Ragnorium – Starter Guide

This guide designed to teach you the basics of Ragnorium and give you some tips and tricks to have your first successful run.

First Mission

Your first mission is arguably your most important! You must pay very close attention to this!

1) First take a look at the colonists you have available to clone (3). Each colonist has four stats: HP, combat skill, crafting skill and character level. They are defined below:

  • HP is pretty simple. It defines how much of a beating a colonist can take before they are incapacitated. Note that the least damage a colonist can take is 1 even with the best armour, so even then it’s important!
  • Combat skill is mostly unimplemented as of this guide being written, but it is generally believed that in a future update it will decide their effectiveness with weapons. Generally, characters with high combat skill tend to have traits that complement it (muscular) or high HP.
  • Crafting skill is also mostly unimplemented as of this guide being written, but will likely determine how effective colonists are at gathering, crafting, constructing, etc. in the future.
  • Character level is defined at the bottom of their character portrait, and defines how many “skills” they can be assigned in the game (skills range from improving HP to letting them do certain jobs to increasing their productivity in certain jobs).

2) Once you select two colonists with the above information in mind, you must construct your ship. This is where you make a critical decision: do you start with two colonists, or three?

My recommendation is to start with two colonists! Your basic cargo containers you start with researched provide enough supplies for just over a day for one colonist. Therefore if you get three clones, you’ll only have room for a days worth of supplies for one of them, which immediately puts you in danger of starvation, dehydration and being unable to cloth or equip them all. Finally, you need to decide what intersections you want to connect the ship. Initially, you’ll only have enough credits to have one specialized intersection with the above build. I recommend one Intersection F, so that you start with slightly more food. It’s not much, but every little bit helps, and extra colonist XP won’t be useful anyway at the start (though that may change with a later update).

3) Once your ship is constructed as specified above, you need to launch it. Take time to randomize your first ship a cool name. It doesn’t really matter, but why not? Then just hit launch! When you’re flying over the planet, consider the following:

  • First, move your mouse around. You’ll notice the game helpfully tells you whether an area is “easy”, “normal” or “hard” to start in. I’m not sure how this works, but I assume it mostly looks at how many trees, bushes and food you can forage is in the area.
  • That said, you want to settle somewhere that is at least normal- which is rare! If you have good eyes, look for places with a healthy amount of trees, some boulders (which are usually iron or stone deposits) and maybe has a source of blue water nearby. Lakes have fish in them which can be eaten later, or at the very least have ducks and geese living around them you can tame or hunt!
  • Finally, once you found a good spot, click it immediately and then start sending your colonists/cargo.

Note that wherever you click is going to be where all future launches deploy to! Your ship can fly around for a while so you can pick a spot, but it can’t fly forever, and you can’t control where it goes. If you see an area that looks like it meets the above, don’t be greedy, click there and settle!You may not fly back over it or find a better spot before you run out of fuel. Worst case scenario, just restart the save slot.

Making Landfall

Congrats! You landed!

Your first order of business is to look around. Look for whatever resources you have available, because they’ll all be important later. You want to prioritize:

  • Cacti, an early source of water.
  • Weird mushrooms, an early source of food that regrows quickly.
  • Bushes, an early and temporary source of leaves that can be gathered quickly.
  • Trees, something you’ll always need more of…

Other resources that are lower priority are stone silos, iron silos, organic masses and mineral silos. Stone is only minimally useful for constructing wells later on, and fireplaces for your colonists’ homes. Iron is currently not very useful (at least not for much content I found in the game so far), mineral silos are presumably used for creating explosives in the mid-game, and organic masses can supply you with a temporary source of alien meat.

Next, define a stockpile somewhere flat near where you landed. Relocate your colony computer next to it.

Your stockpile should be near the center of where you want to live. It’s only temporary, so don’t go too wild or take up all the prime real estate. Leave plenty of room for your first buildings.

Finally, right click your fallen cargo containers and order your colonists to harvest them.

Most of your first afternoon on this planet will be spent collecting resources from your drop pods and storing them. This is very important, so I would refrain from giving your colonists any other jobs until this is done. If you get hurt or hungry, you can’t eat or use any of your supplies until they’ve been stockpiled! Far as the game is concerned, they won’t even exist!

The Stone Age

Alright, now that you covered the basics, you can tackle your first challenges…

First, go to the bottom right tab that allows you to select a shared objective. I recommend the “gather wood” objective first since it is the easiest.

No matter what objective you tackle, you’ll need to gather wood first. This challenge is easy, requiring you to just smack around 5 trees until they produce wood.

Second, select the “wood hoarder” objective.

Much like the first objective, all this requires is that you gather around 12 wood for your stockpile. You’ll be using it soon, so you may as well do it.

Finally, you can select the “campfire” objective.

Your campfire should be built near the center of where you want your colony to be. Colonists will flock to this at night when they’re freezing cold, which is something you’ll deal with a lot in the early game. Make sure you right click on the campfire and select “wood” as a fuel source so colonists will actually fuel it later!

Next, select the “finding flint” objective.

Flint is needed to light your campfire, and if you don’t want to be at risk of freezing on your first night, that means you need to finish this challenge ASAP. Assign both of your colonists to this mission and send them to complete it. They may get a little banged up, but it’s important. Make sure the flint you find at this mission site is selected for storage (right click on it and make sure “store” is selected).

Now, select the “homeopathy” objective.

By now your colonists are probably a bit hurt from fighting garnworms. If you don’t want them to die once you run out of bandages, you’ll need to learn and construct the homeopathy table. This table lets you craft foliage bandages using leaves gathered from bushes (finite supply, very fast to gather) or shaking trees (infinite supply, very slow to gather). Construct it.

Afterwards, select the “bandages” objective.

Now that you have a homeopathy table, you don’t have much of an excuse not to create bandages. This is a very simple task that if nothing else teaches you how to craft stuff in the game.

Next, select “stick warriors” objective.

Stick warriors is something you can easily bump up in the list if you want, but it fits here too. You’ll need to craft a primitive workbench for it, but that should be easy once you’ve done the wood gathering objectives anyway. I recommend you prepare two extra sticks for future colonists. While you’re at it, create two primitive leaf skirts for your colonists!

Finally, complete the other challenges at your own leisure.

Every other challenge at this point is kind of up to you to complete whenever you want. You should have enough influence to upgrade your tech level by now, but I would wait until you have 12 influence to do so. Reason why will be outlined in the “Second Mission” section.

Second Mission

Presumably you finished completing your Stone Age objectives and leveled up your tech level by now.

First, make sure you have 12 influence before sending a second mission!

For every 6 influence you get, you earn one research point to spend at the ship building screen. You’ll need two research points to follow this next critical step in the guide.

Next, hit “send mission” at the bottom of the screen once you’ve survived your first day and therefore meet the criteria.

In the mission menu, go to research. Find the research for “Essentials Cargo Container MK1” and “Clone Lab Humanoids LV3”. Unlock both technologies, prioritizing “Essentials Cargo” if you can’t afford both.

When building your ship, give it two clone pods, two essentials cargo containers and two Intersection F variants!

This is critical. Essentials cargo containers have enough food to last one colonist two days (or two colonists one day), as well as some seeds, building materials and happy pills/bandages. With two Intersection F variants, that increases the amount of food by 30%. This means that your cargo can feed not just the two clones you’re bringing along, but your two clones on the planet already for just over one extra day. That’s a lot less stress for you!

Next, select which clones you’ll be bringing.

If you followed my guide, you should now have access to some new clones. Of note you’ll have access to a new Amerikana clone with really high crafting skill and a new Euro-African clone that has really high combat skill. I recommend recruiting both, even if skills don’t matter much at this point, but ultimately adapt it to whatever your colony already has (if you lack a high combat/high HP warrior, select a clone for that, or if you lack skilled laborers, select one or two of those).

When complete and clones have been assigned to their pods, launch!

Advanced Tips

Here we will cover some advanced tips for you to keep in mind when developing your colony:

  • All items, most importantly food and medicine, will deteriorate in open stockpiles or on the ground! Durability is depicted by the white bar beneath the items name when hovering over it. As soon as you reach Tech Level 2, construct small wood crates to store items in; colonists will automatically move items from stockpiles in favor of crates!
  • Your colonists have needs associated with every tech level that must be met, otherwise happiness penalties will be acquired! In your first tech level, the only need of this type is to wear clothing (underwear/primitive leaf skirt).
  • Canceling quests inflicts a serious happiness penalty! When taking a quest, you can roughly gauge its difficulty by looking at the rewards and reading the description. Quests offering big rewards or that come very late in your tech tier’s list are likely to be more challenging!
  • You can always skin garnworms even days after they’re killed, you don’t need to waste time skinning them right away if you have other priorities! Also, always remember to right click and store scrap (looks like coils of wire) which typically spawns near clone pods and cargo containers that have landed at your colony! Scrap is a rare resource that is useful both early and mid-game (you’ll regret not keeping a good stockpile of it)!
  • Remember that you don’t always need to send new colonists when you meet the requirements! You can easily wait 7 days after you meet the requirements for a mission before sending one incase you want to complete more objectives first so you can research better stuff or prepare for their arrival. I recommend doing this and planning ahead for colonists, rather than sending them in unprepared!
  • If you plan to invest in augmentations for your colonists (a type of research after researching Humanoid Clones LV3), try to prioritize researching that and its upgraded version (3 research points/18 influence total) before you send in new colonist missions! Augmentations can only be installed in new clones, not existing ones!
Originally posted by Inflectus

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.


*