Farthest Frontier Beyond-the-beginner tips and info [v0.9.4]

Intro

The purpose of this guide is to consolidate information that I found useful so far and provide some slightly advanced not-a-total-beginner tips and advice that is based 99% on my personal experience with the game so far.

This guide assumes that you already know the basics of the game. If you haven't tried playing the game for at least a little bit or haven't seen any letsplays of it, a lot of the stuff in the guide would likely be confusing to you.

This is not a guide about every single building and production chain in the game (but who knows, maybe I will update it in the future!). The best way to learn that is to just play and explore -- and believe me, it will be much more fun this way than reading some guide!

My biasI'm not a pro at the game and I haven't played at every difficiulty and every map. So my experience with the game is pretty limited.

Here's how I played the game so far:

Default Trailblazer difficulty. Higher difficulties are supposed to make diseases and wildlife more challenging .

Default Idyllic Valley map, which provides all resources and a flat fertile land. I'm certain there are unique challenges to other maps which I'm not familiar with.

Pacifist mode. Which means this guide will have little to no combat-specific info and tips. But 99.9% of this guide still applies if you play with combat enabled.

v0.9.4 update. Further updates might invalidate some of the information and advice given in this guide.If you find any inaccuracies or out-of-date info, please leave a comment! I also intend to update the guide as long as I keep playing the game.

With this out of the way, let's finally proceed!

Game Progression Overview

This is just for context. In the game, there's a natural progression of trying to upgrade your town center, and based on this, we can separate a single playthrough into four phases:

Tier 1, early game: establish a basic town without dying and reach population 30. Only basic buildings are unlocked.

Tier 2, early/mid game: establish the long-term survival of your town and reach population 150. Basically all essential buildings are now unlocked, giving you more options for food and resource production chains.

Tier 3, late game: establish the prosperity of your town and reach population 400. All remaining production chains are unlocked (except deep mines). The efficiency of your town becomes more important as it grows to support a bigger population.

Tier 4, engdame: grow your town until you become bored. A few remaining buildings are unlocked. You can choose to keep growing your population until your computer cannot handle it anymore, build every building, produce every item, etc. This guide is not structured by tier because it doesn't really make sense to do it this way. But I will be regularily referencing at what tier a building/resource is unlocked.

Prioritising Resources When Placing A New Town

When the game starts, the simulation is moving, but the time is not actually ticking. So you have time to look around and carefully choose the location.

There are several basic things to consider: flat space to build, fertile land for farms, availability of water, wood, and stone. Other than that, you need to consider resources available on the map around you, and how close you want to be to them. This is what this section is about.

Important note! Mining resources marked by infinity sign can be used only in tier 4! You should pretty much ignore them unless you have big plans for the endgame.

Most important resources Deers: produce meat, hides, and tallow, all of which are important for meeting villagers' needs.

Clay: a lot of it is needed starting from tier 2.

Iron: a lot of it is needed starting from tier 3.

Nice to have, but you will manage just fine without them Herbs: used to make soap to fullfill villager's need for cleaness, also required for tier 2 shelter upgrades. But it's relatively easy and cheap to buy at the trader.

Willow: used to make baskets, which increase villagers' carrying capacity.

Schoals of fish: produce protein food on the same level as deers, but doesn't give any additional resources. Will help you meet food requirements, which is really the bottleneck when growing your population.

Useful, but really not required Medicinal roots: used by villagers to prevent and cure diseases before you build healer's house. But you build it relatively soon (early tier 2), and in my plauthroughs so far I never saw roots being consumed. Could be more important on higher difficiulties though.

Sand: can be used to make your farms more productive, and in tier 3 to extend the shelf life of fruits and vegetabels and also to create medicine. But the impact of all of this is less than what it seems at first, and you can easily grow to tier 4 without all of this.

Coal: used in tier 3 to smelt iron, gold, and clay. But you can easily substitute by making charcoal from wood.

Gold: can be sold for some good cash, or smelted directly into even more cash starting from tier 3. But money is really not much of a concern starting from tier 3.

Eggs: just a supplementary source of protein, with significantly lower shelf life (6 months) than smoked meat/fish (24 months).

Berries/mushrooms/nuts/greens: provides food variety (fruits, vegetables) other than just protein, and is useful to meet food requirements in early/early-mid game. But you can grow all these types yourself, and with better shelf life. In the default Idyllic Valley map these resources are plentful so you don't really need to seek them out, they will be around you naturally.

Avoid (only if you're playing with combat enabled) Boars/wolfs: they are agressive towards your villagers, so you don't want them to be close to your town or to the resources you want to use. Though, boars can be useful for hunting, from what I heard.

Food: Food Types

Overall, there are five food types in the game, with some subtypes:

Protein

Grains

Dairy

Fruit

Vegetables

Beans

Root vegetables

Greens The villagers need access to all five types (but not subtypes) in order to stay healthy and happy. Shelter upgrades have requirements about how many different food types are stocked there.

The sections below mostly just consolidatates various information about food, with some occasional advice and opinion.

Food: Farming

You pretty much can't grow your town without investing in farms.

Crops overviewWhen you see all the crops for the first time, it can be very confusing what to grow and when. So here's an attempt to structure crop information and provide the details I found most useful.

You can find exact crop charactersitcts with numbers in the wiki[farthestfrontier.wiki] .

Not food:

Clover: has biggest positive impact on field fertility (+3%), does nothing else.

Flax: used to make clothes (tier 2, very useful) and paper (tier 3, completely useless until tier 4). Very dependent on fertility, and has a moderate fertility impact (-3%).

Hay: used to feed animals during winter (tier 2). Not very dependent on fertility, and has a low fertility impact (-1%). I have never actually grown it, bc animals can also eat excess grain and root vegetables. Vegetables:

Beans (peas and beans): the only crops other than clover with positive impact on field fertility (+1%), and they have the biggest shelf life of all vegetables (18 months).

Root vegetables (carrots and turnips): Bigger harvest than beans, but lower shelf life (12 months) and with a small negative fertility impact (-2%). Can also be used to feed animals.

Greens (leek and cabbage): even bigger harvest, but even lower shelf life (8 months) and worse fertility impact (-4-5%). Grains

Wheat: biggest harvest, biggest impact on fertility (-6%), biggest dependency on fertility.

Rye: somewhat smaller harvest, a bit smaller impact on fertility (-5%), a bit smaller dependency on fertility, good weed supression.

Buckwheat: smallest harvest (half that of wheat), small impact on fertility (-2%), small dependency on fertitliy, huge weed supression, no frost tolerance.

Farm sizeFarm sizes varies from minimum of 5x5 to maximum of 12x12.

Early/mid game, when you're still pressed on available workforce, you will want to create smaller farms. They require less time and less people to create and maintain. Small farms also lower the impact of diseases.

Late game, you will likely want bigger farms in order to take the full advantage of compost, because the compost usage doesn't scale with the farm size (which tbh I think should be rebalanced).

As an option, you can start with 6x6 fields, and once you have more resources to spare, expand them first to 6x12 and then to 12x12. There's currently no mechanic to merge adjusted fields, so you will need to plan ahead and leave space for field expansion.

Labor cost of expansion from 6x6 to 6x12 is the same as the labor cost of creating a new 6x6 field, but a significant downside of field expansion is that it naturally increases your weed and rockiness levels. So you might want to expand as soon as you can, so that you don't waste resources spent on improving farm stats.

Fun fact! When expanding a field, you don't have to keep it the final result rectangular! The extension must touch the original field and be at least 5x5, but these are the only requirements! Do with this information what you will.

(yep, that's the only image i bothered to add to the guide!)

Soil compositionIt's a very straitforward mechanic. The biggest issue is that crop requirements are hard to reference in-game.

Soil composition is on a scale from very clay-like to very sand-like. You can add clay/sand to shift the soil composition accordingly, and it requires work from farmers.

Different crops prefer different soil composition, and can give from -10% to +10% harvest bonus accordingly.

The best strategy is to grow crops with similar soil requirements together on one field, and mix its soil composition accordingly. If you have resources to spare, it can significantly boost your production, especially when you have low starting fertility.

But you don't have to do any of this, or you might not even have an option to do it (for example if you simply don't have the sand you need). The crops will grow just fine, and you can compensate any negative soil bonus with general land fertility or with more fields.

General farming advice Grains can't be utilised until you get the mill and the bakery (tier 2), or the brewery (tier 3). It will take you some time to get these buildings, so you can ignore growing grain in the meantime and instead focus on bringing up your field fertility.

Use clover and beans to bring field fertility up. You will likely want to have the overall fertility impact of the rotation to be positive, at least until you get a stable supply of compost (which will take a while).

You will likely want to manually monitor and edit rotations until you bring rocks and weeds down. After that you can set the rotations with just one maintaince slot and basically forget about the farm. Unless it catches a disease, then you would want to rework something to get rid of it.

You really don't need much of flax. You can probably get enough with just one field once in three years.

For crop rotation examples, you can reference wiki [farthestfrontier.wiki] or other steam guides.

Food: Fruits Vs Berries

'Fruit' is an ambigous term in the game. It's both the name of the produce of fruit trees, and the name of the food category that unites berries and fruits-from-trees. In this section, I will be using 'fruit' to reference only to the produce of fruit trees.

Fruits last 6 months. You can grow them using an arborist building (tier 2). There are three types of fruit trees: apples, pears, and peaches. They bear fruit in different seasons. Nothing produces in winter, but you can grow extra apples (which produce in fall) to balance this season out. One arborist building with two workers managing the maximum of four 3x3 fruit tree fields will give your ~700 fruits steadily over the course of the year.

Berries last 5 months. There are three types of berry bushes scattered around the map: blueberry, hawthorn, and sumac. They grow berries in different seasons. You can relocate blueberry bushes and essentially create a blueberry farm, but you can't relocate hawthorn and sumac. This means you can't guarantee a steady supply of berries throughout the year -- yes, you can produce a lot of blueberry, but it will likey spoil before it can be consumed, and you need to get lucky with other berry bushes.

In tier 3 the preservation is unlocked, and preserving fruits and berries will bring their shelf life up to 18 months. With this you can forget about managing fruit/berry supply throughout the year, but you need sand and glass production to do preservation.

Overall, I definitely recommend fruits. You can set one, maybe two arborist buildings and basically forget about this food category for the rest of the game, even without preservation.

Food: Animal Farms

Animal farms (tier 2) require money and time investment more so than crop farms. You can build a prosperious town without them, but they can significantly boost your food production.

Animals are bought from traders, but you need to build animal farms first, or the animals won't be sold. Not every trader brings animals with them, so you either wait, possibly for many years, or you send the request for the next trader to bring animals at a premium price.

There are three types of farming animals: cows, goats, and chickens. Chickens are the cheapest, cows are the most expensive. Each animal requires a corresponding animal farm.

There are also horses, but they're used for training some soldier units, not for farming, and I play pacifist so I can't tell you anything about them. After you bought first animals, the herd will take several years to grow and populate (you can of course buy more animals to speed up the process). By default the herd size is set to a maximum possible value, but you can lower it. Once the herd size is reached, the excess animals will be slaughtered.

Each animal farm requires a grazing area of different sizes. The animals will be grazing during warm months. Grazing areas of different farms can overlap, and I haven't noticed any negative impact of this (but I didn't have a lot of farms). Grazing areas leave the land very fertilised, so theoretically you can move grazing areas around and then create crop farms in their place.

Animals consume food during cold months (grains, root vegetables, hay). The exact food seems to be chosen simply at random.

Animals produce waste which can be converted to compost. Big animal farms is a way to produce a lot of compost quickly.

Chickens produce eggs, and when slaughtered, meat. They require very small grazing area and have low negative desirability, so you can have them relatively close to town.

Goats and cows produce milk, and when slaughtered, meat, hide, and tallow. Milk spoils very quickly (3 months), but in tier 3 it can be turned to cheese with the highest shelf life of all foods in the game (36 months). Cows produce more and require a bigger grazing area. they both have big negative desirability.

Food: Misc Advice

Accept that there will be some spoilage. You might even want to delibererately overproduce quick-to-spoil but quick-to-produce food (bread, greens, fruits) just to increase your food surplus and motivate the migration into your town.

Smokehouses are very efficient and can handle several hunters and fishers, but you want them close to where meat and fish is produced so that nothing spoils. Raw meat/fish has the lowest shelf life among all foods, but smoked meat/fish is second best. It's really the foundation of your food supply.

Grains have signigicantly bigger shelf life (24 months) than flour (16 months) or bread (3 months), so to avoid spoilage and unnecessary use of your limited workforce, you should set production limits for flour and bread. If you ever need to rapidly get more food (after a big migration wave, for example), you can just increase the production limits. It's very useful.

Two hunter cabins can hunt on one deer location without depleting it. I wish I discovered that earlier than in late game.

Trading: General Advice

Most likely than not you will not have all resources you want in order to grow your town. There is even one resource that you need to buy. You also need gold for upkeep of some buildings, and for several upgrades. This is what trading is for.

Some general advice first:

It's a good idea to store your gold in the trading post (tier 2), because once you get rich, the gold starts taking way too much space in your storage, and the trading post seemingly doesn't have this limit. This might get patched out in the future though.

If you're playing with combat enabled, you can consider using the vault (tier 2) instead. But the vault is kinda expensive, and it might honestly be easier to just protect the trading post. You don't need to keep someone working in the trading post all the time. You can put people there only when a travelling merchant arrives. The downside of this is that you might not have enough time to transfer all the goods you want to sell (tho in my experience it was rarely an issue). The upside is that you don't have needlessly idle villagers when you're pressed for workforce elsewhere.

More often than not, you will have several traders at your trading post. Sometimes, one trader will be selling some item cheaper than another trader is willing to buy it for. You can use this to get some profit for youself, usually a couple of hundreds of gold. This can be huge in the mid game.

Trading: What To Buy/sell (extrimely Subjective)

I wasn't able to find a neat table with all the prices, and I can't be bothered to make it myself, so any recomendations below are based purely from my experience and vague memories of prices and should be taken with a grain of salt.

What could be a good idea to sell Shoes, hide coats, linen clothes, soap, baskets, candles, pottery: all of this costs around ~10 gold per item, is unblocked in tier 1 or tier 2, and if you're consistently producing them, you will soon find yourself with a few dozens of extra items which you can sell. This won't bring you a ton of money, but it can carry you far enough.

Gold ore: costs 13-15 gold per item, and if you have productive mines, it can bring you a lot of money. I recommend doing it in tier 2. In tier 3 you can smelt 100 gold ingots from 1 gold ore, which is much more efficient then selling it, but in my experience, by that point money is not really an issue anymore and I would rather be smelting iron instead.

Herbs, medicinal roots, beer: costs 3-5 gold per item, but you will likely have them in large quantities, especially the beer. Herbs and medicianal roots usually just spoil on me, so I sell them every chance I get. Beer can often be used to completely dry the traders of their entire budget, which is always fun!

What you would likely need to buy Animals: they cost a few hundreds gold, which is a bloody lot in the mid game. Chickens are the cheapest, so if you're low on money and luck, you can request next trader to bring chickens at a premium price and still possibly be able to buy it. You can also request other animals just to see how much it would cost you this way.

Tools: you can't produce them until tier 3, but they make your villagers work more efficiently. Costs ~40 gold per item, but if you have the funds, it could be worth it.

Heavy tools: you can't produce them until tier 3, but you need one for a mill in tier 2, and another one for a blacksmith in tier 3 (in order to be able to produce the tools yourself). They cost around ~500 gold, which is a lot in the mid game.

Raw resource (iron/clay/stone/wood/etc): they are sold often enough, and the longer you play, the more money you have to spare, so at some point buying these resources is so much easier than producing them yourself. Note that you can't produce iron ingots until tier 3, but there are some upgrades you might want to get in tier 2, in which case buying iron ingots is your only option.

Organising Your Town

Frankly, I haven't entirely figured it out myself either -- which is honestly half the fun of this type of games! But below some of the info I did figure out.

Market Market works at the same principle as in any other Banished-like game. Workers at the market stock the shelters with food and other required resources, saving the time for everybody else. You basically want all your shelters to be in radius of a market, it makes a dramatic difference. Fill all worker slots in the market too, it's really worth it.

In my experience, I was able to reach tier 4 with just one market and maybe ~10 houses outside of its radius which I added to reach 400 population. All my shelters were upgraded to tier 3, which helped to cram more people in market's radius. You don't need to do this -- markets are cheap, it's not a problem to build a second one. Don't be scared to have markets overlap with each other -- you really don't need that much space to reach tier 4 population goal, and having shelters more concentrated makes it easier to provide high desirability to them.

Transport logisticsTransport logistics are either buggy or I'm stupid. The game unfortunately doesn't provide the player with tools to investigate why exactly, for example, the production site spends 90% of their time transferring goods. I strongly suspect that some of these numbers are lying, but oh well. Below is what little advice I can give:

Cluster your production by the type of resource they are working with and have a corresponding storage nearby. Most of you production can easily fit in one industrial district.

Roads. Use them to connect far away production sites (most likely some mines) to you industrial district. Upgrade these roads to stone in tier 3. You don't need roads anywhere else. Leave the space in the town for houses and decoration instead.

I'm not entirely sure, but I believe having storage at the far away production site is a bad idea. Instead you need to let wagons transfer the goods to your town/industrial storage. In my experience, when there's a storage nearby far away production, they spend more time in 'transferring goods' state than if there's no storage. I've no idea why, I might be doing something wrong here.

Wagons. I don't fully understand how they work. I believe you're supposed to put wagons at you production sites and let them transfer the goods to town storage. But there's no way to check the history of their tasks or their transfer locations, I see them idlying most of their time, and my production sites still show that they are spending ~90% time transferring goods. But still, as a rule wagons usually make the situation better.

Temporarily shelters. The supposed way they work is that you put them near the far away mines or wood camp work areas, and people spend more time working instead of going home. In practice there's absolutely no way to check how the temporarily shelter is being used, and the time statistics of the production sites don't show any obvious impact to me, so I have no idea if this stuff actually works. But temporarl shelters are cheap, and they probably don't make the situation worse, so you can as well build them I guess.

Misc Rat catchers (tier 2). Build one and disable it until the rats actually become a problem. Build more if you need to. In my game, the rats appeared only in late tier 3 -- which is frankly very suspicious, it's possibly a buggy behavior.

Upgraded shelters produce more taxes. If money is an issue, investing in expensive but desirable buildings (healer, school, temple, theater, etc) can be benefitial.

Production

Just a collection of info and tips.

You can move work areas of everything except the market and the apiaries. Use that. Your workers can actually go pretty far before it becomes an issue. Try to keep the buildings close together for more efficient logistics, and move them only if the production drops.

Assign minimal amount of workers at first (which is not always the default), and if you need to speed up the production, then you can add more workers. It will help you save on workforce which you never have enough until the late tier 3.

Put production limits wherever you can. When the limit is reached it will automatically free the workers to be assigned somewhere else.

When you build the new farm and then disable the building site (for example because you were mapping out where you want your farms to be in the future), the game still assignes farmers to this field. There's no workaround that I know of. Just cancel the build altogether, or a sizeable amount of your workforce will be assigned where you most likely don't want it to be.

Work camp (tier 2) is much less efficient than you would want it to be. If you don't already have a dense forest on your map, you need to constantly move the work area if you want to produce more than 100 wood per year. It can't plant trees until you upgrade (requires tier 3 resources), and even then trees take forever to grow. I would say it's still better than using laborers to chop trees (they are already at a deficit often enough), but god does it suck. Buying wood instead is so much easier. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, I don't know.

UPD: it looks like the long time to grow trees is a bug of v0.9.4. This should be addressed by v0.9.5, but it's not yet released. Fishing. Every few years, my schoals of fish get depleted and the production stops. You would either need to disable the production for a few years, or find another fishing spot and rotate between them. Don't be afraid to try far away fishing spots to see if it works -- even if the transport time is not efficient, it's probably still better then disabling the production altogether.

ApiariesI had quite a few misunderstandings about this particular production, so here's a separate section dedicated to it.

Apiaries are unlocked in tier 2 and produce wax and honey. The resources are collected by idle farmers, which means you can't assign a specific worker to this task, and if your farmers are too busy managing the farms (for example, if you're developing new fields), resources from the apiaries will not be collected. There's no concern about spoilage because of this (wax has a shelf life of 60 months, honey doesn't spoil at all), you will just have a delay of actually getting the resources.

Apiaries' productivity is higher near farms and wild plants. You will see the exact bonus in the UI. Overlapping apiary work areas significantly reduces the bonus! You will not see this if you're placing several apiaries at once (if it's not built, it can't be taken into bonus calculation), so this is easy to miss. Don't concentrate apiaries in one place, spread them all around the town and surrounding area instead. Note that you can't move apiaries' work areas (which makes sense, how are you gonna tell bees what to do?)

Wax can be turned into candles (tier 2). It's one of the luxery options requires to upgrade houses to tier 3, and can also be sold to traders for some reasonable cash.

Honey can be turned into beer (tier 3). It helps you to utilise the grain (which is so easy to overproduce), it generates taxes, and it can be sold for a lot of money (one beer costs little, but it's relatively easy to overproduce, enough to completely buy out the entire trader's budget)

Honey can also be turned into medicine (tier 3). It supposedly helps you manage the diseases and requires a lot of other resources to produce. On Trailblazer difficulty, diseases are a complete non-issue, so medicine is kind of useless. Maybe it's different on higher difficulty or with combat, I don't know.

Overall, apiaries are cheap and the production they unlock makes the life significantly easier, but they are not required.

Weapons (when playing pacifist)It's a bit annoying that combat-related resources and buildings are not hidden when you're playing pacifist, so here's my experence in what you actually need:

Bows and arrows, produced by fletcher (tier 1). They are used by hunters, and you don't need much of them. Just set the production limits on the fletcher and forget about this.

Crossbows, produced by upgraded fletcher (tier 2). They are used instead of bows by hunters. You can stop producing bows once crossbows become available.

Possibly, but I think unlikely, swords are also used. They are produced by blacksmith (tier 3) and are taken by hunters if they're available in storage. I strongly suspect that they are not actually being used and that it's just a remnant of the combat mechanic.Everything else combat-related can be safely ignored when playing pacifist. Or, if you have resources to spare, you can produce combat items just to sell them.

Final Words

If you find in accuracies or out-of-date information, please let me know! I will try to keep the guide updated.

Even better, if you know the solutions for some of the issues I mentioned in the guide, do let me know!

This is my first steam guide so I hope it was easy enough to follow.

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3338879963

Beyond-the-beginner tips and info [v0.9.4]