Crate Entertainment has been continuously working on the survival city-builder Farthest Frontier. It’s been a year since the initial Early Access launch, and currently, at v.0.9.0, it looks bound to be released in full soon.
So I decided to do a check-in and see how the game has shaped up. I played most of the game during its pre-release period and haven’t touched it since.
The good news is the game is still fun, in a week I racked up a solid ten-hour worth of playtime on a new save. Though with this being close to release, I am a bit worried of some aspects of the game that haven’t been improved on.
The biggest change I noticed with the current version of Farthest Frontier is it runs dramatically smoother. Though when the town gets big, say over 150 citizens, the performance can drop, especially so the longer you play in a session. It’s an optimisation thing, which is usually really worked at the later stages of development, so I assume there’s still more to come with how the game performance can improve.
My other big complaint was the “flatten terrain” tool and how it works. The tool will not level out an uneven surface, but at least it takes less use of it to get the terrain be smooth to place buildings on.
Mid Mid-Game
The mid-game feels a bit off. Once you reach Town Center Level 2, you’re expected to start making gold by trading. There are now new buildings which you can plop like shrines and temples but they have a maintenance cost to them, just like guard towers. And during this part of the game, you can’t generate a positive cash flow and as such, must rely on trading.
The traders available seem to be too static to my liking. It’s good that they are predictable in what goods they have in stock each time they stop by the trading post. But they also are too predictable in what they want to purchase. I find that some items that you can stock for trade have no buyers whatsoever- I have an abundance of greens and beans sitting all pretty in stock but have never been moved since because there’s never a willing buyer. Once you get the production line of goods that the handful of traders want, then you will quickly be swimming in money.
There’s one other oddity regarding trading and gold. I have an instance where I was in the middle of upgrading my trading post and then a raid happened and unfortunately, they plundered all the gold ingots that were placed to build the upgraded trading post. I can’t undo the upgrade process, and I’m a couple of gold ingots short, and until the upgrade construction is complete I can’t use the trading post to get more gold. There’s probably some other workaround for this, but this example is to show the roughness of the midgame as your small settlement transitions into a town where money becomes an integral part of building a safe and thriving city.
The UI is still something I struggle against. The design sensibility here feels like it’s from the 2000s, which is fine if you’re nostalgic for all the great PC games of that era. But it does throw me off from time to time. R is a hotkey to open the resource key, as rotate gets shoved to Tab by default (you can change the key bindings). Switching traders in the Trading screen requires you to hunt for a text (not even in a box) which can be hard to find on the first try. There are four overview panels that are tabbed together, but the window size is all different and can be disorienting. Most of my disorienting experience comes from menu items not being anchored in the same place every time. It will become second nature once you grasp it. But jumping back in after a year of not playing makes me feel stupid again trying to figure out the quirky UI.
On another note, I find that the overall game balance on the default difficulty feels easier than before. The new save I made had no wolf dens, there were only a few deaths by surprise bear attacks (it’s always silly to see a bear mauling a person driving a cart, or when bears attack the raiding raiders). And citizens just don’t immediately die of starvation if they lack a month’s worth of food. The raids are properly paced out too. There’s plenty of time before they come knocking, seemingly always in the direction where your defence is the weakest (as in, the part of town with no defensive walls).
I think the late-game additions where you can build deep mines that can mine infinite resource (balanced out by how slow the resources can be mined compared to shallow but finite source) is swell. The spiritual aspect is okay, though I don’t find it impacting much of my usual gameplay with or without it.
Closing Thoughts
This check-in has been me rambling about why I am particularly not satisfied with the state of Farthest Frontier right now. But it comes from a place of love. I am still enjoying my time building and watching the settlement grow over the years. And I am still surprised how much time I lost in a single sitting of this game, it’s a great timesink that rewards your patience and fortitude in balancing workers and resources to ensure the folks have enough to live and can survive the elements.
The devs can take their sweet time to get the full release of Farthest Frontier just right. Content-wise it’s solid, though I welcome any more additions. It’s a matter of tightening things up and getting some optimisation work done.
As far as survival city-builders go, Farthest Frontier is already a great one, and it can only get better from here.