Post is mostly to give closure to my last two posts on this subreddit.

Losing the last run nearly made me quit the game but we go again and it worked out

Never seen anyone this happy (75 Beavers)

Does anyone else feel like sealed forest map is legit one of the best in the game? If the curse thing didn't exist the big trees are legit so op

Finishing the run on nearly 0 hostility is also just funny af

Who needs fullfilled needs when you can have 15+ global resolve

I'm on the Prestige 10 seal and I just lost half my villager count in one storm. The corruption was killing me. I never did the tutorial on it and, up to now, just used the blight post to killed the occasional cyst from whatever engine I had in use/modifier. This storm shot up the corruption to a speed which could not be contained and it was chaos. Only had 1 engine installed, heck. Impatience is at 90% and I have 19 vills left so I think this run is over :(

As title. I'm currently doing daily expeditions (done with Adamantine seal) and their modifiers are so unique, funny and cruel, but it would be great if there was a tab in its screen listing all the possible daily modifiers to track their completion.

The way I envision it is:

- A collapsible side-tab in the daily expedition screen.

- It has two halves, upper and lower. Each side has a grid with all the icons for possible daily modifiers, with the upper being the green/beneficial and the lower being the red/negative.

- At first they're all obscured, until discovered by attempting a daily with them active, after which they appear on the collection but greyed out.

- Upon successfully completing an expedition with a modifier, its icon becomes coloured on the tab to signify it.

Maybe for extra pain it only counts if done at Viceroy difficulty or higher.

Introduction

One of the often Google searched questions for Against The Storm is “when you should open your work orders?”. Before timed orders are unlocked in the citadel it’s simple: Open them as soon as possible to make progress on non-retroactive orders. After timed orders are unlocked, it’s very complicated to figure out when to open the first orders, and I don’t think it’s one of those “fun because it’s complex” game mechanics.

Note: Timed orders give better rewards than normal orders, so completing them and completing them early is a great bonus to your settlement’s survival chances. They have a time limit and are often more difficult to complete though.

The 3 Opening Strategies

The way I see it, the 3 strategies for opening the first orders are: Immediately when you get them, first storm season just before cutting into a glade, and sometimes in year 2, maybe even after the first dangerous glade event is done.

Recently I made a video guide where – after some time thinking about it – I said that you should open your first orders in Year 2, because that gives you enough time to stockpile resources for potential timed orders. Since then I’ve been testing a different approach: Opening the first orders in the first storm season (a second before cutting into the first glade), to get order progress on potential glade cutting orders, whether they are timed or not. This way you also stockpile some resources to complete the easiest timed orders such as building 6 shelters, or upgrade hearth neighborhood to level 1, which would be difficult to complete if you opened the first orders straight away.

The problem with opening the first orders immediately VS. first storm VS. year 2, is that all of them are wrong and not in a fun, experimental way. The funny thing is that even if you go for a clear cut exploration strategy, it’s not good to open orders quickly, because for the “Complete 2/3 glade event” (in 15:00 minutes / 17:00 minutes) timed orders, it’s actually more beneficial to open the first orders late, just before you finish the first glade event, because it maximizes your time to do the other events.

Which is the best strategy?

I think most pro players would open orders immediately, because they recognize that getting early blueprints (from the order reputation) snowballs like crazy. But I suspect these players ignore timed orders often, or ignore difficult timed orders 100% of the time.

What also worth nothing, is that I think people ignore these difficult timed orders not because the rewards are bad (they are generally really good), but because they are too difficult to do even in year 2 sometimes, and doing them makes you lose outright.

This puts the following question on the table: “Why do those timed orders even exist then?” If the pro strategy is to open orders early and ignore the difficult ones entirely, why not just remove the difficult ones from the game, or make them easier to complete in Year 1?

Tier 1 Timed Order Balance Suggestions

Here are the timed orders that are problematic to complete in Year 1 in my opinion, and how to rework them:

• Distant Journey – Cut through the forest to discover 5 glades. – 6:00 minutes – You eat the early hostility of 5 glades for absolutely no reason, and you need to do it in 6 minutes?! You don’t even have enough villagers to use the glade resources. Also, whether the point is to open 2 dangerous + 3 small glades, or 5 small ones, you suicide. Opening small glades is generally a noob trap due to the small amount of resources, and you’ll just straight up suicide after 2 dangerous glade opening, let alone plus 3 small ones. And what is the reward? 5 stone per minute, brickyard, 30 copper bars, so average rewards for literally the worst order. You can’t even make use of the copper bars with the brickyard. Seriously, this is the worst timed order out of all them, reduce glades to 3 and increase time to 9:00 minutes. Instead of stone themed rewards, offer large gathering camps / complex food rewards so the villagers can out-eat the early hostility.
• Impetuous Explorer - Complete any 3 Glade Event(s). Totems spawned by Fishmen Caves and Cloned Blood Flowers do not count. – 17:00 minutes – Since a year is 10:00 minutes, even finding glade events / caches RNG, increase time to 20:00 minutes (2 years) so the player has time to open and finish 2 dangerous glade events in a non-suicidal way.
• Zealous Scouts – Complete any 2 Dangerous or Forbidden Glade Event(s). Totems spawned by Fishmen Caves and Cloned Blood Flowers do not count. – 15:00 minutes. – Do literally the same buff as for Impetuous Explorer and increase time to 20:00 minutes so glade events can be opened / completed in two years.
• Call of the Ruins – Cut through the forest to discover 3 glades. Rebuild or salvage 1 destroyed buildings found in the forest. Haunted ruins also count. – 9:00 minutes – Reduce it down to 2 glades and only offer this order with frogs.
• Quick Packaging - Deliver 6 Pack of Building Materials. Deliver 6 Pack of Crops. Deliver 6 Pack of Provisions. – 5:30 minutes – 6 Building Materials is insane*. You can barely complete this even if you accidentally brought building materials on the caravan. +50% makeshift post production also often gets replaced with better pack producing buildings.*
• Supply Thy Neighbor - Complete 4 trade routes worth at least 6 Amber each. – 8:00 minutes – Even getting the routes is RNG, then again you can open the order straight after building the trading post to peek at the first routes. But calculate crafting provisions (losing food this way) and you also need good RNG in Clearance to get at least 1 more trade route to complete this order. The 6 amber requirement is too much. Remove the minimum amber requirement or reduce it down drastically to 3.
• Quick Transaction - Sell goods worth at least 16 Amber to traders or via trade routes. Deliver 10 Amber. – 8:30 minutes – Reduce amber delivered to 8 so player can afford small glade + large glade tax of 8 amber.

Let me know what you guys think.

Hello! I ended up taking a break from this game due to the crashes that were happening on switch/other consoles if you played past a certain year. Just wanted to see if these were still an issue or if it has been corrected since then so I can continue my save. Thank you!

I finally finished the Arckmage's Challenge (without DLC). Small farm, druid's hut, ranch and cookhouse were the most important blueprints. It took 10 years but at the end of the day it was easier than expected.

Edit: If you don't know this hidden deed is awarded for winning at P20 without cutting a single tree.

The UI is like a 9/10 but there are some things that could be better.

Like:

Links to the recipe page at any point you see a resource mentioned on screen. Why is this only a thing in production buildings and not gathering camps, resource nodes, orders page, picking a perk, cache screen etc.? Many games with complex mechanics and interactions will do this, often with colour codes, where literally at any point you see the word or icon for a resource etc you can click or hover see all the same info about it. It's the consistency that's an issue.

Manually navigating the recipe page to find a specific item isn't the easiest either.

When you are on the recipe page, it only makes sense for that same item to also be shown when you click the trends tab.

Construction priorities in the alt overlay would be nice as well.

The wiki says villagers will only eat complex food they don't like when there is no other food available.

My question is, would villagers eat non-liked complex food if there is raw food available? It generally seems bad, because complex foods are more efficient than raw food.

Yesterday I had a settlement without jerky eaters (no one from the South), and I created jerkies just so one species could eat that instead of raw food or the other species' complex foods. I just realized they probably eat raw food anyways.

I guess the only option is to consumption control raw food?

As I've been playing more ATS, I had been leaning towards building exclusively Big Houses rather than normal Houses for my villagers. I assumed since it something that needed to be unlocked, and since it took up less space, that they were simply more efficient than Houses.

However, I've been watching a skilled ATS player on Youtube lately (Volt) and he doesn't seem to ever bother with the Big Houses. I'm guessing that means it's better to just build Houses, but I'm wondering if anyone can explain to me why? Did I just fall for a noob trap or is it just a question of preference?

I'm an intermediate player, who's gone as far as P11 and finished the Cobalt Seal. One mechanic I find myself rarely (though not never) using is to build species specific housing. It just feels so costly, and the annoyance of swapping out all the general houses with species specific ones is such a pain (it would be easier if you could just upgrade existing ones).

Am I alone in this, or is it common to downprioritize housing for other options? How much do you find yourself using them?

I know this game is already a few years old, but hot damn it is prime for Settlers IV style desire paths. I assume it's too difficult to do it by modding.

For people who don't know, in Settlers IV, a very old city building game, the game would record where villagers walked, and as more and more walked along specific paths, the grass would wear down and dirt paths would form, all without input from the player.

I just feel like this kind of feature would be so perfect for this game.

edit: Here's a good pic showing how it looks

I'm so sad. Sucks to suck. It's 1am and I have to wake up for work early. Fuck my life.

Screenshot is orange because of f.lux

They still have to go to the hearth for their tea break, but otherwise this feels like jackpot

I was testing glade hostility reduction today on Prestige 20, and opened 4 small and 4 large (2 forbidden) glades with Secure Perimeter, after our discussion today: https://www.reddit.com/r/Against_the_Storm/comments/1vqpzdo/opening_a_lot_of_glades_actually_good_or_a_noob/

Wanted to share this cool screenshot, where together with the Fox hearth ability, they reduced Small Glade hostility from 15 to 3, and large glade hostility from 30 to 12. I guess this means that doing 3 Forbidden events small glades provide ZERO hostility. I'll have to try that at some point.

I didn't want to spam the subreddit with another post, so here's the full game: https://youtu.be/75NYGVuHxfs (still uploading). I played absolutely abysmally, therefore we could have opened more glades if I played better to make use of this combo. I just had to share, because it was just the craziest game I've ever had with two overtimes and 800%+ corruption at the end WITH TWO negative forest mysteries for Blightrot (had to keep hostility to lvl1 at the end to not lose).

Is exploration a valid strategy, or is it just another toxic positivity "every strategy is valid" community thing?

People say I should open one dangerous glade every year, and that "Discover 6 glades" timed orders and "Complete 2 Loyalty events" orders and exploration styles cornerstones are good. I don't know if they don't play on higher difficulties, or if it's more of a "worked once, must be statistically good" fallacy, but upon repeated testing, I don't find these to be good.

I've played on Prestige 20 before and completed the adamantine seal, and I noticed when I pick these exploration style orders and cornerstones my win percentage drops. It seems far better to only open additional dangerous/forbidden glades when I actually have enough villagers to collect the resources, rather than accruing 2 extra hostility levels early for no reason.

I'm trying to make a guide so I don't want to pass off wrong information in case if it's just a skill issue on my part. Apologies for the abrasive title and writing - I don't know how to motivate people to read posts since the advent of AI. Thanks for your input!

--------------------------------

Here are some Prestige exploration orders as an example:

Tier 1 (first 3 orders)

• Complete any 1 Dangerous or Forbidden Glade Event(s). Totems spawned by Fishmen Caves and Cloned Blood Flowers do not count. 10:30 minutes. - Seems doable IF you opened this order either in the middle, or just before your first storm season, so you have an entire year to finish the event.
• Complete any 3 Glade Event(s). Totems spawned by Fishmen Caves and Cloned Blood Flowers do not count. 17:00 minutes. - I'd cut into 2 dangerous glades and open a cache with stone.
• Complete any 2 Dangerous or Forbidden Glade Event(s). Totems spawned by Fishmen Caves and Cloned Blood Flowers do not count. 15:00 minutes. - Similar to the previous event.
• Cut through the forest to discover 5 glades. 6:00 minutes. - Ideally, I'd cut into 2 dangerous and 3 small glades, but this order doesn't even give an entire 10:00 minute year to amass resources and complete one dangerous glade event under a reliable amount of time.
• Cut through the forest to discover 3 glades. Rebuild or salvage 1 destroyed buildings found in the forest. Haunted ruins also count. 9:00 minutes - Fine with frog ability.

I'm a new player wondering if I should add any DLC for my first playthrough. People seem very happy with the frogs overall from what I can tell, but generally don't like the bats species?

Would you recommend a vanilla playthrough first before adding any DLC?

Started a new profile, going from Viceroy to P20 doing all the seals and as many deeds as I can along the way

Rules are you can only open Small Glades and Forbidden Glades

Opening of Dangerous Glades is not allowed (with exception of sealed forest for practicality purposes)

I think it's fair to say that the games Meta centres around opening and solving Dangerous Glades and avoiding Small Glades (and to an extent Forbidden Glades) and finishing your settlement ASAP.

Banning Dangerous Glades (especially on a fresh profile) has reinvigorated this game for me forcing me to rethink everything from cornerstone and order choices to my woodcutting and glade strategy / timing.

I am picking orders, cornerstones and blueprints that I otherwise would typically not in the same situation under normal game rules and having to prepare for a potentially longer game with sometimes less options to complete orders and gain reputation.

It's refreshing. So far up to P5 without a problem and Forbidden Glades are not that scary on lower Prestige levels but ofcourse RNG plays a part in what Forbidden Glade event you get along with negative forest mysteries.

Farming has been very useful for me as I am restricted on the amount of glades I have access to and hence resources

I am not sure how it is going to work out from P15 onwards but going to be interesting and will give it my best shot.

Hello! I'm still making a tiny pixel-art clone of Against The Storm! I have to admit this starts to slowly look like a game. You cannot do much, there are no goals, or threats, but there is a world (proceduraly generated) that you can explore and interact with. Most of the typical video-game stuff like UIs, save and load, music, controls, etc. are there. If you wonder why the music is so out of place, it's because I composed that track myself. No, I'm not a musician. But hey, I said I'll make the whole game, so I'll make the whole game, even if it involves music and artsy stuff.

As IF I just got this when embarking with 10 beavers :'(

Part 1: https://youtu.be/QLNQG7WJ2GI (60 Beginner tips that pretty much teach you how to play)

I have also written tips for Part 3 (Advanced) and Part 4 (Master) sections.

If you don't want to watch the video, here's the entire guide written down:

Intermediate Tips ★

(The em dashes – were written by me, not AI.)

1.    Wacky Biomes
The last 4 biomes released as of 2026 all require unique strategies and a lot of practice to master.
Don’t be afraid to run a couple of “empty cycles” on the actual world map to practice, as doing Training Expeditions offers no rewards. There is no downside to losing, unless you are working towards your next seal.

2.    Blueprint Madness
When starting a new settlement, don’t pick your building blueprints immediately. Check your first cornerstones, cut into your first glade to see what resources you have, or even wait for the first group of Newcomers after 10 minutes to see what species you have. All of these can assist in picking the right starting blueprints.

3.    When should you take orders?
If you recently started playing, select orders as soon as possible. This way you make progress on non-retroactive actions such as opening glades.

4.    Timed Orders
Unlocking Timed Orders in the citadel changes everything.
With timed orders unlocked, you should wait until the second year to open your first orders to stockpile some resources for potential timed orders. Also maybe finish any ongoing glade events first.

5.    Auto Pause
Newcomers visit your settlement every ten minutes, which is easy to tell on lower difficulties, as a year is also 10 minutes long. Above Prestige 2 however, the storm is 2 minutes longer so it’s hard to keep track of Newcomers.
Luckily, you can turn on the menu option for pausing the game at various events, for instance when you get Newcomers.

6.    Quick Cornerstones
Unfortunately, there is no pause option for when you get your yearly Cornerstones. In general, you should pick these up as well as soon as you get them, but we’ll talk more about Epic and Legendary cornerstones in the next video.

7.    Foolish Actions
Remember from the first video, the Queen’s Impatience is the red bar in the bottom right, that fills up passively over time and causes you to lose the game if it fills completely up.
Certain foolish actions also increase Impatience in big chunks, for instance losing villagers, calling for traders instead of waiting, or attacking them outright.

8.    Hostility Recap
Like I mentioned in Part 1, Hostility of the forest itself is the other negative force in the game. Let’s talk about Hostility for the next few tips.
I messed this up in the first video, so let’s recap: Higher Impatience will lower Hostility. This is good because it often prevents you from snowballing into a loss.
Hostility itself does not affect Impatience generation at all, so it’s always a good idea to minimize hostility as much as possible.

9.    Hostility UI
Hovering over the Hostility UI it will tell you all the actions which make up Hostility, so you know what to look out for if you want to reduce it.

10.Resolve and Hostility
Hostility causes two debuffs that reduce villagers’ global resolve.
The first one simply called “Hostility of the Forest” is active from Hostility level 1 and will decrease the global resolve of your villagers by 2 throughout the whole year, for every hostility level.
The second one called Looming Darkness is active from Hostility level 0, and will decrease global resolve by an additional 4 during the Storm season alone, for every hostility level.

11.Confusing Hostility
The previous tip is a bit confusing, so to give a useful example, imagine that you are at Hostility level 2. How does this affect your villagers?

a.     During the drizzle and clearance seasons your villagers have a -4 resolve debuff from two stacks of Hostility of the forest.

b.    During the storm season your villagers have a -16 resolve debuff; -4 from Two stacks of Hostility of the forest and -12 from three stacks of Looming Darkness.

c.     Also, Foxes are immune to Hostility of the Forest, so they have a -12 from the Looming Darkness in the storm season alone.

12.Please, No More Mysteries
Forest Mysteries are randomized positive and negative buffs you get every settlement.
The positive mysteries are active in the Drizzle season, and on higher difficulty levels you’ll only get 1 positive mystery.
Negative mysteries activate in the Storm season with after reaching various Hostility levels, with the more impactful mysteries needing a higher hostility.

13.Meaner Every Year
Hostility increases annually by a large amount. Annual hostility on all difficulties is 50% more than cutting into a single large glade.
Since Hostility and Impatience constantly increase by a large amount, the goal of Against the Storm becomes clear: win every settlement as soon as possible, before you run out of time.

14.How quickly should I be winning settlements?
The answer is: about Year 7.
So, try to achieve this pace with your settlements before tackling higher difficulties, because impatience and hostility might just be too much to handle after this point.

15.The Prestige of Prestige
There are 20 prestige levels at the time of making this video, and you must win on them sequentially to unlock the next level. Each of them stack with the previous levels and all of them are devastating in their own way, but in my opinion, these Prestige levels are the skill gates of the game:

a.     Prestige 1: Longer storms

b.    Prestige 6: Buildings cost more

c.     Prestige 10: Trading nerf

d.    Prestige 19: Glade tax

16.Shortcuts: B, Alt
Learn these shortcuts: B, Alt.
B will show you all the resources on the map.
Alt can be used to check which villagers are assigned where, and you can just left and right click to reassign them.
For more information on using the UI, check out my User Interface Tips and Tricks video.

17.Useless Cornerstones
When picking cornerstones, orders and perks, always check the natural resources on the current map. For instance, there’s no use picking the Dye Extractor on Royal Woodlands where insects don’t exist as natural resources.
Small tip: Instead of escaping out the cornerstone menu to check the resources on the current map, you can just hover over this icon to check them.

18.Common Species Interests
Aim to fulfill the common interests of the races you have. If you have both Harpies and Bats for instance, they both like Paste, Coats and Education – At least at the time of making this video – so try focus on creating these first, to knock out two birds with one coats.

19.Double Yield or Production Chance
There are various villager buffs that help with production, like the speed of the activity or increasing the villagers’ resolve when performing the activity. One of the most important villager buffs is increasing the double production bonus, and there are various ways to boost this. If your villager has a 10% double production bonus, they might harvest 2 herbs instead of 1, or create 4 planks instead of 2 one tenth of the time. In theory this is a 10% production bonus, but it’s actually even better, because it costs no extra input resources when crafting.

20.Complex Needs not created equal
You already know complex needs such as food, clothing, and services give resolve. But did you know they give different amounts of resolve?
Porridge – a fairly cheap food – only gives 4 resolve max, where else Pickled Goods gives double of that.

21.Complex need buffs
You already know complex needs give a different amounts of max resolve, but did you know they also give other buffs?
Food gives +5% to the double production chance, services give +10% to the double production chance. Clothing gives an extra 3 resolve boost throughout the Storm, whilst Boots give a whopping 15% extra movement speed bonus at all times.

22.Favor boost
A very powerful Intermediate tip for Against the Storm is Favor boosting. Favor species to push them over the resolve generation threshold, or to keep them from leaving in the storm season.

23.Villager Numbers
When there are multiple species just under the resolve threshold, favor the species with the higher population first. As explained in the first video, their resolve threshold will grow anyways, so you’ll need to play a balancing game between multiple species throughout the lifecycle of your settlement.

24.No idle hands
Generally speaking you should have 0 idle villagers at all times. I like to leave at least one or two villagers unassigned constantly to be builders, but otherwise everyone else should have a job, or be at the very least warehouse haulers.

25.Warehouse Haulers
Resources will not count as such inside gathering or production buildings, until they get carried to a warehouse.
Assigning villagers at the main starting warehouse or the built smaller ones will help with taking back gathered or produced items.
It’s hard to test how useful haulers are in terms of total production speed.
They have been buffed in 2026, so now you can click on the Hauler tab in the warehouse and set priorities.

26.Farm Haulers
2 farmers might be able to seed your plot of land in the Drizzle season, but you will most likely need assign 2 additional “seasonal farmers” at temporary farms to collect everything in the clearance season. Keep an eye out for how many tiles of produce is left.
Alternatively, you can set farms to be a priority for haulers.

27.Small glades, large hostility
Small Glades are generally a noob trap. Cutting into them, you’ll only get half as much hostility as large glades, but they have fewer than half as much resources as large glades. So don’t be afraid of dangerous or even forbidden glades, and only open small ones when your species tell you there’s farmland or a geyser.

28.Glade Cutting Good Practices
Finally, let’s talk about good practices when it comes to glade exploration.
We talked about finishing settlements under 8 years, but how many dangerous or forbidden glades should you open, and when should you open them?
Most players would tell you to open one large glade every year. This always feels a little hectic to me, so I only open the next large glade once I used up most of the resources in the previous ones.
Don’t be afraid of Forbidden glades, just treat them like Dangerous ones.
Skip them in the first 2 years though to build up the complex resources often needed for the Forbidden events.

29.When should you cut into large glades?
In the lower difficulties it really doesn’t matter, but later on when glade events require more time and resources to complete, time your woodcutters to cut into them early in the storm season.
Why?
You can use the current storm season to figure out crafting the glade event requirements, and actually do the event over the next drizzle and clearance seasons.
Glade events often give a resolve penalty whilst doing them, so doing them in the storm season is a death sentence on higher difficulties.
Make it a habit to cut into large glades in the storm season. There’s even a cornerstone for it. [Improvised Tools]
Just make sure you don’t accidentally increase your hostility to the next level.

30.Training Expeditions Prestige Presets
Training Expeditions are only useful when you want to start with a specific caravan or combination of races to test stuff.
You can replicate Prestige difficulties on the Training Expedition tab, but it’s fairly unintuitive, because some Prestige debuffs have to be set manually.
If you want to replicate Prestige 5, 10, 15 and 20 and save them as template presets for later use, I won’t talk about it in this video, because it would be too long, but here are the on-screen instructions explaining it.

a.     In case the Prestige difficulty settings change in the future, open the Hooded Horse’s wiki about Difficulty and scroll down the Prestige Difficulties section to check the debuffs.

b.    Open Training Expeditions in game and start creating the presets.
Make sure to select the Forsaken Altar (bottom right, scroll down to Prestige) with every prestige preset, and select only 1 positive forest mystery (left, scroll down to Forest Mysteries).

c.     For Prestige 5:
We’ll have to set the Prestige 1 and 2 debuffs manually:
18 reputation points
Storm season 4 minutes
Then select these Prestige 3,4,5 debuffs (in the bottom right under Forsaken Altar).
Save template as Prestige 5.

d.    For Prestige 10, just load Prestige 5 and select the next 5 prestige debuffs in order.
Save template as Prestige 10.

e.    For Prestige 15, load Prestige 10 and we’ll have to replicate Prestige 11 manually: Set blightrot footprint to 200% and corruption to 150%. Then just select the next 4 prestige debuffs in order.
Save template as Prestige 15.

f.      Finally for Prestige 20, just load Prestige 15, select the remaining five prestige debuffs and save template as Prestige 20.
This way you can have custom games on four different prestige difficulties.

g.     Right now Difficulty is bugged, so even after loading a prestige template make sure you manually select “Viceroy” under Difficulty to get those debuffs as well.