Surviving the Aftermath

Bare bones general guide:

Choose a scientist and a scavenger at first. Hope for a scout soon after. You can get fighters later. Specialists will frequently show up with random groups of survivors.

Never turn survivors away. They provide more work, and if they die... there'll be more later.

Send the scientist out looking for science points. Send the scavenger out to look for goods, but focus (when you can) on rare earth metals, components, and electronics. There's no limit to how much they can carry, so fill them up. (Also take 4 different kinds back for an achievement.)

Build maintenance depots where you have things that get polluted, or that break down easily. The front gate is one place, the outhouse is another. Maintenance depots are relatively cheap, and once you get machinery running, will be indispensable.

I researched in this basic order. Switch it up if you see a more pressing need.

Resources: Centralized Repairs => Metal Scavenging. You need the resources. Hold off on Handicraft.

Food: Skinning => Ice Fishing => Wider Piers => Hunting Crew => Survival Skills. Hold off on farming until later. You will want to go through Handicraft to get to Bartering once you find some societies and have goods to sell.

Safety: Guardians => Frontier Outposts. Upgrade the Guard Posts to show the map further, and then break them down and build new ones further out. These are primarily to let you see.
-Build Frontier Outposts soon. When you get a few specialists, send them out to settle areas to scavenge (science points are the priority FIRST, then fun boxes because of the income potential and the use in later buildings).
-Secure Storing => Reinforced Gate => Hazmat Engineering. Get rid of pollution for camp space.
-Flushing => Leadership. This helps you clear the map quickly.
-Hold off on weapons for a while.

Community: Bunk Beds => Education => Communal Living => Interior Walls.. I never used crowded tents or upscaled tents. I just built a tent city. It'll get you through until you get up to improved tenements (10 person capacity instead of 3) and two-story housing.

I saved Infrastructure for later. I didn't have a need for water in buildings or water storage until later. I got by without power for a while, too. I basically used wells and, later, drilled wells for a lot of my water. Later I moved to getting it from lakes, and much later the industrial ones that require power. Remember that wells do NOT freeze over, unlike lake production.


After this point it was a case of building my settlement. With the gate, bandits will be held back. In the later game, I only had one gate breach with a fortress. Mostly they dropped the health down to 22%, and I used a maintenance depot to auto-repair.

Send scouts out to open new sectors. Keep looking for potential scavenging sites.

Once you find other societies, start making trade runs. Trade for resources you need, like metal. If you can trade items with the gold symbol (buy or sell), do this. This improves your reputation.

These are just some basic tips. Hopefully they help a bit to get you rolling.