Lost Tribe Guide

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

Choosing tribals (Optional) 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. However, Neolithic technologies are more labor-intensive, so you'll still want colonists who are good at more than one thing. All the following are suggestions to keep in mind. In practice, you may find yourself making exceptions for a really excellent character whose positive synergies balance out their negatives. But if you keep these goals in mind, it will be easier to only deviate from the plan for a character who really is worth making an exception. Skills you need Violence: Hunting for food and self-defense. Construction: Building a shelter for your tribe. Dumb labor: Hauling, cleaning and cutting plants. Medicine: Treating the sick and injured. Since herbal medicine has a low medical potency, the doctor needs to be skilled and have a clean room to work in. Try to have as many doctors as possible. Low tech weaponry and armor mean that situations where multiple pawns are injured will be more common. If one or more primary doctors are downed, there needs to be someone who can patch them up or replace them in a pinch. Research: Researching new projects. Since your tribe is slow to research many projects, you may want to start soon. 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 who can grow food crops. Also useful for caravans. In biomes and seasons where it's possible to do so, tribes forage at a rate of 170% while traveling. Forage amounts are determined by a colonist's Growing skill. Mining: Obtaining metallic resources such as steel for building better equipment. Cooking: Cooking food without giving your colonists food poisoning. Crafting: Crafting better weapons to replace the poor starting weapon choice. Clubs and recurve bows are good for prisoner capturing and hunting respectively. But you can't craft better weapons than those until you research Smithing, so research is also important. Social: Convincing captured prisoners to join forces with you, as well as bartering for resources. Traits to avoid Can't dumb labor: Everyone needs to clean. Everyone needs to haul. Everyone needs to be able to refuel passive coolers in the summer and campfires in the winter. Can't violent: There are likely to be situations where you've only got one pawn able to stand, and they'd better be able to hold a weapon. Incapable of caring: See above. In an emergency, everyone needs to be able to attempt doctoring. A crude herbal bandage is better than nothing. Health Tribal starting characters have a higher chance to be malnourished, have chemical addictions, or have scars from old wounds. Even a character with amazing traits and skills may not be your best pick if their physical or mental health is poor, because you will lack the resources needed to help them manage their conditions. Addiction: Addiction is very difficult to manage in the first in-game year. An addicted character is likely to go into withdrawal, a lengthy process which will slow or disrupt your efforts to get the colony on its feet. High pain levels: Be sure to hover over each wounded character's wounds and see how high their total pain level will be. The pain from old scars will remain constant until you can reliably replace body parts via surgery. But if a character's pain is 15% or higher, they will have a constant -10 to Mood (unless they're a Masochist). Movement / manipulation penalties: Old injuries also reduce the effectiveness of the injured part. This is a bit more situational than the others, depending on the colonist's skills. An artist or researcher can live with a small movement penalty, a hunter can get by with damage to their hearing, a cook is still effective with reduced manipulation, etc. Make sure your colonists' health issues don't directly prevent them from doing their primary jobs.

Beginning

You appear with supplies scattered around, hungry and malnourished, the pemmican (400 units) will only last for 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	Steel Ikwa	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 steel ikwa should be given to your best melee pawn, followed by the wooden club. The jade knife is best left alone as it's the lowest damaging melee weapon; even wooden clubs, easily made, beat it in damage output.

You can place a crafting spot to make extra wooden clubs or Recurve bows, which are the next bow upgrade and it's research is already finished by default (to address the differing weapon skills of your tribespeople).

Shelter

You will need to find shelter for your tribespeople. The easiest solution is to look for ancient structures in the proximities which are already standing and require a wall patch or two. If there isn't any nearby, then a simple wood hut will do. Preferably, choose an area where there's rough stone ground, any fire that may spree around will be prevented from burning your home. Note that tribespeople need to research stonecutting. If you can't obtain a massive amount of steel due to lacking skillful miners, you will need to stick to wood for some time. However it's still very likely that stonecutting tech will be finished before you need to build any other room, as at early start you can just handle with an all-built in barrack.

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  Wooden hut surrounded by rough stone

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  All built in barrack, early start.

Another good option, if your map has ruins, is to deconstruct some of the walls that are close to where you want to put your base. This will yield stone blocks. You can use stone blocks to build your own stone walls even before you have Stonecutting researched. If you end up with a patchwork of different stone types, that's fine -- any stone is better than steel and much better than wood. Deconstruction has the added bonus of slightly leveling up a pawn's construction skill with minimal loss. If they waste resources deconstructing a ruin, you only lose something you didn't have to begin with, and your pawn still got the experience.

With this method, on day one you could pick one of the larger ruins for your tribe to camp out in. Put a roof on it, and as soon as your plant cutters get some trees chopped, add doors. Wooden doors are fine -- stone doors open much more slowly, and if your walls are stone, rebuilding a burned-down door is no big deal. Toss down some sleeping spots, butcher spot, crafting spot, campfire and a few basic stockpile zones. You may want to put in a table and stool on the first or second day. If the weather is hot, putting the campfire right outside the door and putting a torch lamp and passive cooler indoors may be better. This will be a huge help in keeping your colonists' mental state stable, as it can help you avoid negative thoughts like "Slept outdoors," "Slept in the cold" / "Slept in the heat" and potentially even "Ate without table."

Food

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

Growing crops

Crops differ one from another and your decisions will differ based on the "Growing period" of your map, be it 10/60, 20/60, 30/60 or year-round. Besides the crop of choice it is very important to analyze ground fertility, as this will have significance over plants development speed. Your growers skill points will affect the sowing speed as well.

• Rice grows fast and can be harvested soon.
• Strawberries are second fast, can be eaten raw without any negative mood debuffs.
• Potatoes take a while to grow but provide more food. It is useful if there is a lack of fertile land as it has low fertility sensitivity.
• Corn has the longest growing period but it provides large quantities once it matures, this crop choice is better made once you have secured a large food storage.

While food should be your main concern, there are two other plants you would do well to work on as well:

• Cotton can be harvested for cloth. In a biome with extreme cold, it will also help to have wool-bearing tame animals, as wool has a higher cold resistance factor than cloth. No matter the biome, however, you will need cloth to make beds. It will also help to keep some cloth stored to make Flak armor sets once you have researched the technology. This is important to prepare yourself against mechanoid attacks. Mechanoids start triggering once you have spent at least one year on your map. These enemies can easily blow off limbs, and you will regret not preparing yourself well if you can't make protective gear for your colonists.
• Healroot can be harvested for herbal medicine but requires a minimum skill level of eight. If your growers are not ready yet, keep planting the other crops until they reach this level.

Food preservation

Unlike the other starts, lack of cooler technology means it's impossible to build a sub-zero freezer to prevent food spoilage. Until you have researched air conditioning and built a proper freezer, your colony will be walking a tightrope of "don't hunt more than you can cook / stockpile as much food as you can."

Whenever possible, make more pemmican. Since you start with pemmican researched already, as long as you have both meat and edible plants, you can make it. It can last over a year (70 in-game days) without spoiling, and potentially longer if it spends time being refrigerated or frozen. It also does not have a cooking skill requirement to make. So when you have the materials available, you can set your primary cook to making simple meals and another colonist to making just pemmican.

One way to do this is to have two campfires, or a campfire and a fueled stove once you've researched Complex furniture. At the stove or primary campfire, set a bill for simple meals which includes only your most skilled cook. Set a second bill for pemmican with either no minimum skill requirement, or one which includes your second-tier cooks. (Food poisoning chances are affected only by kitchen cleanliness and cook skill level, but pemmican is much less likely to give food poisoning than other food types.) Then at the secondary campfire, set a bill just for pemmican. This will make it easier to convert meat into pemmican as fast as possible whenever you get it, so you don't lose as much meat to spoilage.

A passive cooler can't achieve true refrigeration in the summer, but it can lower the temperature to 17C which does slow down the rate of deterioration. Building double walls on your food storage area, and putting passive coolers in the locations where you'll want regular coolers later, will help a lot. If you are in a biome that has winter, during the winter season you can build a door between your food storage area and the outside and set that door to "hold open" to let the climate act as a freezer. A vent is better than a held-open door if you want to avoid wild animals wandering into your fridge. (But perhaps you do want wild animals wandering into your fridge -- where you can shoot them.)

Especially in warm weather, don't cook too many simple meals; they may spoil, wasting the food. Then again, not cooking raw food will also allow it to spoil. If you have run out of either meat or plants and can't make pemmican, this issue will come up frequently. With 5 colonists, setting a bill at your primary campfire to make simple meals "until you have 20" may be a good balance to start. Your cook will be very busy, but the meals will get used up quickly enough to minimize spoilage.

Mining

Mining is not one of the top priorities for a tribal start, so you may not have any colonists with high mining skill or passion. However, if there are steel ores within proximity, some of your colonists could still be assigned to mining them.

Steel walls can be built without research and have higher resistance to fire than wood. It's also not as slow to mine as stone even for miners with modest skill, although low level miners will not get the full 40x ore out of each tile. Keep in mind that the amount of mine-able steel in each map is finite, and it'll be awhile before you have a smelter to make steel from slag. You will need a lot of steel to build spike traps, as that will be your go-to defensive structure. And you'll need even more once you get more industrial technologies researched. Any steel walls you build can be deconstructed and replaced with stone walls once you've researched Stonecutting. Once you've done so and want to replace wood walls with stone, cutting stone blocks from the random stone chunks laying around on the ground is more efficient than mining for stone in most maps.

If you choose to build a starting shelter among existing rock formations, you'll likely want to mine into them get steel or make more room. But be aware when tiles start to be roofed with "Overhead mountain." This roof type can collapse if not properly supported. Also, while your AI storyteller is unlikely to send you an infestation in the first few quadrums, any overhead mountain terrain within 30 tiles of a colony structure will be at risk later on. Consider planning to move out into a free-standing base once you have the means to do so.

Silver is free money you can use to buy food and weapons. Jade makes very effective clubs or valuable sculptures. However, stone blocks are more plentiful and all of them can be used to make art. So jade sculptures should be reserved for your top crafter unless someone has an inspired creativity.

Other minerals are more situational. You may wish to stock up on components if you're currently working on Electricity research. Low-volume rare minerals such as gold or uranium could possibly wait until you have a plan to use them for a particular project. Minerals which are still in the ground, i.e., have not yet been mined, do not count towards your colony's item wealth. Raiders tend to target your valuables, and wealth is one of several factors your storyteller uses to calculate the size of threats to send you. So stockpiling valuable minerals for which you have no immediate use is counterproductive.

Gathering and Hunting

Raspberries can be found across the map , which can be harvested for decent early-game food supply. They grow fast, can be harvested multiple times and can be eaten raw without giving mood debuffs. Biomes with a reasonable amount of plant life will also have enough wild healroot for you to get by early on if you keep an eye out and harvest it regularly.

Hunting is the classic feeding way of pre-agricultural tribes, since there is a gap between running out of your starter food and a successful harvest (min: 60% plant growth). You can look on the Wildlife tab to see a list of all the animals on the map and mark some animals for hunting. The Wildlife tab will also show injured animals who will be easy to hunt, or predators which might have recently killed prey nearby. Checking around the map periodically, you can sometimes find the corpses of animals which have died after being injured by predators or vengeful prey. Although there is no notification, you will hear a sound of animal distress, often a loud "squeak!" when a wild predator kills a prey animal. Unless the prey is very small, there will usually be a corpse left over with meat and leather you can use. These animal corpses are forbidden by default. If they're still fresh, you can unforbid them. Your haulers will go and collect the free food.

Once an animal is marked for hunting, your hunters equipped with ranged weapons will automatically shoot the animals from a distance. The list of animals is a great resource to find out which ones to hunt -- or later on, attempt to tame. On the one hand, it's useful to go after large animals. They yield generous amounts of leather which your colonists can use to build bedrolls or tribalwear. It also conserves your hunters' effort by maximizing the amount of meat they get for their time.

However, you will want to balance these rewards against the risks of hunting a particular animal. The Wildlife tab also shows whether an animal is a predator, and what are the odds it will turn manhunter in revenge for being harmed. Just being an herbivore is no guarantee of safety. For example, a vengeful, herbivorous Megasloth can easily kill all five of your colonists on day 1 -- their movement speed is surprisingly fast for something named "sloth"! A single healthy Thrumbo is a challenge even for a well-equipped group of midgame colonists. Animals which are in a herd are also dangerous. If a herd animal goes manhunter, their entire herd might join in their revenge and overwhelm your colonists.

Thus it's best, especially in the early game, to prioritize hunting animals which:

• have a 0% revenge chance, such as deer and alpaca
• are more likely to be found alone and have a decent amount of meat, such as turkey or raccoon
• are injured in a way that restricts their movement (check the animal's Health tab)

It's best to avoid the very biggest animals if they're healthy, or numerous herds of anything. A swarm of rats can be a menace even in the midgame. Execute boomalope and boomrats from a distance to avoid having a colonist caught in its death explosion.

Having a hunter on the night shift (particularly if they're a Night Owl) can give them a little extra advantage, since the animals will be asleep until a shot hits them or lands near them.

Apparel

Your tribe members start wearing tribalwear and some may also have a parka. After you settle down and have spare time, chop trees for wood or hunt animals to obtain raw materials to make war veils or war masks. These give slight protection, increase pain threshold allowing your tribespeople to hold out in battle longer before falling.

Once you've researched Complex clothing, you may wish to prioritize temperature-resistant apparel. If your biome has extreme temperatures this is even more urgent. If you're low on crafting materials or haven't completed the research when the extreme temperature season rolls around, you may have to resort to wearing parkas or dusters scrounged from dead enemies. Avoiding heatstroke and frostbite is important, and the negative thought from wearing one item of tainted apparel (-3) is smaller than any of the negative thoughts from being too hot or too cold.

Animals

Tribal starts begin with three random animals. If you're lucky, you may get one capable of hauling or even a pack animal. Some or all of them may start already bonded. The list of animals has all the details on what animals can be trained to do, and which produce resources. If you have a resource-producing animal or one which can be trained to haul, it can be very valuable. Make sure you enable any training you want your animals to have, and consider carefully how to set their allowed zones. Wild predators can hunt your tame animals for food, particularly the small ones. Keep those bonded Yorkies, cats and monkeys close to home!

You may need to slaughter some animals for food if your biome has harsh winters, so it's best to keep even nonessential, unbonded animals alive as long as you can. Slaughtering uses the medical skill; if possible, have one of your doctors do it. The experience is small, but it actually benefits them and isn't as much use to your animal handlers.

All animals except wargs can eat pemmican and cooked meals as well as kibble, even if the meal's ingredients conflict with the animal's diet. Wargs must eat raw meat or corpses. If there's an animal you want to keep, be sure to set its zone restriction so it has access to food. For example, wargs should always have access to the dumping zone where you bring corpses, while herbivores should always be in an area with plenty of vegetation to eat.

If an animal has been successfully trained to haul, it may be a good idea so set its zone to unrestricted. The benefit of having it occasionally haul things which your human haulers don't have time for far outweighs the fact that it can go in and out of your fridge or track dirt on the floors. Plus, if an animal hauler takes away raider corpses after a fight, your human haulers may be able to avoid some of the mood penalties from handling the bodies. Hauling animals which are larger predators themselves, such as huskies, cougars and wargs, are less likely to be hunted by wild predators.

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  Betty the cougar, helping my colonists avoid "Observed corpse" bad thoughts.

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  Way to go, Betty! Keep up the good work.

The next step

Once you have built an all-in barrack shelter and harvested your first crops, you should look making small step over all improvements.

Research

Research is a high priority and should begin as soon as you can spare a colonist to the task. Building a simple research bench within the first few days is not a bad idea. If you can't spare someone to full-time research, having a colonist who can multitask between research and a periodic duty such as animal training or hunting will let you start making progress even before your food supply is stable.

Due to their low starting tech level, research costs for tribes are doubled or tripled on most Industrial and Hi-tech projects. With the exception of Smithing and related projects, neolithic and medieval technologies do not have a research penalty. This means you can access them quickly to get your colony on its feet.

If you have more than one researcher, setting one on the day shift and another on the night shift can speed up your progress.

• Stonecutting will let you build a stonecutter's table. Stone blocks are a must for constructing strong, non-flammable walls without using up steel. They are also great for making small sculptures, which have decent trade value even for crafters with modest skills.
• Complex clothing will let you make temperature-resistant clothing such as parkas for cold weather and dusters for hot weather. In a biome with extreme temperatures, this is a priority. Lack of protection from intense heat or cold can ruin your colonists' health, productivity and mental state and potentially kill them.
• After Stonecutting and Complex clothing, you may wish to prioritize upgrading your weaponry. It will be a long time before you're able to craft your own guns. Research Smithing to make better melee weapons and great bows. The Fueled smithy also allows making Simple helmet for only 40 steel, an upgrade from war masks.
• Then Plate armor for better protection against enemies who do have guns.
• Complex furniture is very valuable before you have electricity. Building vents, fueled stoves, tool cabinets and beds will help you keep your colonists healthier and more productive in the early game.

After taking care of the basics, Electricity is your main goal, immediately followed by Batteries, immediately followed by Air conditioning. Then you can build a freezer to keep your food from spoiling, and keep those coolers running frozen even during eclipses or times with very little wind. Once you have a freezer, which industrial and higher technologies to research first will vary a lot depending on your biome and play style.

Construction

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 at first. When you do research Complex furniture, save those bedrolls for use by your caravans.

In the first few days, you may need to keep your stockpile outdoors. Keeping this within six tiles of your shelter's walls will let you put a roof over it. Roofs are free and reduce the rate of items' deterioration (though they don't help food from spoiling).

A food storage area is an absolute must. Planning early how to make your fridge both well defended from the outside and easily accessible from the inside will pay off in the long run. Passive coolers lower temperature to a minimum of 17C, which will give you an extra day or two of storage for raw meats before they spoil, and an extra few days for meals. A single entrance with an airlock system (door, empty space, second door, with walls on both sides) can help maintain the coolest temperature you can create.

The exception to this is an extra door or vent to the outside in the winter, if your biome has winter, to let you take advantage of the natural cold to temporarily freeze your food. Double walls also help retain temperature. Stone or metal for the outer layer and wood for the inner layer can work just fine before you've researched Electricity, since you don't have to worry about Zzztt events setting the walls on fire from the inside.

Room arrangements in general should minimize the distance colonists need to travel between tasks. The bedroom areas should provide easy access to the dining room, the kitchen should be near the fridge, the workshop should be close to the materials stockpile, etc. If you don't want to spend the space and resources to make individual bedrooms, a large barrack with a couple pieces of art of normal quality or better can be impressive enough to avoid penalties if it's kept clean. (However, your pawns will still suffer from disturbed sleep, which stacks up to -3.) In the early and midgame, a combined dining room / kitchen / workshop can be very effective. The space required to hold all these functions will make it easier to keep this room impressively spacious even before you have art. It's also helpful to centralize temperature control devices such as passive coolers and campfires as much as possible. Because neolithic temperature control uses so much wood, having a high priority dedicated stockpile just for wood very close to the entrance to your living and working space can save time for your haulers.

Walls around your growing zones will help protect them from raiders, fires spread from lightning strikes, and herbivorous wild animals. You may be able to get away with building fewer walls if the terrain allows you to have one or more sides of your growing zone bordered by a natural firebreak. (However, this will still leave your fields accessible to raiders, who will try to set them on fire.) Some examples include ancient asphalt road, rough stone or a river. For obvious reasons, walls around your crop fields should be stone, or steel at minimum.

Defense

It's never too early to think about security. As you won’t have gun turrets for a long time, you may 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 traps could be useful too. Just remember that colonists have a low chance of activating the traps and severely wounding themselves, so either put them in a checkerboard pattern or include shortcuts with doors for colonist access. You'll want to edit the allowed zone for your animals to make sure they're not allowed in the areas where you've set up spike traps.

Even in the first few days, even if you're short on steel, a few wooden spike traps in any narrow passageway can be used for defense by having your colonists flee across the area where they're set up. A natural choke point such as a rock formation near the ruin you're camping out in is ideal, but a stockpile zone near your walls set to hold stone chunks and/or stone blocks can also get the job done. Stone chunks give 50% cover, and also work as a fire break if the stockpile is at least 4 tiles wide. Although your first raid will always be a single human, animals turning manhunter in revenge or hunting your colonists for food can happen anytime. Wood spike traps do half the damage of steel spike traps. But wood is cheap and plentiful unless you're in an extreme biome, so it may be more efficient in the beginning.

If you have a pawn who spends a lot of their time in your campsite, such as a cook, crafter or researcher, it's best that they have a good weapon. An injured colonist fleeing from a raider or maddened animal may need to run back towards the spike traps set up near your base. It makes a big difference to have someone taking potshots at whoever is pursuing them, or running out to give the pursuer a good whack. Some options to consider are a recurve bow for those with decent shooting skill, a club for those with decent melee, or a pila (the neolithic shotgun!) for those with neither.

Raiders target your valuables as well as your colonists. If there are no people close enough to attack, they'll burn crops and destroy structures wherever they can easily access them. A cheap method to distract them is to build a table and stool in a couple of different ruins you haven't deconstructed yet, some distance from your base. Raiders will often detour to smash this furniture and set it on fire, buying you time to get your fighters back home to defend your crops and loot. This can serve a second function of giving your colonists an extra table where they can eat food or "relax socially" while they're out hunting, gathering or hauling.

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  The few raiders who didn't get distracted by tables died in the spike traps.

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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