The journey to the Farthest Frontier continues!
Your people have settled in a lush land rich with natural resources. Everything they own is stowed away in a cart. The rest will have to come from nature. After chopping down some trees for logs, construction of the Town Center will begin.
This structure is the central pillar of your future town. From within its menus, you can monitor your people’s happiness, health, resources, and work assignments. Should you opt into Farthest Frontier’s optional combat, the Town Center will also serve as the first line of defense, allowing some of your people to seek shelter inside and launch arrows at any nearby threats.
With the Town Center erected, you decide what happens next.
The Foundation
Providing for the basic needs of your people is one of the core elements of Farthest Frontier. Your people arrived in the frontier with limited supplies. Your next step is to ensure they are provided with the essentials necessary to survive the first year. Villagers need shelter to survive the elements, but that alone will not be enough to endure the harsh winter storms. Firewood must be chopped from logs and stocked in homes to stay warm in the winter months.
If food runs out, a grim future awaits your settlement. There are a number of ways to secure initial food supplies for your nascent village, including fishing, hunting and foraging. They can be quickly established but ultimately are limited by the bounty of the surrounding land. To grow beyond a certain population, a settlement will eventually need to harness the power of agriculture, by clearing and tilling fertile land. Preparing a field for planting is a significant investment, especially if your town is located in rocky arid lands, but the long-term pay off is well worth it.
Likewise, people need water to survive. A nearby lake may suffice at first, but such water may have parasites and bacteria. A well offers a clean solution, but your people will need to mine stone to construct one.
Building a Future
Once your people’s basic needs are met, you will need to look to the town’s future. How will your people exploit the resources at their disposal and thrive? If hunting offers a steady supply of food, the hunters will eventually need additional arrows to keep hunting. Clothes and tools inevitably wear out and must be replaced.
Perhaps you wish to improve your people’s quality of life by providing them with luxury goods such as pottery and candles? Or are disease outbreaks a rising concern, which can be mitigated with soap and medicine?
Buildings in Farthest Frontier are organized into 8 categories:
Service Buildings
Service buildings fulfill a number of important roles in your town. Here, you can find structures such as the Trading Post, which will form the backbone of your town’s economy, and a Healer’s Hut, which is critical in staving off diseases and helping soldiers injured in combat.
Housing
Housing buildings provide your villagers with a safe place to live and to seek shelter from the elements. As your town grows and prospers, you will notice the Shelters upgrading into finer and finer homes. Shelters, along with the Town Center, are the only structure in the game with multiple upgrade tiers.
Storage
Storage buildings offer a means for the town to keep and preserve all of the resources and materials it gathers and produces. Without storage, goods would quickly go to waste out in the world and food would spoil rapidly.
Food Production
Without food, villagers will inevitably starve and the town will become deserted. From humbly gathering berries out in the woods to domesticating cattle, there are many ways to produce food for your people and provide them with a varied diet. All of these options are available in this category.
Resources
The Resources category offers a wide range of options to grow your town’s economy and provide for your people. When you first start out, you will have access to a well and a firewood splitter, both important structures, but your options quickly expand from there.
Defenses
Depending on the difficulty you choose to play on, Farthest Frontier can be a relatively tranquil place, or one fraught with dangers. If you are not playing on pacifist difficulty, you will have to contend with external threats.
Walls and Roads
A clear symbol of civilization, roads define how your people move about the frontier. Well-tread paths make travel faster and deliveries more efficient. Cobbled roads ensure even footing, making movement even faster.
Where roads define where to go, walls and gates offer security and bar access. Walling off precious storage, or even the entire town with enough effort and resources, is a big step towards securing your people’s safety in the frontier.
Decoration
Decorations in Farthest Frontier are more than just cosmetic features to beautify your town. While they can absolutely visually elevate a humble village just starting out in the wilderness into a thriving metropolis, decorations also contribute to an important feature that acts as a measure of the prosperity of your people: desirability.
Villagers living in desirable areas will eventually upgrade their homes, which is not only an indicator of just how far your town has come from its modest beginnings, but also generates tax revenue from wealthier citizens.
Upgraded Standards
As your town thrives, you will eventually find the need to upgrade certain structures. This is done by meeting various requirements and providing the necessary resources for upgrade construction.
Upgrading the Town Center, for example, is critical to progressing to more advanced buildings, which in turn gives your people access to new goods and resources.
Shelters in desirable areas will upgrade when their growing needs are met, which not only provides additional living space but also higher tax revenue.
An upgraded Hunter Cabin will begin placing traps to catch small game, which is a good way to boost hide production. Upgrading the Saw Pit not only allows additional villagers to work there, but also improves efficiency by enabling the structure to use heavy tools.
These are just a few examples of advanced structures available in Farthest Frontier.
You will have many options to construct and manage your idyllic town in Farthest Frontier. In total, there will be over 70 buildings to choose from when the game enters Early Access, and that’s not even including upgraded structures!
Eager to learn more about Farthest Frontier? Check back on 05/09/2022 for the next Journey Log!
