The Farthest Frontier review

Priorities. This is what managing a medieval city is all about. Farms are crucial for long-term survival, but fishing and gathering make more sense if people need food quickly. Chopping logs into boards allows construction of recent buildings to begin, but if people are freezing in their homes, the wood must be turned into firewood instead.

And the assignment of workers to extract resources from nearby ruins should be stopped if – and here’s just one quick example – a giant rabid bear is rampaging through the city, brutally mauling everyone to death. Yes, a killer bear could confuse the city’s priorities true Quick. Forget fishing and firewood: it’s now every citizen’s job to find something edged and become an expert bear stabber.

Hungry wildlife is just one of the many, many dangers you may encounter in the Farthest Frontier survival game, where starvation, heatwaves, disease, fires, bandit attacks, and even bee stings can send your settlers to an early grave. (New priority: build a graveyard. Big one.)

But Crate Entertainment’s city building is not only about disasters and crises, it is also a deep and sophisticated management simulation in which you take your settlers from the beginnings of poverty and dirt roads to economic stability and (bear-free) cobblestone streets.

Town halls

The first year of Farthest Frontier is like walking on a knife’s edge. It’s all about preparing for a harsh winter: building enough houses but not so much that you waste wood and labor, stockpiling enough food but not so much that it spoils, directing your scouts to scour the map for resources but not venturing all the way to the bandit camp or wolf den because you absolutely can’t risk fighting at the beginning games. You have very few citizens, almost no food, and losing one settler to an animal attack or accident is a major setback.

Over the next few years, this tension gives way to, well, a bit of boredom. Early Farthest Frontier is characterized by leisurely progress, perhaps a little too leisurely: when there are only a handful of settlers waiting for trees to be cut down or hunters waiting to kill deer, there is nothing to do but press the rapid forward button and sit back and watch. Progress towards anything beyond basic production is narrow behind milestones such as population growth, and this can take time.

However, things move quickly once you reach the second level and more of the game’s nearly 200 different buildings become available. Much of the fun in the mid-game comes from choosing a specialization for your city, a direction in which to direct your efforts. In one city I specialized in bees and mass-produced honey from apiaries all over the city, which was like liquid gold because I could turn it into beer and medicine and sell it to traveling traders.

Radiant coatings

In my last city, my scouts discovered something better than liquid gold: real gold. The gods of the procedural map generation smiled on me by placing several gold deposits just outside my city. Who needs to tax citizens or sell products to traders when I can literally mine and mint my own money? I couldn’t see the look on my citizens’ faces, but I bet they were excited that their lives and the lives of their children would be spent working in the mines.

My lust for gold was quickly punished, however, as I hastily built gold mines long before I built anything else, such as a proper defense for my now wealthy city. It wasn’t long before bandits came down from the trees and attacked my town, taking with them more gold than I thought would fit in their pockets.

I know the raid system is probably just a game of checking my city for valuables and flipping the “bandit” switch to “on” when it sees I have something worth stealing, but the raids in Farthest Frontier feel surgically planned. One raid took place while most of my city was busy putting out a fire (I’d like to think it was organized by a bandit as a distraction), and the second took place right after I moved all my gold from the vault, a stone building surrounded by stone walls, to my trading depot, a wooden building surrounded by nothing.

After I built walls around my trading post, the next raid hit my foundry: the place where I melt gold ore into bars. Now I also need to build walls around it and maybe actually invest in some guard towers and cavalry. Good news, miners, some of you can now put down your pickaxes and spend your life fighting bandits to the death. My citizens must love me.

Crop circles

One of the most engaging parts of Farthest Frontier is the production chains. I decided to focus on the orchards that produce fruit: making people content means giving them more to eat than just dried deer and berries. It seemed elementary enough: build an arborist building, wait for the trees to grow, harvest the fruit, profit. The problem eventually became apparent: the fruit rotted much faster than other crops, so it wasn’t worth it.

No problem: I’ll just replace some of the fruit with preserves. How tough can it be? Well, I had to build a glass factory to make the glass jars, which required a sand pit to collect the sand to make the glass, but also required hefty tools to build the actual production building. Making hefty tools meant building a blacksmith’s forge, which required iron bars, which meant building a foundry, which needed ore, which needed a mine, which needed… hey, soldiers, put down those swords and grab your pickaxes! You’re miners again!

It took years –years— to achieve all this, to be able to turn peaches into peach jam. But finally completing this kind of project, setting up production chains, creating space in my city for buildings, and attracting enough recent residents to do all this work is a lot of satisfaction, a lot of satisfaction, without destroying all my other tiny industries.

You can observe these production chains in real time because all these resources and products exist in the world, not just as numbers on a ledger. Do you have a trader in your trading post interested in buying smoked fish?

It doesn’t happen magically: someone has to take a wheelbarrow or cart, load it with fish and take it from the warehouse to the trading post. It may be tempting to release all soldiers until there is a military emergency, but they cannot be immediately reinstated: they will have to physically go from wherever they are to collect their weapons and put on their armor before they can return to their posts. It’s fun to just sit back for a while and watch everything move around the city and see how the place you’ve built actually functions.

Farming is another sophisticated pleasure. Whenever I start a recent town, I actually kill time until I have a immense enough population to be able to turn about 20 people into farmers. If you’ve ever wanted to ignore the entire city while obsessing over optimal crop rotation and spoilage rates, tinker with the clay-sand mix in your soil, monitor weed levels and frost tolerance, and loudly make dramatic pronouncements like, “Turn on the turnips, we’re going all out on leeks this year!” this is your game.

Like the beginning of the game, it feels a bit leisurely, once my town reaches around 500 people and the economy stabilizes, the pace slows down and I look forward to a recent challenge. Farthest Frontier supports cities of thousands of people (if your hardware is powerful enough), but I’ve never felt the need to grow that immense. I wouldn’t say I’m bored, but leading a functioning city isn’t as engaging as building it from nothing.

Farthest Frontier has a lot of what I look for in a survival city builder: sophisticated production and farming systems, tough challenges balanced with moments of relaxation, and plenty of customization options (you can turn off bandit raids, hostile wildlife, and even diseases if you want a quieter experience). There is enough variety that each of my cities (I’m already in my third) feels like it has its own distinct plot and story. I’ve built Bee City and Gold Gulch, and I can’t wait to develop an identity for my recent town… as long as my settlers survive another bear attack.