… and they were right!
I aimed to do Conscientious Diet, Barren Land, Jewel in the Desert and There can only be 500 all in one playthrough. I’m happy to say that I’ve done it and I don’t have to count chickens anymore!
Seriously, chickens absolutely CARRIED me. First it was 11 brave fishermen who fended starvation off, then arborists spiked up my food supply, and finally chickens carried the torch to the endgame, with a little help from the milk-makers and preservists. Not a lot of choice when I cannot hunt, farm, or slaughter animals…
I had more chickens than villagers!
This was a fun challenge, much more fun than it would’ve been to do each of these achievements individually. Sure, there was a lot of grinding (i.e. quite literally waiting for fruit trees to grow) and finding a suitable map seed, but it was worth it in the end due to the unique playstyle. Not having to micro farmers and farm fields was really nice, too. Now I’m genuinely considering not relying on farms as much in my future playthroughs.
I ended up enjoying the gameplay a lot more after I hit around 350 pop, when I realised I can stop expanding and that the end is in sight. I just had to wait for a kind trader to buy a few more bricks from and voila, run over. Really hoping future patches bring more “objectives” like these
There was definitely a lot of luck involved, primarily in the form of getting Amatok & First tree relics out of the four ruined sites available on my map. Stuck with them to the endgame, of course ocasionally switching one of them out for Tusk during raids.
Here’s the (small size map) seed in case you guys want to see what I went up against, or if (god forbid) you want to try this out yourself. Worth mentioning that I reset this map a few times until I got a couple of salvage sites close to the spawn point (the only type that gives planks, “ruins” I think)
Before you ask, no, I’m not doing it with ark of the vengeful dead as well. I prefer to retain the small amount of sanity I have left.
Here’s some screenshots from shortly after I got the achievements. Not the prettiest town, I know, but it was efficient!
