Against the Storm Strategy Guide

Contents

(This table of contents contains jump links.  Click on any line in the contents to be taken to that section of the guide.)

1. Introduction

1.1. Against the Storm
1.2. Audience
1.3. How This Guide Works
1.4. About Me
1.5. The Basics of Against the Storm

2. The Five Problems

2.1. Glade Events
2.2. Hostility of the Forest
2.3. Food & Starvation
2.4 Fuel & Blightrot
2.5 Impatience

3. Reputation

3.1. Orders
3.2. Resolve
3.3. Glade Events
3.4. Balancing Out

4. The Standard Strategy

4.1. Summary of the Standard Strategy
4.2. Pre-Game
4.3. Early Game
4.4. Mid Game
4.5. Late Game

5. Miscellaneous

5.1. Sealed Forest
5.2. No Orders
5.3. Queen’s Hand
5.4 Building & Cornerstone Tier Lists
5.5 Submissions

6. Conclusion

6.1. Changelog

1. Introduction

1.1. Against the Storm

Against the Storm is a roguelite city-building strategy game set in a dark fantasy world of eternal rain.  It was published by an indie developer, Eremite Games, in 2023, and can be found on Steam.

As of September 2024, it has one expansion, Keepers of the Stone.

1.2. Audience, a.k.a “Who’s this guide for?”

This guide is intended for Against the Storm players who understand the basics of the game but are struggling to win on higher difficulties.  If you can win on Veteran but can’t handle Viceroy, or if you can handle Viceroy but are struggling to win on Prestige, or if you can win on P20 but are struggling to beat Queen’s Hand, this guide will help.

This guide will generally assume that you’re playing on Prestige difficulty from P2 up (so, 18 reputation points to win, and 4 minute storms).  However, all the advice here will mostly apply to lower difficulties as well – everything will just be a lot easier.

1.3. How This Guide Works

The idea of this guide is to teach you how the game works and give you a framework that’ll let you figure out how to win on your own.  As such, it will mostly discuss general strategy.

This guide does not contain any “tier lists” or “power rankings”, because for a game like Against the Storm these are not very much use.  The game is not about figuring out the best choices and picking the same ones every time, it’s about learning to adapt to circumstances and work with what you’re given.  Good players can reliably win on P20 with any combination of races and any set of blueprints, and once you understand how the game works, you’ll be able to do the same.

This guide will not cover basic stuff, such as “if your hostility is too high, reduce woodcutters during the storm” or “build small warehouses near places where you need resources” or “try to put your villagers in buildings that match their specialisations”.  If I covered all this stuff the guide would be twice as long and a lot more boring.  So I’m going to assume you know (or can look up) all the obvious stuff.

1.4. About Me, a.k.a “Why should you listen to me?”

I’ve been playing Against the Storm since its early access stage in 2023.  In that time I’ve done the following:

• Won multiple Adamantine Seals, playing every settlement at P20 with every world map modifier, including no orders + no trading
• Won a ‘ladder challenge’ (this is where you start a new profile and raise the difficulty to the maximum every game until you do the Gold and then Adamantine Seals)
• Won multiple Queen’s Hand Trials
• Won a Queen’s Hand Trial, playing every settlement at P20

I’m not the very best player of Against the Storm, but I’m definitely in the top bracket.  And while there are a handful of players better than me, one advantage that I have that they don’t is that I’m a professional author (I’ve written two urban fantasy series, Alex Verus and Inheritance of Magic, that have sold more than a million copies in total).  So I know how to write something in such a way that it’s reasonably easy to read.

The one thing I’m not an expert on is speedrunning.  I don’t enjoy winning games as fast as possible, since I like taking my time and getting to play with all the tools available.  So if you’re looking for advice on winning settlements in Y4/Y3/Y2, this guide won’t help you.  The strategy recommended in this guide will let you win settlements fast enough that you can beat the Adamantine Seal or the Queen’s Hand Trial, which in my opinion is as fast as you need to be for any reasonable purpose.  If that sounds good to you, read on!

1.5. The Basics of Against the Storm

The win/loss condition of Against the Storm is to fill the blue bar (reputation) before you fill the red bar (impatience).  If the blue bar fills first, you win.  If the red bar fills first, you lose.

As such, every action that you take in a game in Against the Storm should do one of two things:

• fill up the blue bar, thus helping you win
• slow down/stop the growth of the red bar, thus helping you not lose.

This is all a bit abstract, so let’s take an example.  You assign two workers to a Small Forager’s Camp, harvesting Vegetables.

Why are you assigning those workers to harvest vegetables?

Let’s look at some possible scenarios, and in each situation we’ll look at whether assigning these workers is good (helps you win the game), bad (does not help you win the game), or unclear.

1. You have no food at all.  You need food, any kind of food, right now, or your workers are going to starve to death.  Assigning these workers to the Forager’s Camp stops you from losing villagers, which stops your impatience from going up.  Conclusion:  assigning workers to the camp is good.  Note that just because it’s a good move doesn’t mean it’s the BEST move – there might be some better way to generate food – but it helps you not lose the game.
2. You have a complex food production line going which uses vegetables, such as Pickled Goods, Porridge, or Skewers.  Assigning workers to farm vegetables here serves double duty – it stops you from losing (by preventing starvation) and also helps you win (by making villagers happy ).  Conclusion:  good.
3. You have a complex food production line going which doesn’t use vegetables.  Any vegetables you harvest are getting eaten as raw food, but your need for raw food isn’t desperate.  In this situation whether harvesting vegetables is a good move is unclear.  You’ll get some use out of them, but it’s not immediately affecting your blue or red bars.
4. It’s mid-game and you have a complex food production line (or some other supply chain) which uses vegetables, but you’ve got a surplus of vegetables already.  Are you going to need the extras?  Unclear.   
5. It’s late game and you have a complex food production line (or some other supply chain) which uses vegetables, but you’ve got a massive stockpile of vegetables already.  Harvesting vegetables is now bad because you’re never going to use them.
6. It’s late game and you have plenty of food but you’re struggling with Hostility/impatience.  Harvesting vegetables is now bad because it doesn’t help you win and doesn’t solve the problem that might actually cost you the game.

Every move you make should bring you closer in some way towards winning the game.  If you understand this, you will be most of the way to becoming an proficient AtS player.  Now it’s time to look at the problems you’re going to have to overcome to get there.

2. The Five Problems

In any settlement of Against the Storm, you will have five major problems, and most of your time playing the game will be spent on managing them.  I say “managing”, not “solving”, because your goal isn’t to permanently solve them, your goal is to hold them off long enough to win.

These five problems are:

1. Events
2. Hostility
3. Food
4. Fuel
5. Impatience

Think of these as your five “lose conditions”.  Keeping all five under control doesn’t win you the game, but does give you enough of a free hand that winning the game becomes relatively easy to do.

These problems are arranged in rough order of how much of a headache they are, as in “how much time on average will you spend worrying about this”.  We’ll go through each in turn.

2.1. Glade Events

Dangerous and Forbidden Glade Events are your only “temporary” lose conditions.  The other four  problems never go away, but once you solve a Dangerous or Forbidden Glade Event, it’s gone forever.  The rewards for solving one are usually very good;  the consequences for failing one can be very bad.

This combination means that solving an active Dangerous/Forbidden Glade Events should almost always be your top priority.  Any time that you have one of these events ticking, the number one thing on your mind should be “how can I get this solved in time?”

So, the instant you open a Dangerous or Forbidden Glade, you should pause the game, click on the event, and read all of it.  (Yes, ALL of it.  Don’t skip.)  Here’s the general flowchart that your mind should be going through as you do so:

2.1.1. The Dangerous/Forbidden Glade Checklist 

• Question 1:  Do you have the resources to solve this event?

If yes, life is good.  If no, go to Question 2.

• Question 2:  Can you get the resources to solve this event?

If yes, start gathering/crafting them.  If no, go to Question 3.

• Question 3:  Are you sure?

Check your stockpiles of goods, and all of your blueprints, then compare those to the potential solves for the event.  Look at all the resource nodes on the map.  If none of those work, look at their secondary outputs.  Look at the caches – do any of them have contents that’d work?  At the last resort, you can wait for (or summon) a trader.

• Question 4:  Are you REALLY sure?

Most events in AtS have a lot of potential solves.  Even if it looks like you don’t have the resources, you can probably scrounge them up if you really try.  It’s actually very rare to hit a Glade Event that’s impossible to solve before the timer runs out – far more common is that you make a mistake or don’t do your preparations in time.

• Question 5:  Check the event’s failure consequences.

Okay, so you got super unlucky (less likely) or you goofed up (more likely) and you’re going to fail an event.  That’s okay, it happens.  Time to shift into damage control mode.

The good news is that for most Dangerous Glade events, the consequences for failing to solve an event in time really aren’t all that bad.  Usually they’re something like “1 point of impatience + some mildly annoying temporary penalty”.  In this situation, the best thing to do is to suck it up, take the hit, and get your resources ready so that you can get the solve done next year.

However, there are a few events out there where failing is REALLY bad.  Massive penalties to Global Resolve, killing large numbers of your villagers, huge increases to Hostility, etc.  These “you lose” consequences are much more common for Forbidden Glade events than for Dangerous Glade ones, but either way, you this is why you absolutely must READ THE TEXT on any Dangerous/Forbidden event as soon as you open it – you have to identify straight away whether failing it is something you have to prevent at all costs, or not.

The decision about when to open Dangerous/Forbidden Glades is covered in more detail in Your First Dangerous Glade.

2.2. Hostility of the Forest

If Dangerous Glade Events are your biggest short-term problem in Against the Storm, Hostility is generally your biggest long-term one.  It won’t kill you as fast as a botched Dangerous/Forbidden Glade Event, but unlike Glade Events, it never really goes away.

Hostility of the Forest is a scaling threat.  At the very beginning of the game, Hostility is barely noticeable.  The longer your game goes on, the worse a problem it becomes.  This is because the main sources of Hostility are:

• Years passed
• Opening glades
• Adding villagers to your settlement

Whereas the only guaranteed ways to reduce Hostility are:

• Increasing impatience
• Building additional Hearths
• Having villagers die or leave

So why is this a problem?

Because the first three things scale and the last three things don’t.  Impatience can’t go above 13.99, or you lose.  Hearths are expensive and consume fuel.  Losing villagers weakens you and increases Impatience.  All of these will work in the short term, but they’re not sustainable.

As a result, in almost all games, you’ll find that your Hostility problem gets steadily worse the longer the game lasts.  Your Hostility in Y4 is worse than your Hostility in Y2, your Hostility in Y6 is worse than your Hostility in Y4, your Hostility in Y8 is worse than your Hostility in Y6, and by the time you hit Y10 Hostility is a devastating threat where getting through the storm without losing villagers is almost impossible.

Important note:  above a certain level, Hostility WILL kill you.  There are some Forest Mysteries at Hostility 4+ that are simply not survivable – if Hostility gets to that level, and stays at that level, then you’re going to lose.  And even if you get lucky and don’t roll any of the really bad mysteries, the basic Forest Mystery (Looming Darkness) will still eventually kill you, because there’s only so many increments of -4 global resolve you can take before your villagers start leaving.

So what does it mean?  It means that managing Hostility is a race against time.  Your goal isn’t to stop Hostility growth, it’s to slow it down enough that you can win the game first.  To do this, you have to learn to manage hostility.

2.2.1. Managing Hostility – The Three Rs

There are three ways to manage Hostility:

• Resolve (tank it)
• Reduce (decrease it)
• Race (outpace it)

Resolve

The main way that Hostility hurts you is by decreasing your Global Resolve.  As such, if you can boost your Resolve high enough, then Hostility mostly stops being a problem.

Increasing your Resolve is the ideal way to manage Hostility, since it not only stops you from losing, it also helps you win.  For a more in-depth discussion of this, see the Resolve section.

Reduce

If you can’t boost your Resolve, the next best option for dealing with Hostility is to reduce it.  You naturally get a certain amount of Hostility reduction from Impatience and from extra Hearths, but at Viceroy difficulty and above, this will not be enough.  To stop Hostility from creeping up year by year, you’ll need something more.

The good news is that between cornerstones, Glade Events, perks, and buildings, there are lots and lots of Hostility-reducers in the game.  And almost all of them are good.  While there are some exceptions, as a general rule, anything that says “reduces Hostility” on it is worth taking.  In most games you’ll be offered at least one decent Hostility-reducer.

There is however, a catch:  which (if any) Hostility reducing effects you get offered is totally random.  In some games you’ll accumulate -150 points of Hostility reduction and Hostility will never be a problem at all, while in other games you’ll get basically nothing.  As such, while Hostility reduction is a very helpful part of your toolkit and something you should always look out for, it’s not something you can count on.  Which brings us to the last method of managing Hostility:

Race

When all other options fail, the last resort is just to race the Hostility meter.  The goal here is to win the game before Hostility becomes unmanageable and kills you.

You’re generally going to lose some villagers while taking this approach.  It’s common around Y3 or Y4 for your resolve in the Storm to drop into negatives, resulting in some villagers leaving.  This is to some degree a self-correcting problem, as the lost villagers result in extra Impatience, which will eventually bring Hostility back down to a manageable level.  Obviously if this happens too many times your Impatience will cap out and you’ll lose, but hopefully you should be able to win the game before that happens.  For advice on this, go to Section 3.

2.3. Food & Starvation

Running out of food doesn’t usually directly kill you, but it makes your life thoroughly miserable – it slows your progress to a crawl and weakens you to the point that it’s much harder to fight off other threats.

Food and fuel are the two big “taxes” on a settlement, and of the two, food is the harder one to pay.  This is because your fallback option for fuel (chopping down trees in Woodcutter Camps) is fast, while your fallback option for food (gathering food from small gathering camps) is slow.  You can run a settlement on wood fuel just fine, but if you try to support your population with food from small camps, you’re going to have problems.

The scale of these problems changes a lot depending on what difficulty you’re playing at.  You can divide the food problem into “pre-Prestige 7” and “after Prestige 7”.  The difference between the two is night and day – once you go from P6 to P7, you’ll be shocked at how fast a pile of food can vanish.  Before Prestige 7, you can kind of muddle through on food with a fairly inefficient setup.  From Prestige 7 onwards, you can’t.  As such, much of the early-mid game of a settlement comes down to solving the food problem.

2.3.1. Solving the Food Problem

The best way to solve the food problem is with complex food.  Complex food that your species likes both satisfies their hunger and gives them a hefty resolve boost, which translates into better resistance to Hostility and earlier reputation points.

One of the first things you should do in every settlement, once you know what your 3 species are, is to check their needs to see which complex foods will feed them.  Then, every time you see a blueprint, check to see whether it supplies that particular complex food.  Once you find one, get it, build it, and run it non-stop.  You should also strongly consider installing and powering a Rain Engine in whichever building is making the majority of your complex food.  Most food production buildings take Drizzle Water, which is why Drizzle Water geysers are generally considered the most desirable.

If you can’t get complex foods that your species like, life is going to be more difficult.  At this point your options are:

1. Make complex foods that your villagers don’t like, and force them to eat them via Consumption Control.  While this means you miss out on the resolve bonus, a 2-star or 3-star complex food recipe is usually a fair bit more efficient than raw food.  So if you have something like a Beanery with a 3-star porridge recipe, but only 1 of your species likes porridge, you probably want to force everyone onto a porridge diet until you can find something better.
2. Buy desired complex foods from traders or loot them from caches.  This won’t last very long, but sometimes “not very long” is enough.
3. Eat raw food.  You’ll fall back on this option a lot, especially in the early game.  The problem here is that raw food is inherently less efficient than 2-star or 3-star complex food, meaning that at P7 and higher you’ll need a lot of it.  “A lot of it” generally means a 2-star recipe from a farm (i.e. Plantation), or gathering camps with some sort of bonus (small unbonused Trapper’s/Forager’s/Herbalist’s camps will struggle to keep up).  If all goes well, this’ll keep you going long enough to get something better going.
4. Just let your guys go hungry.  This is the least desirable option but happens to everyone sooner or later.  It’s usually not too big a deal EXCEPT if you do it in the Storm.  Hunger stacks in Drizzle/Clearance are just an annoyance, but hunger stacks in the Storm usually mean lost villagers, so if you’re seeing your food numbers hit zero then you should take it as your cue to make sure you get them up before the storm arrives.

Solving the food problem is usually the big turning point for a settlement.  Once you have a plentiful supply of complex food that all three of your species like, everything else becomes much easier and you can move on to generating reputation and winning the game.

2.4. Fuel & Blightrot

Unlike food, fuel is usually not too big of a deal.  You’d like a good fuel recipe, but you don’t NEED a good fuel recipe.  Particularly on fuel-rich biomes like Royal Woodlands, you can often make do with woodcutting and the odd cache or order reward – one lot of 30 coal will run a hearth for a full year all on its own.

However, this changes once blightrot comes into the equation.  At P11+, you’re getting 10 cysts every 3rd year, and probably 5-10 cysts per year on top of that from even moderate use of Rain Engines.  Suddenly that 30 coal is getting used up just to get rid of your yearly deposit of blightrot.

Blightrot in practice functions mostly as a fuel tax.  Every blightrot cyst requires 1 Purging Fire to destroy, and each Purging Fire requires 10 wood, 4 oil, or 3 coal.  One fully stocked Blight Post can handle up to 15 or so cysts, meaning that absent heavy rainpunk usage or a troublesome Glade Event, blightrot is fairly easy to contain . . . IF you have the fuel.  As such, I usually think of the blightrot problem as a subset of the fuel problem.  If you can get a good supply of fuel, blightrot’s rarely an issue.

2.4.1. The Fuels Compared

Against the Storm has one basic fuel (wood) and three advanced fuels (oil, sea marrow, and coal).  As a general rule, advanced fuels are good and basic fuel is bad.

Basic Fuel (Wood)

Wood is easy to get, and that’s all that can be said for it.  It’s mediocre as a hearth fuel and terrible as a recipe fuel (recipes like Jerky require 5 wood, but only 1 Coal or Sea Marrow).  You can manage on wood alone if you’re on Royal Woodlands or have some other bonus to wood production, but otherwise you’re going to need something better, especially once you go up to 2 or more Hearths.

Advanced Fuel

All three advanced fuels are equally good when it comes to burning in the Hearth.  The main difference between them comes in their secondary uses and in how easy they are to get.  Sea Marrow is the easiest by far to extract, since you can literally pick it up off the ground with a Stonecutter’s Camp, but it’s only available on about half the biomes.  Oil needs a blueprint and an input ingredient (Plant Fibre is generally best), but has the nice side benefit of being used in a ton of Glade Event solutions – an oil production line will set you up very well for exploring Dangerous Glades.  Finally there’s coal, which is an extremely powerful hostility reducer when sacrificed in the Hearth, but which is generally the hardest of the fuels to get – it can be found lying around on those maps which don’t have Sea Marrow, but it requires a more expensive resource extractor (the Mine) and is extracted much more slowly.  To effectively mine coal you generally want an upgraded Mine, which comes with a significant up-front cost and, depending on which citadel upgrades you have, may not even be possible.

2.5. Impatience

Impatience is generally the problem you’ll spend the least time worrying about.  From a certain point of view, all of the other problems are just sub-categories of impatience, in that the way they make you lose is by making your impatience hit 14.  However, this isn’t really how it works in practice.  If you lose 10 villagers from starvation and have your impatience shoot up to 14, then technically it was the impatience that killed you, but it’s more accurate to say that you lost because you catastrophically failed to solve the food problem.  

As such, for this category, I’m only counting impatience gain NOT caused by villager losses due to Glade Events, Hostility, food/starvation, and fuel/blightrot.  This means:

• Regular per-minute impatience gain
• Impatience gain caused by deaths/losses that are NOT related to Glade Events, Hostility, or running out of food/fuel

. . . and nothing else.

It is actually VERY rare to lose a game to this.  Usually your hostility clock runs out long before your impatience clock – it’s the year on year Hostility increase that makes your position untenable.  Generally the only time that pure impatience becomes a problem is when you’ve got some effect that’s artificially boosting it, such as the Land of Greed world map modifier or the Mist Piercers cornerstone.

However, while this problem is the least common of the four, it’s also the hardest to fix.  There are very few ways to reduce Impatience – the only really reliable ones are the human firekeeper bonus, and gaining Reputation, and once you get to P15 gaining Reputation is only half as effective.  As such, if you’re going to have a problem with Impatience, it’s important to identify it early.  By the time you realise you’re about to lose, it’s probably too late.

The only reliable solution to the Impatience problem is to win faster.  A human firekeeper or certain rare perks/cornerstones can reduce Impatience growth, but you aren’t guaranteed any of these.  In practice, the best solution is just to gain as much Reputation as possible, as fast as possible.  Which neatly leads us into . . .

3. Reputation

Reputation is your win condition in Against the Storm.  Unless you’re playing in the Sealed Forest, the only way to win a settlement is to push your blue bar all the way to the left.

There are three main ways to gain reputation in Against the Storm:

1. Orders
2. Resolve
3. Events

Let’s take a look at each in turn.

3.1. Orders

Orders are your first and easiest way to gain reputation.  Early game orders in particular are typically quite quick and easy to do and you should make completing them a priority.

Choose your orders carefully – a common mistake newer players make is to snap pick orders without thinking them through.  Here’s a very rough set of principles to help you choose which order to pick:

1. Pick orders that you can complete fast.  Ideally, you want to complete 2 out of your starting 3 orders within a year or less of opening them.  Why?  Because orders mean reputation, and reputation means blueprints, and blueprints now are better than blueprints later.  The faster you can get your hands on a building, the more benefit you can get out of it.
2. Pick orders that you can complete cheaply.  Usually, the best orders are ones you can complete just by doing things you want to be doing anyway (opening glades, completing trade routes, making your people happy).  Orders that require you to deliver any substantial amount of goods are less attractive, particularly if they’re goods you have to gather/manufacture first.
3. Pick orders that you can complete reliably.  Be wary of timed orders that require some resource that you might not get (such as a glade ruin).  Also be wary of taking orders that require you to satisfy a service, as services other than clothing require both the service good and the corresponding service building.  Orders that require a specific building (“have a Workshop”, “have a Monastery”) are worst of all, and you should never take these unless you have the building already or know for sure that you can get it.
4. Pick orders with good rewards.  This is the least important of the considerations.  An order with crappy rewards that you can do quickly, cheaply, and reliably is better than an order with amazing rewards that’ll take you 4 years to finish.

Ideally you want orders that satisfy all 4 of these conditions.  In practice this will usually not be possible and you’ll have to choose.

3.2. Resolve

Resolve is your second “natural” source of Reputation, in that it doesn’t require opening glades or finding anything in them.

High Resolve earns you Reputation over time, but it makes a big difference whether that high resolve is sustainable or temporary.

3.2.1. Sustainable Resolve

Sustainable resolve is the resolve level that you can afford to maintain on a permanent or semi-permanent basis.  High sustainable resolve is great because of how hands-off it is:  once you’ve managed to push your species into the blue, you can turn your attention to other things and enjoy the free Reputation.  It’s also great for tanking Hostility – if your villagers are sitting at 20-30 Resolve when the Storm starts, Hostility levels have to get REALLY bad before you’re at risk of them leaving.  Having high Resolve is just a Really Good Thing, so it’s worth taking a brief look at how you can get it.

Basic Housing

Not much to say here – it’s a cheap +3 bonus which also protects against some very nasty Forest Mysteries.  Get it.

Species Housing

Much more difficult to supply than Basic Housing since it uses the same building materials that you need for all those buildings that you need to actually make your settlement run.  If you’ve lucked into a good recipe for the building material in question (such as fabric for Harpy Houses) then great, but in most cases you won’t be able to afford to mass-produce species housing until very late in the game, if at all.

Due to how resolve numbers work, Species Housing is a much better deal for species that you don’t have very many of.  If you only have 2 Lizards, then building them a single Lizard House is highly cost-effective.  If you have 20 Lizards, you’re probably better off sticking them in shelters.

Complex Food

Complex Food is one of the best ways of providing sustainable resolve.  This is because your villagers have to eat something, and raw food isn’t any cheaper than complex – in fact raw food is usually more expensive than complex food on a per-unit basis.  So by switching from raw food to a desired complex one, you’re not only providing your villagers with a very healthy resolve bonus, but saving resources into the bargain.  This is why getting a Complex Food need filled for all your species is so worthwhile.

While supplying your villagers with 1 Complex Food is great, supplying them with 2 is rarely worth it, at least not on a permanent basis (food is expensive).  It’s one of the most common ways to get a boost for the resolve party though.

Clothing

Coats and boots are a ‘halfway house’ need;  more of a luxury than food, less of a luxury than services.  They become somewhat better at high Prestige since they don’t get the increased consumption penalty that food (P7) and services (P8) do.

Services

The top end of the resolve pyramid, services clock in at the highest boost of all, giving +8 to +10.  However, the cost of mass-producing them plus the cost of building and staffing a service building generally puts always-on services out of range for all but the most wealthy settlements.  They’re great for a resolve party, though.

Global Resolve Bonuses

There are lots and lots of ways to get these:  hearth upgrades, cornerstones, glade events, etc etc, and they’re all very good.  As a general rule, if anything says “global resolve bonus”, you want it.  Even a +1 to global resolve makes a difference, and the more the better.  Stacking global resolve is one of the easiest and most reliable ways to win the game.

Final Note on Sustainable Resolve

There is really no such thing as “enough” sustainable resolve in AtS.  No matter how much you have, you always want more.  So don’t focus on just one of the above things – go for ALL of them. Stack resolve from every possible source you can.

3.2.2. Temporary Resolve

Temporary resolve is any boost to resolve that you can’t keep up, either because it comes at the expense of something else (like favouring) or because you don’t have enough of the resources in question (like a cache of complex food).  Since it doesn’t last forever, you want to use it in such a way that it makes a difference.

How do you do this?  Simply put, you want to use your temporary resolve boosts when they push your villagers out of one category and into the other.  So, keeping them out of the red and into “content”, or out of “content” and into “happy”.

Earning reputation through temporary resolve works better the later the game goes, and works best of all if you can stack a lot of temporary resolve bonuses together.  The maths for this gets a little complicated, but the short version is:  you want to earn as much reputation as possible through sustainable resolve FIRST, then use all your temporary resolve boosts at once for one big push to get you over the top.  Often this means using consumption control to stop your villagers from using up your resolve-boosting goods until you’re ready to kick off your resolve party and win the game.  

3.3. Glade Events

Your third source of reputation, and usually your weakest.  Glade Events can earn you a lot of reputation, but have two major drawbacks:  1) you need to OPEN the glade first, which comes with a cost, and 2) they require resources to solve.

Dangerous/Forbidden Glade Events

A lot of Dangerous Glade Events will offer between 0.5 and 1.0 reputation if you can do the “good” solve.  Usually (but not always) this solve is the harder one.  Forbidden Glade Events almost always offer 1.0 reputation for the “good” solve.

There’s not much to say about these events except that you should treat them as windfalls.  Grab them when you see them, but don’t rely on them.

Abandoned Caches

The right-hand solve on Abandoned Cache events lets you spend tools to send the goods to the citadel, gaining you reputation and amber.  This is typically a very good deal and you should do it whenever possible – there’s some argument for keeping a reserve of 15 tools just in case you run into a particularly nasty Glade Event, but ideally you should be spending tools as fast as you get them.  In practice, though, you’ll usually find that finding caches is much easier than getting the tools to use them – it’s very common by mid-late game to have 5 or more unopened caches on your map.

Because caches are so common, they’re a much more consistent source of reputation than Dangerous Glade Events.  The problem is that converting them into reputation requires tools, and tools are one of the most expensive items in the game.  Buying tools from traders costs a fortune (especially at P10 and above) meaning that you’re generally better off making them yourself.  If you can get a good tools production line going, however, it’s one of the more reliable win conditions, since it not only gives you a steady supply of reputation, but plenty of Amber as well.

3.4. Balancing Out

These three sources of reputation – orders, resolve, and events – are how you’ll win the game.    On Prestige 1 and higher (which requires 18 points to win) a typical win might score something like this:

8 from orders
6 from resolve
2 from Dangerous Glade Events
2 from caches

Often one of these three will fall a little short.  Maybe you get unlucky with your orders and get 2-3 that are really hard to complete;  maybe you don’t get offered a single building with a tools recipe all game.  In this case, the other two will have to pick up the slack.

Always keep an eye on your reputation bar!  There will be a certain point in every settlement where you come within reach of that magic 18-point number, and the trick is to identify when you’re reached it.  As soon as you do, you should drop everything else you’re doing and focus on generating Reputation to win.

So how should you get to that point?  Well, that leads us into . . .

4. The Standard Strategy

This is a general strategy that will work unmodified for around 80% of settlements, and with a little modification will also work for the rest.  While this approach isn’t the only way to win a game of Against the Storm, it’s simple, reliable, and effective.

4.1. Summary of the Standard Strategy 

Set up in year 1.  Open one Dangerous Glade per year from Year 2 onwards.  Throw a resolve party in your last year to win.

Let’s break this down in more detail.

4.2. Pre-Game (Embarkation)

Spend a little while looking at your caravan choices.  While you should pay some attention to the starting goods, more important is what species you get and how many of them you start with.  Certain species do better on certain biomes and modifiers – humans are the best if you’re expecting to be tanking high levels of Hostility, foxes are great if you’re going to be going wide and opening a lot of glades, etc.

However, generally the most important thing to look for in a caravan is villager count.  A caravan with crappy starting goods and 9 villagers is better than one with great starting goods and 6 villagers – labour is in short supply in years 1-2 and every extra pair of hands counts.  I would strongly recommend starting with at least 8 villagers, and the more the better.  This lets you hit the ground running.

For embarkation points, the only thing I would always go for every time is cheap food.  You want at least 100 food and more is better – a good food stockpile buys you time and helps you out in those crucial early years.  Beyond that, there are too many variables to give any hard and fast rules – people on the AtS Discord server can spend hours arguing about the best way to spend embarkation points, and everyone has a different set of favourites.

Once you’ve done, click the embark button and let’s go!

4.3. Early Game

First thing to do upon entering the game is to look at the map and the resources available to you.  Look at the glade layout, check the Forest Mysteries, and check your starting blueprints.

Early game is all about setup:  building the basic infrastructure that you’ll rely on for the rest of the game.  I define the “early game” of Against the Storm as everything up to your first Dangerous Glade.  Once you’ve got the resources to solve your first Dangerous Glade Event and have started the solve, I consider the early game to be over.  This usually means that “early game” works out to Year 1 Drizzle/Clearance/Storm, plus a bit of Year 2 Drizzle as well.

Let’s go through the early game process step by step.

Blueprint Choice in the Early Game

First thing to look at is your blueprints – there’ll be 2 or 3 depending on difficulty.  You can easily spend hours talking about how to choose blueprints (and there’s a link in Miscellaneous to videos doing exactly that), but my advice in Year 1 is to prioritise building materials.  The idea isn’t to win the game, it’s to give you the stuff to build the stuff that WILL win you the game.  So take the first plank-producing building you see, with brick and fabric as a second priority.  You’re unlikely to be able to fully solve the building material bottleneck until later, but try to make sure you at least have enough brick/fabric/parts to build a Small Warehouse – you may need one in Year 2 (see Your First Dangerous Glade).

Decision Making

Next look at your map.  Check your positive and negative Forest Mysteries and identify any relevant ones.  Check your glade’s starting resources – do you have access to the materials to make both bricks and fabric, or are you missing one?  Identify the most accessible Dangerous Glade (i.e. the one closest to your Main Warehouse or Hearth) – this is the one you’ll be cutting into.  Once you’ve got a plan, queue up your build orders and unpause.

Basic Infrastructure

Build two Woodcutter’s Camps, one Crude Workstation, one Makeshift Post, and one Trading Post.  Lay out dirt paths to give your villagers easy access to your Main Warehouse and Hearth.  Staff your Woodcutter’s Camps fully (or nearly fully) and build up a stockpile of wood.  Cut up to the edge of your chosen Dangerous Glade but don’t open it.

Build basic shelters for all your villagers, and enough Comfort decorations to level the Hearth up to Level 1.  If you’ve got a forgiving combination of species and Forest Mysteries you may be able to get away with skipping this step, but you’ll want it done sooner or later so you might as well get it out of the way early.

Have a look at your Year 1 cornerstone and decide whether to take it.  Make a few Packs of Provisions and look for trade opportunities to start levelling up your Trade Routes and earn yourself a bit of amber for when the first trader arrives in Y2.  Open your first three Orders and start planning how to get them completed as soon as possible.  If you have any leftover villagers with nothing to do, build a gathering camp and start to harvest the resources in your starting glade.  At this point, you should be looking towards your first Dangerous Glade.

4.3.1. Your First Dangerous Glade

Opening your first Dangerous Glade is always a slightly nerve-wracking moment, and how well it goes is a big factor in whether this settlement is going to be an easy ride or a struggle.

The first thing to decide is:  when should you open the glade?  Turns out that this is not a simple question!  To answer it, we’re going to have to take a closer look at the numbers on Dangerous Glade Events.

A typical Dangerous Glade Event at Viceroy difficulty and up has a threat timer of 13 minutes (that’s how long you have before bad things happen), and a solve time of 5 minutes (at P8 and below) or 7.5 minutes (at P9 and above). Note that many Dangerous Glade Events come with nasty working effects which you do not want active during the Storm.  This means that when you open a Dangerous Glade, you want its Event solved before the next year’s Storm begins.

Drizzle plus Clearance is 8 minutes.  This is just barely enough time to do a 7 and a half minute solve.  It is not enough time if your workers have to make multiple long trips carrying goods and taking breaks in between, and it is DEFINITELY not enough time if you don’t yet have all the items you need for the solve and need to manufacture or gather some of them first.  So what does this mean?

It means you do not want to wait for Year 2 Drizzle to open that glade!  You need time to set up your event solve, and the more the better.  Time lets you gather/manufacture the materials for the solve, and maybe build a Small Warehouse next to the event so that your event workers can transport the goods to the event quickly and efficiently.

So when’s the best time to crack that glade open?

Well, those of you good at maths might already have noticed that 13 equals 4 + 4 + 4 + 1.  So if you want the absolute maximum amount of time to solve a 13-minute event, you want to be opening the glade 1 minute before the end of Year 1 Clearance.

Unfortunately, while most Dangerous Glade Events have a 13 minute timer, some don’t, and a few of the ones that don’t are very nasty.  The Ancient Shrine, in particular, has a threat timer of under 8 minutes.  So you want to open that glade early enough that you’ll have time to set up a difficult solve, but late enough that it won’t be a disaster if you get one with an unusually short timer.

Putting this together, the best time to open a Dangerous Glade is probably some time around the middle of the Storm.  This should give you time to set up a Small Warehouse and source what you need if the event is a hard one.  For more details, see Glade Events.  The longer that you think it’ll take you to set up a solve, the earlier you should do the opening.

Once you’ve got your first Dangerous Glade solve locked in, you’ve officially left the early game.  It’s time to transition into the mid game.

4.4. Mid Game

Mid game is all about exploring and expanding.  Your priorities here are growing your settlement while looking for ways to win.

Blueprint Choice in the Mid Game

Almost all blueprints are viable in the mid game, which makes choices here quite difficult.  You have to balance blueprints which will solve a problem right now against blueprints which will open up options in the future.  However, your first priority is usually going to be solving the food problem.

If you followed the advice in section 4.2 and embarked with a big pile of starting food, you probably got through the early game without having to think much about food supplies.  Once you get into the mid game, this will no longer be the case.  You need a food production line, preferably complex foods that your villagers like:  see Solving the Food Problem.

In addition to the food problem, the mid game is also where you need to solve:

4.4.1. The Building Material Bottleneck

Remember how I said you want to spend the early game picking up blueprints for building materials?  If you didn’t manage to do this, this is where it’ll come back to bite you.  Midgame is where you get the highest concentration of new blueprints – ideally, you want to be able to build each one as you get it.  If you can’t, everything you try to do will happen much more slowly.

It’s quite rare to find a good plank recipe AND a good brick recipe AND a good fabric recipe by the start of the midgame.  Usually you’ll be missing one, and often two.  That’s fine – the key here is to identify your bottleneck materials EARLY.  If you know you’re going to be short on bricks, then you want to be looking for orders with a brick reward, checking caches for brick stockpiles, looking for bricks in the inventory of your Year 2 trader and buying them if you see them, avoiding any orders or Event solves that require bricks as a component, etc.  It is very important that you do this BEFORE you need the building material in question!  The last thing you want is to get to Year 3, notice that you’ve got 15 Blightrot Cysts on your buildings, and suddenly realise that you haven’t got the bricks to make a Blight Post.

Having a ready supply of building materials will make your mid game much smoother and will enable you to react more quickly to new Glade Events.  Which neatly leads us into . . .

4.4.2. Opening Glades in the Mid Game

Your mid game will be heavily shaped by how many glades you open, and what you find in them.  You can’t choose the latter, but you do get to choose the former.

Dangerous Glade Timings

You should aim to open one Dangerous Glade per year during the mid game – so one in Year 2, one in Year 3, one in Year 4, and so on.  Note the discussion in the last section about when to open a Dangerous Glade – usually your Year 3 glade is best opened in the storm of Year 2, your Year 4 glade is best opened in the storm of Year 3, and so on.

On certain rare years it will be better not to open a Dangerous Glade.  This generally happens because you’re in crisis mode due to existing problems and can’t handle a bad Dangerous Glade Event as well.  In these situations, it can be better to play it safe and take a “year off” to consolidate before opening the next glade.  Be warned, however:  taking a year off is not free!  Every year that passes means that your Hostility is growing, your Impatience clock is running, and your settlement is consuming food and fuel.  You’re going to need to expand sooner or later, and it will only get harder the longer you leave it.  When in doubt as to whether to open a Dangerous Glade or not, you should generally choose to open it.

Opening Multiple Dangerous Glades

Opening 2-3 Dangerous Glades in the same year is possible but places much more strain on your settlement than opening only one.  You’ll need a good-sized workforce, and there’s a risk of getting two Dangerous Glade Events that play off each other.  A working condition of +300 Hostility is manageable, and a working condition of a big penalty to Global Resolve is manageable – having both at once is usually not manageable, so if you’re hoping to open two Dangerous Glades but open the first one to see an event with a really bad working condition, then you should probably put off the second until the next year.  You’ll often find that you don’t have enough workers to effectively exploit the resources from two Dangerous Glades at the same time anyway.

The Small Glade Question

“Are Small Glades worth it?” is a popular topic for debate on the AtS Discord.  Small Glades offer resources without any risk of a nasty Event, and make it much easier to find geysers, especially Drizzle Geysers.  However, you pay for it in Hostility – the gain per Small Glade isn’t much, but it adds up.

I’m personally a little undecided on whether Small Glades are worth it, but if I had to choose, I’d say that they usually aren’t.  What tips it for me is ruins – every time you open a Dangerous Glade, you have about a 50% chance of finding a ruin, which is kind of like getting a free blueprint.  Small Glades almost never have ruins, and when they do they’re only camps.  This means that the best possible Dangerous Glade is many times better than the best possible Small Glade.

However, while I think the answer to the Small Glade Question is usually “no”, I don’t think it takes very much to swing it to “yes”.  Here are some situations where I’d be happy to open a bunch of Small Glades:

1. A fox Hearthkeeper.  Bringing each Small Glade’s Hostility score from 15 down to 9 makes them much more attractive.
2. Any bonus that triggers on opened Glades regardless of their size, such as the cornerstone Improvised Tools.
3. An Order that requires a lot of opened Glades.
4. Enough Hostility Reduction.

Next up is:

The Forbidden Glade Question

“Are Forbidden Glades worth it?” is asked less often.  It’s less relevant than the Small Glade Question because Forbidden Glades are so difficult to reach – practically every map in Against the Storm has 2-3 Small Glades right next door, but finding even a single Forbidden Glade typically requires you to haul your ass all the way across the map.

For those willing to make the journey, the rewards are mixed.  Forbidden Glades are basically “Dangerous Glades, but better” – more resources, more caches, and an event with higher rewards.  Forbidden Glades offer much more reputation than Dangerous ones – on average you can expect to get at least 2 rep from a Forbidden Glade if you can do all the right-hand solves.  However, the price for this is that Forbidden Glade Events are FAR more lethal than Dangerous Glade Events.  A failed Dangerous Glade Event is usually just an annoyance, but there are Forbidden Glade Events like Dark Gate or Fishmen Outpost where failing to solve them is pretty much instant death.  The only time I really like Forbidden Glades is on Marshlands – a harvesting operation on a giant resource node is almost enough to win you the game all by itself, so if you have 1-2 of the advanced Trapper’s/Forager’s/Herbalist’s camps, I think Marshland Forbidden Glades are worth the gamble.

4.4.3. Midgame Strategy

Your goal in the midgame should be to improve your position on every front.

• Complete every order you can.  Orders are usually the easiest way to gain Reputation and snowball your settlement.
• Get your Resolve as high as you can.  Whenever you can put a species into the blue without significant cost (e.g. by favouring them), do it.
• Build and upgrade a second Hearth once you have the population and resources.  Ideally you want to put it near one of your more distant work locations (e.g. farms or rebuilt ruins) but a second Hearth is almost always worth it even if you don’t have an ideal spot.
• Upgrade your trade routes and start mass-producing trade goods, and use this to build up a stockpile of Amber.
• Start sending caches to the Citadel.
• Once you’ve passed the break point where service buildings become worth it (this happens somewhere between 20-30 population), start building and manning ones that match your species.

In addition to this, you should be opportunistically looking for “win conditions” – things that will directly or indirectly give you enough Reputation to close out the game.  This can include:

• Cornerstones that provide stacking bonuses (Prosperous Settlement, Protected Trade, Trade Hub)
• Components of a tool production line that will let you send caches to the Citadel (this requires a good Tools recipe + a source of Copper Bars/Crystal Dew)
• Glade Events that provide Global Resolve bonuses (Harmony Spirit Altar, Totem of Denial)
• Service Buildings that provide Global Resolve bonuses (Tavern, Explorer’s Lodge, Guild House)

The more Dangerous/Forbidden Glades you open, the higher your chance to randomly stumble into one or more of these, which is why I recommend exploring fairly aggressively.  The Ancient Pact and Mist Piercers cornerstones remove the “random” part of this process and allow you to pick and choose the glades that’ll win you the game, which is why they’re so powerful.

4.4.4. When To Transition into the Late Game

I think of the three phases of an Against the Storm settlement as follows:

• Early Game:  Setup
• Mid Game:  Exploration
• Late Game:  Closing

Mid game ends, in my opinion, when you no longer need to do any more exploration.  You don’t need to open more glades because you have everything you need to win the game already.

Judging when you’ve reached this point is difficult since it’s dependent on exactly how much Reputation you can get from your resolve party.  You look at how many more Reputation points you need to get to 18, then you subtract everything you could get from caches and Orders that you have (or will have) the resources to complete.  Then look at the number that’s left.  Can you get that from Resolve?  If yes, it’s time to close out the game.

4.5. Late Game

Production priorities in the late game change.  You can mostly stop cutting wood and making building materials (just keep a small stockpile for necessities) and you can dial back on producing food and fuel.  Focus instead on stuff that’ll gain you reputation (tools and materials for orders) and resolve (clothing, services, complex food).

Don’t cut into any more Glades unless you need them for orders or for caches.  The extra Hostility will slow down your resolve party, and you don’t want to have to deal with an annoying Dangerous Glade Event with a bad working condition.  (In practice you can often just ignore Glade Events at this point since you’re intending to win the game before they go off, but why take the chance?)

Your goal at this point is to “cash in” – turn every spare resource you’ve got into Reputation.  So complete every order you can, send every cache to the Citadel that you can, and get ready for the resolve party.

Blueprint Choice in the Late Game

Most blueprints in the late game are irrelevant.  Since all that matters is Reputation, the only blueprints that matter are ones that give you Reputation fast.  In practice, that mostly boils down to:

1. Service Buildings
2. Buildings that fill a hole in a production chain

Everything else can be ignored.

4.5.1. The Resolve Party

The Resolve Party is the most common way to close out a game.

What’s a Resolve Party?  Basically, it’s when you stack every single source of Temporary Resolve that you can possibly get your hands on.  That means every Complex Food that you can get, every item of Clothing that you can get, and every Service good that you have the associated Service Building for.

For maximum effectiveness, you want your party to start right at the beginning of your last Drizzle and last all the way through to the end of Clearance.  Drizzle and Clearance together comes to about 4-5 breaks depending on species and break times, so ideally you want to have enough goods stockpiled to supply your whole population for that many break cycles (don’t forget about increased consumption levels on P7 and P8), though you’ll usually find you’ll win the game before running out.

Here’s what this looks like in practice.

The year before the party

• Stockpile as many Complex Foods, Clothing, and Service Goods as you can.  Use Consumption Control to stop your villagers from using up the foods and clothing, and keep the service buildings unstaffed to stop your villagers using up the Service Goods.
• Hunker down and try to make it through the Storm.  Continue producing food/clothing/service goods as you do so.  You may have trouble with villagers dipping into the red due to Rationing penalties;  if so, sacrifice or unrestrict a few goods as necessary.
• Between one and two minutes before the end of the Storm, go to Consumption Control and set everything to “allowed”.  Staff all your Service Buildings.

As soon as Drizzle starts

• Crank up all your Rain Engines to the max “comfort” setting.
• Go to the trader if one arrived during the Storm, or summon one if they didn’t.  Spend all your Amber and trade goods on yet more clothing, yet more service goods, and yet more complex food.  If the trader’s stockpile doesn’t have enough, summon another.
• All your villagers are now wearing nice clothes, pigging out on their favourite foods, and consuming Service Goods.  Resolve should shoot up into the blue.
• Watch the Reputation bar start climbing.

As the year wears on

• Continue to monitor Resolve levels.  Decadence and Hostility increases from all the Reputation you’re earning may cause some of your species to drop out of the blue.  If this happens, fiddle around with favouring and worker placement to try to get them happy again.
• Check stockpiles of all your goods to make sure you’re not running out.  Mouse over the Reputation bar to see how much you’re gaining per minute.  Figure out how long it’ll take to get to 18.
• Win!  (Hopefully.)

So why does the resolve party work so well?

The short answer is that it’s due to the difference between sustainable and temporary resolve discussed in Section 3.2.  Supplying all your villagers with clothing, services, and multiple Complex Foods on a permanent basis is incredibly expensive.  Supplying them for only two seasons, on the other hand . . . that’s very doable.  The idea here is that you use your sustainable resolve to earn Reputation slowly and steadily throughout the mid game, then use all your temporary resolve at once to get one big boost to put you over the top.

And that’s it!  The rest of this guide will cover various odds and ends, but you now know the standard strategy I use and recommend in almost all games of Against the Storm.

5. Miscellaneous

This section will cover extra stuff that doesn’t really fit in to any of the earlier sections.

5.1. Sealed Forest

The Standard Strategy detailed above will work unmodified for most games, and with a little modification for others.  So, if you’re playing on Forbidden Lands or Untamed Wilds you’ll want to be a bit more careful with opening your big glades, if you’re playing on Bandit Camp then getting stuff for your resolve party will be harder, if you’re playing on Ancient Battleground you have to pay more attention to Hostility, etc.  For the most part these are all kind of obvious so I’m not going to go into them in detail.

There is, however, one biome where you have to throw the Standard Strategy out the window, and that’s the Sealed Forest.  Reaching 18 victory points on Sealed Forest does not win you the game, and Hostility scales off number of trees felled instead of off woodcutters.  These two factors make aggressive exploration less attractive.

As such, I don’t recommend the “one Dangerous Glade a year” approach on this biome (though it can still work).  Instead you want to beeline for the Seal as fast as possible, then evaluate whether you need to continue opening Glades.  Only do so if you need the resources – otherwise, settle down and focus on completing your Seal Objectives instead.

5.2. No Orders Games

While most World Map modifiers don’t change the game all that much, there’s one that absolutely does, and that’s No Orders.  As mentioned, Orders are your best and easiest source of Reputation.  In a typical game they’ll supply half (or nearly half) of your 18 points.  Take that away, and all of a sudden you need to earn 8-9 more Reputation.  That’s a lot!

As discussed in Section 3.4, where one source of Reputation falls short, the others have to pick up the slack.  All of your 18 points are going to have to come from Resolve and Glade Events.  Generally this means you’re going to have to do a lot of both – you’re going to need lots of Resolve AND a good Tools production line AND pick up a few extra points from Glade Events along the way.

Despite how hard they are, I actually do recommend no-orders games.  Some of the most fun settlements I’ve played have been No Orders, simply because it really makes you think about how to make the most of everything you’re given.  Probably not a good idea if you’re still struggling with regular difficulty, though!

5.3. Queen’s Hand

The Queen’s Hand Trial is sort of the “New Game Plus” mode of Against the Storm.  It’s for players who’ve beaten the Adamantine Seal and aren’t finding regular P20 games enough of a challenge any more.

Queen’s Hand is quite a shock to the system if you’ve gotten used to playing with a fully upgraded Citadel:  losing those upgrades hurts.  The main advice if you’re struggling with Queen’s Hand is to remember that you don’t have to play the first few settlements (or even most of the settlements) on high Prestige.  Playing on P2-P5 is vastly easier than playing on P10 and higher – the difficulty jump from P5 to P10 is arguably higher than the difficulty jump from P10 to P20!  So just stay at P5 or below until you’ve got a good number of upgrades under your belt and are feeling a bit more confident, at which point you can start striking out for the Seal.  It’ll cost you in Seal Fragments, but that’s what Obsidian Box is for.

Of course, if you really want a challenge, you can push the difficulty up a bit anyway.  I personally like Queen’s Hand “ladder runs”, where you start on a certain Prestige level (P10 is good) and push the difficulty up one notch with every settlement.  If you’re really masochistic you can do P20 the whole way, but this massively frontloads the difficulty so I don’t recommend it unless you just want to prove you can do it.

5.4. Building and Cornerstone Tier Lists

As I mentioned above, I think “tier lists” for Against the Storm are kind of like a belt made out of watches – a complete waste of time.  The whole point of this game is adapting to what you’re given, and just because a building is good in most situations doesn’t mean it’s good in the situation you’re in right now.  The Lumber Mill, for example, is possibly the best building in the game to be offered at the beginning of Year 1, but this is because it’s the best building for making planks, and over the course of a game you’re going to want a lot of planks.  If you get offered Lumber Mill in Year 6 when you’ve got 50 spare planks already and are gearing up for a resolve party, it’s pretty much useless.

That said, there is a lot to say on cornerstones and blueprints, so if you’re relatively new to the game and want a good in-depth discussion on the subject, I recommend AngryPidgeon’s Youtube videos.  At the time of writing he’s got a building tierlist video, a cornerstone tierlist video, and an update video which shuffles the tiers around a bit for the 1.3 release.  These are all now out of date now that the 1.4 patch and the Keepers of the Stone expansion have been released (he’ll probably get around to doing another update eventually), but the important thing is that he actually goes through the reasons for why each building or cornerstone is in its tier, and encourages watchers to think for themselves about the situations in which they’re good, which is much better than just telling players to pick things blindly.

5.5. Submissions

To be added.

6. Conclusion

And that brings to the end of our guide!  I hope you’ve found it helpful and at least reasonably entertaining to read.

If you have further questions, I recommend the Against the Storm Discord.  The community there is large and active and there’s almost always someone online willing to help.

May the Storm be gentle on you!

6.1. Changelog

25/09/24:  Version 1.0 released.  Added species and title illustrations.