Overview
This guide will be expanded and modified as I learn more about the game. Basically, this is just a bunch of stuff I experienced on my playthroughs that may (or may not) be helpful. Since there are only 7 guides for this game right now, I figured- what can I loose by making my own? Y’know, apart from my sanity.
Water, Water Everywhere And Not A Drop To Drink
This is the part that caught me up at first.
I wasn’t sure how to get water for my increasingly thirsty villagers.
(As a matter of fact, three of them died before I got the situation under control.)
I had a fountain, and water tiles selected to harvest, but no one would use the water. Since there are only six options for water buildings, it didn’t take me long to discover I needed a Water Purifier. This building will provide fresh water to fill fountains, your villagers bellies, and-oddly-your farm crops. (Why do crops need potable water?) Okay, so apparently farms need the dirty water to function. This is good news, since your hard-earned clean water isn’t being put to use growing carrots. (Kudos to uzeybug and Phillus for clarifying that point.)
If you build the Water Purifier close to your water source, the workers won’t have to walk as far to transport the filthy lake/puddle water to the building for cleansing.
Rain Catchers only work when it rains, as the name suggests. Even when fully upgraded, they only provide 480 units of water, which doesn’t make them the best source to procure water for your villagers. However, it is fresh water, so it doesn’t have to be purified.
The well is especially useful in the winter (if you have 4 or 5) because they don’t freeze. It provides fresh water year-round.
The Fountains can be scattered around your base so the villagers have an easier time of locating water. I actually witnessed one villager using my Fountain. (It wasn’t a complete waste of building materials after all!)
With the Bottler, your villagers can then carry bottles of water around to drink from wherever they are. If all of them are actualy smart enough to do this is another matter entirely…
Oh, and if you don’t have any natural water sources close to your village, you can use the Waymakers to dig holes. They will fill with water the next time it rains.
Some Food For Thought.
In order to survive, your villagers need food as well as water.
Currently, this need is fulfilled by the humble farm. (There are plans to add hunting and possibly domesticated animals in the future.)
The Makeshift Farm has 6 farming plots, the Farm has 9, and the Established Farm has 13. Each plot grows one unit of food. Both upgrades also add 10% to global harvest speed, and 5% to global farming. When you first build the farms, the farmers need to harvest wild food first to plant as seeds. After your farms have been established, they are self-sufficient.
The kitchen will turn food into rations, which provides 2x the food value.
The following is adapted from a post by the dev:
Every update cycle (60 times a second) your farm gains or looses:
+1 growth point if the farm is tended. (Your farmers do this automatically.)
+1 growth point if the farm is watered. (Farms prefer dirty water, and keep in mind that you have to
have water tiles selected to harvest before your farmers will water your crops.)
+2 growth points in “ideal” weather. (Mid-level temperature bar; usually in spring or autumn.)
+1 growth point in slightly warm or cold weather.
-1 growth point if it’s above the frying point. (Hot summers.)
-2 growth points if it’s below the freezing point. (Cold winters.)
(There is no mention made of the effect of rain, so I’m assuming it doesn’t play a part in this.)
But this point system explains why you can’t grow crops in the winter, since the tending and watering are cancelled out by the cold weather. The heat of summer slows, but does not stop, the growth.
Finally, your farms growth points can drop as low as -20,000 if you stop tending to them. (Like if you unassign your farmers during the winter.) So in order to start growing again, you’ll need to get back to 0. Hence, it’s a good idea to leave some farmers assigned even in the winter, so that when spring comes around, your farms will still operate.
The Essence Of The Matter
In my opinion, essence is weird.
What exactly is it, from a gameplay standpoint?
When you harvest trees, crystal, and wild food, essence gets left behind. Same thing for killing monsters.
It basically resembles a sparkly trail (one guy described it as ‘fairy dust’) that- if your ‘hand’ gets too close to it- will chase you until you consume it.
This stuff fills your ‘influence’ meter, which allows you to use your powers. (Your meter also regenerates over time.) It also charges the magic buildings, like the Elemental Bolt Tower and the Golem Combobulator. They use the essence as energy to power every magic shot, or create Golems.
Three buildings collect essence for use by you and your defensive structures: the Lightning Rod, the Essence Collector, and the Ancient Radiance Pool. When you throw things into the Cullis Gate, on the other hand, you get essence from it but the building doesn’t store it.
Essence Collectors also generate essence by burning crythilium, which is refined crystal.
If your essence bar isn’t full, hovering your ‘hand’ too close to an Essence Collector or Ancient Radiance Pool will draw the stored essence out to refill it. This can be extremely annoying when you don’t want to refill your essence bar. You can pause the Essence Collector to stop it from outputting essence, however.
On a side note: circles of essence sometimes spawn in your world. They are easier to find at night if they are beyond the cozy lights of your village, since they glow in the dark. Clicking repeatedly in the circle spawns either a loot box, or a Suspicious Key.
If you click the box repeatedly, it’ll jump a distance away. It has a slant to move towards the village, but this ‘minigame’ can be irritating. A simple way around it is to use the Recall spell to bring all the goodies back to your village center once it has been opened with the key.
Dropping a key ontop of a loot box (hope you have a good aim) will unlock it, spilling out a treasure trove of goodies. So far, I have seen this combination of loot:
Basic Resources. (Water buckets, wood, rocks, iron ore, gold ore, and silk.)
Armor and Weapons. (Both wooden and iron.)
Health. (Potions, bandages, and Medkits.)
Refined. (Gold bags, lumber, cut stone, iron bars, and gold bars.)
Ammunition. (Stone balls, and ballista bolts.)
Equipment. (Shields, helms, and armor.)
Building A Road To Nowhere
Ah, the humble road.
Where do I begin?
Construction of a Waymaker’s Shack will unlock the ‘create or maintain roads’ button three from the left in the bottom-right corner. Now, you can build helpful little paths throughout your empire!
There are five kinds of roads, in order of upgrade: the Path (free), the Log Path(1 wood), the Cobble and Log Path(1 rock), the Cobble and Board Road(1 board), and the Cut Stone and Board Road(1 cut stone). The Cut Stone and Board Road doubles your villagers speed, making roads a worthwhile investment. A word of warning, though: monsters can use your roads as well to enhance their speed. (Thx Lord Quinton, I was wondering about that just yesterday.)
A few thoughts on the road system:
Paths can be worn into the ground by villagers repeatedly walking there, but they disappear after awhile. The better roads need to be maintained (I’d assume the speed penalty makes neglected roads no worse than walking on plain ground.), but I don’t think they vanish if you neglect them.
Road maintenence is free. (Aside from labor.)
You can build roads into your buildings. Not the actual structures, but the places where your villagers walk to go into a house, a crystillery, a farm, stuff like that.
You can hold ‘shift’ to build roads in a straight line. This also works for walls.
Man’s Best Friend
If you’re like me, you peruse stuff like ‘Statistics’ while waiting for your villagers to build a Ballista 1% at a time.
My eye was caught by the heading ‘Animals’. I had also run across the Doggo House while building homes for my currently homeless peasants.
So I became interested in finding a Doggo and somehow domesticating it.
One day, I was panning across the No Man’s Land between my cozy village and the filth of the Corruption when I caught sight of the cutest pixellated dog. I siezed the canine with my imaginery hands and tossed it into my village, where it proceeded to wander around confused.
It seemed quite content roaming the buildings, chatting with my villagers. Yes, apparently the Doggos can talk.
Night had yet to fall when I got the wonderful announcement that Vincent the Doggo had joined my village! Being the highly intelligent animal that he was, Vincent wasn’t going to sleep outside while I built him a Doggo House- he moved right in with my villagers.
Thankfully, after his own home was constructed, Vincent packed up his dog bone and moved to his smaller abode.
Doggos are useful. They carry resources (one might call them Go-Fers), harvest wild patches of food, and provide a square of pixels that is somehow cute to look at. The sound of their endless barking now permeate your village.
Seeing as how Vincent was lonely, I resolved to find him a friend. It didn’t take me long to locate another, and being quickly transported to the village by unknown means, the second Doggo soon found a master and threw his lot in with us.
I didn’t invite any of the others…
Apparently, word got out that I had an empty Doggo House, and more food and water than I knew what to do with. Brushing aside all notions of an invitation, brazen Doggos marched through my shoddy wooden gate and quickly made themselves at home.
And yes, they eat your food, and they drink your water.
As Summer dragged on, and I watched my food count tick down with anxious eyes, I began to consider the Doggos as providing another kind of service…
Unlike Rimworld, there is no Slaughter button, so I was stuck with Vincent and company. At this point, I was more than happy with four Doggos, and wondered how to post a pixellated sign that said ‘No Doggos Allowed Except By Invitation!’
I was only able to prevent one canine from taking up permanent residence.
He came through the gate, boldly announcing he was here to drink my dwindling water supply. I scooped the creature up and tossed it onto a rocky island. He never made any attempt to swim to the shore, or drink from the entire lake that surrounded him. I watched his slow deterioration with interest, checking back on him freqently.
When he died, I consumed his essence.
You would think an ordeal like that would have turned the other Doggos off from coming, but no. The other three strolled in as well. I now have seven Doggos.
The end of this story occurs five days later IRL.
Vincent and Tiberium died of old age.
;(
The Blood Moon Rises Once Again!
I never recieved an in-game warning about the Blood Moon.
Rise To Ruins excells in giving you a mini-tuturiol a day after you accomplished what the tuturiol explains. If this is intentional, it’s very well done.
Maybe the Blood Moon is the trial by fire (or blood) that seperates the wheat from the chaff. They toss you in, and see if you can swim. It was probably the second day of Fall when I got the ominous warning that something was off.
This being my first game, my base is rather a mess. I only have walls facing the Corruption. Three-fourths of my firepower was centered around my killing maze. I wasn’t forewarned why that might be a bad idea.
The Blood Moon began with fire raining out of the sky and sending my hapless villagers running around screaming. It quickly followed up that act by dropping Blood Slimes. I only had one defensive tower in the main body of my village- a Makeshift Bow Tower to which Slimes are nearly immune. They proceeded to beat at half a dozen buildings as I sat there powerless. (I had run out of essence.) I figured I would loose my Forge or Clinic before the night was out, but that didn’t happen.
Since my Doggos showed more backbone that a fully-equipped-in-steel-armor villager, I had no manpower to deal with the threat.
So I sent 6 or 7 slimes to Limbo. No idea what the downsides of this (now-extinct) tactic were, but I figured it was better to save my incompetently built village and deal with the Limbo backlash later. And it worked- I lived through the night without a single building being destroyed.
The next morning, construction began on Elemental Bolt Towers…
PS: I’m not yet sure those towers are a good idea in the village. I’ve seen a lot of magic bolts dissapating harmlessly on buildings, rather than hit the enemy. I’ll have to wait until the next Blood Moon to find out. The next Blood Moon rolled around and, yeah, the magic bolts were more likely to explode against the walls of my Marketplace and Clinic rather than any Blood Slimes.
So far, the best way to deal with the Blood Moon is to have either golems or guards to defend your village. I’d lean more towards the golems since they won’t run like chickens as soon as things get dicey.
Holy Golems are pretty handy in a pinch as well.
A Hero’s Guide To Deadly Monsters
Just in case ruling over your trembling peasants with an iron hand gets tiring, Rise To Ruins throws monsters at you faster than you can say, “But I don’t have any walls up yet!”
There are 6 different types: Slimes, Headless, Zombies, Skeletons, Fire Elementals, and Specters.
Slimes
These come in the ordinary or Blood variety, as well as Small and regular. They are painfully resistant to physical damage. I’ve been using Elemental Bolt Towers and upgraded golems to deal with them. I’m pretty sure they are the slowest monster in the game.
Headless
As the name may have tipped you off, they have no heads. The lack of any brains means they have no resistance to any types of damage. That, coupled with a relatively low HP, makes them one of the easiest monsters to deal with in the game. They also have a vulnerability to fire if you want to rain meteors down on them.
Zombies
Apparently, if your villagers die while ‘blighted’, they turn into zombies. Zombies are the monster with the most variety: they come in regular, Child, Catjeet, Catjeet Child, Doggo, and Doofy Doggo. I have only encountered the first two, and they operate like most other zombies. Meaning, they have an unhealthy craving for your brains, their skin is a mossy green, and- the zombie classic- walk with their arms straight out in front of them like rods. The Child Zombie is faster than the regular Zombie.
Skeletons
These tall monsters are the fastest in the game and oddly resemble walking snowmen. They are vulnerable to crushing damage, (Thx again Phillus!) which is provided by the Sling, Spray, or Bullet Tower. Apparently, water slows them down now….?
Fire Elementals
Dropping these flaming monsters into water (your lakes and ponds) is very effective. (Thx Phillus!) Keep in mind that, during winter, in the night, the water freezes over. Since they have no resistance to Piercing damage, the Ballista tower is amazingly effective against them, even more so when upgraded to the Ice Ballista. However, the tower has a painfully long reload time and an even more painful miss/hit ratio. I found ice golems to be more useful.
Fire Elementals appear to be the second-fastest monster, and are the only one that has a ranged attack. Sometimes, it’s longer than your tower range. Also, I found out that- since they can’t travel through water- if you have an island, you can strand them there. I have 15+ Fire Elementals from the night before ‘wandering around’ on a 4-tile piece of land. This doesn’t work long-term, obviously, because once the water freezes in the winter… *100 Fire Elementals come to destroy base.*
Specters
These ghostly blue monsters are resistant to physical damage, meaning you would be better off with some magic towers to deal with them. Annoyingly enough, they can float right through your stone and wood walls without batting an ethereal eye. However, for some reason they can’t pass through the curtain walls. They appear to be a tiny bit faster than the slimes, which means they are one of the slowest monsters.
On a side note: when your villagers die, they sometimes appear as harmless ghosts at night in your village. You can use the ‘Resurrect’ spell to bring them back to life. (In case you rushed through the in-game tuturiol.) I think the dev missed a golden opportunity: you should be able to use the Resurrect spell on the aggressive Specters. It could turn them into frail old men or something.
Some tips on dealing with the monster horde:
So long as they aren’t in the Corruption, (you are powerless there) monsters can be picked up by using your ‘Grab’ ability. From here, you can drop them on the other side of the world, into a Cullis Gate, or into the water. Or into your village if you enjoy torturing your villagers.
It’s a good idea to have Golems behind your walls to attack the enemy should they get past. Unlike your cowardly villagers, Golems are made of sterner stuff. Namely, stone, wood, and crystal. You will need a Recombobulator to keep your Golems healthy. This building- for some odd reason- isn’t in the Aid section, (Seems pretty ‘Aidy’ to me…) but in the Miscellaneous subsection of Defense. If that isn’t confusing, I don’t know what is. Y’know, aside from the fact that the Lightning Rod is in the same place.
You have an array of special powers to beat enemies into the ground with. I have had the best success with Magic Bolts. On a side note: the Meteor can create mud where it lands. The mud then turns into a puddle of water when it rains.
I don’t know why, but not a single monster is slightly resistant to ice or lightning. Hence, I am going to upgrade all my towers to one or the other. I’ll get back to you on how it works out.
From what I see, all monsters except skeletons regenerate their health. I’d hazard about 20 HP every 3-4 seconds.
Golems And You
Okay, I have all three types of Golem Combobulators up.
Their base attributes are as follows:
The Wood Golem is faster than the Stone, and has a Crushing melee attack.
The Stone Golem is slow, but has a lot of HP. He shares the same Crushing attack.
The Crystal Golem has a ranged magic attack, and the least amount of HP.
All three types can be upgraded to one of the Lightning/Ice/Fire choices. Once upgraded, they all get ranged attacks, BUT the Stone and Wood Golems do NOT get magic attacks. I have no idea if this has any in-game relevance, but they deal just plain Ice/Fire/Lightning damage. No magic.
Also, it’s very important to have a Recombobulator as close to their fighting ground as possible. This will cut down on the baby-sitting. Golems don’t regenerate their health; they need the Recombobulator to heal.
I only use Stone Golems. Since they have so much health, they can get clobbered a lot more before they need rescuing. They are slower, but with how many enemies flood in every night, they don’t need to walk far to encounter another enemy.
Stone Golems gain health with every level. At lvl 10 they have around 1000 health.
You can use the Grab power to rescue your Golems from sticky situations, but dropping them (and villagers as well) deals around 1-10 damage.
How To Kill A Maze Runner
Unless you’re playing on Peaceful, the monsters come for you.
Unless you have a way into your village, they’ll tear down walls to get to you.
Unless you have a plan to survive, they will kill you.
Welcome to the Maze.
Recalcitrating The Cataclysmic Putrescence
By the time you figure out what the title means, I’ll probably have enough experience to deal with the subject. 😀
Some Random Stuff That You May Or May Not Know
This is basically where I’m going to dump a concise variety of knowledge until I have reason to expand upon a given subject.
For starters, trees, wild food, and crystals all regenerate. You can speed this process along by using the ‘Motivate Land’ power. (It works best during the rain.) All three resources regrow, and spread. As of this writing, rock is not replenishable. Conjure Material and Earthquake give you chances of obtaining rock, but the result was negligible for me.
Once you decide to destroy a building, and click the button, there is no going back. You cannot reverse that decision. This was one of those times when, a day after discovering I couldn’t change my mind about destroying my Mining Facility, the not-so-helpful information card on the subject popped up.
Monsters can travel through water (Except for the Fire Elemental). They don’t usually, but during the Blood Moon, I saw several slimes swimming through the lake.
For reasons I cannot understand, monsters will pick up food that is laying on the ground. They actually alter their course to go and pick up carrots.
On the subject of food, if you don’t have any room (i.e. storage buildings), villagers will harvest the food, but leave it on the ground. And the food does disappear after awhile, as does stone, wood, iron, equipment, or basically anything that can sit on the ground.
You can drop stuff on your villagers and incapacitate them. Who knew carrots could be so deadly?
The Lightning Rod protects your village buildings from getting struck by (guess what) lightning. When a storm does roll in, the rod takes damage when it is struck, but the lightning bolts charge it with essence. However, it slowly looses it’s charge. The rate seemd to vary from 1-2 energy per second.
You can upgrade buildings and towers and they will remain fully operational while construction is underway.
I’ve seen complaints about having to click the ‘+’ icon 400 times so that their wood harvester will maintain that number of lumber. You can actually right-click the ‘+’ so that it goes up by 10, rather than 1.
‘Far Lands’ is the worst song on the music playlist. Avoid it at all costs.
So, from what I have seen/heard, food, trees, and crystal won’t regrow during the Winter. However, if it is raining, I have used the Motivate Land power to great effect. My food count didn’t dip below 400 all Winter, as I harvested my wild carrot patch repeatedly.
When it’s a Full Moon, the monsters won’t attack.
Concerning the Winter, you might want to have 2 Water Purifiers constructed beforehand. I didn’t know the entire lake would freeze over, and my water count was running dangerously low.
Don’t put your Cullis Gate in the center of your village unless you like watching your villagers and Doggos running around screaming whenever you drop a monster in it.
As you may have noticed, there are monsters strolling around the screen at the main menu. If you click by them, you shoot magic bolts. Kill 50 monsters, and your whole screen lights up with magical music notes, and a killer soundtrack. Definitely worth all the clicking.
Using ‘Destroy Terrain’ will remove all traces of rock, forest, or carrot from the specified area, but you won’t get any concrete resources from it, only essence.
You can click the dead bodies of monsters/golems to make them dissolve faster, hence getting essence faster. Go figure. 😛
This game was never designed for multiplayer. Hence, the odds of it being added are exceptionally low.
Building rotation will probably never happen, because it’s a lot of work, and will slow future development considerably.
Update Notes….?
The recent discussion on increasing villager numbers sent me scrolling through the RtR update notes for information. I found some interesting- and amusing- stuff. For those of you who aren’t interested in spending a couple of hours exhausting your eyes reading, I decided to just toss the highlights of what I found in here.
*Disclaimer*
Some of these notes are really old. As in, 2+ years old. Believe it at your own peril.
–All villagers can now hold between 3 and 8 resources at a time based on their strength. They will
gain 1 additional resource per 100 strength, and always be able to carry a minimum of at least 3.
This applies to labor golems as well.
– A slight chance the mother, or mother and child will die during child birth will be added. The
chance this will happen will be based on the mother’s age and health.
– Lowered specter level cap to 30. Raised zombie level cap to 25. Raised headless level cap to
20. Raised fire elemental level cap to 30.
– Overpopulation now has a much larger negative impact on nomad rates. Total population in
general now has a negative effect on nomad rates. Available water now impacts nomad rates.
– The Quality of Life update has been released. The highlights in this patch are the new
upgradable housing, farms, storage, and the new marketplace system. But there’s a ton of other
awesome new content, like $1.99 loot boxes. (Kidding, please don’t kill me!)
– Villagers and doggos will no longer try to chat with monsters.
– Fixed extremely rare “invisible villager” bug, caused when you knock a villager out while they
are in their home.
– Combobulators will now stop producing golems when paused.
– Fixed an extremely rare bug where villagers would get stuck in their home waiting for their mate
to arrive, even though both are already in the home.
– Monsters will no longer attack loot boxes when they’re blocking a path.
– Can now poke dead mobs again.
– You can now pause or disable storage of resources in buildings by clicking on their icons in the
bottom GUI. Setting a resource to pause will prevent any more from being added, setting it to
disabled will cause the workers to remove any resources that are already inside.
– Fixed bug where in extremely rare cases, the farmers would try to “plant” water buckets in the
farms.
– Fixed a bug where monsters would sometimes “attack” the void if they could not reach a target.
– You can use left shift plus left or right click to autoset the make and maintain controls to 0 or
infinity.
– Fixed a bug if a doggo became owned by a child, and the child grew up, the doggo would no
longer be assigned to the child.
– Fixed a bug if a wild doggo became domesticated, their owner would “forget” who they are.
– Holy golems are not longer counted as homeless in the GUI.
^ It’s always funny when the update notes about fixing a bug are misspelled.
– You guys finally convinced me. 2x speed controls are being added to the game, and the
previously planned haste tower and spell is now being scrapped.
– The chance of a wild doggo on the map visiting the village will increase during the daytime,
when they are hungry or thirsty, and when it is raining or snowing.
– Fixed spells confusing/panicking mobs even when they don’t successfully cast.
– Doggo ghosts can now be properly resurrected.
– Fire elementals no longer die walking on frozen tiles.
– Haste Tower. Increases the movement speed of all mobs (monsters and villagers included) in
the area.
– Boost Tower. A tower that will use essence to “boost” nearby tower’s firing rates.
– Chain Lightning Tower. A tower that does pure electric damage that jumps from one mob to the
next.
^ Kingdom Rush’s Tesla tower anyone?
– Sticky Tower. Does no damage, but will slow down anything it hits.
– Flame Tower. Does fire damage in a small area, burning everything in its path.
– Frost Tower. Similar to the flame tower, but fires a cloud of ice. Does low damage, but slows
down the enemy.
– “Has been completed” and “Has been fully repaired” messages no longer pop up on the
console for monster spawners.
– Fixed a rare bug that would cause monsters to attack their own spawners.
– A new guard job will be added, guards will work together and create patrol routes in and outside
your village. They will also spar/train with each other in their spare time to level up.
^ I get the feeling that the second idea was never implemented.
– Fixed an extremely rare crash when a farm was removed from the game, but farmers still
attempted to interact with it.
^ Talk about refusing to let go of the past.
– Zombies now do “Blight” damage, and can turn a villager into a zombie if they die while
blighted.
– The world now has a “Full Moon” night every 7 days.
^ I’m assuming that this was changed.
– Monsters do not attack during a full moon, unless you get too close to them.
–Essence spawns randomly all over the map during a full moon.
–Ghosts (dead villagers) pop up very frequently during a full moon.
I Appreciate Your Feedback…
I want to make this guide really helpful, and I need your help to do that.
If I have made any kind of mistake, please tell me so I can fix it.
If something is poorly explained, I’ll try to make it clearer.
If you have any suggestions, or there is a subject you’d like more info on, I’ll be reading all the feedback.
Also, if you enjoyed the guide, please give it a thumbs-up.
(Thanks to Phillus for designing the guide’s picture.)