[WIP] Assorted tips, and some notes

Some personal optimizing tips I've learned through multiple playthroughs of the game

Disclaimer

The numbers used here are from the main, default difficulty. Expect the numbers to change (and the game be a lot harder) when you pump up the diff.

I'll also be using the term Whiskers, mice, and rats interchangeably.

This guide is largely WIP!

And it might proooobably be WIP for a long time. The devs at Minakata Dynamics are too awesome at updating the game, and as of time of writing we even got a couple patches in a DAY.

Additionally, I don't game full-time -- I also work and live my life so expect this guide to lag a bit with the patches. Currently, this guide considers up to Patch #5.

Maybe not-so-obvious game mechanics

Building

• You can build on top of every other building. Only exception is when a "solid ground is needed" alert shows up. Always experiment with verticality with the F and V keys.
  
• Whiskers will not path over flat rooftops. You will explicitly need to place a Makeshift/Plank/Stone Path to let them do so. Solid ground is always pathable.
  
• You may get a "blocking entryway" alert when you're obviously not doing so -- in this case you may be blocking another building's entryway, or at the time of writing, an Earthworks designation.
  
• If there is are unsupported cells (e.g., empty space, or mined terrain) below your intended building, the game automatically generates supports at the cost of 1 Log per cubic unit / cell.

Farming

• Use the Farm Tool (N by default) a lot. It will give you vital information re: raw statistics (nutrients, sunlight, etc.) as well as suitability for plants when you select the plant on the window.
  
• To farm Mushrooms, you'd need an area with 0% sunlight, optimally, which means an artificial cave, or a covered piece of land. They do NOT care about nutrients and rocks; so don't bother removing the rocks or fertilizing the soil. They will still need heating during Winter to grow though, and pollution will affect growth time.
  
• Hold down SHIFT when using the Farm Tool to shrink plots.
  
• You may get an error while building stuff and it may seem like a bug. Ensure you're not building on the same tile as a farm plot.
  
• You can have elevated paths on top of your farm plots. The plots under will take a hit to Sunlight, but are still arable.
  
• Cotton, Tea, and Peppers will deplete the nutrients of the soil. Rotate crops (leaving Fallow) or fertilize the field to avoid this.
  
• The two numbers under nutrients are (Current Nutrients)%/(Max Nutrients)%. You may find that reclaimed land via Earthworks has more Max Nutrients than natural terrain.

Logistics and conveyors

• Logistics Hubs will prioritize the nearest storage to the hub for fulfilling demands. Useful for outposts.
  
• Setting a storage to "Empty out warehouse" WILL NOT consider an Input Hopper as a destination, in the current version of the game. In that spirit, there are NO ways of putting an item into conveyor belts once it has arrived at a storage. You can only move it to a workshop or another storage.
  
• The black square behind the Small and Medium Warehouses, including your Central Warehouse, act as an inlet for conveyor belts, Up-Stairs, and Down-Drops.
  
• The lower square of the Up-Stair, and the upper square of a Down-Drop can be inputted by (multiple) Input Hoppers, belts, and other conveyor infrastructure in any direction.
  
• You can build on top of the lower square of the Down-Drop. You cannot build on top of the lower square of the Up-Stair.
  
• Storages can have a resource type restriction. Helps with pesky Stone and Fish clogging up random Storage Sheds.

Services

• Whiskers will prioritize eating at a Cafe (or Dining Hall, henceforth), and the best quality food available there. The Cafe tends to stock lower-quality items as well, so if you want fully the best quality food, restrict it by unchecking it in the Cafe.
  
• If there is no food at a Cafe (it will hold 21 meals, which DOES NOT equate to 21 Whiskers; Miners Guild rats will eat twice, and Heavy Eaters an additional time), a Whisker will resort to eating at a Warehouse at a debuff.
  
• All Cafes are considered at the end of the day. A Whisker will avoid eating at a nearby warehouse if there's an available Cafe 1000 blocks away.
  
• Bathing docks (and similar) will NOT get stocked with Soap unless you have the Luxury Supplier.

Heating and pollution

• Heat seems to be calculated as a constant "raycasting" calculation with a dropoff (e.g. as lines bouncing). Hence you may find heating an enclosed space, such as a cave, much more efficient than heating open-air areas.
  
• Pollution, on the other hand, seems to work via a heat equation[en.wikipedia.org], dissipating over time. There seems to be an inherent decay, so an enclosed area (given enough size) won't fully get clogged up by pollution.
  
• Pollution does not strictly rise up. You will find its diffusion action affecting cells lower than it, albeit at a negligible rate (unless polluting buildings are spammed).

The Claws

• Your Claws' Trust (CT) will never exceed 4, or go lower than 0.
  
• If you fail to pay at all (not even make the first marker) at Claws' Trust = 0, cannon fire will destroy a number of your buildings, similar to Pirate attacks.
  
• Refusing Supplier shipments at CT == 0 has no effects. Helpful for reducing an upcoming tax cycle.
  
• Depending on your difficulty, unpaid taxes will only contribute a fraction of itself to your next tax cycle. It is NOT 1:1.
  
• Cannon fire will not target underground buildings, at time of writing. Buildings count as underground if they are under natural terrain.
  
• Population tax is 3 per Whisker per day on Normal, and 6 on Dire. Industrial tax is a flat % on your produced goods, and Admin tax is a constantly, slowly increasing tax based on time.

Miscellaneous

• Resource extractors (Woodcutters, Miners, Foragers) can be moved free of cost.
  
• Pumping water from an inland lake (which can be made via reclamation) will eventually drain said lake.
  
• Ore spawning behavior changes as you go deeper underground. You may find Iron, Rock Salt, Potash, among others spawning at a certain level. Gold Ore spawns sporadically globally.
  
• Approval impact among higher expectation mice (e.g. 2 and 3 star mice living at a Stone Shelter) is largely the same. However, you will gain positive approval if you exceed the expectations of mice (e.g. a 1 star mouse living at a Stone Rowhouse).

Smuggler prices

Currently, there's no way to view smuggler prices outside from the smuggler dialog.

Vote for this feedback post on the Discord[discord.com] if you'd like to see it implemented in the game. But while it isn't implemented, here's a quick reference of smuggler prices:


If the image is unavailable, the prices in order:

• Medicine - 55
  
• Furniture - 55
  
• Steel Plates - 55
  
  
• Bedding - 34
  
  
• Hearty Meals - 21
  
• Fertilizer - 21
  
• Fancy Meals - 21
  
• Tailored Cloaks - 21
  
• Cut Stone - 21
  
• Savory Meals - 21
  
• Fish Skewers - 21
  
  
• Soap - 13
  
• Jam Pastries - 13
  
• Ropes - 13
  
• Mushroom Stew - 13
  
• Woven Cloaks - 13
  
• Smoked Fish - 13
  
• Fuel - 13
  
  
• Planks - 8
  
  
• Bread - 5

General tips

General tips

• Get an Educated rat ASAP. It doesn't matter what guild they come from, but you should get at least one to get research up and running. As of game version at the time of writing, on default difficulty, their Expectations (stars) don't matter as much.
  
• I typically get Explorers Guild or Engineers Guild rats in the early game. The penalty for raw food (Farmers Guild) and the extra food consumption (Miners Guild) right now is too crippling for a startup colony.
  
• So far, I try my best not to get any Monarchist rats -- it's way easier managing rebellious thoughts by completely avoiding them rather than avoiding rebellious rats.
  
• Understand how storages/logistics work and how travel time affects your production. I have a dedicated section below but TL;DR: keep workshops near sources, keep an output (and if needed, an input) warehouse close to them, and have a Logistics Hub set up early on. I usually have mine set up even before Spring ends.
  
• When mining, mine as laterally as possible. The rats' vertical movement speed sucks A LOT in the early game, and you won't have a lot of options transferring tons of ore and stone upwards as well. Furthermore, mine as if you're planning to use that space (e.g. residential, industrial, or mushrooms).
  
• Do NOT mine out fertile ground.
  
• While building vertically is awesome, spread out your stairways (i.e. have multiple points) and don't go too far up in the early game. Place related workshops and warehouses on the same floor if possible, for now.
  
• Pollution-generating buildings, such as furnaces, should cap out your builds (i.e. put them on rooftops). I'm not familiar with how pollution works exactly right now, but I've found that a bonfire underground will cause a TON of Nauseating Pollution thoughts versus a bonfire exposed to the elements.
  
• Build as compact as possible. Saving space is secondary here IMO, it's more of efficient heating placement. Think about where to place your campfires/bonfires and how they'll affect your layout. Vertical building helps out a lot here.
  
• Moving some buildings, (e.g. Woodcutters, Mining Camps) is free. Re-check and move them AS CLOSE as possible to the extracted resource, especially when the resource is on a different z-level.
  
• Don't be afraid to mine next to water. It won't flood the mines.

Early Game

Expectations, approval, and housing

Just get Stone Shelters!

~35 Stone Shelters just after Year 1 Winter. See that I still have 170 stone left over.

• In my first few playthroughs, I always gunned for the early Log Cabin or any of the Plank house varieties when satisfying my rats -- I've realized now that this is mostly a trap.
  
• Why? Because wood (and derivatives from it) is very, VERY important. Stone on the other hand will immediately fill your coffers, especially if you're doing some heavy mining, which you should choose to do anyway.
  
• Additionally, they have a very efficient footprint of two cubic units per occupant, the most space efficient choice in the early game. Not to mention their ease in layouting.
  
• The approval hit is not that bad. If you manage things "correctly," you should still be able to stay in the green for approval, which takes me to the next section...

Daily maths

Satisfying Whiskers, I found is more at the collective level rather than at the individual level. Maybe they'll change this in the future for balancing (or is this worse in higher difficulties?), but it's not like Timberworld or Rimborn where you need to cater to a particular need of a single rat (outside of starvation, of course) lest they leave, get sick, or whatever.

At the end of the day, what you care about is number of positive points minus number of negative points. Hence if a rat with 5-star expectations feels like ♥♥♥♥ -- it can always be offset by a number of lower-expectation rats feeling like it's the ♥♥♥♥.


With Stone Shelters, Raw Fish, a Cafe: (on default diff)

• Regardless of Whisker expectations, Rough and stuffy (crappy house) ALWAYS "costs" 2 approval.
  
• Similarly, Bland Food ALWAYS "costs" 3.
  
• If you have Farmers Guild rats, you will get an extra 2 approval deficit per Fish eaten.
  
• Subpar Clothing is a substantial hit, but you won't get better clothing until later in the game (Year 2 or 3 onwards, if you rush it).
  
• Give or take, say you will always have an average of 6 approval cost per Whisker.
  
• Eating raw Fish or Berries ALWAYS gives 3 approval.
  
• Visiting a Cafe gives 1 approval.
  
• That ♥♥♥♥♥♥ Stone Shelter? Also gives 1 approval.
  
• So on the bare minimum average, you're getting 5 approval per Whisker.
  
• So, you should be satisfying around a ~1-2 approval deficit per Whisker -- which is particularly easy to do. Note that I still haven't factored in daily replacements of clothes, random hardtack/tea supplies, etc.
  
• Not to mention that not Overtime-ing your rats should give you a base 1 approval for Early to bed.

Hence, it's not that hard to keep approval in the green, allowing you to enact good Policies or consistently recruit Whiskers even with raw Fish and the Stone Shelters.

Tax, Claws, and food

Fishing is king!

• Every day, with a good setup, you should be able to get ~40 Fish for three employed Whiskers. Fish counts for 2 by default (and more when you smoke it and sell to the smuggler). This is my numbers from a Fishing Dock with a Netter, without Overtime.
  
• One of the first EA patches so far reduced population tax from 5 to 3. This means we should be fishing for 1.5 Fish per rat to offset their population tax. If you intend to feed your rats raw Fish daily as well, that would be 2.5 Fish per rat. More if they come from the Miners Guild (3.5 Fish), since they always eat extra.
  
• Since Population Tax is typically the heaviest contribution to your taxes, always figure out a sustainable way to satisfy that as your colony grows. Fishing ticks all the marks, since Copper Ore will eventually be harder to obtain (and you'll be using it for building and research) as you deplete the veins, and Cotton is usually slow to grow, and depletes ground fertility which will require some crop rotation (i.e. micromanagement) without fertilizers.
  
• Drawback is Fish isn't space-efficient, so build a good number of Warehouses and forbid Fish in the Central Warehouse.
  
• Credit to TactiCat on YouTube for this strategy. I used to spam berry farms for food but it never occurred to me that I could just let my rats eat fish and not worry about any side effects.

On smuggling and stone

• Early on, what I've found I do is spam Cut Stone and sell that to the Smuggler for Bullion. Stone is plentiful and never fails to clog up my storage, so I found that to be my go-to strategy.
  
• However, once you start building with Cut Stone, it's good to switch exporting Flax-based goods (Ropes, Clothes), or Fuel (from Coal), or Smoked Fish. You can find some ramblings on value in a later section.

When to over/underpay taxes?

• I tend to overpay very early on when it's easy to do so. 150% of a 200 Gold tax (300) is way way easier to do versus 50% of a 2000 Gold tax (3000).
  
• You NEED to pay appropriately when your Claws happiness is less than 4 (the max). You can go to the Tax Report screen to see your current level.
  
• I've found that keeping the Claws happy just before Winter and underpaying right after the season is my usual strategy. Remember to always think about the benefits of overpaying them and if it's worth spending all of your resources NOW to keep them satisfied. Important resources such as Logs are usually saved for a last resort when I can't keep the Claws happiness up.
  
• Reinforcing the point above, Unpaid Taxes for the next tax cycle doesn't seem to be 1:1 to what you missed; so you'll be saving much more money underpaying after Winter (when your taxes are at their highest) for the Claws disapproval you get.
  
• Finally, I tend to save Bullion as much as possible. They're a very space-efficient way of storing gold -- and can always save you in a pinch.

Logistics basics

I typically get a Logistics Hub early on and get at least one Whisker to man it. When you see your requests getting unfulfilled despite the availability of your resources, that's a good sign to add a Whisker or two.

How logistics work

Logistic requests are the core of the system. The hubs themselves do nothing else except store the carts and serve as a waiting station for your assigned Whiskers. I suggest just putting this at the rough center of your city.

The set up for my input warehouse for my Sawmill.

Input warehouses

"Input" warehouses are warehouses close to your workshops that store input material -- e.g. a Storage Shed holding Logs for a Sawmill. You can "ask" (hence "request") for say, Logs, by clicking on the plus icon for the desired number.

If there are available Logs in your colony, workers at the Logistics Hub will be dispatched to fetch those Logs and deliver them to your input warehouse. Having a dedicated Whisker do all this delivering is way better and way more efficient than having the actual worker of the Sawmill fetch them from god-knows-where.

Output warehouses

"Output" warehouses, well, you get the gist -- it stores output material. Say a Storage Shed for Planks near your Sawmill, or for Fish near your docks.

The set up for my output warehouse for my Fishing Dock.

One important note here is to have a separate storage area for resources you store in bulk. For example, I regularly store hundreds of Fish, so I have an area elsewhere that stores the Fish (see image). However, I STILL keep even a Storage Shed (the output warehouse) with the Empty out warehouse option to reduce travel time for the Fishing Dock workers.

If I don't actively empty out the warehouse, the output warehouse will get FULL and the Fishing Dock workers would have to travel farther to empty out their workshop.

However, for other goods I use sparingly (e.g. always/regularly <80), I tend to just plonk down a Small Warehouse, restrict it to that item, and leave Empty out warehouse OFF. It saves some overhead for the logistics workers and won't clog up my other general warehouses as well.

Considerations for both warehouses

• If you played Factorio before, treat input and output warehouses as requester and active provider chests, respectively.
  
• For mixed inputs, there's currently (as of writing) no way to set a maximum, or partition a single warehouse to have N, M, of goods X, Y. For example, if I allow a single Storage Shed to have Copper Ore and Fuel for my furnaces, there's no guarantee that it will clog, i.e. it'll be full of Copper Ore and it wouldn't keep the requested amount of Fuel. This is because allowing a resource tells the colony globally to "hey, feel free to dump items here!" Hence, it's easier to just set two Storage Sheds for Copper Ore and Fuel separately.

General tips

• I've found assigning Swift Whiskers to Logistics Hubs be the best. I tend to rename Swift Whiskers appropriately so I can easily spot them.
  
• As of writing, there's no way to preemptively configure the warehouses before they're built. Emptying them when they're full of undesirables (e.g. fish, stone) is a bit cumbersome, so I do recommend actively waiting for them to get built and then configuring appropriately.
  
• For catalysts, I tend to skip building a warehouse unless the catalyst is extremely far away. They don't replace those as often.

On conveyor belts

Conveyor connectivity

Conveyor systems can be built in a number of ways compactly. For example, Up-Lift Stairs and Down-Drop Slides don't need to "match" and have belts in between. Some examples:

Additionally, the second half (downwards) of the Down-Drop Slide isn't considered to "occupy" the space above, which means Whiskers can walk a path over it, or a building can occupy the space above:

As of writing, there is no way to split off or filter contents of a conveyor system without Whisker interference. However, you can merge into belts and ramps.

On resource extraction

When you start to transition to the midgame, you'll find that trees and ores are getting farther and farther from your main population and industry center. Since conveyors can be refunded at full cost, it's wise to use them instead of dotting output warehouses which would heavily stress your logistics Whiskers.

Your resource extractor Whiskers (woodcutters, miners), like all other Whiskers, don't need to eat, rest, or go away from their work area during work hours. Thus, having these temporary conveyors saves a LOT of travel time.

Later on, you could just easily extend these conveyors (again, refundable at full cost), or fully tear them down if you choose to utilize the area they occupy or move away from said extraction point. Hence, this is mostly a lossless investment, saving precious labor (by having fewer logistic rats) and heavily increasing efficiency (by maximizing work time) -- at the "cost" of logs, planks, and cut stone.

An early example of using conveyors for tree extraction. Without this, you'll see that 60-80% of your woodcutters spend their time travelling to and fro a warehouse.

Another early example for mining. Note that conveyors block pathfinding, so be aware of that. I don't intend to mine another z-level above which is why my conveyors are at "ground level." Note that you can easily go around conveyors by going over or under them -- use verticality to your advantage!

Saving on foundation costs

If you're laying down belts over a large gap (e.g., from another island), you can save costs by placing them on top a Covered Bridge. On average this should save around 3/5 (60%) of the Log costs of the foundation.

You can even take this to the extreme and stack a lot of bridges laterally and build an entire village on that -- you do you.

On Sifting Towers, fuel, and some economy maths

For fuel

I've found that if I have a good influx of Coal, a fully-staffed Sifting Tower with catalysts (Ropes, which you should already have for Netting, Sawmill and Stone Cutter catalyzation) is just roughly just as efficient as a Charcoal Furnace:

My Charcoal Furnace averages at around 27 Fuel per day, but eats up a whopping 18 wood. This is setup with input and output warehouses extremely close (just 2-3 blocks away, on the same z-level).

The Sifting Tower currently averages at around 45 Fuel per day, which is roughly twice (maybe 1.5, 1.75x) more than the Charcoal Furnace right now.

When to use Furnaces vs. Sifting Towers?

Personally, I find Sifting Towers to be more preferable, even though you'd need more Whiskers and some water infrastructure to match the Charcoal Furnaces' output.

Should I sell Fuel or Smoked Fish?

Additionally, it uses Ropes for catalysts, rather than a more expensive, less-sustainable Fire Tongs.

However, it's important to note that aside from Steel, (which is a bit way into the midgame) Coal doesn't have much use while you'd want to have a lot of Logs at any point of the game due to building requirements. Additionally, it multiplies Coal's sale value drastically:

• Coal is worth 13, and makes 5 Fuel. Fuel at the smuggler is also worth 13, which makes each piece of Coal essentially worth 75 each, if you choose to sell it. The labor value would be something like 75 - 13 = 62 per day.
  
• You can also use each piece of Fuel in Smoked Fish, another valuable smuggler trade good. One piece of Coal can make 5 Fuel, and then 25 Smoked Fish (worth 13), which bumps it up to 325 each. Factoring in labor with Smokeries and Fishing Docks, and Fish being worth 2, 325 - 13 - (2*3*5) = 282 per day
  
• While this multiplies Coal's sale value more, it doesn't factor in the amount of work needed to produce Smoked Fish. For that, we need to ramble on.

Formulating a theory for gold per day of rat labor:

• 1 rat: 40/3 = ~13 Fish/day; 25/2 = ~12 Smoked Fish/day; 45/3 = ~15 Fuel/day. Fishing and Fuel is catalyzed here, since setting up Table Salt is another matter.
  
• In terms of rat labor: 1 Fish = 0.08 rat labor units (RLU); 1 Smoked Fish = ~0.085 RLU, 1 Fuel = ~0.07 RLU.
  
• To understand that, say you need 45 Fuel/day, that will be 45*0.07 = 3.15 RLU, i.e. you need ~3.15 rats to work a whole day to make 45 Fuel (which is backed up by statistics, but a rough approx.; this is a fully-staffed Sifting Tower for Fuel + Ropes)
  
• I'll be exempting the labor for Log/Coal gathering, since I don't have enough data for now.
  
• 15 Fish/day + 25 Smoked Fish/day + 5 Fuel/day = 5(0.24 + 0.425 + 0.07) = 3.675 RLU per batch of Smoked Fish, from Fuel and Fish.
  
• Selling pure Fuel (minus Coal costs) would be 62 / (0.07*5) RLU = 177 coins per RLU (i.e. 185 coins gained from a whole day of rat labor). Note that this exempts labor from logs or Coal.
  
• Selling Smoked Fish (minus raw costs); 282 / 3.675 = ~77 coins per RLU. Which makes sense since you need way more rats to not only Fish, but also smoke it.

TL;DR: Therefore, labor-wise it's way better to sell Fuel as-is. However if you're saving on Coal, you can get more value out of it by incorporating it into Smoked Fish -- but the labor value goes down drastically. I personally recommend NOT to sell Fuel as-is if you're still relying on Logs for it, but as soon as you process Coal, it's better to sell Fuel, factoring in rat labor.

However, sell what you have the most. If your storage is clogging up with Fuel, and it's still Summer or early Fall, go for it. Similarly with Smoked Fish. Gold bullion used for bonuses NOW is better than stockpiling either.

Your first outpost (Tin Ore)

As you go through the tech tree, you'll find out that you'll need Tin Ore to make Bronze -- and if you settled on the conventional "main island," (the one with Copper Ore), you'll quickly realize that Tin Ore isn't there. In most cases, it can be found to the island nearest you.

It'll take a few days to set it up, and in my case, I even set it up during Winter (don't do this, maybe wait for Summer). It's a bit slow, but doable.

The naive approach

You can just set up some bridges, earthworks, and/or tunnels going to the other island and plonk down your miners there. However you'll find that they will literally spend 1/3 to 1/2 of the day going there, and they wouldn't have time to go back and eat, take a shower, resupply, and reheat during the colder days. They won't usually starve to death, but they'll definitely spend a good chunk of the morning looking for food. And even if you Overtime them, they'll still travel back to look for food when there's no Cafe nearby.

Sure, it'll work, but one Whisker will act like a tenth of a Whisker. You can definitely brute force it with ~20 miners and be done in a few years.


If you choose to go down this path: I recommend micromanaging these mice by picking them up and down (which costs 1 Approval)

The bare minimum

Here is what I recommend for a bare minimum outpost:

• A connection. I go for bridges for the aesthetic and the labor savings. You can also tunnel to the other island -- up to you.
  
• A conveyor system going back to your main island. Unless you want to set up industry at the outpost itself (in computer science, this is what we call "edge-heavy"), I recommend having a conveyor system feeding back to your main population center for all the extracts and what not.
  
• Later on, a conveyor system going to the outpost. I don't opt for this since I tend to clog storages (since there are several requirements for the outpost), but if you can make it work, that would save some logistics Whiskers.
  
• A Cafe.
  
• A Bathing dock.
  
• Fire Tender(s), and bonfires to cover.
  
• A Small Warehouse, or a few Storage Sheds. Set these to request some Fuel, and some food.
  
• A Logistics Hub. No need to fully staff it, but feel free.
  
• Stone shelters for the workers above, and for your extractors (miners, woodcutters). Quick to build, and space efficient. I opted for a few Stone Rowhouses in the screenshot, but let me tell you -- even with 10 construction mice and the night building edict that took FOREVER.

Don't think about building over fertile land for now -- you can move underground if needed later on. You just want things to get set up for now so that your mice don't live in hell going to and back from the main island. Essentially, this will be like Day 1 except you have more tech to play around with.

The Cafe and the Bathing dock are self-explanatory, as they don't need to go back to your colony center for services. Likewise for the bonfire. The Fire Tender will attend to the nearest bonfire, and probably your colony center Fire Tender(s) are too far away to even keep the uptime to 100%.

Likewise for the Logistics Hubs, unless your colony center is saturated with logistics rats, you'll find that your requests will go unfulfilled. Having a Logistics Hub near the Small Warehouse (or similar) will help fulfill the requests for your outpost.

Expanding the expansion

Later on you'd like this outpost to be more self-sustainable. You'll find that your logistics Whiskers travel way too far to fetch some food for the Cafe -- so you'll set up some Fishing Docks and maybe a Smokery for local food. Then you'll find fetching Fuel becomes cumbersome, so you start to process Fuel locally as well -- you get the gist. Eventually, this outpost will sustain itself and the interactions between your colony center and the outpost should be narrowed down to Tin Ore among other exports.

Sample builds

Smokery + Fishery complex, Day 80

[HowNowPunCow]

I liked stacking my logistics hub ontop of my cafe with storage sheds for easy distro/collection.

[Lickorice]

personal recommendation:
1. put pollution sources a little bit away from high-traffic areas and not bunch them up together. open air, or a large underground room is also preferable. having a Cant Smell rat work on it is also great.
2. mechanics re: heating and pollution propagation are easily observable, and are in "Maybe not-so-obvious game mechanics." i'll leave that as an exercise to the reader !

[Molay]

I was wondering one thing about pollution: Is it desirable to place pollution producers higher-up? I.e. would it be fine to have pollution producers on top of rowhouses, as most pollution will just lift and not bother people on the ground?

[aN4oUSSS]

Привет! Твоё руководство очень хорошее, спасибо. Ты смог разобраться с отоплением пещер? Пожалуйста, расскажи о механике распространения дыма и вентиляции в пещерах. Два дня не могу решить эту проблему.

Machine translation:

Hi! Your guidance is very good, thank you. Were you able to figure out how the caves are heated? Please explain the mechanics of smoke propagation and ventilation in caves. I've been struggling with this for two days.

[Lickorice]

thanks for reading through @Reiner! hope it helps :)

[Reiner]

im a big fan of the genre and i was struggling with finding some in depht guide, backed up with maths and so on...
Played 42h since release and i didnt know slides didnt need to match for example
this was great thanks for the effort

[Lickorice]

yup, also tunneled in one of my previous saves -- personally id still choose bridging over for the aesthetics though. a full subterranean save would be fun and crazy though ngl

[OutlawTacoh]

You can also mine a tunnel underneath to other islands, It's cheaper and easier as long as you're not tunneling deeper than 2 blocks to get there

[Sapik]

you can remove crop with shift.
for others islands, you can build bridges, with wood or dirt. but when the sea is very deep, best option is to build a bridge (the building) because it doesn't need support.

[pmcmanaway]

how do u go to another island to get more resources?