My little village, of nearly freezing to death during the nights, has come a long way. With that has also come a great price to the local area. While there have been many failures along the way, I've managed to survive longer than expected.

It’s kind of shocking to think that food is still the biggest struggle of the village. My own character alone eats about two pieces of food per day. Once you start getting over 40 villagers, that starts to add up.

For a short while, I tried to expand our food gathering with fishing. It just had too many issues. Each fish would yield only one meal. More times than not, I'd have to prepare it myself. When that was not the issue, there would be no bait being produced. There would also be times when all the storage space I had set up for fish would be full.

I have not checked in on my fisher in quite some time. One day, when we were out of meat and fruit. I thought I'd at least have an emergency number of fish I could cut up and we could make into soup. The storage was empty, and the fishing camp was barren.

I have no idea how long my fisher has been doing nothing at all. I would have thought he would have brought up the issue under settlement issues. There are no issues reported in there from the fisherman. Making this entire villager and his post a waste of space, resources, and my time.

There is also another huge issue. So many of my villagers have such high skills that they require only the best of food. For a while now, many of them have been losing some happiness to only being able to eat soup or stew.

The issue here is that the higher tier foods require more imputes and you get less. Why would you want half the food when you are already barely getting by. As a result, I'd set them up to only make stew if we already had lots of soup made. It would only happen on occasion.

A short-term solution was assigning another villager to help with cooking. Since I was having more villagers work at night, between guards do other activities to free up the village a bit. This became prime time for the cooking house to have zero food when people needed it.

I ended up upgrading to the best cook building I could. This would also allow me to make pies. Up till this point, eggs were rather useless as they would come out as spoiled food. Thankfully, with four meat, one water, and four eggs, I'd get a few pie slices.

That, however, did not solve the issue. You see, these villagers were so excited to see pie and had been wanting the higher-tier food for quite some time. Every single time one of them went up to grab food, they would take every piece of pie.

I’d sometimes catch a single villager taking six or more pieces of pie. This, in turn, would make me even short on having enough food to feed everyone. Thankfully, after about a week of this nonsense, and lost a lot of town happiness. There came a breaking point where people who had taken way too much pie were still eating it. While those who had been starving were now getting enough food.

Speaking of unhappiness. You would think that with the food, defenses, break time, and other things to do around my village. Everyone would be happy. It turns out that this far in, many just get almost depressed. I even ended up losing a villager as they were so unhappy.

It’s gotten to the point now where when someone hits a downward spiral, I have to stop what I'm doing and see if it’s something simple, like them not having clothing in the winter. Otherwise, like the villager above, I just end up taking them off all work details.

Now, while my village is struggling the most. I got a villager that I've told to just eat, sleep, and mope around town. Not an ideal situation. It’s, however, better than losing them and having to go even further out to find more blood shards to replace the ones I've almost lost.

There is also my quest for better gear. During invasions and from killing some other stuff. They can drop Darugar weapons. These weapons can be studied, and you gain a small percentage of unlocking them. This ends up costing me many days where I have to sit around studying an object instead of doing critical work to keep the village afloat.

I also have so many people now that, despite how skilled my villagers have gotten at making basic tools and clothing. There is just no keeping up with the demand for materials in making them.

I have far more advanced buildings made for things I'd like that I'm forced to leave empty. Such as this improved armor smith building. I’d love to give my best warriors the best armor possible. It, however, takes so many resources per piece that I'm forced to just manually create myself a set right before each invasion. Afterward, it’s hard to want to keep using that gear over storing it for next year.

The solution to that is getting another villager to gather resources for making basic clothing to keep everyone warm enough during the winter. I’ll then run out of food again. So, I need even more food. Before you know it, I needed to add another five to eight villagers. This then makes the blood moons and the invasions harder, so I need more people for the defense of the village and combat.

You also just can’t keep scaling like that. That is way too simple. This here was the last of the birch that was worth walking out to and getting near my village. The next area of it is quite a walk for people to haul back a single piece of wood.

Now, thankfully, I knew this was going to be an issue a long time ago. I’ve since been slowly working on a solution, and one I'll be posting in the next post. It would have been game over for me if I had not been.

My main village itself has grown to the point that it’s hard to quickly get to anywhere or get anything. There are just so many buildings. Almost 50 villagers are running around. Lots of places for people to take a break or things to increase the desirability of a spot, trying to fight unhappiness issues.

I have also reached an unthinkable moment. Despite how massive my current main village is. I need to expand it further. Thankfully, there is one side of the walls I've not fully upgraded. So, I can make one final expansion to the village itself. After that, I'll either need to move defenses between attacks or rethink how this main village is set up. As this is quite an issue.

I’ve also discovered that certain types of storage are getting so full of stuff I only need on occasion. That they are preventing the items I need to get stored and put into the ecosystem of the village.

Thankfully, I caught this happening in a few spots before it got too bad. I've since updated the maximum amount of certain stuff to be stored. I also went on a massive dumping spree of stuff we just don’t need, endless amounts of just to make room.

Doing so also made me a little nervous. Some of the stuff has long been depleted in my nearby area. It’s also not worth really setting up complex solutions to gather at a more efference rate those less than desirable items. So, when they do run out, it's going to take a while to replace and thus slow down the gathering of far more in-demand materials.

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, it all comes down to how the next invasion goes. This is the invasion on day 119, just moments after it started. After the first wave, we pushed hard towards the winter portal.

With all the efforts and struggles along the way. This one ended up the best so far. Zero deaths, very little damage done to walls. My biggest time sink now is harvesting the corpses for resources. I almost fear how big the next attack could end up being. The more people I add to resolve issues, the bigger these attacks get.

Information

Screenshots were taken, and content was written by @Enjar about ASKA.

Disclosure: A review copy of the game was received for free.

Disclosure: This content was written during early access.