Architect of Utopia

The achievement Architect of Utopia III involves having 500 sheep on your farm. This guide will help you form a strategy for accomplishing that.

Early game

To begin, you must unlock and play as The Ram character.
To unlock this, play until you can get 50 sheep on your farm in any run.

This is essential for a few reasons. The first of which is that this character comes with some important passives such as God sent Wheat (this allows you to begin the game with the Wheat Expansion essence that spreads wheat each turn) as well as Sheepremacy (this will turn all normal and alpha wolves into slave wolves that turn wool into luxury cloth). It also provides the best starting setup of wheat, fences, sheep, and wells.

Next, your perk selection:

This should include your level one Architect of Utopia. The others are less important but Seven Seas Explorer is a good choice as you will need many many islands late game to support your absurd number of sheep. Save the Animals and Monoculture are also viable options. None are explicitly required for this run, but feel free to experiment with the rest to suit your playstyle and work with what you currently have unlocked.

Now lets get into the game. The first thing you should do on day 1 is to place your cards in an arrangement something like this:

Note that we have placed only one of our wheats. This slightly slows the growth of our wheats due to Wheat Expansion and allows us to place a few more sheep and wells early. Its important to balance water, sheep, and maintenance costs in the early game to avoid failure.

Next, place wells and sheep on your islands until day 3. When it comes time to select a card you will have limited options. Taking wells will probably be the best choice, followed by wheat. Continue placing sheep if you have enough water and wells on only two or three islands until day 6.
It should look something like these:


When selecting cards from here on you will begin to have more options. Take sheep, fences, wheat, wells, watery trees, or water cows. Try to minimize the number of rerolls you use. Take the best option given to you rerolling once or twice if you must. If you are given bad cards, try to take a bad card with the lowest # of cards given to you (the number at the bottom tells you how many of that card you will receive).

After day 6, you may begin to expand from your starting islands in a cross formation with each island adjacent to your sheep islands having 2 or so wells on it and using 1 wheat card to fill it with wheat. Three sheep should sustain you enough income to make it for quite a while. Getting an early water cow or a few watery trees can make managing your water after that easier.
This is what my day 15 farm looked like:

You'll want to place your new fence next to two of the islands already populated with wheat and then place one water cow on that island. The future placement of water cows should skip one in the diagonal line of fences to maximize coverage. If you don't have them yet it would be good to leave space for them.
Example:

Mid Game

With your water cows and/or watery trees placed your next goal should be to search for crows, wolves, giant sheep, and antenna while still expanding our sheep empire. Antenna will provide energy for our cutters and looms later. We wont need a lot of energy but a few antenna will be required to make full use of our giant sheep. When you get them you will place them on any island that uses a small fence instead of a medium one. Also, make sure the islands adjacent to your antenna island are filled completely with 1 space items (such as wheat or wells). The very first island you placed sheep on should work perfectly.



On day 20 you will receive your first essence selection. For this run many essences will be completely useless and sometimes none of the offerings will help us. Feel free to select randomly in that case as long at they are not detrimental in some way. These are the essential essences for this run:
Rabbit Apprentices (If 2 animals of the same group are on the same island, get a card of the cheapest animal of that group)
Home Sweet Home (2x slots to all structures)
Black Water*(+10 production to animals and now consume fuel instead of water. Every increase of water cost on animals increases fuel instead)
*Make sure not to take Black Water until we get our fuel setup going later

These essences are also nice to grab:
Gluttonous Feast (Every animal produces two times per turn)
Dionysian Rites (Every 10 turns get +4 production to crops and 3x production to grapes for 5 turns)
Dealers Hand (+2 hand size but every card is +50% more expensive)
Tropical Soil (The value of items made by crops is increased by double of it water cost)

At this point you should have enough water to sustain crows when you get them. Be careful with how you place them as you will want to leave room for a few different setups. Do not place them without pre-planning how you will use them and making sure you leave space for whatever it requires. Crows are important because they will scale infinitely and provide massive production bonuses to your wheat, which can then be fed into your giant sheep > cutter > loom to create massive amounts of wool fabric, used to create fuel, or mill > centrifuge for pie crusts

For the giant sheep setup place your giant sheep on the same island as a crow and make sure 3 adjacent islands are entirely filled with wheat and no wells/trees. Reserve one of the adjacent islands for a cutter + loom setup later. You will fill it with wheat after that and still maintain the bonus from your crows.



Fuel will be essential to removing our water limitations late game. To get massive amounts of fuel you will need a crow and a biofuel generator. Place the crow in your preferred location, preferably where all 4 adjacent islands are full of wheat. Then instead of placing your diagonal fence, place a biofuel generator. One of these setups should last you your entire run.



Once you get fuel going you can do another crow setup into pie crusts for another source of income.


Another income option is black sheep. They get +30 production if there are no other sheep nearby but they also get +5 production each and every turn they attempt to destroy wheat. It will be a good idea to take these and place as many as you can. Don't bother trying to place them by themselves because the scaling will eventually make that insignificant and we are trying to MAXIMIZE the number of sheep we can get.

Moving further you'll begin to look for more things to scale you into late game. Each run will be unique and move at their own pace. Make sure you're keeping track of what you have and what you don't.

Late to End

Once you have all of those, feel free to do more pie crust or giant sheep setups. Eventually you will need to focus on rapidly expanding your islands to accommodate your growing number of sheep. It will be best to maximize the number of sheep you can put down. To do so you'll need to take as many fences as you can while looking out for the following.

Pastors: +5 production to sheep in a 3 island range and gives you 1 sheep card per turn if they're on the same island as at least 3 sheep

Churches: Gives 50 gold per sheep on farm as well as 1 sheep card

These may also be a good addition:

Crosses: Pastors get 30 gold per sheep in 4 island range and 2x production to wheats. They will not alter your slave wolves.

Wheat: if you need to fill empty spaces

Crows: for more setups

I finished the achievement in 268 days but of course your milage may vary.



Some important things to note are that if you save and exit I have noticed that the crow bonuses will be removed at the moment so unfortunately you may have to do this in one sitting. Also, if you fail for some reason after at least getting Architect of Utopia II it will make it much easier to get through early game with that perk.

This is not an all-encompassing guide and I hope if I have missed anything, made any mistakes, or you simply have other good ideas, that you will leave a comment to help other people who may come across this. If you enjoyed this please leave a like as it is my first time writing a guide.

Good luck to everyone in your achievement hunting
and thanks for reading c: