Welcome! This guide will prepare you for your journey on the back of your brand new Onbu. There are many like it, but this one is your-bu.

We will cover the basics of gameplay, how to tell the trust of your Onbu, and how to survive the spore clouds. Etc Etc

With this guide, you should be more than prepared to handle even the largest of spore clouds.

This section is just going to quickly cover all the different buttons in the game. If you've already played a bit, you can probably skip this section.

Speed
Speed can be brought up to 4x by tapping the fast forward button twice. You can lower it to 1x by clicking the middle icon. The game can be paused by pressing the play button on the left.

You can also:

• Space to Pause
  
• Press 1 for 1x speed
  
• Press 2 for 2x speed
  
• Press 3 for 4x speed or 2 twice.

Resources

Resources will be in the top left when in the zoomed in view. You can hover over a resource to see information on it.

Onbu, People and Map

Clicking on these 3 icons beside Onbu in the top right will instantly move you to the relevant screen. You can also use the scroll wheel. Note their placement has changed since release.

Onbu's health, toxicity, hunger, and sleep will be listed here. You can hover over them to see their percentage.

And if he's happy, you'll see him swaying with his derpy lil smile.


There's also a circle for citizens now, and a drop down menu that gives detailed information on their needs. Needs are extremely simple. They show you the math when you hover over the hand icon. It maxes at 30.

• Food quality: How many stars does the food they're eating have? E.g: 2+2+1
  
• Food variety: How many different types of meals are they eating? Eg: Raw berries+ Berry Jam=2
  
• Housing Quality: What houses are they living in? E.g: Huts.
  
• Decoration: Are their houses pretty? Personally I just spam stone pillars because they're the cheapest to make. They don't care too much about variety.
  
• Poisoned: If your peeps are poisoned it'll display here
  
• Town Center/Community Center: If you have those active they'll display here.

Construction, Destruction, Priority, and Science
You can bring up and minimise this menu by clicking the middle bar (the one with the hammer).

This menu is one of the most important. If you're unsure what something does, hover over it.

• Want to cut some trees? Leftmost option, the curved dagger (aka, a sickle). Don't want to cut berry bushes? Select only trees. Don't want to cut growing trees? Select 'only harvest fully grown'.
  
• Want to set something to a higher priority? Star icon. Click and drag to set the priority of many things, or just tap something for solo things.
  
• The lock allows you to lock and unlock buildings. It has a few niche uses.
  
• Broken House icon: deconstruct things. Simply click on it, and then click on what you want destroyed, or click and drag. You can then switch to the priority tool to increase it's priority.
  
• The hammer and wrench is the window that's open by default, and it's where your buildings are. Each tab in this menu leads to a different set of things you can build.
  
• The wrench icon is for indicating repairs.
  
• The science menu is the gear with a magnifying glass. You can click to start a research here, or shift+click to que different researches so you don't have to keep selecting new ones for a while.
  
• The confused people is the worker management menu. Here you can adjust how many are working on a building on a fly. Personally I mostly did it manually. The menu puts things as a list and it's not that intuitive.
  
• The meal menu lets you set foods as forbidden. E.g: Raw turnips. Useful if they keep eating food before you can cook it.

Your Onbu comes in one shape with two colours. The first thing to determine is what sort of generation you gained. Work out ahead of time where you want to place things and leave room. In general, here are a few tips:

• Your storage/kitchens should be near the center of the map. But leave room in the dead center for if you want the machines like the liquid food dispenser or bile maker.
  
• Despite needing tents, the people never actually use them. They can be put anywhere that's most convenient. Though do leave space for decorations once you upgrade from tents.
  
• Leave space on one side of wood trunks and quarries to allow for a sawmill and such in late game.
  
• I would advice against touching Onbu's spikes until you have access to at least the pet function.

Following this, I've grabbed a rough outline of how I normally lay out my structures. If I'm fortunate enough to get a central dirtzone, I'll use that for any industrial buildings, like kitchens, forges, planks, etc etc. This leaves me a large portion of land for which to use for growing food.

Also set aside an area for mushrooms as well. They don't need a large zone, but should be somewhere close to the front of Onbu. I will try to leave an area open far away from everything for Spore Mushrooms too. Similarly: the compost heap works best right next to the pooper scooper.


You might notice some red boxes. I'll briefly explain what those are here. While I'll be getting into it in a later section, those are Decontaminators. Back in the beta you needed 7 of them. Yes, 7. Thankfully you need far less now the game is out. We will discuss that in more details later in the guide, just know that you need to plan for them as well.

All of this is prep you can do in the first second of the game, and I'd recommend pausing to start while you plan out your Onbu.


If you're wondering how Onbu picks which direction to go, it's completely random. Here we see Onbu ignoring food he needs to take the north path.

Let me put it in plain English for you now. I'll have a section at the end going into the math and experimentation I did behind it.

• Trust is a measure of the damage you've done to Onbu+ the damage the environment is doing.
  
• You hurting Onbu is weighed significantly more than environmental factors. (Forcing him to run, Food Injector, Bile Maker)
  
• Taking good care of Onbu is also weighed significantly more. (Healing him, petting him, curing his toxicity.)
  
• If the Onbu is a-swayin' your Onbu is at high trust.
  
• There is either no cap, or a very high cap on how much Trust Onbu can have. So you can stack up a ton of trust, and then use it to obtain the dark resources like black pudding.
  
• Onbu will disobey about 50% of the time at neutral Trust, and takes more damage to their Trust. So it's best to avoid damaging it at the start of the game.

• TLDR: 1 kitchen to 4 farm workers (So 1.3 farms). Same for the Mycologist. 1 Kitchen to 2 berry farms.

A single farmer can, if not hungry, plant 4x4 plots before the first is due to harvest.

Depending on the type of crop, the amount of plots you need is actually a ton smaller than you think. A fully staffed herbalist can only manage around 24 herbs. Notice how the last lane in the patch of 4 is empty.

As such with farmland, 1 staff can produce roughly 10 crops a day.

Now we times that by 3, meaning 30. Why 3? Because 3 farmers make 30 crops. Unless you have the upgrade.

As such: 1 full staffed farm+kitchen produces approximately 30 food per harvest.

A person eats roughly once a day. And you will harvest multiple times a day. What this means is, essentially, 1 farm can feed roughly 30 people.

Berries on the other hand, are not the best food source. 1 berry bush produces 8 food x number of workers provided there are at least 6 berry bushes each. Workers will automatically stop planting once you have enough bushes. You can uproot berry bushes at the start and the workers will automatically plant the seeds.

Pro Tip: You can use Air Wells as water storage at the start of the game. Since you might have bigger priorities than making water storage. Just swap the worker between them.

Farmers prioritise the closest to the 'entrance' to the farm building before spreading out. Basically: 5 farmers(The upgrade) means you can leave more space to farm, but it's generally more efficient to do rows of 4 in front or to the right of the building. Typically I set 3 rows of 4 to the south/north west and east of the building. And they will always prioritise the closest job. Be it planting or harvesting.

In general a farm uses around 2 water wells. But I typically set up 5 per full farm in case of a desert. If you're growing tomatoes that number is three. The reason for this is given most biomes give 1 water in the time it takes 1 plant to be planted. Even with 5 people this generally holds true for the early game.

1 kitchen can handle 2 berry farms, with some leftover. It's about 1.5 kitchens.
1 kitchen can handle 2 farms, fully stocked.

The onbu kitchen makes more food than you'll need, even just staffed with 1 person. But you will need a fully staffed mycologist.



If you're in the early game, and are ok with some micromanaging: you can make a ton of quick compost by setting the farm to plant only with a single farmer. The plants will decay, and then you need to set them to harvest only. Alternatively you can also then bring on 3 farmers set to harvest only, and mimic what farms do where they hire people for harvest season.

It's not really needed due to how easy it is to get the pooper scooper, but if you're doing a no poop challenge it could be useful.

Are amazing, and wonderful. But you probably want some rough numbers.

In general: 1-2 is all you need. But once you get the scout tower upgrade, you can increase that to 3.

Events
Events that happen when going after a resource are a little harder to predict. It used to be that if a choice leads to a bad outcome, it will always lead to a bad outcome during that run. But that's no longer the case. The rewards are always the same though.

e.g: For example the quicksand event. I ran for the rope once and it was successful. The second time led to death.


Are just affected by your town's happiness. I would recommend not getting more than 14 until you get a farm set up, as you'll need those first few days to not starve.

There's a few types, and they can all be handled differently. But generally they're really not that threatening anymore. It used to be constant aoe damage so you had to run through them. Now it's a 'one and done' effect.


Tornadoes and sandstorms
Used to be very fast, but are now much slower and don't come back around. (They used to bounce between two points) You can run past them but you don't need to anymore. The best way to time it is:

• Wait for the right moment by laying down, and then sprint through. This runs the risk of Onbu getting bored though. Which is why I recommend:
  
• Walk toward it, and wait for the tornado to hit the aoe marker. (It will turn red) When it is halfway across: start sprinting. If you timed it right you should get through without issue. This may take a few tries to get the timing right. Make sure your Onbu is well rested before you do this though.

Or you can walk through it and ignore them entirely.

Spore Clouds and skyscrapers.
Are actually beneficial now for those initial spore clusters. It's worth getting hit to get at least 10 spores so you can grow your own. Do be careful of skyscrapers though. They're quite rough.

Hot and cold spots

Not a big issue. Click 'plant' to turn off planting on farms, and harvest everything if they're going to decompose.

Hot sand.

Sleep on the nice toxic free sands, and then run through.

Sporemoths and other insects
These new events are cool, and you can actually grow some of them for food. Still, they're really not that threatening. As long as you get a pest control building up and some fuel, you can take care of them easily.

Worms and Parasites

Are annoying. You can either make them go away or have to deal with them. Only solution for them is to rush the onbu doctor.

Generally there's not much you can do to avoid them either. Sometimes you just have to give your dog a flea bath.

Whirlpools
Have a nasty habit of going the direction you are. What's worse: Onbu won't stay still if one is on them. You just have to deal with them, basically.

Originally in the beta, the end of the game was a battle against a huge storm of spore clusters on a dead Onbu. That's not really the case anymore. It was kind of like a boss battle in a way.

These days, the spore is not only not that threatening, but it can be beneficial. It can still get out of control though. So be careful not to let too much grow. Onbu will get a poison status effect if it does. If that happens: even if it means halting your farms. Even if you have to pull away scouts. Get as many butts as you can into those seats. It stacks up quickly.

Let's go over the three p's of dealing with spores.

Preparation

• Make sure your doctor has 2 people working at it, and you have medicine. Disable the onbu doc to steal it from that building if you're super low. (They will take it from the disabled building)
  
• Get your defences ready. If not decontaminators, then free people to react to the spores. If you want to harvest them when grown 2-3 will be fine. If it's a bad infestation get everyone.

Prosecution

• If those spores are infecting trees, be careful. Each of those trees can infect other trees. It can grow very quickly. Keep the spores contained, or get them gone.

Peace

• Disable every decontaminator, reduce the doctors to 1 once everyone who got sick is healed, and continue on. The Decontaminators will attack any spore farms you have with a mushroom farm too. So watch for that.

How many Decontaminators? Where to put them?

The fact of the matter is people are slow. Having a decontaminator in every corner will greatly speed up the removal of the threat. However, the spore isn't really that much of a threat anymore.

It used to be that citizens needed to eat 3 times a day, and had to go back to the building after every torch. That, plus the aggressive spread of spores that was 5 times the speed it is currently, maybe even 10, it required 7 decontaminators. Those red squares are where I used to put them. These days, I put three, one in each corner, just because I still have nightmares haha. You really only need one but better to be safe than sorry.

And that's really all there is to it.

Do note these these are just suggestions. Sometimes you'll want the doctor before the horn, for example. Adjust as needed depending on your game, and style.

I will go through this in my general route that I use for games.

• Air well, because you need to.
  
• Farm, because food.
  
• Hornblower, because you need to control where you go.
  
• Pantry, Because you need to to unlock corn.
  
• Corn, in case of an early desert.
  
• Carpenter or Mycologist, Do what you have resources for first. One is needed for future buildings, and one is needed for food. It's good to get all farmables you can as soon as you can.
  
• Feeding Trebuchet, because food.
  
• Onbuologist, Because you need it for later research.
  
• Onbu Kitchen, because food.
  
• Cactus, for water in the desert.
  
• Water Tank/Kitchen, at this point you should be looking to expand. Really you can get these whenever.
  
• Stonemason, required for scavenger hut.
  
• Herbalist, as mentioned getting farmables is important.
  
• Scavenger Hut, so you can get bonus resources

Then just follow your dreams. But all of the research listed here are what I'd consider 'important'. Decontaminators require spores, and the pest control might not be needed at all for months.

Desert

Deserts are amazing. They never have any toxicity. Meaning they're your safety zones. Grow corn, harvest oasis.

If you've been playing right you'll have water stockpiled before you head in. They are your one 'safe zone' from spores in late game.

Jungle

Humid spore central. If you've only got 1 doctor active, increase it to 2. Use this biome to stock up on water. I'd say 5 or so water gatherers are good if you can get to that point. This place is honestly great as long as you have the herbs for it. Otherwise avoid.

Mountains

It's an ok biome. Good to restock on water. Grow beets here in case of cold snaps. Might have spores but it's not too bad.

Ruins

This biome is good for stocking up on spores, but it's definitely challenging. Avoid it unless you're sure you're ready for it. It has good scoutables.

Ocean

A more arid region, this biome has new buildings that turn salt water into water and salt, and fishing options. However, Onbu cannot sleep while swimming. So watch their tiredness.

Roads are very useful, and good to invest in early. However: roads are best utilised for long distances. For short you need to plan your city around them. The people will always prioritise the fastest path to their destination.

This section will go into the buildings and things that hurt your Onbu's trust. Skip them is you're sensitive to that.

In my attempts to better understand how trust works, I'm going to introduce a concept to help make it easier to understand: Trust Points. Think of Onbu as a calculator, for a moment. Trust is accumulated depending on actions, and lost much the same. For example: Let's say patting Onbu gives +5 trust. Or that choosing a direction is -1 Trust.

So let's go over what experiments I tried.


After healing, antitoxining, and petting Onbu: I used a nearby decision location and changed my mind rapidly. However, even after 100 times Onbu never disobeyed. This was on my 390 days of pampering Onbu file. Therefore: we can confirm choosing a direction does not affect trust.


I then tried commanding them to sit and walk repeatedly. On the 7th 'Onbu grows weary of your frequent commands' appeared. 8th: still obeyed. 9th. 10th, 11th,12th, 'Onbu is fustrated by your incessant commands' 13th, 14th, and then I stopped counting.

Construction pump constructed. Only still wagging tail. Feeding time! ...Pause...Realise it's happened. Onbu still wagging his tail.

MORE FOOOD. Still nothing. MORE FOOD

Still wagging. Out of food...Time for even more intensive experimentation.

Bile extractor! Oh so that's what that sound was! It's Onbu's heart. Awww that's rather cute. Still wagging his tail. Wow onbu really trusts me.

Some time later...oh! No more waggies! I eroded the trust enough to experiment now.

3 commands, left right left, doesn't listen. Ok! We're more neutral.

Health Potion, back to tail wags. Turning the pumps back on.

some experementing later...

Health potion gave more tail waggies than antitoxin. But it's hard to give a definite amount as I forgot to disable for part of Onbu's nap.

My guess: they are = the same amount. And together grant a large amount of trust. It's a lot easier to maintain trust once you have it, rather than go all in.

injecting insecticide or liquid weed killer is extremely damaging to trust. To the point Onbu goes from happy to sad if you have him near neutral. Using 1 pet, 2 health potions, and 2 antitoxin, I was able to get Onbu back to tail wags.

Therefore: Onbu's max trust is Likely 5-6 pets. Or 30 'trust points', with their neutral being 0, and their head dipping low for any number in the negative.

The long and short: if you have the ability to spam the trust building items, you can basically do whatever you want with and to Onbu.

So the challenge mode is honestly...one I didn't finish. It's just tedious doing long game after long game to unlock the harder difficulties. I wish we could just go all in at once but that's not an option. If you're looking for more replayability you can do it though.

Some things to note:

• The cold one doesn't affect cold snaps and heat waves. Just makes it so you can't grow corn or cacti in a desert.
  
• The Spore one makes spore more like the beta. However it's still far from how it used to be.

All the achievements have descriptions explaining what to do and there's no hidden ones, so I'll just give some advice on the ones that are time sensitive.

Spa Day is timed when the day and night are half and half, not when the icon is fully day or night. It'll be very tight. Make sure the items are right next to the doctor too.

For the 100 day achievements, you can knock out a bunch in one playthrough doing the following:

• Run a game for 100 days without any housing, or kitchen, or farms, or air wells. I wouldn't recommend rushing the scavenger hut before day 12 or the feeding trebuchet, as this is already a lot to manage.
  
• You can then do surviving to day 30 without berries, a scavenger hut before day 12, and surviving until day 100 while using the feeding trebuchet a max of 3 times in a second run.

It's not worth it. You are losing a ton of manpower and it's hard to regain that. If you're really in a tight spot with your citizens's mood you can. BUT: make sure you have enlightenment researched and ready to be done after. I lost 30 people making that mistake.

With this, you should be more than ready for even the hardest difficulty. Best of luck out there nomads.

If I missed anything feel free to leave a comment.