The Wandering Village: Tips For Beginners

The Wandering Village has been released to early access on Steam, and with it comes the challenging prospect of building a village and surviving through harsh biomes with your friendly giant companion Onbu. If you're new to The Wandering Village and need help knowing where to start and which building to prioritise first, read here.

• Be sure to also check out our Wandering Village review and see if the game is worth a purchase for yourself.

The Wandering Village Tips: Consolidate Your Berries

You may get caught up in the idea that farms are needed to feed your hungry villagers and whilst this may be true, you can survive solely off the berry bushes in your first month. Building a farm will require a Kitchen and additional staff and you won't unlock all the types of crops straight away either. For a quick and constant food supply, you’re better off starting with a Berry Gatherer.

When placing your Berry Gatherer, keep an eye on the percentage gauge on the right-hand side of the building. This will tell you how much of the berries you'll yield on harvest and how many bushes will be picked depending on where you place the building. Aim to cover at least 70% of the bushes by placing the hut as near to as many bushes as possible.

Once you're able to build a Kitchen, you can then order them to make berry compote, an easy and effective meal for villagers in your starting months.

The Wandering Village Tips: Herbs Are Life Or Death

The Wandering Village tries to ease you into gameplay but inevitably you'll be hit with your first poisonous zone. Once poison afflicts your village and spreads from tree to tree it can require a high number of resources to get it under control. Prepare for this in advance by building a Herbalist hut and growing medicinal herbs.

Ten herbs are needed to cure Onbu of 20% poison affliction. Likewise, herbs are needed to treat your poisoned villagers. You'll also need to build a Village Doctors and hire at least one doctor to treat patients and you'll need an Onbu Doctor (via air balloon) to be able to administer treatments to Onbu.

As well as growing the herbs in advance, you'll also need to work towards getting the required materials to build a Decontaminator building. Direct your research tree towards learning the blueprint for this (via the gear icon at the top right) as having this building will limit the spread of poisonous plants.

The Decontaminator sends workers to burn away poisonous plants to stop them from spreading infection. They run off Biogas or Bile, building a Bile Extractor is an easy way to accrue the fuel needed and won't require a worker to function. You can also remove poisoned plants with the scythe Harvest Tool, but this is a lot more time-consuming and may not stop the spread in time.

Make sure you only have workers assigned to the Decontaminator building during times of poison, as otherwise they will be wasted and remain idle. This does mean, however, that you need to be proactive and make sure you assign workers if your town is hit with poison.

The Wandering Village Tips: Don’t Forget About Onbu 

Although this seems like an obvious point, it's easily done. When you're in the city view it's easy to get swept up in the grind of resource management and forget about the giant beast you're building on the back of. Onbu's survival is critical to the game.

Whenever you get the chance, you should be constantly petting him, creating food from mushrooms at a Mycologist for him and keeping an active eye on his health bar. Onbu often wanders into heat patches and fog clouds, he may eat stones that appear like his favourite food, or he may even decide to sleep out of exhaustion right in the eye of a storm. Food will be common enough at the start of the game, but eventually, mushroom patches will get sparse. Make sure you have a Mycologist (mushroom hut) and Onbu Kitchen at the ready to be constantly making treats for him as they only solve 20% of his hunger at a time.

Make sure you go into map view often and keep track of the course you've set for him and work towards establishing a strong relationship so that he listens to your commands. This is also important for avoiding natural disasters, stationary poison sections, and poison clouds. The clouds will float back and forth (the direction of which can be found by clicking on them), sometimes it is worth making Onbu run or lay down to avoid a poison cloud, this must be timed right, however.

• Check out our Farming Simulator 22 review if you love farming games.

The Wandering Village Tips: Be Strategic With The World Map

Make sure you regularly check the trajectory of your journey as Onbu seems to frequently pick the most dangerous path. By establishing a connection with the beast, you can click on any crossroads and guide him to the path of your choice. He is more likely to listen to your command if he trusts you.

You can use the map to your advantage by stopping to pick up travelling nomads and multiplying your worker force. You can click on groups to see which direction they are travelling towards. You can avoid missing the groups by commanding Onbu to lay down or sleep (if you have the interaction unlocked) which will essentially pause him on his journey to give the nomads time to catch up. You can also recruit more villagers by having scout parties travel to settlements on the map.

Once you have the Scavenger Hut built, you should be constantly sending out parties as it is essentially a free action to pick up extra resources. You will sometimes be faced with a choice to spend resources in a gamble to gain more knowledge points (if you send a party to scavenge from a shrine) or better resources. It's usually worth the risk even if your party returns home poisoned, as this can be easily cured if you have the Doctor's hut set up.

Once you've established the essentials you can eventually research the Scout Tower which expands your map view.

The Wandering Village Tips: Other Top Tips

The following are some other essential tips you should be aware of when playing The Wandering Village:

• Make sure your Compost Heap is set to biogas as it'll be automatically set to compost. Biogas or bile is what you need to fuel the Decontaminator building.
• Building paths may not seem like a priority but they can speed up the walking speed of your villagers. This is an important mechanic at the start of the game when you don’t have many people and need to constantly swap out their jobs.
• Giving Onbu a laxative will stop your buildings from crumbling when he eats stones.
• Build a Water Tank so you can store any extra water in them when collecting from jungle biomes. This will be vital once you hit desert biomes that lack water supplies.
• Extra water can be acquired by sending the Scavenger Hut to Oasis spots on the map.
• Scavenging at shrines gives you knowledge points which are needed to unlock more buildings at the Research Building.
• Worker's Posts are effective for managing workers and directing them to spots you wish to prioritise. This is helpful if you have several building projects on the go at once.
• If you're desperate for water, you can make water from Onbu's blood at a laboratory.
• The tabs work as a 'click to toggle off' option. Meaning if you want to set up a farm to harvest crops, you must select the 'Plant' tool which will turn it off.
• Poison will always be your biggest threat to survival.

• If you love The Wandering Village, check out our guide to the top ten best farming games.