Ginger: Beyond the Crystal

Building houses requires building materials, and unfortunately unlike blue crystals, these are not in abundance. There are four different building materials, and you can see your totals if you pause the game. Wood is the most common, followed by stone, then the bag of gold, and then the cubical pile of cloth is the rarest. Here are all the ways you can get building materials:

1) Scattered around each town - there are building materials scattered around the open world of each town in two ways: out in the open for you to collect, or platform to collect, and then locked in a spot where you need to use a specific outfit to access the material. The former materials are visible on your map. Pull it up with and you can see building materials in colored circles around the area. Definitely collect all of these in each town. The latter type aren't visible on your map and you can just collect these as you come across them. Since they aren't on your map, don't waste time poring over the whole town to find them, but definitely don't pass one up if/when you find them.

2) Scattered/hidden in each world - each world in each town has some building materials scattered around it, sometimes hidden in corners or in areas not immediately visible with the static camera. These are often very easy to collect and should be picked up throughout your playthrough.

3) Quest rewards - all of the quests that you can complete in each town give building materials as rewards, and often a decent amount of them, such as three pieces of wood or three stones. This is a huge source of building materials. Unfortunately the quests are mind numbingly simple and repetitive, but thankfully they are so easy that each one doesn't take more than a minute to do. Refer to the "Starting the adventure" achievement solution for more information on quests.

As far as actually building the houses, you have to walk up to a broken house and press to bring up the build menu. You can choose from four house types to build on that plot. Refer to the "Supreme builder" achievement solution to make sure you meet those requirements while building all the houses in every town.

Unfortunately there isn't a way to see where you still have houses left to build. The town map doesn't show which houses are built and which ones are still broken, so if you still have houses left, you have no choice but to run around town and check all the houses to see which are built and which are broken. As far as knowing how many houses you have left in a given town, the achievement tracker for each town will give you an indication of how close you are to unlocking the achievement, which will indicate approximately how many houses you have left.

As you play through the first town, Lowleen Town, you'll find you're always in need of more building materials, and you'll finish everything else there is to do there and you'll still only have around half of the houses built. Don't worry about that now. Just move on and continue playing the game. Later towns have more quests and you can therefore get more building materials. To put it in perspective, when I finished everything in Crater Peaks, I had enough building materials to build all the houses in Crater Peaks and then also go back to Lowleen Town to build all the houses I had left there. So don't worry about trying to farm building materials before you finish all of the worlds and all of the quests. I know it will seem long and boring doing all of those quests, but you'll need the building materials for sure.

After I had done every single quest, beaten the game, and collected all of the hub world building materials, I had still only built around half of the houses in Bleepside Lake, so I needed to grind for building materials. The absolute best level I found for this was the Honey Bees level. This is the southwestern-most level in Lowleen Town. This level takes only around 2 minutes to play through and will net you a lot of building materials:

• There's a chest up behind the rock at the start. This always contained a bag of gold for me
• There's a piece of wood at the bottom left corner right at the start.
• There are 3 pieces of wood along the bridges during the level
• There is a spider web by the highest level. Behind it was either a stone or wood for me
• Before heading up to the highest tier, you can go down to a blimp and take it left. This was always a stone for me
• At the end, after collecting the honey, there are two pieces of wood by where the red crystal comes. Make sure you grab them before leaving the level

I had more than enough cloth by the time I finished everything else, so I didn't need to grind it anywhere. You'll typically need 2-3 times more wood per house than the other materials, so I found this level great for farming wood as well as getting some stone and a bag of gold each time.