Welcome to the Helia Moon Research Project, Grand Commander. You’ve been promoted from shovel duty to head terraformer of Scorchlands, a charming logistical puzzle of a city builder that has you fine-tuning colonies to move resources with efficiency, fending off production bottlenecks like the plague, and teaming up with your feathered flock to do battle with lava slugs.
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If you stick around long enough you’ll craft new, excitingbiomesfull of precious resources to fuel your terraforming ambitions. As is the case with most good city builders, Scorchlands will have you walking for a while before you run. But with a few tips to get you started, you’ll be aiming your lasers with precision, stockpiling big surpluses, and cruising through your tech tree in no time.
10Don’t Let Mirrors Overcomplicate Things
At face value, mirrors aren’t a particularly complex part of Scorchlands: use them to reflect your transportation lasers toward destinations that aren’t directly in their path. In practice, though, this is easier said than done.
Not only do you need to consider the distance of the mirror from the lasers, you must also plan the angle at which it intersects the beam. Once you’ve spent a few frustrating minutes building, repositioning, rotating then destroying a mirror, you might choose to abandon them altogether. Once you progress into the later stages of the game, you won’t really have a choice but to use them, but while you’re familiarizing yourself with Scorchlands, you should be able to get away with planning your logistics around line-of-sight laser connections.
9Plan Colony Placement Around Lasers
Lasers are the glue that holds your Scorchlands colonies together. They’re the bright, shining nodes of your logistics network that keep the right materials moving to the right destinations without disruption. So it pays dividends to prioritize their continued functionality when planning your way to total terraforming transcendence.
Even though you won’t need lasers to make your first few tech tree upgrades, once you do, try building thembeforeyou choose the location of the colony you need to transfer material to or from. In other words, let your laser placement choose your colony placement, not vice-versa. This will ensure there are no line-of-sight obstructions, minimizing the need for mirrors.
8Watch Out For Laser Quirks
While Scorchlands generally runs without hiccups, keep an eye out for minor quirks in the way resources are allocated in colonies and lasers. For example, if you notice that the amount of a given resource in a colony doesn’t match the amount being delivered to it by a laser, try removing and re-adding those resources from the incoming laser.
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On occasion, it also appears that if you’ve upgraded the transferring colony’s production capacity while the transfer was already happening, those newly available resources sometimes won’t appear as available for transfer. Performing the remove and re-add technique should fix this issue as well.
7Don’t Be Afraid To Rebuild
If you came to Scorchlands looking for high-stakes, nail-biting gameplay, you’ve come to the wrong place. Don’t be mistaken— this resource management-driven colony sim is chock-full of complex logistical challenges that even hardcore lovers of the genre will appreciate, but it’s also merciful.
As a beginner, you’ll have to work through the tutorial and maybe your first few tries at the campaign building some poorly-planned settlements while you master all the mechanics required to collect, move and profit from the landscape’s bounty. Don’t be afraid to tear down everything you built and start over — if you learned from your mistakes, it was time well-spent.
6Place Terraformed Biomes Near Important Colonies
When you unlock your first new biome, you’ll need to choose where to place it. It’s pretty big, and you probably won’t want it to overlap with any of your existing colonies, so you’ll need to find a large empty plot of land to terraform.
It’s also helpful to find a spot on your map that’s within the line of sight of as many of your colonies as possible to ensure that you’ll be able to easily transfer newly-acquired resources between them with the least amount of friction. Scorchlands maps areprocedurally-generated, so your mileage may vary, but generally speaking, the closer your surrounding colonies are to your new biome, the better.
5Don’t Ignore Your Tech Tree
Progressing through your tech tree is necessary for unlocking new biomes to terraform, and you’ll also want to spend your precious tablets on upgrades that make your Scorchlands life a little bit easier.
This is especially true when it comes to combat. Unlocking the ability to spawn additional fighters early on will help you defeat higher level enemies, get to the crystals they’re protecting and claim nearby scorched lands. Claiming scorched land transforms it into buildable terrain and awards you with additional population to spend on new colonies.
4It’s Easier To Rearrange Buildings Than Colonies
Neither is particularly high-stakes, but it’s easier to re-plan the layout of your production workflow within individual colonies than it is to re-plan the location and orientation of one or multiple colonies entirely. So try to devote some extra energy toward planning out colony locations relative both to each other and the resources on your map.
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If you’re updating your intra-colony workflow, it’s probably because you need to improve its resource extraction efficiency or because you need to open up some space for a laser. If this happens more often than you’d like, consider spending some tablets on upgrading your colony radius so you have more tiles to work with.
3There’s Nothing Wrong With Single-Serve Colonies
While you might be tempted to squeeze every last drop of efficiency out of your colonies from the very start, as a beginner, you shouldn’t be afraid of building a few single-serve colonies. You can optimize them for producing a large surplus of a single resource for use across your crafting workflow.
You can either treat each of these single-serve colonies a hub with multiple lasers per colony, delivering portions of their surplus to other settlements, or, depending on the terrain, they can each use a single laser as part of a chain that delivers the surplus through one colony at a time.
2Watch Out For Production Bottlenecks
Scorchlands resources are not stored. Production is ceaseless: one resource supply is always being consumed to produce another, and the only way to progress is to expand your production capacity without creating too many bottlenecks.
Your production is bottlenecked wherever you have a big resource deficit, so the earlier you implement a strategy to keep all of your resources as close to equilibrium as possible, the longer you’ll be able to play without the need to backtrack to find out why you’re having trouble producing more of that shiny new advanced resource you just unlocked.
1New Biomes Require New Workflows
While strategizing about how to maximize production in a new biome, it’s important to remember that different parts of the landscape will contain different resources. Even if your newly-terraformed environment bears a close resemblance to the one that came before, that doesn’t necessarily mean your resource extraction workflow will look the same.
For example, the plateau of the desert biome looks an awful lot like the cliffs of the starting biome, but instead of placing your mines along the sandstone cliff side, you should place them both atop the plateauandon the sand-swept lowland. And while it is possible to create colonies that straddle multiple resource types, until you upgrade your settlement radius, you might have a hard time fitting all the necessary buildings within the available area.
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