Keep your Villagers working hard in Farthest Frontier with these district layouts!
Farthest Frontier rewards efficient road and building locations. The less time your Villagers have to spend walking around, the more they'll be able to produce in a year. Grouping the right buildings together is therefore key to ensuring your economy thrives.
It's not as easy as it sounds – houses need to be kept far from industry, for example, and the local terrain can make it hard to get the exact layout you want. Given the right amount of space, try some of these layouts to help your frontier settlement grow into a bustling town!
Farthest Frontier is in early access, so some buildings listed below may change before the full game launches.
On most maps, you'll need to build long roads to give your Villagers easy access to far-off resources. Even if you build houses for the townsfolk who work far from the Town Center, there will still be plenty of foot traffic as goods are transported back and forth.
Try to build a Temporary Shelter at every crossroads and the midpoint of long thoroughfares. This lets your Villagers take cover if the weather suddenly shifts, reducing the chance that they'll die of exposure. They can also grab a snack from the shelter's food stores, reducing the number of stops they have to make on their trip.
Hunting and fishing are important parts of the early-game economy, and they continue to have a place in the mid- and late game as well. By necessity, they'll usually be at least a short hike from town so that there aren't too many people tromping about scaring the deer away.
Group your Hunter Cabins and Fishing Shacks with a Temporary Shelter, Tannery, and maybe a Storehouse to ensure that your frontierspeople can efficiently ply their trades. You should also have one Smokehouse for every food-producing building at the outpost to preserve the large quantities of meat and fish you'll be producing.
Don't forget to build a well by the water's edge! The workers will appreciate having a clean source of water nearby, and the Tannery can use it when processing hides.
If the outpost has lots of dangerous animals nearby or often finds itself in the path of raiders, it should be fairly easy to encircle with a palisade wall. A Lookout Tower can also grant extra protection, but at that point it might be worth including some permanent housing inside the walls instead of the temporary shelter.
Industrial buildings like Soap Shops and Brickyards need to be at least a short distance from any homes in the area, lest they bring down the local Desirability and prevent houses from upgrading. Grouping all such buildings together in one spot concentrates this effect, giving you free rein to build new neighborhoods elsewhere.
An ideal spot for an industrial quarter is along a road connecting important areas. Since Villagers will be traveling the road frequently anyway, letting them stop to work or pick up goods saves lots of time. A centrally-located Storehouse along the road makes it easy for Laborers and Wainwrights to make their rounds in the area as well.
If you can, put your industrial buildings near the raw materials they need, such as iron mines and clay pits, with a Stockyard nearby to hold all the minerals.
The Trading Post is a high-value target for raiders, so it's important to protect it at all costs. Building it immediately adjacent to your Town Center provides it basic protection, and having a Lookout Tower or two in the area as well should deter most would-be bandits.
As the game progresses, it's also a good idea to build your Barracks near the Trading Post as well. The Town Center is a central location, so having the Barracks nearby makes sense so that your Soldiers can get anywhere in town with reasonable speed.
When you have sufficient iron, construct a Vault to complete the town square. Your gold will be secure inside, and it's near enough that your Traders can pick up and drop off cash as needed.
Historically, crop rotation is a farming technique that's served humans for centuries. The entire farming system in Farthest Frontier is built around the idea, so if you're not familiar with it, you'll learn quickly. Rather than one big field for crops, plant three smaller ones af roughly equal size on similar soil. Each year, two are producing food while the other lies fallow for maintenance. The following year, the fallow field is used for crops and one of the active fields is switched out. This reduces the impact of your farming on the soil without sacrificing productivity.
If your fields are producing grain, build a Granary, Mill, Brewery, and Rat Catcher nearby using the same principles as the Industrial Road entry above. You can bend the rules a little and build a Bakery near homes, since the smell of fresh-baked bread increases Desirability rather than reducing it.
If soil conditions permit, the best way to execute a three-field rotation is to have your two active fields produce different kinds of crops – one vegetable and one grain is a good idea, but you can also do two different types of vegetables (roots and greens, for example). That way, if a crop disease works its way into one field it's unlikely to spread to the others, limiting the impact of the infestation.
Houses require lots of Desirability before they will upgrade, and increasing that attribute is expensive. Therefore, it's best to have as many homes clustered together as possible so that they can all benefit from Decorations, Markets, and other services.
Small Parks and Shrines have the same 3×3 footprint as houses. This means you can build a 9×9 block with eight houses and a decoration in the center. A centrally-located Market, School, or Healers' House can service two to three such blocks, or even more once upgraded.
In the example pictured above, the two diagonally-opposed blocks each have a Shrine, while the middle of the L-shape has a Small Park. Houses can't gain Desirability from multiple copies of the same building, but the Shrines are far enough away from one another that the entire neighborhood is covered.
Matt Arnold is an actor and writer based in New York. A lifelong gamer, he draws on a decade of experience in the tabletop industry. Support your local game store!
