Farthest Frontier: Best City Building Strategy Guide

Starting Location For Building The Best City 

The first thing you have to do when you start the game is to choose the town center. A good starting location is one that gives you access to a lot of resources. Selecting an infertile land or land where the resources are too far from the town center is definitely not recommended.

To build an optimal city, your town center should be placed on flat fertile land close to water, sand, and other early game resources. The fertility of the land can also be checked by pressing “F” on the keyboard. Also, make sure to keep your town center away from hills because there is a danger of wolves and bears there.

Another important thing we need to inform you about starting location is that you don’t need to worry about how far your starting location is from your settlers or villagers. Even if it’s halfway across the map, once you choose your starting location, your people will automatically teleport to your starting location and start building the town.

Fire & Water Needs

As soon as you pick your starting location, the first things you need to worry about are fire and water needs. These resources are not only required by houses but also are very crucial to keep your industries up and running. So building resources that constantly provide you with water and fire is necessary for building the best city in Farthest Frontier.

Under the resource section of the build menu, you can easily find “Basic Well” and “Firewood Splitter”. For Basic Well, pick a location where you have good access to water as well as a good water bonus percentage. Make sure the water bonus percentage is above 50%, preferably above 70%.

Place it at a location where the town people can have easy access to it and is not too far from the town center because in case there is a fire outbreak, you don’t need any delay in putting it out. For Firewood Splitter, there is a desirability rating you have to keep in check.

People don’t want it near their houses since it’s an industrial building. You need to start thinking about where your industries and houses would be in these initial stages because fixing these mistakes can be quite a hassle once you are too far in the game.

Harvesting Resources

For the Firewood Splitter to function, you’ll need logs. Most city building sims have lumberjack as a starting building, but unfortunately, that isn’t the case here. Now there are two ways to harvest resources in Farthest Frontier in order to build the best city. The first is through building a Work Camp.

To build Work Camp, you need to fulfill certain requirements like having your town hall at tier 2 with a Stockyard and Wagon Shop built. These requirements can be hard to fulfill early in the game, so your only option left is to use the second method. The second method is manually harvesting resources. Click on Harvest Resource on the bottom right of the screen or press “H” on the keyboard, press the left mouse button, and then drag it around the area you want to harvest resources from.

After that, any idle laborers will go to the selected area and start harvesting the resources. These resources will be stored in the Storage Cart. The storage is limited in the Storage Cart during the early game, so make sure you are keeping an eye on that too.

Setting Up Food Production For Building The Best City In Farthest Frontier

To keep a city up and running, you need to feed people. Food is a major part of building the best city in Farthest Frontier. During the early game, you can choose between a couple of buildings like a hunter’s cabin, a forger shack, a fishing shack, smokehouses, and crop fields which can provide you with the necessary food resources.

Our recommendation would be to select the crop field and place it on fertile land. For the early game, you don’t need it to be too big, so a 5×5 area is enough for now. You can expand your crop fields later on.

Keeping An Eye On The Work Radius

Work Radius is basically an area assigned to a building in which they do their work. They cannot cross the boundaries and move outside the Work Radius. The work Radius is independent of the location of the building. You can have a Work Radius on one side of the map and the building on the other, and you still won’t have any problems with production.

Secondly, selecting an optimal Work Radius for a building is necessary. Buildings specializing in fishing should have their Work Radius placed near the seas. Similarly, the hunter’s cabin work radius should be placed in an area where there are animals like deer. The same goes for every building in Farthest Frontier.

Furthermore, it isn’t sometimes enough to just set up a Work Radius for a building and then forget about it. If the area inside the Work Radius has no more animals to hunt or no more trees to cut, you need to change the Work Radius of their respective buildings in order to keep the production of resources stable.

You can also check how many resources are in an area by pressing “F4” on the keyboard.

Housings & Desirability 

As we have mentioned before, to keep the Desirability of the masses in check, you need to build your industries away from their houses. Make sure you are building the houses in little clumps and not too far from each other. The reason is, when you set up decorations in the area, they will give a desirability boost to all houses.

The decorations won’t have the same effect if the houses are far from each other, and you will have the hassle of building separate decorations for each house, so make sure the houses are in the form of groups.

Additionally, decorations, such as shrines, will have a greater effect on the overall Desirability of the houses if they are built near them. 

Storage & Spoilage

As mentioned above, the storage you have early in the game is very limited, so get your storage buildings up and running as early as possible. The buildings you are going to need are a storehouse, a stockyard, and a root cellar.

Make sure to build the root cellar close to where your forge is so that the workers can carry the materials back and forth quickly. The buildings require wood and stone to be built, so make sure you are still harvesting these resources too.

The biggest benefit of these storage buildings is the barrels. These barrels are not available until tier 2, but once they are available, you will have a 5% reduction in spoilage for every barrel you have. In addition to that, once you have a higher-tier Town Hall, your food spoilage rate will decrease, and your storage capacity will increase as well.

These buildings will also automatically upgrade themselves as long as you have the automatic upgrade turned on. The automatic upgrade option is located in the top right corner of the screen. In case you are running low on a particular resource, click on the resource you want and then select prioritize. After doing this, all the workers of the village will stop what they are doing and focus on harvesting the resource you marked.

Creating A Good Network Through Roads

Another important factor for building the best city in Farthest Frontier is a nice network of roads. Roads can be built by pressing “N” on the keyboard or selecting the “Dirt Road” option present in the bottom right corner of the screen.

The network of roads should be built in a way that helps your people move around the city as efficiently as possible. Roads can be both straight and curved. So, see where your buildings have been placed and try to build an efficient network.

To destroy a road you don’t like, simply select the road and select “destroy” if it’s under construction. In case the road has already been completed, select the road you want to remove and click “salvage”.

Farming Tips

Farms in Farthest Frontier play a bigger role as compared to other city buildings sims. You need to keep an eye on several factors, such as fertility, weed levels, soil mixture, and crop rotations. Crop harvesting can take in-game years, so you need to plan what to do each year with fields accordingly.

For year 1, we will recommend adding maintenance to the field to get it up and running so it’s ready for plantation and harvesting next year. For the second year, we will recommend going with 1 batch of clovers and two batches of turnips.

Lastly, for the third year, we’d recommend going for 1 batch of peas,1 batch of clovers, and then maintenance again. This harvesting process will give you a lot of yields, so keep rotating this batch in order to keep your city fed.

You can use different crops as you progress through the game, but this process will be very beneficial for you during the early game. Another benefit of this process is that clovers and maintenance help in keeping the weeds down, which helps to produce higher yields.

For more details on farming, consider reading our guide on Farthest Frontier’s best seeds.

Building Relocation

In case you messed up and have placed a building in the wrong spot and want to change, fortunately, you aren’t permanently doomed for that decision. Farthest Frontier allows you to relocate a building instead of destroying and rebuilding it again in a different place.

All you need to do is press the relocate building option shown in the image below and place it at a new location. The new location should have enough space for the building. Also, there is no catch to relocation, and you don’t lose any resources, so relocate the buildings as much as you like.

Other Tips

Farthest Frontier is a city-building simulator developed and published by Crate Entertainment. Farthest Frontier really tests a player’s ability in resource management. Still, sometimes a player can make a mistake, and it isn’t necessarily the player’s fault if he doesn’t know much about the basics. So make sure you go through our best tips & tricks before starting.

As you progress through the game, you’ll also be met with several difficult situations like disease problems or insufficient gold resources. So before reading further, also consider going through our Diseases and gold farming guide as well.

This concludes our guide for building the best city in Farthest Frontier. Let us know what you think about our guide in the comments below.

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