Never did I expect in a game like this to be building a city and managing resources. It is a bit basic but it is adding something a little different. I was kind of hoping it was a bit more rewarding but it is at least interesting.
There are quite a few main story quests that take you through slowly building a new city from a couple of different buildings. Each one so far that I've done gives you a deadline of 150 days.
There tend to be two parts. The first part is building a certain number of buildings or upgrading buildings. The second part is going off and solving some kind of issue the city is having.
What I noticed is outside of the first quest. The ones that followed so far have not had any penalties for failing them. Instead, you are just not getting some kind of boost. Some of these boots are quite more important than others. It’s interesting to see what the reward for finishing on time has been.
I also found the timeline for doing what these quests have asked to be rather easy. Some of the quest line time limits in the past were real nail bitters. This one seems they want to give you time to go off and do other things in the game and come back just to further upgrade things as needed.
With the start of each of the quests I've done so far, you get some starting resources. It started mostly giving you what you needed. If you fell short on things like wood or stone you could spend silver and have one of your people buy supplies.
This entire thing seems to be a giant silver sink. That is if you want to speed things up. There is resource building but they are quite low produces. I could see the giant amount of time given due to the fact you are only getting a couple of each resource you have a building for.
The first quest requires you to have one house and two resource production buildings. I ended up wanting to build all resource buildings and some extra houses. This ended up coming in handy later on when the requirement to build better buildings required a certain number of homes already in the city.
It’s also kind of simple. You buy for a cheap price some blueprints off the vendor. These then you get to place down on the ground. The biggest challenge at first was trying to work out where I even wanted to place anything.
It appears once the houses and production buildings are made, they require nothing else of you. Since space was quite limited towards the entry of town. I decided to head off quite deep into the area you can build in and put up my first buildings.
Each building itself has three phases. For each phase, you need to start it. That requires having enough materials on hand. The first homes I put down had 5-day construction windows.
Since I wanted to my first home up right away. I ended up setting up a tent in town and just sleeping five times in a row. Then I'd run over to my house and start the next phase till it was finished.
I could not build any production buildings till I at least had one house. So, this seemed important enough. I also had no idea how much time the rest of the requirements for the mission would end up taking. In my mind, if they give me 150 days it must be quite time-consuming.
I was quite tempted to put down a few homes. I however did not want to run out of resources and end up failing this first quest due to that. While it would have been the smart play as I had a massive bank of silver on standby. At the time I just did not know better.
Once the first house was done, I put up the production buildings. I am kind of shocked at how massive these things are. Sadly, you can’t go inside any of the buildings. All you can do is walk around the outside of them. There is no interaction once they are up they just audio produce whatever resources like food, wood, and stone.
I also discovered one of the NPCS working for me had an option where I could join for a week to help build. From what I could tell I had zero impact if I helped or not. This just seemed like a way to make seven in-game days past quickly without having to spam rest in a tent seven times.
Once I had the buildings done. I was told the workers were having some health issues. I needed to go collect a Myrum Egg and then dip that egg in a certain liquid. That egg then would help make some kind of fertilizer they needed to grow some herbs.
I have to say these people are just strange. I was however not willing to lose the quest over such nonsense. So, I went and got the egg and then dipped it in this strange pool of liquid. They were quite happy about getting this egg to keep working.
Once all that was done. A few of the workers would not be leaving. So I would not have a reduced build speed penalty for the remainder of these build quests.
The next questline required having three homes and two specialized buildings. I had somewhat overbuilt during the last quest so I just had to catch up on some homes. I also started to upgrade some of my production buildings.
This is also when I started to realize things were getting expensive quickly if I wanted to somewhat rush through these quests. The first one I must have finished before one-third of the time was even used up.
By the time this quest was getting done on the building end. I had cashed in my 10k silver and was lumping large amounts of the almost 100 gold bars I had into the treasury. On top of trying to cover the daily upkeep costs of the place.
On top of that the special buildings I was starting to put in also required having a rare item to construct the building. This is where all the samples I had collected from ore to plants came into play.
I ended up opening a few of them and I mostly got resources. I only got one of the three rare resources I needed to build the buildings I wanted. While I only needed two. I found out there is a building limit of three specialized buildings till you progress far enough along in the quest.
Thankfully because I had turned in over a dozen samples to be tested. I had an option to send out some expeditions and for them to bring back the rare resource I needed. This made all the time I spent collecting the samples feel like it was worth it. While also giving me a way of finishing this quest on time.
Unlike the first quests, I decided to sit on this quest for a while. I had almost one hundred extra days. I was out of silver. I also did not have many other types of rare resources for upgrading the building in the future.
On top of that, I also needed to carry a heavy stone into a dungeon called The Elder Brothers which required going through another dungeon first. I went out early to charge up the stone. I however just dropped it inside the city after discovering it did not reset every seven days. It seems for now it’s a safe place to keep it while I use all the extra time I have to allow resources to collect and rebuild some of my silver stockpile back up.
Final Thoughts
I was kind of shocked I've blown through over 25k silver so far to get as far as I have in the building's main story questlines. I also did make some mistakes along the way like not waiting for resources and spending silver to just buy what I was missing.
I do at least feel I have lots of extra time. I’ve decided not to go back to the forest to the dungeon I've farmed in the past for silver. Since I need more samples anyways and some items, I've been looting in this new region go for 40 to 600 silvers. It seems it’s a decent farm going after samples and just clearing out random dungeons as I explore around the region and try and learn it better.
Information
Outward Definitive Edition.Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about
