Retro-Pixel Castles >>> Advanced Guide/wlkthrough

For those struggling to get through summer I help give you a great start towards surviving beyond day 9. "The winter is coming", well autumn really but after that, winter is coming, I promise.

The beginning

Ehyder has a good intro guide that even though written for InDev19 is still valid for 95% so go and read that. After you have read that come back here.

When selecting your first map choose Woodhaven. It has a great beginner starting point.
Then place your town center in the bottom right (SE) plateau. This helps limit the direction from which monsters will approach you as you can remove the spawns that appear within range. More on that later.

I set my town center a little more east of the center of plateau as most of the resources were on the western edge so you want to leave plenty of space for the harvesting buildings to be on that side.

Mobs in general will not come across the water. They can, they just don't do it often. So that beach provides a nice buffer between you and death.

Ignore the prebuilt small farm for now. Build a single large farm while your center is being built. build it at least 6 spaces to the right of town center. While that is happening in the left UI menu select the tab for resources and start marking up the stone and forest to the immediate east for collecting.

After the farm is built you can now select the food resource. Highlight the little section of food for gathering. Set 4 people to work the farm.

Right before the farm finishes building drop 6 tents in a north-south colum just west of the farm. We just want shelter fast so our workers stay happy.

While that is being done, here is where you will want to put things down, but not build, just for placement reasons. Put a crystal harvest thingy south of the town center, near patch of crystals, then put the crystal refining thing west of that. North and as west as possible of the crystal refining place a stone harvest building, north of that, place a stone cutter building. East of the mining building place a tumbler (manufacturer). Remember to keep the buildings paused.

Now north of the stone cutter place a logging building. Let them start building this. East of that put a carpenter building (wood refining). East of the carpenters put a Bower (manufacturer).The only building being built is the logging camp and remaining tents. Lastly drop down the Ways building (manufacturer) anywhere really, south is probably best as the north is being reserved as the killing fields.

Now click on the build order button on the top UI. Order the list as follows. Un pausing no more then two at a time.
Logging building
Mining building
Carpenter building

Now drop another Large farm due south of the first one once the carpenter bulding gets started.

Reorder the buildings again.
Large Farm
rock cutter

Unpausing so no more then 2 buildings are in process. Fend off any slimes with villagers using heal magic to keep them alive. OR just grab them and toss them on the other side ofthe map.

Setting up the killing field

Now it is time to start laying out the killing maze.

For this to work you have to block the paths to you to force the mobs down the lane. There may be some flowers in the way so highlight them for destruction using the destroy terrain in the left GUI. All other buildings need to be paused for the workers to do this action. They will build everything else first.

Just south of the hillside to the north you will make a west to east run of wall. Then go south three blocks on the far eastern edge. Then go back west this time drop 6 squares at the end, then go back east. You should have something akin to a squat S. The last hollow that opens to your town is where towers will go. Ok so between the first west to east run, and the return build another wall divideing this into two rows. The mobs only need a single square to move. So we are funneling and then forcing them back so before they move south of our turrets they will have gone by them twice at least. Now depending on the room, adding a third and fourth row before they get south is preferred. Remember we are using wood for these walls. It may take some wonky wall work to get the paths blocked. Mobs can not travel through the forest or hills so use those to help force the mobs. Towers are 3x3 blocks so the idea is to have a diouble row of towers in the middle of your maze.

If the mobs start wandering around the north of the hilside and along the shallow beach, then build some fire pits to extend your build range so that you can lay down a wall to keep mobs from going into that little canyon to the beach.

You may find that in order to expand the wall you will need a couple fire pits first. You will have to experiment a bit and restart a few times.

once you have the first two rows or the more if you want to test your timing, and the big 6 wide row, at the closed end of the 6 wide, build two bow towers on the bottom half of the row. The front will go to shorter range bullet towers.

Now reorder the buildings:

Bower
Drop another large farm allocate up to 6 farmers total when finshed.
Tumbler
Ways Marker
Crystal Harvester

North of the bow towers place 2 of the bullet towers.

At then end of the first row on the east side place a sling shot tower. We want this tower to fire into the lane, as if the zombies were bowling pins.

Remember to keep it to two buildings at a time, 3 max.

Prepping for the summer

By day 4 hopefully most of your killing field is up. (The Pic above is where I am at mid evening day 4.)

To get through summer, you need at least three farms. I usually try to get a hovel, the big one up in here at some point prior to summer as well. It provides some more food storage and more heat resistant, that is they cool down faster. If you manage a Hovel, then destroy a tent or two to get some occupants otherwise it will fill with food that noone will use, it is comical really.

Try to get a large food storage built during spring as well. Place it just north or on the eastern edge of your farms.

Lets talk assignments during the spring

Farming - 6
Mining - 3
Lumberjack - 4
Stone cutter - 1
Carpenter - 1
Crystal Harvest - 1
Bower - 1 during the day, 2 during the night.
Tumbler -2 during the day, 3 during the night. (depends also on how many turrets you manage to get up)
Ways and Marks - 1 (don't forgot to lay out your paths using the left UI icon.)
Builders -12
Total is 32 - Summer will be a good time to have some babies.

If while keeping an eye on the farms you notice that there always seems to be food ready to pick, add another farmer incrementally until you don't see food constantly. It just depends on the rain you get in spring. Remove from the builder pool.

Other tips for spring:

1) If while building your killing field you start to get too many mobs, use the grab magic to keep moving the mobs back to the start of your maze. Just be quick as every second counts when holding.

2) Also you can fire ball the graveyard spawns which puts a DoT on it so it will be destroyed which means fewer mobs the next time night comes around.

3) If a mob does get into your citezenry then use the area heal to keep them alive.

4) Work on balancing your tower building with your food and resource gathering.

5) Use the encourage growth often to keep trees close by.

6) Hovels, food, and regular time off, cause characters to be much happier, which in turn gives you more mana to use and higher chance for babies.

7) Learn to have full mana when night time comes!!!!!!!!!!

Surviving Summer

Summer, oh the sun, the sand, and the endless waves of skeles and zombies.

First the SUN!

Giver of all life, infinte source of energy and igniter of citizens.

"Yes sunstroke is no joke people", as my drill used to say, "Drink water, drink water, drink water!"

How do our citizens drink water? They must be sent home with nothing to do but twiddle their thumbs before they will slake their thirst and ward off the evil that is overheating.

The key during summer is the keep expanding your killing zone, while minimizing the workers exposure to the heat. When the temperature gauge in the top UI is full red, or above the little grey line, start monitoring the problems box. If it says someone is overheating, they are going to die shortly if not sent home. There is no simple way to find who is specifically over heating. So what I do is the following.

If the problem box says 7 are over heating I un-allocate 7 workers. They then meander back to the house and cool off. Preferably a hovel. The main thing here is to send however many are indicated are over heating home. It takes a few cycles to update, the message doesn't dissapear right away.

TIP: Using the left UI you can pause a building by selecting the pause cursor and clicking on a building instead of having to select building and deftly clicking the tiny pause button. If there are multiple buildings of a single type (ie farms) they must all be paused or workers simply shift building. Pausing effectively sends the worker home without having to change allocation.

I have had as many as 25 of 32 people just relaxing on a hot summer afternoon. The benefit here, is all that down time means, LOVE time!! We love our babies! Some times at night the temp drops enough I can send the bums back out to work, but you will see that it is never for long periods of time before someone starts over heating.

Farms need 1 person per farm to keep up unless you get a lucky rain storm, then quickly assign a group to gather it all up. Don't forget to use the encourage land magic on the food patch and then highlight it to scoop it all up. Once your farms are full it goes straight to the wearhouse.

Monsters start to get tougher, and more frequent and the evening and nighttime raids get much more serious. Keep expanding the killing field as best you can, but building is slow in summer.

TIP: If for some reason your towers are being damaged. If you put an already built building at the top of the build order list, it will be repaired more quickly.

Try to get the Ways building built by the first day or two of summer. Once it is built assign 1 or 2 guys and start marking the paths your citizens use. You can just go over the common paths. The first path type is free. EAch consecutive path type requires one or two resources. All the way up to I think cobblestone.

TIP: Your resource collection really speeds up with a road leading to the rock quarry and the forest.

Tip: Also make sure you place a path along your turrets so that resupply is done much faster.

The heat of summer is more dangerous then the monsters. Respect the heat, read the gauge and for heaven's sake drink water!

Advanced combat tactics

Really not much to say. Build some fire towers once you get the crystal refinery going.

In the north toward the eastern side of your tower row, place a fire turret and somewhere east of your turret row, place an essence collector. Once the essence collector is built build a crystal generator in the general area. You are going to need them.

The fire turret sucks essence like a VW diesel. You will need to learn when to cast the dissolve spell to maximize the amount of essence available. It can disolve crystals as well as corpses so having the crystal field there may help.

Tip: Look for the little red circles highlghting corpses when you have disolve selected. select different targets to maximize the number of corpses disolved per spell.

Once you get into the fire turret and the golems for defense, you will need an essence machine of some kind. I think maxing your crystal refinery staff will help. Perhaps building a harvester and refinery near the turrets is the best idea.

At some point around day 11 or 12 you will really need two fire turrets or to have nearly doubled up your maze armaments. By this point you will have a good grasp of the mechanics and can start experimenting on your own.

I hope you found this useful, if not poorly written and totally lacking any format. It was just a hack to help more people enjoy the game so that we continue to get updates, which gets better reviews and further updates.

Feel free to comment.
No promises I'll respond.
Have fun surviving.

I will make it to Spring! (day 13 so far)

[Lordly Cinder]

what someone say my name?

[Gopher]

This really needs to be updated... Still, pointed me in a generally useful direction!

[Lady Cali]

too bad this doesnt work anymore. :(

[Acieeed]

Thanks man, very useful guide for such a great game!

[Arcanepollock]

i was thinking instead of going from left to right for the maze you should go up and down otherwise your arrow miss when they walk by