Lost Tribe Guide

In the Lost Tribe guide, you start off with 5 people, but less material resources, and research slower.

In-game this is classified as a difficult scenario.

Choosing tribals

Since you have 5 people, each tribesperson doesn't have as much of an impact as colonists from other scenarios. You can spread skills across the whole party.

You will need these skills to survive:

• Dumb labor: Hauling, cleaning and cutting plants.
• Growing: Growing food crops. Starting a stable food supply is high priority as you start off with very little food.
  • Aim to have 2 growers which can grow food crops.
• Violence: Hunting for food and self-defense.
• Medicine: Treating the sick and injured.
  • Since herbal medicine has a low medical potency, the doctor needs to be skilled.
  • Try to have a redundant doctor if possible, who will take over if the first is downed.
• Construction: Building a shelter for your tribe.
• Cooking: Cooking food.

Some skills are useful to have:

• Research: Researching new projects. Since your tribe is slow to research many projects, you may want to start soon.
• Crafting: Crafting better weapons to replace the poor starting weapon choice. You can't craft good weapons until you research Smithing, however, so research is also important.
• Mining: Obtaining metallic resources such as steel for building better equipment.
• Social: Convincing captured prisoners to join forces with you, as well as bartering for resources.

Starting off

Your surviving tribe should start off standing, with their supplies scattered around. Since they start off hungry and malnourished, they will devour the pemmican they brought with them. You don't start with a good amount of pemmican (300 is only enough to sustain 5 ravenous people and 3 pets for the entirety of the first day and the second morning) and before everything starts off a lot of it would've been eaten.

Weapons

Your tribe starts off with a low-tech selection of weapons.

Short bow (x2)	Pila	Wooden club	Wooden spear	Jade knife

The pila can be given to moderately skilled shooters, as they can deal heavy damage if they hit but don't have much range, and the long time between shots means that you'll regret missing with it.

One short bow should be equipped by the most skilled shooter, and the other by a less skilled shooter.

The only decent melee weapon that you start with is the wooden club; the jade knife has slightly inferior damage output to fists due to the longer cooldown (1.76s vs 1.6s), and then the wooden spear is simply abysmal - but both of these weapons should be sold as soon as possible. Since fists have been buffed to do 7 damage, and have a slightly shorter cooldown, even equipping a wooden log will hinder the pawn's damage output.

If you need to, you can immediately drop a crafting spot which you can use to make extra wooden clubs or short bows.

Clothing

Each of your tribe members should start off wearing tribalwear. Some of them will be donning a parka.

After you settle down, you can instantly chop wood or hunt animals to obtain the materials to make war veils or war masks. These give slight protection, as well as increase pain threshold allowing your tribespeople to hold out in battle longer before falling.
However, crafting these will distract your tribespeople off more important tasks such as construction and growing, so you should do these only if you have someone to spare.

Food

Obtaining food should be one of your priority tasks so your tribe won't starve.

Growing crops

First, plant rice as it grows fast and can be harvested soon. Choose a more fertile patch of land to grow it on.

Then, if you have sufficiently skilled growers, grow strawberries. These can be eaten raw without any negative mood debuffs and grow quite fast.

Potatoes can efficiently provide food but take a while to grow. It's useful if there is a lack of fertile land due to its low fertility sensitivity.

Corn can be used to increase food production after your food production stabilizes, providing large harvests with each cycle, but taking extremely long to grow.

Healroot is good to plant once your growers have finished planting your food supply, as you will run out of your starting supply of herbal medicine quickly. If needed you can usually find wild Healroot on the map.

Cloth is useful for making clothes to help deal with the cold once winter starts. Tailoring takes a lot of time, so it's best to start as early as possible.

Hunting and gathering

The classic way of feeding a pre-agricultural tribe. This is necessary as there is a sizable gap between running out of your starter food and successfully harvesting food crops.

Raspberries can be found across the map in many areas, which can be harvested for a decent early-game supply of food. They grow fast, can be harvested multiple times and can be eaten raw without giving mood debuffs.

You should also mark some animals down for hunting. Once done so, your hunters equipped with ranged weapons will automatically shoot the animals from a distance. Short bows have a decent range, but tend to miss wildly at mid-long ranges, meaning that a hunter will need to make many shots before successfully downing the animal. To speed this up, manually draft the hunters to shoot at closer ranges instead of automatically at long distances. Try to go after animals that drop a lot of leather so your colonists can build bedrolls.

Food preservation

Unlike the other starts, lack of cooler technology means it's impossible to build a sub-zero freezer to prevent food spoilage.

Since you start with pemmican researched already, as long as you have meat, you can start making pemmican. They last a long time without spoiling.

Don't cook too many simple meals otherwise they may spoil, wasting food.

Shelter

You will need to find shelter for your tribespeople.

Like all other starts, a simple wood hut will do to keep the rain out. However, take note that tribespeople need more research before they unlock stonecutting, so unless you obtain a massive amount of steel, you will need to stick to wood for some time.

The Next Step

Once you have built some shelter and harvested your first few sets of crops, you should look into long term survival.

Research

Research is a high priority and should be set up as soon as food supplies are stable, because tribes research slowly due to their low tech level.

As soon as you have your simple research bench, you should prioritise getting great bows, as this will help with raids, and then after this smithing, so you can build better melee weapons if bows aren’t your style. After this, electricity should be top priority, as building coolers is useful for food storage or hot environments, and heaters are necessary for long term survival in cold environments. After researching electricity, you’ll want to get air conditioning or heating, depending on where your tribe has been established, and then batteries and solar power so you can build better generators that don’t require wood for fuel.

Shelter

Once you’ve build a basic hut to keep your tribals safe, and you’ve got some basic infrastructure up, you’ll want to start building individual rooms for your colonists. As you can’t build beds until you’ve researched them, you’ll want to use bedrolls or sleeping spots in these rooms.

Other structures that could be useful include a stockpile room, a research room, or a production room.

Defense

As you won’t have gun turrets for a long time, you’ll need to use deadfall traps to your advantage. Building a wall around your base could be useful to guide raiders into an entrance covered in deadfall traps, and building mazes filled with the traps could be useful too. Just remember that colonists have a low chance of activating the traps and severely wounding themselves.

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Guides

Progression

Quickstart Guides • Basics • Intermediate Midgame Guide • Advanced Endgame Guide • Ending the game

Scenarios

Lost Tribe Guide • Rich Explorer Guide • Naked Brutality Guide • The Mechanitor Guide

Survival

Extreme Heat Guide • Extreme Cold Guide • Extreme Desert Guide • Ice Sheet Guide • Sea Ice Guide • Events Guide

Combat

Defense tactics • Offense tactics • Weapon Guide

Construction

Colony Building Guide • Defense structures

Production

Food production • Money making guide

Other

Skill Training • Permadeath save conversion guide •
Ideology Min-Maxing