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Genre: Survival colony simulator
Developer: Crate Entertainment
Publisher: Crate Entertainment
Release Date: August 9th, 2022
Edited by AlexKnight2005
Sometimes you may feel exhausted by any limits, orders, or requests. Of course, you can decide just to play along and keep going. But sometimes, you might start to desire more freedom and more space to try to fulfill your dreams. And that is the moment where you go and try to find the Farthest Frontier.
Farthest Frontier is a survival city-builder focused on resource management and economics. You will need to keep your people well-fed, clothed, and happy. But don’t expect it to be an easy task. There will be obstacles in your way, including weather, bandits, wild animals, or health issues.
Your adventures begin when several townsfolk decide they have had enough of their king and try to find a new home, hoping they can finally find peace and happiness.
When you reach your destination on a randomly generated map, you will be able to choose where your town center is going to be. What intrigued me right at the start is that if you decide to build, for example, in a forest, people will need first to cut down the trees or clear any obstacles. And as you cut the trees down, your people will immediately start to use the resources at the building. That means you don’t need to use any storage in the middle of the building process.
This is very useful since you are building a town, so you will be covering a lot of space, and transporting everything from one side of your city to the other one can take a while.
Resources are pretty complex, which means that if you cut down a tree, it doesn’t mean it’s at the end of the production cycle. Yes, there are moments when you will need logs, but you also need to turn them into planks for building and chop them into firewood for houses or workstations.
Game devs also implemented a spoil system, which means that if your food-related resources are not correctly stored, they will expire after a short while. Although just storing is not the only way to avoid that. First, there is a difference between storing things in a big warehouse and storing them in specific buildings—granaries for grain, cellars for vegetables, and so on. And if you need to make sure your food will last even longer, you will have to make sure you can smoke, boil or preserve them.
And while we are on the subject of food, what stands out is the farming system.
You can’t just build a field and start growing crops. Every place has its specifications. It would be best if you kept your eye on the rate of weeds growing in your field, the rockiness of the ground, and the soil fertility. This will make you not only tend to the fields but also keep the crop rotation going since different crops have different effects on the soil.
The negative effects you can encounter are pretty well thought through. Fires will break out much more in houses that work with open fire. This means that a fisherman’s hut will be less likely to catch fire than houses, let alone a bakery.
And since there are lots of health issues that can happen to your people, you will be seeing many more people with broken legs in the winter unless you make sure that every citizen has good shoes, and if you build houses too close to granaries, they might get bitten by rats. This can be prevented by having ratcatchers throughout the town. And in case you want to make sure your people are safe from any illness, the infirmary and herbalists will be at your service.
And when it comes to physical danger in the shape of raiders and wild animals, the town can be defended with the help of a network of watchtowers and barracks, as long as you supply them with weapons from the smith or bows and arrows from the fletcher.
Every time you start to feel like you got everything running smoothly, you open a new tech tier by upgrading your town center, and a whole lot of new opportunities open—new resources, new buildings, new decorations, but also new challenges. Everything is closely tied together, so that you have to keep planning your next steps. This is a great way to keep you moving forward without forcing you to do anything. You are completely free to do everything at your own pace, yet still, your town will be moving forward naturally.
And all that is happening right in front of your eyes in a beautifully detailed world.
All your surroundings are pretty realistic and well-designed. You can zoom all in and see your townsfolk do their work. Animals do not stick to just one spot; trees move in the wind. The design just makes the world feel alive.
Even though the game recently just hit early access, It feels very well thought through, and the devs must know well what they are doing. I will surely keep an eye on this game, and if you are a fan of survival city builders, so should you. Because I think it has a real potential to be a big hit.