With early access release approaching, players will finally get to experience Crate Entertainment’s first foray into the town-builder genre for themselves. To prepare you for what lies ahead, we are creating a series of dev updates to familiarize you with the rich depth that Farthest Frontier has to offer.
Welcome, eager pioneers, to the Farthest Frontier Journey Log!
Your people have packed up their belongings into wagons and set out into the unknown. Many dangers await, both seen and unseen, but there are also the endless bounties of nature. These gifts of the land are what will allow your people to start anew in the farthest reaches of the known world.
Depending on where you choose to settle, not all resources will be immediately available to your people. Others still may be entirely absent in your region. How you capitalize on what’s at your disposal will ultimately be up to you.
World Resources
Wood and stone are the foundations upon which your town will grow. Many buildings require one or both of these resources for construction and your people will need logs to chop into firewood to endure the harsh winter cold.
While trees naturally regrow from surrounding forests, stone is a more finite resource that will require venturing deeper into the wilderness to gather it. Work Camps combined with Wagons will be an excellent solution to this.
Your people cannot sustain on wood and rocks though. Foraging for wild greens, mushrooms, nuts, and berries will likely be your town’s first source of food. Foraging is also the only source of herbs, medicinal roots, and willow, which help stave off disease and are used in the production of medicines, soap, and baskets.
Hunting and fishing will provide protein for your villagers’ diets. Hunters armed with bows and arrows will seek out herds of roaming deer to process for meat, hides, and tallow. While deer can be found throughout the world of Farthest Frontier, a herd can only support so many hunters. Hunting too heavily can wipe out a herd entirely or cause it to migrate further away from the town.
Some prey may even prove too dangerous for a single hunter to handle. Selecting multiple hunters and ordering them to attack a boar is a safer strategy. Likewise, clearing out predators such as wolves and bears is best handled by multiple hunters, or even soldiers.
Fishing can only be done on larger bodies of water, a luxury if your settlement is founded in an arid area. Likewise, overfishing can deplete the supply, so careful planning is important lest your town finds itself starving when a once reliable source of food is suddenly gone at a critical time.
A prosperous town will eventually wish to harness the raw materials of the earth. Precious iron, gold, and coal can be mined out while clay and sand can be gathered in pits. These valuable resources will help advance your town beyond a fledgling settlement of survivors to become a vast city.
Note, however, that mining is dangerous work and villagers working in mines and pits are more susceptible to injuries.
Nature’s Bounty
The boons of nature are what drew your people to settle out in the wilderness, but what resources are available is tied closely to the surrounding biomes. Dry areas have more sparse tree coverage, but are plentiful in stone. Likewise, clay deposits are more frequently found in lower elevations, near water, while sand is plentiful in arid zones. Iron deposits are found almost exclusively near the mountains.
Willow is found along shorelines or in the swamps. You will not find any nuts to forage out in the open plains, so seek dense forests.
Even the presence and density of the deer population will depend on the availability of tree cover and proximity to water.
In this way, where you choose to settle will guide how your town develops, what resources are readily available and what will be a source of struggle. You may find that you need to trade for certain goods, using what your town produces as leverage in exchange.
The above are just a sampling of what awaits you. Farthest Frontier features over 60 distinct resources and goods for your town to gather, manufacture, and trade. Your town’s economy and prosperity will be in your hands later this year.
Eager to learn more about Farthest Frontier? Check back on 04/25/2022 for the next Journey Log!
