

Did you know that you can also farm animals? Build fences and traps. You need at least 5 fences placed in a row, which spawns a farm for animals. Then, place a trap near any of the animals (chicken, boar, or sheep; or their weird counterparts in other worlds). When the animal walks over the trap, there's a good chance the trap snags it. You can then have a dwarf "catch" the animal by clicking on the trap and choosing the option. From there, a dwarf will haul the animal back to the farm.

Then, it's just a matter of collecting the drops. The animals will multiply over time based on some mechanic, which I didn't fully explore. I would assume you need at least two of the same type of animal, but who knows!?! You must kill chckens and boars for feathers, eggs, and leather, but if you make shears, you can shear the sheep for their wool without killing them. The wool will eventually grow back too!

I find that you really don't need to farm, if you're diligent about exploring the map and killing the spawning animals often, but mid-game you go through a lot of wool and leather! So, it helps to have a farm for sheep or boars (or even both together). Late game, if you want a steady supply of fire arrows, you could even farm chickens. Cheers!

[stylez]

Originally posted by Mysterio28:

Sounds like that could be handy, but I never ended up having that much gold really. Ended up spending a lot of it on wool because I can never find enough sheep for them. I'm taking it, along with the frontal blocks, I should also be mining the back walls of everything too? Usually I would only mine the back wall if it had some type of ore in it but I guess I could try going all out and mine everything.

Yep. Even the top dirt layer has a decent chance for dropping gold coins. It's probably not fun to most people, but if you are constantly strapped for resources and not strip mining, you're really just wasting your time.

If you weren't aware also, you can right click + drag across multiple blocks to mass-queue an order (chop, mine). If you have a block selected when doing this, e.g. select stone and Rclick+drag across a bunch of dirt, you can mass-replace front and/or back layers.

[Lions_Den]

Check out the pinned tips and tricks thread. There are a lot of good tips in there that are still good for the game.