Against the Stormis an indieroguelitecity-builder game that tasks you with building, maintaining, and improving a settlement, with the aim of making your villagers happy to build up your Reputation, all while the Queen loses her patience with you…
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To help you with this are Cornerstones — powerful perks you get at the beginning of a map and after every Storm phase that can fundamentally shape how you manage your settlement and deal with the challenges presented to you. All the Cornerstones are useful, but here are the ones you should definitely pick if you should encounter them.
This game is in Early Access and details might change in the full release.
Effect
Gain two insects every time Woodcutters cut down two trees.
Wood is a ubiquitous resource in Against the Storm, and you literally can’t complete a settlement without gathering quite a lot of it. Food is almost as important and unfortunately, not nearly as plentiful.
With the Woodpecker Technique, you get both, and at a pretty decent rate at that. This ability allows you to get insects even if they’re not native to the biome.As food sources, they’re pretty damn flexible.They can be eaten as is, but can also be used as an ingredient in a few complex foods, most notably Jerky, which is enjoyed by almost every species of settler. If your pantry is full, insects are also used in Pigment recipes, which are used in a few different craft recipes.
8Calming The Forest
For every two completed Dangerous and Forbidden Glade Events, Hostility lowers by -50.
Hostility is a strong negative stat, and while the Queen’s Impatience is what’s likely to end your settlement in a loss, Hostility will probably be the stat that starts the snowball that ends your run. Worse yet, there are many ways to raise it and very few ways to lower it.
Calming the Forest is one of those ways, turning an action that normally increases your Hostility — discovering a Glade — into a net Hostility loss, provided the Glade is Dangerous or Forbidden and you resolve the associated Glade Event. Which, given the consequences of those, you’ll want to do anyway.
All houses have room for one more villager.
Housing is an especially important need to meet for the denizens of your settlement. In addition to giving a boost to their resolve, being housed protects villagers from some Mysteries, like Hailstorms, which has a chance to kill anyone who isn’t housed every 15 seconds for the duration of the Storm.
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Even so, one extra capacity might not seem like much, until you realize that species-specific housing, which is far more effective at making villagers happy, only has a capacity of two. Getting this upgrade is a full 50 percent efficiency boost to every house you’ve built.
Gain one Global Resolve for every two Impatience Points.
The value of this Cornerstone is inverse to how well you’re doing, but even if you’re doing relatively well, this can be quite helpful. If you’re having a bad time, Rebellious Spirit can even out the score, and if your Reputation is high enough, it can even push you into a win.
There’s a grace period before you lose at max Impatience (which can be increased at the Smoldering City), but if you reach max Reputation, it’s an instant win. Even if you manage to keep your Impatience levels low, you get a small background bump to your Global Resolve if Impatience is at least at two.
Gain three barrels for every ten planks produced.
Free resources is always a good thing in a game where you’re constantly generating and managing them. Of that type of perk, this one is the best. Planks are a stable building material and are used in most construction recipes, and you’ll be doing a lot of construction, especially early on.
The fact that this Cornerstone produces barrels is even better, since all three items you can use for liquid recipes — jars, waterskins, and barrels — are a pain to make. On any given run, you won’t know if liquid recipes are even on the table, and as such, you’re likely not going to be prepared if they show up. This Cornerstone guarantees that you’ll have some form of liquid storage should liquid recipes show up, and even if they never do, you can effectively sell the barrels for pure profit.
Grain Bags (Grain)
Meat Specialization (Meat)
More a ‘style’ of Cornerstone than any specific one, scaling production buffs all have the same ability — namely that, after you produce a certain item 25 times, you add +1 to every time it’s produced. You get more and more efficient as you gather items as these Cornerstones proc, with your progress really only being limited by exhausting nodes on the map or running out of other related resources. If those resources happen to be produced by the trees, running out becomes a non-issue.
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Since there are so many types of resources to get, and what’s available in any given map varies from run to run, all of this type of Cornerstone can be quite powerful. Just make sure you pick ones that are related to items you’re able to get on the map you’re on, and as early as possible to fully take advantage of them.
Woodcutters’ Camp production is 35 percent quicker.
You’ll need tochop a lot of woodin any given run in Against the Storm, since you’ll need it a lot, from fuel to infrastructure. And even if you find yourself somehow with a large surplus of wood, you’ll still need to cut down trees to free up some real estate or, more importantly, to open up new Glades.
Though this Cornerstone is not exactly flashy or game-changing, it’s still a strong straight-up buff. Since so much of what you do in the game relies on you chopping down trees, you’re not just chopping down trees 35 percent faster, but speeding up other aspects of your settlement management as well.
2Safe Haven
-40 Hostility for every Hearth upgraded to Neighborhood (Level 2) or higher.
Hostility, as you might be able to judge by its name, is bad. The higher your hostility levels are, the less happy your villagers are. There are also detrimental Mysteries that are triggered at certain levels of Hostility that can make your life even worse.
What’s great about Safe Haven is that Hearths already lower Hostility some, but with this perk and getting each Hearth to Neighborhood status — a relatively easy thing to do — you more than double each Hearth’s calming powers from a -30 Hostility to a whopping -70.
Sahilda’s Secret Cookbook (Every ten Pie makes ten Jerky.)
Zhorg’s Secret Ingredient (Every ten Pickled Goods makes ten Skewers.)
One of the more difficult of your villagers’ needs to meet is that of complex food, which falls right below service needs like religion and cleanliness in terms of how hard they are to maintain. The amount of infrastructure you need to getpies, biscuits, skewers, and the like regularly going means that you’ll be planning and building for a bit before you get it up and running.
With how much Resolve and extra food they give, however, you can’t afford to not invest in Complex foods — ideally as many types as you can manage to appease the diverse tastes of your villagers. To that end, these two Cornerstones, and ones like it, are a veritable gold mine. Not only do they effectively double your food production every time you produce ten of a certain food, but it also diversifies the food you make. Get them both if you can, but never pass up the opportunity to grab even one.
