Note: This guy was made for the Beta. Please see [How to Train your Onbu] for the updated guide.

So let's all admit it: Onbu is an spoiled brat. Don't feed? Oh no he's hungry. Don't let him sleep? Suddenly he's shaking every five minutes because sleeping in the middle of a hurricane isn't a good place to rest. Don't agree? You want the other guide [How to Train your Onbu]. Otherwise: this guide is for you!

It's time to show Onbu who the real boss is around here.

We will cover the basics of gameplay, how to tell the distrust of your Onbu, and how to survive the spore clouds. Because you can only delay the inevitable: there will be a point both paths have unavoidable spore.

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

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 and Map

Clicking on the 3 icons beside Onbu in the top right will instantly move you to the relevant screen. You can also use the scroll wheel.

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

And if he's sad, you'll see his head low with defeat.


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 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.
  
• 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 science menu. 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 best way to explain Trust, is with a story.



I was playing on Adept difficulty on my 'meanie' test file, and we had to pass through 2 hurricanes in a row, and a fork in the road. I used the Onbu punisher to make him run, and make it through the first hurricane, and select the path I wanted to go down. Only, the effect expired before I could tell him to walk once we got out of the hurricane. So he ran until he collapsed. Right in the path of the second hurricane. I managed to get him up after three cycles of the hurricane when the cooldown expired, but by that point he was growling and mad. He then shook three times in a row, destroying buildings faster than I could repair them until I managed to get his trust back up just high enough to stop this.

And this kept happening. I swear, it's like the amount of natural disasters double on a mean file.

To summarise things:

• 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. (Onbu Punisher)
  
• The above is true to such a point, Onbu will spam trying to shake you off when his Trust is 0 faster than you can rebuild. Unfortunately for him: he can't shake us off haha!
  
• Health does affect trust, but has no weighing on trust when your trust is already this low.
  
• There's also a second hidden 'Trust' level. This is where Onbu remembers how well you've taken care of it. It takes roughly 4 'pets' to bring Onbu out of shaking range. Or 4 food. Or a mix of food, and doctoring. From this, I can guess that each of these increases Trust by 2-3
  
• If the Onbu has his head hung low, he's at low Trust. If he's growling, he's dangerously close or is already in the dance zone.
  
• If the Onbu has(By my guess) <10 Trust, it will shake constantly. <20 it will growl. <30 it will look sad.
  
• Most machines like the deep quarry cost 1 trust per 50-100 resources.

So in conclusion:

Due to the current balancing, keeping Onbu at 0 Trust is not viable. You simply can't keep up with the repairs. Because of this, a low Trust playthrough has a more 'reactive' playstyle where you need to carefuly balance your needs with how many 'Trust Coins' you have remaining. You end up treating Trust like coins you can 'invest' in resources.

e.g: 5 'coins' to choose the direction at a crossroads.

This means this playstyle ends up significantly weaker compared to a high trust, as you can't easily control your Onbu. If you're looking for a harder game mode though even after Expert: this is a great way to add an extra layer of difficulty.

It is for this reason I recommend at least 2 herbalists and doctors, as you need to be earning a lot of herbs to fight off poison and spores, which is difficult to avoid.

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 in the center of the map.
  
• Water wells work best near the items using them. Namely: Farms, and the mycologist/herbalist.
  
• Despite needing tents, the people never actually use them. They can be put anywhere that's most convenient.
  
• Leave space on one side of wood trunks and quarries to allow for a sawmill and such in late game.
  
• Touch all the Onbu spikes. They're free stones :D Just remember: If he's a growling maybe hold off a bit.

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. 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. Yes, 7 of them. 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.

Start
On Novice and Adept: you start in in jungle or mountains.
On Expert: you can be anywhere. Including a desert.

• TLDR: 1 kitchen to 2 farms/berry farms. This applies to mushrooms as well. 2 mushroom farms to 1 onbu chef. 2 Water wells to 1 farm.

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

This number is from beetroot, but I also tested it with corn, the longest growing plant. I found a farmer could plant 8 corn before 1 was ready to be harvested

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 fully staffed farm can produce 32 beetroot per harvest.

This number, of course, ignores environmental factors. But let's take that number, and divide it by 3. That gives us 10. Now we times that by 5, meaning 50. Why 5? Because 3 beetroot makes 5 meals.

As such: 1 full staffed farm+kitchen produces approximately 50 food per harvest.

A person eats roughly twice, or three times a day. And you will harvest multiple times a day. What this means is, essentially, 1 farm can feed roughly 10 people.

Berries on the other hand, are very much the better food source. However that is only if they have 60%+ efficiency. At higher difficulties you may only get one or two 'good spots' if at all. However if you put a berry farm there, more bushes will likely have grown by the late game. As such: 1 berry farm can feed roughly 15-20 people at 100%.

Farmers prioritise the closest to the 'entrance' to the farm building before spreading out. Basically: 5 farmers 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.

As for water:
In general a farm uses around 2 water wells. My favourite setup is two right next to the farm. 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.

Storage is also very important on this playstyle. Be sure that you have at least 5 or 6 storage built.

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

In general: 2 is all you need. But once you get the scout tower upgrade, you can increase that to 3 or 4.

Events
Events that happen when going after a resource are a little harder to predict. From what I can determine: if a choice leads to a bad outcome, it will always lead to a bad outcome during that run.

e.g: For example the quicksand event. On my novice run I always ran for a rope, and got a ton of water. But on Adept that always led to death, but pulling them out proved to be the better option. Another run I got glass and science from pulling them out.

Another example: the mysterious forest, on novice I chopped around the big tree. On Adept that caused deaths. But leaving on adept always gave me planks.

I haven't done extensive research on this, but in general if you get a bad result one time, you're probably always going to get that result.

There's a few types, and they can all be handled differently.


Tornadoes and sandstorms
Are fast. You need to run to get past them. 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 tired though
  
• Doing nothing. Putting your limited Trust coins toward these isn't viable. Just let them damage, then repair as best you can.

Spore Clouds
These are slow moving, and can oftentimes be walked past without issue. If they're within 5 dots of the road, you'll need to wait for them to pass. Waiting is impossible, or at least not consistent due to the very small window you have when you use a Discipliner, so make sure to prepare Decontaminators or work stations if he starts going and it hasn't passed yet.

If it moves within 5 dots while you're passing by: run. In general it will travel 1 or 2 dots while you're passing. Use the white outline when you click it as a reference.

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.

You can't really avoid them, so just heal Onbu after.

The spore will come, you can delay it but it is inevitable. As such, it's important to factor in Decontaminators.

The key to handling spores is the sledgehammer approach. Namely: deal with it quick, deal with it fast, or you won't be able to deal at all.

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.

If you haven't unlocked decontaminators: have two/three worker huts built. Even two are 'locked' and disabled. That way: if you run into an early spore cloud you have a way to fight it back.

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

Preparation

• Make sure your doctor has 3 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, the two/three worker posts should be filled and ready for action.
  
• If you have the horn: prepare to run.

Prosecution

• Get those spores that spawn gone ASAP. If you're using worker huts, scour the land five times over and make sure they're max priority.

Peace

• Disable every decontaminator, reduce the doctors once everyone who got sick is healed if you don't need them, and continue on.

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, they will often leave to eat partway through.

While 1 decontaminator can reach everywhere, the person has to walk back to their job building after every torch. That's why the above image has the red boxes where they are.

If you place 7 in the arrangement above: then there will always be some close by. On lower difficulties you can get by with 5 or maybe even 3. Doing this, a large portion of the spores will be dealt with quickly.

If you don't have the pop or materials for this large yet: build the ones in the center first.

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 divide the list into three tiers, low, mid, and high. These tiers focus on getting you what you need to survive.

High Tier: Basics

Kitchen:

• Increases your food by 40% when cooked.

Scavenger Hut:

• Makes gathering resources a ton easier. And all around more efficient.

Hornblower:

• You need it to stop Onbu from walking into spores

Onbu Discliplinerr:

• Because he won't listen to you. So you need to make them.

Dung Collector:

• While you don't need it right now. It's best to get the chocolate cakes baking ahead of time. While the bile generator could go here, you need to be careful about managing your Trust coins, especially early on. It's simply easier to get it via dung.

Onbu Kitchen:

• Required to turn Mushrooms into food. It's good to get that production early, even if you build nothing else yet.

Village Doctor:

• You don't want to need it, and not have it. I'd reccomend two even, and two herbalists. You're going to be sick often.

Mid Tier: Important

Sawmill:

• Need it to make things and bops.

Quarry:

• Need it to make things and bops.

Onbu Doctor

• Good for recharging your Trust coins and Disclipline uses.

Onbu Pet:

• Earns you Trust coins, so you can use more Trust bucks.

Onbu Feeding Trebuchet:

• There is never going to be enough food for Onbu unless you feed him, and it earns you Trust coins

Compost Heap:

• Remember to set it to make biogas.

Decontaminator:

• Without it, you're a sitting duck.

Hut:

• 6 people for the space of 4.

Iron Furnace:

• Need it to make things

Glassblower:

• Need it to make things.

Scout Tower:

• See threats before they appear. And scout more.

Low Tier: Optional
Everything else.

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

Spore central, only go through here if you have no choice. If you've only got 1 doctor active, increase it to 3, maybe even build a second doctor+herbalist. 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. I wouldn't build them all at once. 1-2 is good for the start. You can increase it later if you have to enter this biome.

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.

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.

With this, you should be more than ready for even the hardest difficulty. Remember to give your onbu a good whipping from me.

If I missed anything feel free to leave a comment.