First Day - Foundations and Missteps (Patreon)

In continuation from Friday's article on how to maximize success chances and juggle the competing demands of survival, resource generation and monster control when fighting against Prologue (the First Story White Lion- Prolion?) We're now going to drill our way through the First Day and explain some of the actions that are summarized in the 'Visual Guide to the Early Game'.  We'll look at all of the options, the choices that can be made and the situations in which edge cases promote stranger choices.

1. Do Not Innovate Early

I've been through this many times in the past, but innovating in the early game is an absolute trap. Generally you only need to innovate around 10 to 15 times in a settlement's lifespan at most, and you can often 'tutor' out some of the useful innovations either via monster pee (Ammonia/White Lion/Gorm), from timeline Events (Hands of Heat) or other sources such as the Weapon Crafter allowing you to innovate Scrap Smelting. 

Access to all these special ways of innovating, along with only a few key innovations being necessary to success, means that you have plenty of time to get your innovation train running in a few years time, when you have a lot more resources to spare.

Innovating costs a total of four resources; endeavours do count as resources, especially in the first year where you need them to build multiple new locations, aim for an early birth principle and/or seek to create some stone noses.  

What happens if you do innovate? Well at best you're picking either Symposium, Drums or maybe Paint.  Symposium does little to help your chances of success in the LY1 fight, the difference between 2 survival and 3 is minor when you have few ways of gaining more survival (survival gains are primarily gear based in the early game). Drums is the second best choice, but it is an endeavor intensive innovation and you really want to start work on it only when you've gotten the foundation locations up, Paint is the next strongest option, but honestly you don't need Dash until your gear is good enough for L2 White Lions or the L1 Phoenix. They're all luxuries at this stage and costing a massive chunk of what little resource you have available.

Instead; you can be getting +1 weapon, +1 rawhide armor, +1 monster grease/fecal salve/Lucky Charm and either a shot at +1 population, a location unlock or some Stone Noses. 

I've not written much about this piece of gear because we haven't gotten onto the full Support Analysis articles yet, but this support item, which was added in 1.5, is one of the most efficient and useful pieces of gear you can possibly ask for in the early game. It's obvious benefits are protection from brain trauma and additional survival, but it is also a piece of jewelry, which can be the piece stolen by a white lion on a full defeat (protects your Cat's Eye Circlet). Later on these are also very cheap pieces of gear to sacrifice to hunt events that consume gear for potential benefits such the Dark Blacksmith.

So, the price you pay for innovating is absolutely huge, you're losing 3-4 pieces of gear, 0-1 population or 0-1 settlement location unlocks for something that's not going to impact on your showdown success rate very much.

Therefore, don't do it.

2. Principles

We discussed principles last time, but essentially I often spend at least 1x endeavor on trying to gain +1 population and trigger the birth principle (and the other 2-3 are sometimes spent on opening locations or stone noses).  Intimacy is especially a goal if the population is at 14 baseline after the First Story and Prologue fight.

Out of the early principles you can hit in LY1:

• Graves > Cannibalize 
• Survival of the Fittest > Protect the Young*
• Collective Toil = Accept Darkness (There's no 'correct' choice here)

*If you are experienced SotF presents the most power and utility, but you have to understand how to spend rerolls in a frugal manner.

3. Bones

Bones are where you have the widest amount of options early on, there are three excellent choices for weapons, a flex option for head gear that might be picked in edge cases and two weapons that are something of a newbie trap.

The power order for LY1 items from the Bone Smith is:

• Bone Darts
• Bone Sword
• Bone Club
• Skull Helm*
• Bone Axe
• Bone Dagger

*Depends if you have a skull to reduce its cost. It is not worth 2x bone.

Now I'm going to explain my reasoning behind this tier list, because there are a lot of people who want to defend the Bone Axe when it is, at best, an edge case choice for me.

Bone Darts are the overall most efficient and powerful weapon you can choose from the Bone Smith, they cost a single bone and they are a very strong and flexible weapon. The Range on them is absolutely incredible for such an early game item and you absolutely need 1x Bone Darts in order to avoid situations where the White Lion Ground Fights and you have to get savaged by it because either you don't have any Founding Stones or your thrown stones hit the trap/Glorious Mane hit locations.

The downside of Bone Darts is one that can frustrate some people, they have only 1 speed and they are only as accurate as a founding stone (40-50% accuracy). So for players who prefer more speed and accuracy, especially in settlements where Survival of the Fittest has already been chosen, having Bone Blades for options 2-3 is acceptable.

I consider both of these options to be the bog standard ones, and I think the choice very much comes down to playstyle. I will pick Bone Darts over the Blade personally because the darts remain useful for much longer, whereas the Blade tends to be relegated to 'left red affinity' within 1 to 2 lantern years. Outside of that, it's a fine choice for starting off and because the LY1 Fight is one of the most dangerous quarry fights (you are forced into a fight you can't prepare for here) there is nothing wrong with getting a solid throwaway weapon to protect your hunters.

This is the powerhouse choice for a settlement that's really looking to make a statement. The Bone Club is the single most efficient purchase you can make from the Bone Smith  despite its cost of 3x bone. 

This is because this weapon can be used at every level of the game. Early on it's combined with full Rawhide Armor as a Support/Tank; that allows you to use the Headband to control the monster in the turns where you can't hit the monster because of cumbersome.

After that you graduate to Screaming Armor, where you combine this with Slam and the set bonus in order to get around the cumbersome drawback. After that you can either flex onto Phoenix Armor or go straight for Lantern Armor, where it is one of two weapons you load onto your grid (the other one would be a Skullcap Hammer). And you stand in front of the monster and beat that Gold Smoke Knight's face in with Grandpappy's trusty old whacking stick.

It's crazy that you can spend 3x bone early on and basically have one weapon for your hunt party sorted for 30 years. But that's how strong the interactions between the Bone Club and the various armor sets are and if you have a Prologue White Lion who turns out to be full of bones and not much else, this weapon will carry you hard.

There is nothing wrong with the statline on the Bone Axe, but the simple problem with it is the cost. It costs 1x bone and 1x organ, which means that it's the equivalent to a bone blade and a monster grease. You're sacrificing +1 evasion for +1 strength and savage. That's not a good deal at all, if you want 3+ strength you can use the bone darts and savage is a weak ability type in the early game a lot of the time - it's unpredictable and in essence an inferior version of Devastating 1.  

If the Bone Axe had mid game longevity the way the Bone Club does, then this assessment would change, but it is a weapon type that is not worth pursuing in the early game unless you have access to the Greater Gaxe (Gorm) and even then you should just skip on the frail Bone Axe and go hunt a Gorm straight away because the Greater Gaxe tends to be very simple to build.

Not a bad weapon, but just too expensive and as such it's an edge case option at best for settlements that have zero hide and need to burst monsters down - but the Bone Club is better at that.

Finally we have the Skull Helm and the Bone Daggers. The Daggers represent every problematic weapon we have very nicely, they have high speed and terrible strength. When you use these you tend to just get the monster savaging around with a lot of reactions and hitting the trap more often without actually scoring wounds. There are a few good Daggers in the game, these are not it, be patient if you want to stab things!

The Skull Helm is another edge case, if you're paying 2x bone for this, it's too expensive, but if you happen to have drawn a skull resource then it's worth considering, especially in a campaign with Brawler Armor (yes if you play people of the skull then Skull Helms also become very useful). So this one is one to remember about in situations where you're short on hide. It's very durable for the portion of the game you get it in.

4. Hide

Hide is very simple, you are spending it on Rawhide Armor at this stage, eventually you want 1x Bandages, but that's not important until just before the Butcher turns up. The White Lion and Antelope are not typically heavy bleed monsters and I think you can grab Bandages in LY2 or 3 most of the time.

The order in which I typically purchase hide is as follows:

• Head
• Body
• Arms
• Legs
• Waist

And the objective is to get a complete armor set before starting on the next one. So if you're really fortunate and Prologue has been full of 5x hide (or more) get a full set for one survivor, it will massively increase your chances of survival.

Otherwise the useful builds are Head, Body + Gloves/Bone Weapon and Monster Grease. This is often sufficient to allow you to tank the White Lion/Gorm as long as you stick in and around the tall grass or to perform rudimentary support with the Headband.

5. Organs

Organs are relatively basic in your choices, at least 1x organ will be spent on Monster Grease and often it ends up being 2x organs on the grease, and the third organ will become a Fecal Salve (don't sleep on this item, especially with how powerful it is against the Butcher).

However there is a build I use in the early game if I have triggered Graves, have a lot of organs and I gained the +1 luck from the Graves Story Event:

The Bone Darts can be gloves, and you can scale up further with more rawhide + monster grease if you wish. But this build on the graves +1 luck survivor gives you immediate access to a survivor who can fist & tooth the monster with a 8+ chance of a critical wound. That's very solid, especially if this survivor has +1 strength from the prologue fight and +1 strength from Survival of the Fittest. 

Pushing like this allows you to leverage your way into more resources a year earlier than most settlements would have a Deadly weapon online. Later on this survivor will take up using the Katar for their main DPS weapon while training Fist & Tooth with an occasional punch.

6. Other notes

If you are playing with Spidicules and you do not want to trigger an early death principle, make sure that you do not have more than one single male in the entire settlement with 1+ Hunt XP. The Young Rivals event will kill one of your two males with 1+ Hunt XP during lantern year 2. This is a huge setback if you do not play for it, especially if you have 2 males with 2+ Hunt XP because you've used them in both the prologue and the LY1 hunt.

Going ahead; The White Lion is your best choice to hunt for Hide, the Antelope is more bone based but has an amazing armor set, tends to drop far too many resources from critical wounds and contains one of the best 'buffs' in the game (Blood Paint). But the Stone Circle costs additional resources to unlock, so you might just want to slap kitty cats around for a while.

If you are using the Gorm expansion; it is a very acceptable choice to go after in LY1, especially because of how it diversifies your weapon path while still (eventually) giving you access to a Hit Location scouting item (Wisdom Potion). The Gorm trends you towards Axes, Grand Weapons, Shields and Daggers whereas the White Lion trends you towards Spears, Katars and Bows. 

Your first goal is to survive and slap down the Butcher, weapons with Strength 3+, evasion gear, Bandages, Whisker Harp and the Fecal Salve all help with this. AI Control is not as strong against the Butcher as other monsters but Hit Location Manipulation is a lot stronger than normal - so much so that if you have good evasion, bandages, good weapons and the Cat's Eye Circlet you should be aiming to Deathblow for the increased chance of an early Mask Maker.

As always, what I've written here is not the one, true, path to success. It is simply a well trodden and proven one that gives you a strong foundation. If you have a strong foundation to your settlement then your survivors will grow enough to give you a deep base of power that you can do fun things from. A lot of the really wild, crazy and 'non-meta' things require the same basic steps before you can deviate and experiment. Grow strong, then diversify.