Here are many Against the Storm tips from fellow players on how to play and win in every biome and scenario along with advice on upgrading the Smoldering City. These tips cover settler resolve and happiness, production chains, event solving, best blueprint choices, what and when to trade, how to produce tools efficiently, and much more.
The first tip your fellow players have given you on playing Against the Storm is from Griswold7Slicer and it is about settler resolve and forest hostility. As you know, if your forest hostility level is high during a storm season, additional negative effects are activated, which can have terrible consequences for your settlers. And since this is especially true on higher difficulty levels, Griswold7Slicer’s tip for you is to reduce the forest hostility during a storm season by removing settlers from woodcutters’ workplaces. Use them instead to build more homes for new settlers arriving during drizzle season or roads to connect more resources and buildings to your settlement.
The second part of his advice about keeping resolve high is about upgrading your settlement level at the ancient hearth to the encampment status. If you do this before the first storm season starts, you will gain a boost of two resolve points and avoid the harsh drop in settlers’ resolve, which is already low at the start of any new settlement.
Another player suggested the same tips so I thank you Fregor and want to add that he pointed out that four homes should be your priority to build after the woodcutters’ camps, which I totally agree with since these are prerequisites for upgrading the settlement level at your Ancient Hearth.
He also added several other tips like not rushing to choose your orders until you have weathered the first storm season, completed your first year, and opened the new cornerstones to see what is offered. Then you should crosscheck those with the offered orders and events in the first small glade to pick the easiest orders you can fulfill but which will get you the best rewards for your current situation.
More simple advice from Griswold7Slicer is to make sure you have stockpiled some coal, tools, and sea marrow before you open up any forbidden or dangerous glades as events in those often require these resources to be solved. A way to get resources you might lack for solving glade events is to build the trading post before opening those glades so that you can trade for the required resources and avoid any negative consequences that await you after event timers run out.
Griswold7Slicer continues his advice with the one about using your first few building blueprints to unlock at least one complex food building. I agree, and this is something I do most of the time, but with an important caveat. You should keep track of your orders and available resources before choosing the blueprints.
If you don’t have the required resources at hand for that complex food or if you have a difficult order, it is better to skip the complex food building in the first three blueprint unlocks, finish those orders, and use the next blueprint unlocks to get a building for making complex food.
The last tip from Griswold7Slicer I would like to talk about is the one where he disagrees with my advice about saving up and using your sea marrow for speeding up event resolution in glades which I advise in my other list of tips.
He considers them much more valuable as a trade good, which can even be worth a new cornerstone choice if a trader comes with this offer and you have unlocked the required prerequisites in the Smoldering City. To me, that is a big gamble as traders always have different goods and bonuses on offer and some events can be devastating if not finished quickly. That doesn’t mean you can’t sell any, ever, but you should weigh your options with care.
A simple yet useful piece of advice from Stelu Hututui is about the slow progress of upgrading the Smoldering City. This is because if you mostly play on a lower difficulty, you get fewer resources for upgrading and unlocking the main city buildings. So his tip for you is to increase the difficulty setting when preparing to start a new settlement to get more of these resources after successfully completing it.
DERP MASTER also has some advice for you about the game’s difficulty. As he points out, you might get the idea to increase the difficulty after you have upgraded past the first few levels of the Smoldering City and gotten some bonuses and upgrades.
This, however, will not help you much if you still haven’t mastered the settler game mechanics and the in-game economy, since these are the most crucial aspects of the game.
CetraProfessor has an interesting tip about setting up homes and decorations while conserving space and upgrading the settlement level at the same time. This ties directly into the advice from Griswold7Slicer and Fregor and looks something like this, which CetraProfessor called the “park caddy corner”. I love it, and it is both simple and cheap to construct as you need that one park decoration which counts as four decoration points and fills the requirement for decorations by itself for the first settlement level upgrade, which I talked about in the first tip.
A very good tip from Minestar 2000 is about resource scarcity in different biomes. How in the mushroom realm of Marshlands, it is rare to find farmable land and so it is hard to have a good supply of grain that you need for flour.
Fortunately, this biome has ample sources of mushrooms that can be ground into flour as well, just by changing the input resources using the recipe menu in the building you are using for flour production.
Another player with great tips is Paul R, who tells us about choosing harpies as settlers in caravans used to start a new settlement. This is because of their huge carry bonus when placed as the settler in charge of the Ancient Hearth. They upgrade the carrying capacity of all other settlers by 5, which is a considerable boost and helps speed up resource transportation and your economy.
I don’t, however, agree with his second advice, about using resources to unlock species-specific housing in the Smoldering City. This depends on the difficulty with which you play, as in higher difficulties, this becomes more useful. He makes a good point about how this reduces the number of buildings in the blueprint poll, as you have already unlocked these homes and get more opportunities to choose something else.
Another of his pieces of advice about the different species is that if you have lizards in your settlement, which have notoriously low resolve at the start, you can boost it by using the species resolve interface at the top left of the screen during times you have most problems with them, which is the storm season.
This is quite delicate as it reduces the resolve of other species in the settlement and I must admit only once trying to use it, and the attempt ended badly for me. So use it with caution.
Martin Blake also left a wealth of tips. First, one is about opening and completing glades one at a time and not overstretching yourself, your resources, and your settlers. As you know, each forgotten or dangerous glade can have multiple events which require settlers and resources to be solved. Therefore, opening one at a time is very good advice. Keeping a supply of about 6-10 tools in the early game and 15+ in the late game is very important for solving these events quickly.
His next advice is about keeping a certain quantity of Amber handy as this way you can re-roll building blueprints multiple times once you unlock that option in the Smoldering City. Also, when you choose new building blueprints, prioritize the ones that can boost settlers’ resolve over those that provide new resources or more efficient production. Similar to what Griswold7Slicer has advised.
TheRealXartaX has some good tips about Against the Storm for us as well. First of these is that if you play on some of the highest and hardest difficulty settings, you only receive more XP points and not more resources to upgrade the Smoldering City. So keep that in consideration when looking for a challenge. His advice is important and should be considered along with the advice from Stelu Hututui and DERP MASTER.
TheRealXartaX also points out that you should keep in mind that beavers help with woodcutting as they have a chance to double the yield. If they work as miners who dig in a coal mine, they get a major resolve boost, and also coal lasts longer in the ancient hearth. It is also worth much more than wood in trade. So using them as miners instead of woodcutters lets you upgrade your economy and boost their resolve, while raw wood is more common as a crafting recipe ingredient than coal, which you will have more of as you don’t burn it anymore.
Next, we have advice from DODANG_ 914 about possible production chain setups which help you win. For example, he suggests keeping a lot of humans around, boosting their resolve, as it is the easiest one to keep high. You should have them work in farms, herb gardens, and especially plantations. That is where they produce both berries for simple food and fiber for cloth. In these farming workplaces, boost your production and provide good ingredients for complex foods and other goods.
On top of that, he advises to make sure you have some production of crystallized bars or copper bars so you can use them in the carpenter building to produce tools. Tools, which I explained, are one of the most important resources for solving glade events.
Now interestingly enough, Niko Paseman doesn’t agree with DODANG_ 914 about Humans being easy to please as they have the highest threshold for happiness. While Lizards and Harpies for example have lower thresholds, they do also suffer from very low starting resolve.
This is offset because you can boost their resolve quickly in specific workplaces, matching their specialization. Insects, eggs, and meat can be found or grown in many biomes for their complex food needs.
Here, DODANG_ 914 countered by explaining that in the late game, and with many unlocks in the Smoldering City including special homes, humans become the support species because of their great farming bonus.
This bonus lets you grow a lot of different food ingredients, and then complex food out of those. On top of that, the production chain of the Plantations, weavers along with a carpenter or lumber mill, cooperage or brick house and an alchemist hut with a scribe gets you many services necessary to boost both human and beaver resolve rather high. Combine this with a few lucky cornerstone picks and you have strong production and services which will get you through the hardest of storm seasons.
Thank you for reading these tips or watching the video on my YouTube Page.
Peter is a YouTube content creator and game Guide writer with a love of strategy games spanning decades.