Tropico 4

*This guide can be used for both the "Curse of the Llama" and "Old Faithful" Achievements*

You can get the achievement if you follow the great guide above, if you fancy a lot of grinding and a bit of luck. However, the game's latest DLC: Modern Times makes this achievement rediculously easy to obtain.

First it goes without saying you need the Modern Times DLC (1200 MSP)

Once you've got it, head to the "Modern Times Campaign" and progress to level 4 also called "The Shakes".
This mission places you on an island that has a guaranteed disaster every 12 months (sometimes multiple disasters a year!) If you manage to even finish this mission without obtaining both the "Curse of the Llama" and "Old Faithful" achievements then you must be some kind of wizard.

A few ways to get the achievement even faster: occasionally a scripted event will occur that will give you the opportunity to manually activate or avoid a disaster (obviously activate it).

More specifically for the "Old Faithful" achievement: you will find an important objective (red and yellow ( ! ) marker in the game world) that infinitely spawns and will allow you to automatically cause either an earthquake or volcano eruption for free (obviously choose the volcano). I netted the achievement simply by manually causing the eruptions 3 times (all disasters, regardless of how they are caused, count for this achievement).

All in all I finished the mission, rather quickly, with over 30 disasters occuring, about 10 of them volcano eruptions.

Cheers!

Survive ten disasters

Important You must do this on the same map, these do not rack up over the course of the game. You can however continue playing after your time frame has passed to continue working towards this achievement (thanks SiebeTolsma)

A disaster is either a Oil spill, a Drought, a Volcanic Eruption, A hurricane, Earthquake, A tornado or a Tsunami. (In case you didn't know - I never thought a drought counted but it was my tenth event which popped the achievement for me.)

Create a sandbox map and set all the sliders to make it as easy as possible with the highest possible chances of disasters. Do not enable GOD mode as this blocks ALL achievements.

Personally I earned this on the same map that I did $1m in tourism and a few other achievements as I didn't pick them up during the campaign while racking up some disasters along the way, I passed my time frame goal and continued playing on the island. At the end of getting these achievements I had a pretty established island with a large population, however I did demolish all tourism once I no longer needed it and upset my population into leaving and uprising to thin the numbers down to around 150-200 people.

The reason for wanting a smaller population is that every time you suffer a disaster I would recommend a year after the event save your game and load that save back up, this seems to help to trigger the next disaster much sooner, in every successful save and reload I did my next disaster was within 3 years.

With a large island/population there is a nasty flaw in this game where is can freeze during saving corrupting your file. I found this still happened a few times with a couple of xbox lock ups on a small island/population but it will be no where near as bad as it is with 300+ people.

(If this is the only achievement you are going for just make a small island with a couple of gold mines and start saving / reloading after you have suffered your first disaster.)

I also found you tend to get more disasters occur with a smaller, less built up island, Also the addition of a oil refinery will help trigger a oil spill although it can happen without one - I never suffered a oil spill until I built one, then two came along shortly after one another.

My random created island didn't have a volcano so that particular type of event was ruled out but other events were plenty.

This is a bit of a pain this one, especially if your saves decide to corrupt on you, but once you start you will always have a save previous should you need to fall back on it.

Hope this helps some of you.

v1.1

By far and away the easiest way to gain this achievement is by buying the DLC Modern Times and playing through mission level 4.


In that mission you have to contend with volcano eruptions and earthquakes throughout the entire game. Usually they occur around every 9-10 months and rarely (if ever) any more than a year.

Starting in 1966 I had the achievement by 1976. Even if (under some strange reason) you haven't netted the achievement by near the end of the game- you are given the option to trigger more disasters essentially at will in order to net money from foreign aid.


As I say, the DLC is required. But if you're considering it, or already have the DLC, then this achievement is practically unmissable when playing through the Modern Times campaign.