Terra Nilis a game about revitalizing barren wastelands, turning them into thriving ecosystems with new flora and fauna. It’s your job to leave the place completely untouched by human or robotic hands. While the game is designed to be essentially a peaceful, slow-living sort of deal, there are also puzzle elements that can make the experience a bit more challenging.
RELATED:Best City Building Games Of All Time
These tips are designed as a way to help you get into the game and maximize the relaxation without worrying too much about the ins and outs of the puzzles.
You’ve Got Limited Resources
One of the mistakes we made early on was to drop Irrigators and Toxin Scrubbers all over the place without really paying attention to your resources - that’s the “leaf” resource in the top left of the screen.
The best way to start rejuvenating the wasteland is to place down the Turbines on every available rock, and then place down Toxin Scrubbers to cover as much as the territory as you can.You can place Toxin Scrubbers on the edge of the allowed area, so they slightly overlap, which helps maximize your coverage.See what we mean in the image below.
You want to cover as much area as possible before you start placing down the Irrigators so that you can maximize the returns on your leaf investment. Creating a grid (like the image below), means you’ll get the most out of placing them down.
You can get the most coverage by using the Irrigator pieces like a Tetris puzzle, using the L-shaped pieces to create squares of coverage. You can do this by pressingRto rotate the selection. If you run out of available spots for Toxfin Scrubbers, you’ll need to use theExcavatorand theCalcifier.Use the Excavator to dig trenches to fill with water, and then use the Calcifier to create rock so you can place down more Turbines to cover areas that were previously unreachable.
RELATED:Best Simulation Games
How To Unlock All Animal Habitats
Each animal requires a unique habitat to thrive in. You can see this by using the animal scanner to check each requirement for each animal. It will show you what’s missing in the menu. Once you’ve reached the final stage (the recycling stage) you can mess around with the environments to your heart’s content, as you probably have access to a lot of Leaf now.
Don’t be afraid to destroy things, set things on fire, or otherwise alter the landscape.It’s also a good idea to try and complete the “Optional Goals” in the order that they appear in the drop-down menu, as this can give you some structure and hopefully set you up to have the appropriate temperature and humidity for the animals to survive in your new bountiful wilderness.
You can destroy other animal habitats to create the perfect habitat for another animal. The game only requires you to have 3 unlocked to “complete” the level, and if you remove one (say, by destroying a forest to make room for an empty field), you will still have technically unlocked that animal.
Recycling Is Annoying, But You Can Make It Easier
The recycling stage can be a bit annoying, especially when you start having to deal with Monorails on the later maps in the game.
On the first map, you canuse the Recycling Silos to recycle buildings nearby and then use the drone to go in and destroy the silos.
On the later maps, with Monorails, you need to build a train networkutilizing the Calcifiers to create rocks to build on. You will need to remove all the buildings working backwards so that the train doesn’t destroy itself.
If you can’t access certain areas with the drone, you canuse the excavator to carve a new water path so that you can get those hard-to-reach buildings.
For later missions, which require you to build Monorails, we recommend you recycle the buildings with the Silos first, then use the Monorails to recycle the Silos.
