* * * Welcome to The Colonies, bureaucrat! The Empire salutes your dedication to Progress. If you are experiencing horrifying errors please get in touch with your Gaslamp Games contact via https://community.gaslampgames.com/ or send a missive to contact@gaslampgames.com and we shall assist posthaste. Now let’s start a new game! Spacebar will pause the game. Escape will exit various modes, close windows, or otherwise abort actions. W, A, S, and D will move the camera up, left, right, and down respectively. R will re-center the camera on your starting location Mousewheel forward and backward or use the + and - keys to zoom in and out. Click the Mousewheel to rotate the camera 90 degrees. Right-click on the map to re-center to that spot, Left-click on things to get more information or interact with them. Left-click and drag a selection square to give harvest orders to large areas. Now let us discuss How To Not Starve On The Frontier. This can be avoided in a few easy steps! First you should start farming. This will provide a crop of raw food within a couple days of game time. Raw food isn’t as nutritious to your colonists as boiled food, but it’ll keep them from starving. Find the farm button in the Zones category in the bottom-left of the screen. The Zones icon The Farm icon Click on the farm icon. This activates the building grid and shows that you are in zone placement mode. Left click and drag out a square farm plot on a flat piece of ground. You will see a new patch of dirt. This is your farm! To start farming you must select a crop. Left-click on the farm plot and choose. (Pumpkin or Cabbage are your best bets.) A work crew will automatically start farming once you select a crop. You can also forage berries, mushrooms, and other tasty foods. Simply find them on the map then left-click and drag a selection square over them, release the mousebutton, then select “Forage”. You can also activate a hunting by opening the Work Crews panel (at the top of the screen) then toggling the hunting button. Above, the hunting toggle button. Once you have raw food you’ll want to cook it in Kitchen, a type of Workshop. To build a workshop, select the Buildings category icon in the bottom-left of the screen (icon to the left) then choose the Kitchen (icon to the right). The Buildings icon The Kitchen icon You will enter building designation mode and the grid will appear over the ground, much like zone placement. Left-click and drag to create a blueprint area for your new kitchen. You can drag out multiple adjacent or overlapping squares to create interesting shapes (hit ESCAPE to abort if you mess up). A 5x5 tile area will be sufficient. When you’re happy, press the Done button to proceed to module placement. Click on the icons under “Required Modules” and place a Door, a Small Oven, and a Workbench. That’s all you need to start. Press “done” and your colonists will construct the Kitchen. Once the building and interior modules are complete, click anywhere on the Kitchen to open up the Workshop Menu; there are icons for various cooked foods. Choose something nice based on what you’ve farmed, foraged, or hunted and mash it a few times. Your colonists will start cooking food and hopefully avoid starvation. Now that your colonists won’t starve, you can start building and exploring on your own. We've been assured by the Colonial Minister that the Frontier is "Perfectly Safe"; Have Fun! * * * Edit: Please do let me know if anything here should be written out a little more clearly or has any typos. I've also attached a slightly shorter one-page .pdf version of this guide to the post if you want to download it and print it out because ... some people do that, I guess? I won't judge. Edit2: Updated 15 August 2014
Something to add, always go for the three free immigrants when you get the option. Those cabbages take a very long time to grow and your people gotta eat. People seem pretty okay with the idea of cannibalism in game and that Frontier Justice button is just begging to be used.
I think this might be helpful listed as a "PLEASE READ THIS FIRST OR YOUR COLONY SHALL PERISH" thread "asproperly boiled food" needs a space; otherwise looks pretty good so far.
I have my food production down but I am unsure how to create bricks. I have the building i am just unsure how to get clay! Could you please help!
Clay can be mined from clay nodes. Alternatively, I believe Stone Bricks can be used for some recipes. They're made from Rhyolite, which should be fairly common.
I haven't managed to get clay to do anything, but you can click on the stone blocks that mining Rhyolite leaves behind, and choose to carve them into stone bricks, which do the job.
Clicking directly on objects to modify them is basically a stopgap measure for when you don't have the appropriate workshop. (Ideally, doing things this way should take annoyingly long.) The "ideal behavior" here is that you will make a ceramics workshop, where bricks and glass can be quickly manufactured.
I've updated this guide slightly for the rev30 launch on Steam; it includes instructions about the click & drag orders.
