Beginner's Guide to Aven Colony

This gives some tips that may help you play the game with more understanding!

Introduction

Hello!

I started playing Aven Colony more than a year after release & I was surprised to find very few guides, and no beginning guides, so I thought I would write down some tips and mechanics for how I understand these.

I'm hoping some more advanced users may read this & comment to make it better. I just completed all the campaign maps on Normal difficulty as well as all 4 challenge maps - so I'm no means an expert, but after making it through these, it's pretty fresh in my mind so thought I would share.

Updated 12/20/2018: I haven't recieved a lot of input, but I did go & add some sections (game over / air quality) as I recently came back & played some more.

Game Over Man, Game Over

Aven Colony can be a nice relaxing game if you enjoy long range planning WITH THE KNOWLEDGE THAT CERTAIN EVENTS will doom your colony and it will be game over.

I think Aven Colony has one of the best tutorials / campaigns to get you used to all the intricacies of the game and if you follow the campaign, it's a good hand-holding exercise in what you should be doing.

Saying that, here are some things that will reduce the amount of restarts and rage-quits that will inevitably occur:

1. Save often. I would recommend every 3-5 sols at a minimum and more frequent if you want. You want a save point to back up & correct things you missed.
2. Expand and always have plasma turrets giving your ENTIRE border coverage because if even one creep makes it in, it's game over (unless you are past sol 50 and have hospitals / chemical plants, but if you've made it that far, you know how to play the game).

About that narrator telling you what to do...

Goals

The first 2-3 campaign maps, you are given things to build. After the first one, you may be tempted to skip some of the more basic buildings and go straight for the advanced ones. While this is not a bad strategy, the game will gate further goals behind these simplistic items - and since you will get rewards for doing these, by not building that simple outpost at the beginning, you are essentially not going to get any more and are throwing away all the rewards you would have been given.

So do them, even if they are annoying and you know you can save up & get a more advanced building.

Warnings

You will ge warnings for low food, water, electricity and poor air. These are not always urgent, and it's quite easy to ignore these for a while because you have more pressing things to build...

However, water & food are two global elements that will impact your entire colony and it's very easy for these to get to a "spiraling out of control" point where the game will no longer be winnable and nothing you do will get it better - and if you haven't saved in a while, you're going to regret not listening to these warnings.

Air & electricity are localized to the area where the problem is and will only affect happiness on a small scale - but food & water are global. Pay attention to these!

Balancing Storage

Storage is something that can easily consume way too much resources & time. Water is a beast & it is not uncommon for a third of your storage to be water. Then you add the twenty other things that storage can hold and it's easy to get overwhelmed continually building storage buildings.

TIP: Shift Click on an item in storage to throw away 100 of these. So if you have an excess, it's sometimes better to just delete some things you don't need right now instead of building a new storage building.

Look at your storage and ask yourself if you really need > 2,000 of anything besides water. You want a variety of food, so maybe if you're flush with food, swap out what you are growing in a farm and grow something that isn't as efficient. Eg, give the brocolli a rest & grow some melons. Yea, you'll only get 1/4 the melons, but if you're flush with food, this will give you variety, thus increasing happiness.

You want to have enough alien foodstuffs on hand to make enhancers. It's not a bad idea to have 500-1,000 of each type before you get your chemical plant online, but you don't need any more of these.

Finally, don't be afraid to just de-activate farms and/or wells to get the amounts down to a reasonable number. When they do drop down and you start getting warnings, it's pretty easy to just activate them again.

Employment

In the beginning when you first land, you're going to build a lot of buildings. However, if you've got low employment - where the jobs filled < 70%, you're going to have to do a lot of micro management to get focus where you need them.

The sooner you can get > 70%, and preferably around 80-85%, you will find that you will reduce your micro significantly if you can do this.

I like to build tunnels, solar panels, plasma guns, and lighting towers when I'm in a state where I have low employment. So I'm continuing to expand, but not by creating buildings that will require workers.

Having 2 immigration centers early can really ramp your people so you can get there faster.

Air Quality

Air Quality is very important and rather than wait until it's getting bad, it's best to build this out while you are expanding. When you build that Geothermal plant, build the air filter next to it right then. Don't wait. Certain buildings are really bad for air quality, so plan your air filtration to be adjacent to these. From worst offenders to the least offenders:

Zorium Electrical generators
Zorium mines
Mills
Chemical Plants
Geothermal electrical plants
Mines
Nanite Processing

I also recommend skipping the air fans and going straight to air filters as air filters are not susceptible to the gas leaks that occur from uncapped geothermal vents.

Using micro to your advantage

When you get that warning that you're not going to have enough electricity - remember you can turn off the farms that aren't producing anything anway. You can turn off any building (provided you have enough batter power). This can effectively let you ignore building power buildings for 1-2 sols.

By turning off buildings, this also frees up workers so you can have them in other jobs.

Look at how much Iron you have - if you have an excess, lower the priority on iron mines and increase the priority on nanite processors. Or if you don't have any iron, or a low amount, do the opposite & increase priority on iron mines.

Ramping population

The game leads you to create one immigration center, but if you really want to accelerate your population, you're going to need 2,3 or even 4.

The best (and most expensive thing in the game) is the Space Elevator. Not only does it give you scads of storage, but it will also bring down 23 colonists at a time. However, this is a late game addition as it is soooo expensive.

The biggest problem with booming population is you need the nanite income to create the housing for all these. The 2nd biggest problem is food and water because every colonist that comes is going to consume these. Nanites, get a great income stream going. But no big deal if you find yourself in a crunch, just deactivate the immigration center or space elevator until you get caught up.

Having two immigration centers early is a nice way to get your employment up to 80-90% fast. You can always then turn one off and then turn it back on later.

Zorium is super powerful

In all my games, I have never found it necessary to upgrade a Zorium mine to level 2 until way late in the game - and that is even with a trade hub exporting Zorium. This is really easy to overproduce, and take up valuable storage, so just leave it at level 1 for most games. You'll know when you need to upgrade to level 2.

Actions don't give results immediately

When you are told that you are low on water / air quality / food / etc, it is really easy to overcorrect by building a lot of the thing you need. However, it takes quite a bit of time (maybe 1/4 or 1/5 of a sol?) for the results of one building to be fully realized. What this means is if someone is complaining about air quality and you build an air filter, you won't see an immediate affect. You'll need to wait it out.

The best bang for your buck is to make sure whatever facilities you do already have are 100% utilized. So you can make it high priority so that it is 100% efficient. The next best thing is upgrading them a level if it is possible.

Use T1 buildings to plan out your settlement and upgrade later

T1 (level 1) buildings are really the best way to lay out your colony. There is no need to go right to level 2 unless you are just burning nanites. Level 1 buildings allow you to plan the layout, and then they give you immediate benefits later when you need more food / water / air quality you can just upgrade them.

Deadspace is for buildings with no workers

Deadspace are those squares that aren't connected to tunnels.

Build Lightning towers, batteries, solar arrays, plasma guns and storage in the areas you don't want to build tunnels.

You can expand your colony in any direction you want by using these same non-worker buildings. A great way to get a plasma gun out onto the periphery is to build out a few storage modules, a solar array or two and then put your plasma gun out there.

Expansion is possible with habitation buildings

You really want to get to that geothermal well, and you've built a path out there, and you have a construction hub, but no workers are coming!

Build a small apartment building or outpost and you'll have workers to continue your path. Otherwise, the worker may never come, even when set to high priority!

Just the tips

In summary:

0. Save often!
1. Balance storage. Look carefully at it & keep everything except for water in reasonable numbers.
2. Keep employment > 70%
3. Use T1 buildings so you can upgrade later when it's an emergency
4. Use deadspace wisely (batteries, storage, solar array, lighting tower & plasma gun)
5. Do the quests they give you!
6. Two or more immigration centers can really help you ramp pop.
7. Use Micro such as turning off farms during winter to save electricity / redistribute your people
8. Don't upgrade Zorium mines > level 1
9. Things take time to clear up ... don't go too crazy
10. Use habitation buildings to get workers to remote sites.
11. Build air filters next to the offending buildings as you build these.

[Robotech]

Thank you very much for the guide

I've been battling for a while now, my settlers die quickly and I don't see any progress

the game saturates you with problems and it is difficult to anticipate them
I wished lack of food, air quality, diseases, little popularity, constant attacks etc...

It is desperate to build and not see the changes immediately

thanks to the guide that you have shared I am rethinking the construction, expansion and distribution of my colony

[Tman]

@jch It's too bad, I think this is a good game. I wish the devs would come out with some DLC to give us more campaigns!

[JCH]

Thanks for the tips. There's not much posts about this game.

[Tman]

Interesting tip. I hadn't thought of that but I think my hatred towards those plague spores on that level were the reason I don't do the normal air vents.

[tynian87116]

Thank you for the tips! Workaround for the inconvenient forced air vent midway through the campaign. I was able to glitch the game and delete it at the beginning, Can't remember how I did it,as I forgot the game doesn't autosave and tanked the mission, however, a workaround for that building without glitching is to de-prioritize the building and then destroy all the tunnels around it surround it with solar panels and turrets, then, build an air filter to mitigate the air purity loss. Makes it soo much easier to deal with plague spores that get through defenses. Had to add that because Holy mother of pissed me off it got so annoying having to deal with that stupid indestructible air vent. [/spoiller]

[APoCaLyPSE666NoW]

One worst management game about storage. Who is so stupid to store infinite amount of unit about same production ? Why Devs didn't add player limit for each product ? Why water is limited smarter than food ? Another game bad thinked and it force to make tons of wasting time management because Devs missed that. It cost nothing for Devs to allow player limit. This game can't have positive review from me.

[mgsgt2001]

It has stood the test of time for sure. Kinda blew my mind. So I have returned the "favor" with blow mind award. Thanks a bunch.

[Tman]

The geothermal electrical plants are the mainstay of electrical production. They have to go over the thermal vents you see on the surface - where steam comes out. Also, you can build batteries and the lightning spires and when storms come, lightning strikes will charge your batteries.

[srb180584]

Any information on the electricity producer units outside of solar panels? I am needing to use the one that is connected to the outside world and haven;t found that info?

[Alexander Reus]

thanks for guide, get a little advice from it..