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Hi,
Just had a thought it would be fun to just try and put all settings on maximum difficulty.
So let’s just see for how long they can survive and if I’m even able to survive the first year.
I want to note that I will not play this as true as Nilla, because not everybody can be THAT awesome like trying to keep everyone alive from the start and such. If I can abuse any game mechanics I probably will if that helps my survivability as long as it still kind of makes sense in a way. Letting people die so others can live is harsh but not unthinkable I suppose. So any exploits have to be similar in that way.
Here is a picture of the raw start:
Somehow I actually managed to let everybody survive although the first years were very harsh with initially 6 adults and 2 children but soon after 6/4 and a constant struggle for food and firewood. I barely managed to set up tool making on time and my villagers are butt naked for years already. Now I’m at 7/3 adult/child in year 8 and within a year 8/2 so things are going way smoother already and I can put more and more effort into other areas besides survival.
But of course disaster struck!
There is a fire right now that destroyed at least my smith’s workplace and a turf storehouse is still burning as we speak which was 100% filled with goodies so that is pretty painful to lose.
I’m sure this won’t be the end of the little settlement yet, but I guess tornados exist and it can be game over any minute. If I can manage to dodge that bullet for long enough I might be able to spread a lot of important buildings to make it less of an existential threat, but that’s far in the future I suppose since most of the time I’m on x1 speed or pause to micromanage my beloved little colony.
here is a picture of my first disaster, may the people suffer and overcome many more!
Thanks for the good luck and advice!
Year 20: After waiting for ages merchants finally brought enough glass to turn part of this barren terrain into a nice little forest! Look at my first planted tree it looks really cute right now and it makes me so happy :’)
No more disasters yet. Decided not to build a thingstead; keep the borders closed and prevent diseases to spread this way. Genetic diversity may not be optimal long-term, but I think it’s a good trade-off to keep my beloved villagers safe and healthy this way. Also building a new smithy as we speak in another place so it can burn in solitude if it feels like catching fire again.
Hello and sorry for more than a month of inactivity! Was busy playing other games, but this challenge kept itching in the back of my head so about a week ago I returned to Antarctica and have been playing almost non-stop ever since.
What usually happens when returning to a game save after a while is I’m not so much in the flow of it anymore. Lost my train of thought completely, start making mistakes immediately and whole societies suffer the consequences. That being said, after trying for about half an hour I didn’t feel it anymore so it was time for a total reboot!
Unfortunately 134 years into attempt #2 there have been 0 calamities except for maybe 2 or 3 deaths like a blacksmith that fell into the fire which wasn’t so nice when I still had very few villagers, but far from bad.
With the lack of fires, tornadoes and diseases the most challenging which almost counts as a disaster in harsh weather conditions is climate change. I don’t know how the game mechanics work on this exactly, but it seems like weather isn’t just random every year since I’ve had decent to good DECADES where it thaws in April or very early May and doesn’t freeze until late September or October and temperatures rise to 15 or even above 20°C with the occasional cooler year with bad farming which was no problem since until the next harvest 2 years after the last successful health still didn’t drop or just slightly.
But….. I’ve had twice an unusual longer period of cold weather for about 10 years and the other more than 20! Never did it thaw in April and sometimes the land was still frozen in June with temperatures rising to 5°C (when turnips/potatoes start growing) and 7,5°C (barley) way too late and usually peaked between only 10-15°C. It would freeze again too soon in September and my crops would only be 0-20% grown in august when I have to harvest. So I figured those worst years it’s not even worth trying to plant anything and if it turned out to be a somewhat lucky year I could still harvest some wild foods and apples. What I did to survive was putting lots of working hours that usually go into tailoring, smithing, building and such went into cray fishing instead to have enough food. Note that at the time I was no longer cray fishing for a long time since cow paddocks supplied more than enough proteins for my villagers. So that was quite a setback and at first health dropped significantly by a lack of carbs, veggies and fruits. Before I never collected herbs or have a herbalist since all foods were always available and 5 hearts of health was the norm. I was all the way back to trying not to starve my dear folks like at the start of the game even though back then I progressed quite a bit as well. The little extra manpower I could spare was spend on building a healers hut and collecting herbs which saved the day. Lesson learned and now the stack of herbs is always kept above 1000 just in case there will be a long winter again. Also build an excessive amount of paddocks to never have to get back to cray fishing when there’s another cold period and meat is now forever my staple food. I’m starting to understand the Inuit. Do the Sami live similarly? Maybe if I named my map differently I should build a village hall to welcome Sami nomads and learn how to stay healthy on a carnivore diet.
Now I’m running into new problems. I’ve almost ran out of quality land to live on and what’s left is pretty far from everything else and not as big land masses as I want. The achievements are on 0% so I want to see how far I can get with this map and at least mountain man is of course a must have achievement and probably one of the few since I’m probably not getting many more than 50 villagers anyway. There are still some places to expand to, but they are mostly forest I want to keep to collect firewood. I might try and venture further into lower quality areas for this purpose and repurpose some of my current forest to farm land. That will be my next step I suppose.
I want to note that there are some buildings I just don’t have because I can just trade the goods like bricks, roof tiles and panes and have more room for other stuff. Also no thingstead or village hall, because I don’t really need it.
Thank you for reading my story and feel free to ask questions, give advice or make some other comment!
Now have some pictures to check out this settlement!
pic 1: The large map where you can see what is where.
pic 2: It is still the same map as my first game. Also you can see my industrial area south of the creek.
pic 3: Just to show what I’m usually looking at which is mostly farms kept open at all times to make sure everything goes well. You can see where I started my adventure east side of the river (map centre) and slowly I expanded to the west of it where the biggest landmass lies which I mostly use for farming.
pic 4: The forester’s lodge (east on the map) has been my main moneymaker for a long time since wood is excellent merchandise in Antarctica. Nowadays I only use it to collect firewood. The stockpile used to often be full of logs so it looks a little sad now. There are so many cows that my trading economy exists mostly of raw beef (in warmer years when there is a big surplus of it) and the production of leather from cowhides.
pic 5: To the north is just a small place in-between mountains where I couldn’t figure out anything useful to do besides digging graves.
pic 6: These 2 small forests in the west I use for firewood collecting as well, but one of them has plans to turn into farmland as well soon.
pic 7: The northeast is the biggest unexplored region which is a stiff walk from everywhere else which is why I didn’t really bother using it so far, but I do have plans to turn this into a forester’s lodge area.
pic 8: Still working to fill this one up in case something terrible happens and I need a lot of cash to recover.
Hello again. A small update on my main goal of completing the mountain men achievement on this map. Here are 2 pics.
pic 1: This speaks for itself!
pic 2: added up this makes 50 settlers so the countdown of 20 years has started. There are a decent amount of seniors so my population might drop and more expansion is needed before 50+ is stabilized.
Year 205: Not a lot of new stuff is happening as most is just surviving and occasionally improving some infrastructure. There is a small problem though where the total population is easily over 50 for about 50 years already, but still no mountain men achievement achieved. Does it has to do with the mod where harsh or mountains or anything is not considered the same type that triggers the achievement? or am I missing something? For now it will be considered not possible and the game completed for as far as I can tell.
Just to be sure I wasn’t extremely lucky on the disasters I will scout for a new map with the same settings and try to achieve this a second time where I also want to keep everyone alive from the start which I did at the first, but not at the second attempt with this map.
Also here is a picture of the population:
Just wanted to mention – observation not complaint – that some seafarer maps on this setting are completely impossible due to ending up on the wrong side of the river. Here, there’s only four trees you have access to which isn’t enough for a bridge, and there will be only one left after getting an initial shed and goahti up.
Best-case scenario – everyone eventually starves to death. I’ve also seen the occasional map with no small rivers; esp. if you have a lot of children you are pretty much going to starve without no access to crayfishing.
