If you want to pick up this base-building survival game, I’m going to help you to get off to a good start with a good start with a few handy tips I’ve picked up while playing it myself. Let’s get into it!
Take Your Time to Pick a Good Location
From what I’ve noticed, there currently isn’t any sort of bonuses or penalties for where you choose to set up your colony. So I tend to look for a lake or river area to build by, in the event that there is an update that requires you to have water for your colonists in the future. Plus I like the aesthetic.
I have noticed that you will not get attacked by zombies until you place your banner down. So take your time looking for the perfect spot.
Slowly Build For and Hire Your First Colonists
I start off with three colonists – two to become berry farmers and one to be a guard. You can only hire colonists if there is a bed for them to sleep in at night, so make sure that you build your beds first. What I do is build up a bunkhouse for my colonists to live in and fill it up with beds.
The house above can fit 15 beds in it, which is plenty. But don’t hire quite that many colonists from the start, or you will run out of food and they will die.
Plant Crops and Begin Food Production
Like I said above, I started out with two berry farmers for my initial food production. I like to plant the berry crops in a 5x10 plot next to one another, so that when I hire wheat farmers it matches up with the 10x10 wheat fields… because symmetry!
Berries are useful because they don’t really have a grow time like wheat, which is on a 3-day cycle. The downside to berries is that they only produce 0.6 units of food per bush, and each colonist needs 5 units per day. So you’ll need quite a few of them if you’re going to keep any number of colonists alive and full.
Grow Wheat, Make Bread, and Stagger Your Supply
It’s important to set up your wheat farm ASAP, as you’re only going to produce 12 units of food between your berry farms – which only acts as a buffer to slow your food drain.
Your colonists can eat the wheat after it has been harvested but that’s ultimately a waste, as you can turn it into bread for 3x the food value. All you need to do is build grindstone to have a colonist grind it into flour, and build an oven for a baker to turn it into bread.
Once you reach this point you should stagger your crop harvests between 3 wheat fields so that each day, at least 1 field is being harvested. That way you have a steady supply of food coming in.
Keeping the Zombies at Bay
The zombies aren’t really much of a problem in Colony Survival, but their numbers do scale in relation to the number of colonists. If you have the resources, you can just wall off your city. Currently, zombies can’t damage walls and they can’t get over walls 2 blocks high.
The other option is to make sure that you have guards within line-of-sight range of the entrances to your colonist’s sleeping quarters so they can take care of the zombies. I get by with a mix of walls and 2-3 guards without issue.
Like I said, Colony Survival is still very Early Access but it does already have promising mechanics and multiplayer capabilities. I’m looking forward to what the devs have in store for us as more patches roll out.
What do you like most about the game? What other gameplay additions would you like to see? Let’s talk about it in the comments below! And keep checking back to GameSkinny for more Colony: Survival guides.
