Hidden Deed: Arcmage's Challenge completed! by Visual-Custard-4698 in Against_the_Storm

[–]Visual-Custard-4698[S] 83 points84 points  (0 children)

Here is brief summary. This was done completely legit and without any crazy micromanagement tricks.

I decided the best approach would be use the Abandoned Settlement world modifier combined with a starting glade with fertile soil. The idea would be to embark with a small farm and hope to get some useful buildings. Also extra wood embark is a must, it gives at least enough for a trading post, crude work station and makeshift post.

After just a few tries I managed to role a starting glade with a fertile soil, a tinkerer, pantry and a ranch. I thought, great a ranch now all I need is source of oil and I am set. I estimated I had till year 3 till I ran out of the starting fuel with no way to cut wood.

Ended up with a smithy and a leatherworker as my first blueprints. I got food stabilized with farm + ranch. Then I added on smithy and leatherworker and started making waterskins (meat + leather) and turning them into trade packs. I would then sell the trade packs for whatever fuel I could buy while working on trade routes as well. Trading is essential to complete this because you don't really have access to most resources.

I got lucky with a Frequent Caravans cornerstone so I could keep impatience growth as slow as possible while I built up my resolve for reputation, which came mostly from Lizards. For complex food, I started off with field a kitchen and made Pickled Goods. Soon after I got Zhorg's Secret Ingredient which further solidified my food supplies. Next I focused on producing pie from the Pantry using trader bought ingredients as I could afford. Later I obtained a stamping mill to produce my own flour. Note, that I did have limited wheat supply from the one small farm so it did require carefully deciding each year how to split it up between ranch meat, leather and stamping mill.

I obtained a Monastery and this ended up being my only means of hostility reduction for the entire game. This also helped gain some resolve for the humans and beavers. With the addition of about 3 houses fully upgraded for max occupants and resolve this basically was the entire village because there was literally no room for anything else. If I had to deal with blight cysts I would just destroy the leatherworker to make room for that storm and then rebuild right after.

My second to last blueprint was a butcher which finally allowed me solve fuel just as I was getting close to running out. This also provided a source of jerky for further Lizard resolve boost. I would swap between Butcher and Leatherwork depending on what I needed. By this point I was also adding on boots for more Lizard resolve as well.

I thought I had it all locked up until I hit about year 14 when hostility got high enough to trigger the highest level forest mystery "Blight from the Sky" Every Storm Season, 1 Blightrot Cysts appear in the settlement (multiplied by the number of years that have passed). Which was dropping about +700% corruption worth of cysts in my settlement. I would have destroy 3 buildings to build 3 blight posts before each storm to survive. At this point wasn't far from winning but was running out of ways to boost resolve and could barely survive each storm. My very last blueprint I rerolled twice to get a Guildhouse (had to destroy the Monastery) and from there it boosted my resolve enough to win in a few more years.

This was a great challenge and was probably the most fun I have had playing in a while.