Beginner's Guide

Welcome to Farthest Frontier! This guide will detail how to create a stable start for your settlement and set you up for success. Please note that this is a work-in-progress so if you have any feedback please contribute to the discussion on this wiki and join the community discord for more tips + feedback.

A well-defended and supplied early settlement

Creating Map

See World Generation page for more advanced details

You can leave default Trailblazer settings for a good experience of all the game has to offer, although it is advised to change the map type to lowland lakes/plains for your first run as other map modes provide prohibitively uneven terrain or are lacking in resources.

Placing your Town Center

You will now need to place your Town Center before you can do anything else, note that the center itself offers little use besides safety during raids + some desirability so its not critical exactly where you place it, as long as the general area is satisfactory.

Press F4 to toggle between different resource views (switch to quantity view)
Press F to toggle the fertility view

What to look for:

Animal threats (avoid)

Wolf dens will destroy your villagers in the early game if you settle close to them, so try to steer clear

Boars will turn aggressive and will attack your villagers, but can be hunted for food (not automatically)

Neutral animals

Deer herds, which are an excellent early game of food and will provide important resources like hides and tallow.

Enhanced Shoals of fish. While fish can be gathered around any water body, enhanced fishing spots provide a 50% bonus, which makes them on par with deer herds.

Land considerations

Flat land will make it significantly easier to expand your settlement. The Flatten Land tool (T) may be used, but it is high labor cost.

Fertile land using the fertility view (F). Settling near high fertility land will make farming easier. More details below in food production.

Strategic resources

Clay deposit (most helpful). This will allow you to produce pottery and with brickmaking is important for construction/building upgrades
Coal Deposit. This will allow you to mine Coal which is necessary for metal/brick/glass industries. You can substitute coal with Charcoal made from Firewood so this is not immediately necessary
Iron Deposit. You will be able to mine these to produce iron ore, which will be more important later.

Take note the location of strategic resources before you place your settlement, since they disappear into Fog of war.

Place your town center in a spot that has lots of flat terrain around it (20-30 squares) as that will make settlement expansion easier later. Once it is placed the rest of the map will disappear into the fog of war and the progression of time will begin.

Early Settlement Guide (Tier 1)

This stage will involve you setting up the basic food supply for your settlement, and the gathering/processing of basic resources required for a self-sustaining settlement. Do not worry too much about placement of buildings at this stage as you can move them around later without over-disrupting your settlement production.

Harvesting menu where you select what you want to be included/removed from selection

Cut down 4-8 tress as the town center is being built. Press H to bring up the harvesting interface, you can enable/disable what you want to harvest. Drag to select all checked resources for harvest (you can hold shift and drag to unselect)

Avoid harvesting trees and bush around wildlife, as this will prevent them from regenerating

Place a Firewood Splitter to begin stockpiling firewood (which is processed from raw logs). This should be somewhere near a large body of trees with lots of space for other production buildings

Firewood is a basic survival requirement of your villagers throughout the game, as they will need it to heat their homes during winter. Firewood is also used in the production process of many buildings such as Smokehouses in the early game.

Always monitor your firewood reserves and adjust the amount of workers employed making firewood production to ensure you keep up with demand as your settlement grows.

Basic Food Production

Hunt and Gather

Place 2 or 3 Hunter Cabins/Fishing Shacks (depending if you have more herds/enhanced fishing spots nearby).

Place a Smokehouse near your fishing shacks/hunter cabins

Smokehouses by default processes an equal ratio of both smoked fish and smoked meat, so if hunter cabins are far away from fishing shacks it's sensible to build two separate smokehouses and dedicate each for their own production (see smokehouse for more details).

Place 1-2 Forager Shacks to supplement food and start collecting resources like Willow, berries, and herbs.

Throughout the year, different plants can be foraged:

Fruits and berries are available in the spring/summer
Greens year-round
Hawthorne and nuts in the fall

Note: Gathering buildings do NOT need to be placed physically on/close to the vegetation and wildlife since their work areas can be moved without moving the building itself at any time. This is a good strategy to maximize potential output of your Forager Shacks.

Fields

Start your crops early as possible. Press the F key to bring up the Fertility overlay, and find a decently fertile and flat spot to put 1 field down. A small size of 5x5 or 5x6 (which only takes 1 farmer) is enough to get you started. Important to know the labor cost for "building" a field are pretty high.

If the ground is rocky and weedy, start with doing field maintenance
If it's early spring and your weeds and rocks are under control, start with some peas
If it's late spring and early summer grow some beans
If your fertility is low and weeds are high, start your first year prepping the soil by doing Maintenace-Clover-Maintenance

Next steps: Pause the game for a moment at the end of each fall and when winter starts. Use this time to review your field and make any adjustments before next spring begins:

If fertility is below 60% - grow clover
If weeds and/or rocks are still high - more maintenance
If fertility is high and rocks/weeds are low, stop and read the in-depth Farming Guide to prepare your Settlement as you grow

Next Steps

Monitor how many months of food you have left as your population grows. Six months of available food storage without spoiling is a good target.
Increase your food production if it is steadily dropping.
- Place more hunter cabins if you have untapped deer and boar, and fishing cabins if you have more enhanced fishing spots
- A good rule of thumb is each villager consumes ~35-40 a year
- An efficient hunter will generate ~400 meat a year, and a fishing shack 250-350 fish a year

Basic Housing

Place 6 Shelters somewhere further away from your resource collection areas, such as Smokehouses and Firewood Splitters.

Due to how Desirability works and service/entertainment buildings having an effective radius, you should concentrate your buildings in their own residential district(s). Don't pack them too closely as you plenty of space for parks and desirability buildings.

See Village Layout Strategy for more details.

Place a Well near your shelters (press I for moisture overlay) and gathering district if you have many buildings there. Wells are necessary for consumption (as important as food) and in production lines such as Tanneries. They are necessary to put out fires so it's a good idea to ensure wells cover your settlement.

Next steps

Build more Shelters as you get close to your occupation limit. Your population will not increase without Shelter capacity.

Continue harvesting trees and stone

Basic Amenity Production

As resources and available population allows (with at least 6 laborers spare for resource collection), you can bring production of basic tools and clothing for your villagers.

Near your hunters:

Build a Cobbler Shop, this will turn your hides into shoes for your citizen (and can be sold to merchants)
Build a Tannery, this will turn your hides into shoes for your citizen (and can be sold to merchants)

Near your stockpile and firewood production area:

Build a Fletcher Building, which will produce arrows and bows for your hunters and later guards

Near your foragers and storage area:

Build a Basket Shop, which will turn the willow gathered by your foragers into baskets for your laborers and builders

Early Logistics + Storage

Build a Storehouse and Root Cellar near your town center, you'll want to enclose these off with walls/towers shortly so keep them close together. An example of a space efficient build is the Early game fort.

These buildings will be the primary target for raiders so you want to make sure they will be easy to defend. You will also want to make sure they are relatively close to your housing area so that your market and settlers have easy access to food and supplies.

Build a Stockyard and Saw Pit near a heavily wooded area. You can also move your firewood splitter here, as you'll want this to form your production district (firewood is necessary for a lot of things) so try to find a wooded area relatively near clay/sand/coal

Build a Market in your residential district. You will want to build homes around its effective radius (and build more markets and more houses as your settlement grows). The Market will provide a small but steady stream of gold from selling supplies to your citizens that will fund your early defences.

Eventually your Town Center will be able to upgrade once you reach 30 population, and have built a Market, which you can upgrade using stone and planks

Mid Settlement Guide (Tier 2)

This is the longest and arguably the most challenging part of the game, as you will begin to see enemy raids and see stress on your food supply. It also has the most building options that will involve you setting up multiple production lines for different basic and luxury goods. This is also where the layout of your settlement will start to take solid shape, as your population grows and shelters begin to upgrade (at this point it is unadvisable to move them as they run the risk of degrading)

Settlement Defense

You will now need to build some defenses. Construct 2 Towers near your town center and storehouse and surround the compound with Wooden Walls to build a makeshift motte fort. Refer to the example Early game fort build for layout guidance. Once the towers are complete, garrison both with an additional villager to bring both towers to 2/2 employment

Note: eventually you will get attacked by raiders. Once you get the notification, pause the game. Toggle the villager garrison button (bell) in your town center to make all villagers run to your town center fort. This + your 2 towers will be able to hold back most raids till later on.

As the game progress you will need to build additional towers and eventually build walls to surround the rest of your settlement. Be careful with your garrisoning costs as each tower costs 5 gold a month in upkeep

Now that you have your defenses built you should be relatively safe from material threats for a good while, but you are still at risk of running out of food/firewood so always keeps these monitored

As a general guide, 4-5 hunters/fisheries (with a smokehouse) and a firewood cutter will support a pop of 40-50 people

Industry and Trade

Build a Trading Post. This will allow you to see your surplus goods and buy things you are lacking (and eventually some heavy tools which will let you start your advanced industries).

Build a Soap Shop to turn your tallow and herbs into soap. This will address your citizens sanitary needs and you can sell the surplus for good profit to merchants

Start a secondary industry (or two) to improve the lives of your citizens and enable you to sell goods for gold to Traders (Merchant), depending on the resources available to you you can choose between many different industries at this point:

If you have a clay deposit nearby you can build a Clay Pit and Potter Building to produce Pottery.

You can place Apiaries and Candle Shops to make Candles.

Start Farming (more detailed guide available there). This will provide large amounts of sustainable and varied food, as well as things like Flax that can be turned into Clothes. Eventually you can grow Wheat to turn into bread, which is highly productive and the base grain is resistant to spoilage when kept in a Granary

You should watch for each visiting merchant (usually early spring) and purchase a few sets of Heavy Tools when available. These are necessary for the metal industry, which in turn enables making your own heavy tools and in the construction of a Mill for breadmaking.

Onwards to Victory

You now have a thriving settlement, and the its future is up to you! Keep growing your settlement and upgrading your buildings. Keep up with your food production, defenses, gold economy and meet your citizens demands for luxury

Some good long term goals to aim for:

Get your town center to T3, and eventually to T4 to unlock new buildings and upgrades

Start heavy industries:
- Iron ore can be smelted with coal/charcoal into iron ingots which can be forged into weapons, armour, and are necessary for many buildings
- Gold ore can be smelted with coal/charcoal into gold ingots for huge amounts of money
- Brickmaking is necessary for many buildings/upgrades
Grow your settlement's population and fulfil your settlers increasingly complex demands to upgrade their dwellings, which will generate additional tax income
Establish a steady and long-lasting food supply.
- Growing Grain (Wheat/Rye/Buckwheat) for the purpose of Breadmaking. Wheat will last for years in a Granary and can be milled/baked into large amounts of bread, which will feed large populations
- Raise Livestock for meat and Cheesemaking. Fed grain/root-vegetables and grazed on pasture, Livestock can be milked, which itself can be turned into Cheese - which is a food type that basically does not spoil. Bread along with Cheese creates a food supply that both fulfils short-term food demands and long-term food stockpiling.

Check out the Tips and Tricks page for more helpful info

Good Luck!