Against the Storm Advanced Tips and Hidden Mechanics
Gameplay tips, optimizations, and lesser-known mechanics in Against the Storm to boost settlement efficiency and accelerate reputation gain.
Updated by SinglePlayer in Against the Storm
Intro
A collection of advanced tips and hidden mechanics for Against the Storm, based on in-game testing, developer insights, and community discoveries. Perfect for players who already understand the basics and want to go deeper.
Optimal Settings
Against the Storm offers excellent quality-of-life features, and before starting a new settlement, it’s a good idea to tweak some settings. The default options are mostly designed for brand-new players, so customizing them will make your runs smoother and more efficient.
Gameplay Settings
Set the default Woodcutters’ Camp mode to "Avoid glades except marked." This will prevent your woodcutters from accidentally opening dangerous glades before you're ready to handle their events.
In the Recipes tab, I recommend disabling all recipes and ingredients by default in your workshops, and then manually enabling only what you currently want to produce.
When multiple recipes are enabled in a building — even if their priorities are set to zero — your workers will gather and deliver all required ingredients for every enabled recipe before they begin crafting.
This behavior becomes even more costly in buildings that use multiple ingredients, such as complex food producers. The ingredients brought in for unused recipes will sit idle in the building’s storage slowing down your economy — especially early in the game.
Restricting the Hearth to burn only wood helps preserve more valuable fuels like coal or oil, which are often better used for solving Glade Events early in the game.
Auto-Pause Options
Ever had a trader leave just as you were preparing goods to sell? Enabling this setting pauses the game one second before the trader departs, giving you time to finalize the deal.
Forest Mysteries take effect about five seconds after the Storm season begins, giving you a short window to lower hostility — for example, by sacrificing goods or unassigning your woodcutters.
Pausing the game at the start of other seasons is also recommended, as it gives you time to check new trade routes, orders, and cornerstones.
Useful Hotkeys
The Key Bindings menu is full of shortcuts that help you get things done faster. Here are some of the most useful ones:
- Spacebar — Pause and unpause the game. You can still manage buildings, trade, and change production while paused.
- Hold Alt — Show what each settler is doing and highlight one to assign manually to a building. Use the mouse scroll wheel to switch between species — helpful when assigning race-specific jobs.
- Hold B — Highlight all gatherable resources on the map, such as vegetables, mushrooms, geysers, stone, and berries. For specific resources, it's often easier to select the corresponding building (e.g., the Geyser Pump to see only geysers on the map).
- Hold Ctrl — Show active production across all buildings. This lets you adjust what’s being made without opening each building individually.
- F — Mark trees for your woodcutters. Use Shift + Click to mark a single tree, which is helpful to open new glade by cutting less trees.
Behind the Numbers
This part explains the numbers that some game mechanics are based on.
Production Speed
Buffs that reduce production time apply their effects multiplicatively, not additively. This means each new cornerstone or stack of oil sacrificed in the hearth provides diminishing returns: the first has the strongest effect, and each following one reduces production time by a smaller amount. This prevents production times from becoming too short.
Farming Speed
Farm production speed is not affected by general production bonuses, including cornerstones, citadel upgrades, or even by food production speed. Only specific buffs like Harvesting and Planting (occasionally sold by traders) can speed up farming.
Placing a small warehouse near the farm is a much cheaper and efficient option, as it reduces the time workers spend transporting goods.
Reputation Gain
The formula for reputation gain from resolve was shared by the developers on Steam and Reddit. The simplified version is:
P * R / 1831 for Humans, Beavers, and Frogs
P * R / 1221 for Lizards, Harpies, and Foxes
Where P is the population of a species and R is its current resolve.
This means several things:
- The more population you can keep happy, the better.
- Providing resolve above the threshold is not wasted.
- Humans, Beavers, and Frogs provide less reputation per point, but their higher starting resolve makes them competitive with the other three races.
Hunger and Food Consumption
Running out of food doesn’t instantly kill your villagers. Each race has a hunger tolerance - a threshold that must be reached before a villager dies from starvation. The hunger counter only increases during a villager’s break if they find no food available in the hearth.
Importantly, villagers do not take breaks while working on Glade events. This means they are temporarily immune to starvation, which is especially useful during food shortages caused by events like the Blood Flower.
Foxes have the lowest hunger tolerance of 3, which translates to roughly 6 minutes without food. Harpies come next, with a tolerance of 4 and a shorter break interval, resulting in about 6 minutes and 40 seconds of survival without food.
Even if a villager has built up a large hunger stack, they only need to consume a single unit of food to fully reset their hunger counter. This makes it possible to stretch food supplies early in the game by letting villagers go hungry temporarily.
Another way to save food early on is to allow a villager to eat only one type of complex food - unless you’re in a phase where you want to gain reputation through high resolve.
Micromanagement
Controlling worker actions and building placement manually helps complete more tasks during each season. These techniques include managing delivery paths, minimizing idle time, and taking advantage of building movement.
Constructing camps or housing near the main warehouse speeds up building time, since builders don’t need to carry materials far. Once the structure is finished, you can move it to the desired location for free.
When a worker is returning with gathered resources, moving their camp instantly teleports gathered materials to the camp.
Woodcutters and other gatherers may collect different secondary resources, which can fill up their camp and delay unloading. Moving camps near a warehouse during delivery helps speed up this process.
Once a Glade event is completed, the workers assigned to it will go on break. Replacing them immediately with workers who aren't hungry ensures faster delivery of the event rewards.
Certain events like the Corrupted Caravan apply their penalties based on hostility level at fixed intervals. By pausing woodcutters and maximizing fuel sacrifices just before the timer ticks, you can completely avoid the penalties.
You can assign firekeepers to additional hearths only when the low fuel warning appears. While they may arrive 5-10 seconds late, the temporary -30 hostility penalty is negligible compared to the wasted labor of keeping them permanently assigned. Most of their time would otherwise be spent idle.
More Tips
Various tips, tricks, and small details you might have missed.
Cornerstone rarity alternates by year: at the start of an odd-numbered year, you are offered epic (purple-bordered) cornerstones, while in even-numbered years, you are offered legendary (orange-bordered) ones. Since most of the strongest effects come from legendary cornerstones, it’s wise to save your rerolls for even years. In odd years, consider skipping weak choices and taking 10 amber instead.
Demolishing can be used to recover some of the resources spent on buildings you no longer need, or simply to clear space. A useful trick: If you have the Forest Mystery that creates fertile soil when a resource node depletes during Drizzle, demolishing the node also triggers this effect.
Naturally generated paved roads can be destroyed for stone. Some ruins may also yield useful materials when removed. I don't want to spoil it for you - just try experimenting with different structures found in the wild and see what you get!
References
A Reddit post A big list of unknown mechanics
A Steam Community post How does population calculate into resolve
