The Wandering Villageis an indiecity-builderin early access onPC. After the world is taken by plague, poison, and famine, you’re tasked with building a village on the back of a mythical creature known as an Onbu. The Onbu itself is enormous, turtle-like, and will react to the things you do to build your village. Will you choose to use the Onbu for personal gain? Will you nurture the Onbu because the livelihood of your village depends on it? That’s all up to you as you weigh out the costs and benefits of your actions.
RELATED:The Wandering Village: A Guide To VillagersThe nature of being on a moving creature also means that you’ll cross between biomes at a moment’s notice, suddenly moving from lush jungle to harsh desert. In these moments, you’ll need to prepare your village for different challenges like drought or dust storms. It’s a fun little game with a lot of heart and many thoughtful ideas put into how one build and maintains a village.
10Pet Onbu And Build A Hornblower
While you’ll be given the option to harvest the Onbu’s spikes for stone, harvest its bile, and even harvest its blood, you shouldn’t do any of these things. If you harm the Onbu, it will mistrust you. Instead, you want to feed, heal, and pet your Onbu every chance you get. You’re going to face moments where the Onbu will want to sleep in a poisonous zone.
You’ll have moments where you need the Onbu to run or come to a stop for sleep. The Onbu will only listen to you if you have a hornblower – and if it trusts you. You want the Onbu to trust you because the fate of your entire village could depend on whether or not Onbu spends the night sleeping in a poison forest.
9Note Your Surroundings
It’s easy to stay focused on your village and watch the workers go about their business, so you would be forgiven for forgetting that you can zoom out and actually look at all of your surroundings. You’ll want to do this quite often, as knowledge is power in The Wandering Village. Zooming out to look at the world will tell you if a crossroads is coming up. You’ll be able to see if you’re approaching a clean spot for the Onbu to sleep or if there’s a poison forest that you’ll need to prepare the village to endure. This is also how you’ll spot locations to scavenge.
8Build A Variety Of Farms
You have a couple of reasons to do this, but the most important one is that different biomes will nurture different crops. As your village gets larger and you cross biomes more frequently, you’ll want your farms to be able to maintain production so none of your villagers begin to go hungry or, even worse, starve. As your village grows and the demands of your villagers become more complex, they’ll also want to eat a wide variety of foods to stay happy. Their happiness will also result in higher productivity.
7Supply A Variety Of Processed Foods
Unlike the farms, where you’ll want a wide variety of crops so your village thrives in any biome, processed foods are purely to meet the happiness demands of your villagers. As your village grows, the desires of the villagers will become increasingly complex. Once you’re a full-fledged village, they’ll almost only be happy eating foods that have been processed by one of your kitchens of bakeries.
RELATED:The Wandering Village: A Guide To Scavenging
For this reason, you’ll want to have a number of kitchens all producing different types of processed foods. This will make it so your villagers always feel as if they have options.
6Scavenge As Much As Possible
As you travel, you’ll want to zoom out to view the locations around your Onbu. As soon as you’re able, begin scavenging and create multiple scavengers. Your first priority should always be shrines, as they’ll grant you knowledge points to advance your tech tree. After that, you’ll want to prioritize rare resources and settlements where you can recruit more villagers.
Scavenging is a great way to advance, increase, and reinforce your village. As soon as one scavenging mission is finished, send them out on a new mission. Any time scavengers spend standing in the village is a waste of valuable resources.
5Build Village And Onbu Doctors
Poison can be a malicious foe in The Wandering Village, and you want to do your best to be proactive against infection. A villager who becomes poisoned will be less productive. If that villager falls gravely ill, they will stop working altogether. The infected villager can even pass along illness to other villages. Inevitably, if left to linger for too long, the villager will die from illness.
RELATED:The Wandering Village: A Guide To Poison
For this reason, you want a large quantity of village doctors and herbalists growing herbs. You will only really need one Onbu doctor, but they will also require a lot of herbs to treat the Onbu.
4Build Compost Heaps And Decontaminators
Poison is one of the worst things you can encounter in The Wandering Village. A poison atmosphere can spread corruption along the Onbu itself. This can kill trees, ruin farms, and generally destroy resources you depend on. While you have the option of trying to cut away corrupted plants on your own, the corruption will continue to spread the longer your villagers take.
This can also lead to the villagers falling ill themselves. For this reason, you want to always collect dung, turn it into biogas, and have decontaminators standing by to save the village. These villagers work fast and purge everything hurting your Onbu and your village.
3Never Call A Biome Home
As your Onbu moves from place to place, you’ll find crossroads that will influence the direction of your travels. At these points, you’ll have the option to choose (as long as you have the hornblower and a good relationship with your Onbu) which direction to go. Sometimes the direction will take you to a new biome or keep you in your current biome.
It’s unwise to stay in any one particular biome for too long. The desert will eventually deplete all of your water resources and begin to harm your crops. Staying in a lush biome for too long can create prolonged exposure to poison for both your Onbu and your villagers. When you can, switch biomes so you can replenish and rejuvenate resources on your travels.
2Upgrade Villager Housing
As your population grows, villagers will require better and better living conditions to remain happy. This means you’ll need to provide better lodging if you want those villagers to keep their productivity levels high. The good news is that, while costly in terms of resources, huts and cottages also come with their own benefits to villagers. In addition to being able to house multiple villagers, homes like cottages provide an extra defense against poison. So, the next time you’re going through a lush biome, fewer people will fall ill. This should mean less death and less stress on your doctors who try to heal everyone as quickly as possible.
Nothing magically teleports in The Wandering Village, so you always want to consider where you’re building things and placing workers. For instance, if you place kitchens near the head of the Onbu, dung collectors near the back will need to leave their post for extended periods of time to go eat from your kitchens. For this reason, it’s important to spread out those resources.
Poison clouds can cause any area to become contaminated. That means you’ll want decontaminators placed throughout the Onbu. The same goes for herbalists and doctors. The quicker a doctor can reach a villager, the less likely they are to spread illness or die. It can seem like a lot when you’re placing your first farm and kitchen, but this game rewards thinking ahead.
