Here I've played through a full run of the short path, West Tribe. I talk about a lot of the strategies I use as well as my thought processes for the decisions I make.

If you don't want to watch a 3-hour playthrough, summary in text below.

This game is a LOT of RNG. As a result, you can get some pretty terrible traits on your characters that will make it extremely difficult to win. Unless you're trying to build a sizable win streak, there isn't much of a penalty for simply quitting the current campaign and rerolling.

For reference, my current play stats:
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You can go here: https://as-far-as-the-eye.fandom.com/wiki/Traits to look for the full chart, but I'll point out some of the best traits to look for and some that will make it extremely difficult:
+ Agile: This Pupil takes 1 less turn to harvest. Less time harvesting EVERYTHING means faster resources. This one will easily increase production by 33% or more.
+ Expert: Randomly picks a specialized trade, and you can get both traits when you reach those tiers
+ Regenerating: Regen 5 hp a turn. Makes the character immune to most negative effects.
+ Surveyor: Build 1 turn faster. Will reduce the amount of time you need to reach the high levels of construction.
+ Visionary: Warns of Minor Vagaries 5 turns earlier. This guy will help on longer campaigns if you have high exp gain and plan to use the council to remove really troublesome vagaries. Removing vagaries can be extremely helpful on the long campaigns as they will come hard and fast towards the end, and some can delay your departure immensely or make it impossible to leave.

- Clumsy: -5 hp per harvest. A pupil with this trait can only build or cook without killing themselves slowly. Avoid.
- Eternal Beginner: One specialized trade. Not a problem at the start but you may want to reroll this guy later on. Jack of All Trades are bad in this game.
- Invading: needs 2 housing when working. Housing is not easy to come by, so more housing is not good.
- Glutton: eats +50% rations. -9 food a turn is quite troublesome until you get a high level cook, which will likely take you around 500 turns or more of cooking. (3+ halts) North Tribe members will also have increased wool requirements.
- Puny: loses 1 hp a turn. Avoid pupils that require constant healing unless you have a healer or similar
- Yellow Belly: won't work during major vagaries. This can be the straw that breaks your run if things go south and you really those last 20 turns of a halt.

You will also get a bonus from the second game onwards. You get to pick from 3, and they can be from relatively useless (such as revealing all ruins on the current map: if they are all negative, you probably won't have a druid to change them to positive, never mind if it's worth spending 5+ turns rolling the gacha for a good effect), to borderline OP (such as a free mobile bakery/cookhouse on turn 1. That is a 300 resource building + 5 turns that your builder doesn't need to spend).

Jobs are not as important, as you can pretty much train for everything, even druid. That being said, a level 3 cook off the bat is great because it levels so slowly and will help immensely with your food drain.

Certain job perks are extremely powerful and should be considered right from the start as potential targets you want to hit.
- Level 3 Engineer: deploy mobile buildings instantly
- Level 2 Architect: build permanent buildings instantly
- Level 3 Herder: Predict minor vagaries 20 turns in advance
- Level 3 Farmer: +5 parchments a turn
- Level 2 Hunter: -2 turns to harvest cycle (for parchment farming)
- Level 3 Hunter: +10 per harvest cycle for all harvest trades
- Level 3 Fruit Gatherer: combination of traits that effectively sums up to 0 maintenance costs for the pupil
- Level 1 Druid: Permanently soothe Auras

Starting off on your journey, take a look at what your initial destinations and then see how you can fit your guys into that. See a lot of demand for stone? Better train a specialized stonecutter, and a mobile quarry might be a good idea.

You will typically get around 120-200 turns per halt. Don't feel like you need to rush through each one, especially at the start. Preparation is the key. Later on, you can run into some pretty nasty halts. Personal experience, I ran into one that spawned no wood. Luckily I brought enough mobile buildings and wood to get by, but that could have been a dead end for me otherwise.

Your first major choice in the game will be to decide how to feed your people. Do you want to use farms and pepkins, or meat and fish? Bakeries need grain to operate, but can combine grain with basically any other ingredient to make food, including meat and fish. A cookhouse, on the other hand, will mostly combine fish and game with either pepkins or spices.

ideally you will want to gather enough materials to construct a mobile bakery or cookhouse, because each permanent one will cost you 100 wood + 50 stone or ore. Very expensive to leave behind, and you don't want to have to spend time gathering resources to put one up if you leave your previous halt with very little food and resources. In addition, if you get the "unlock recipes" upgrade on it, you won't need to wait till your cook is high level to use some of the more efficient recipes.

Following that, some basic tips:
- The caravan has a multifunctional upgrade, which allows you to gather either stone, ore, wool, meat, fish, or spices without the corresponding building. Even better, there is no limit on the number of workers that can do so, unlike a normal building (without the workshop upgrade). 750 parchments to upgrade one type of resource, I HIGHLY recommend you decide which buildings you will carry with you and which ones you will mostly rely on this to save you time and space.
**Note that gold meat/fish is not able to be gathered via the caravan even with upgrades.
***Advanced class skills like the hunter -2 harvest turn skills will only activate at a resource gathering structure. They will not work on a multifunctional caravan.

- Fully exploring a halt will give you 200/400/600 parchments depending on the size. As a result, two caravan upgrades: Flying Beast (caravan ignores movement penalties except mountains) and Vision (+1 caravan vision) will allow you to fully explore even a large halt in around 8-10 turns or so, and pay for itself very quickly. It will also aid in developing strategies on which resource paths are viable because there might not be enough of a resource to go on one path.

- The camp can be upgraded to house 3 additional workers, so you only need a 2nd camp if you plan to have more pupils. You can also consider using the +1 housing caravan upgrade to save yourself the 5 turns of building a camp at the start of the game.

- Each mobile building will roughly take up a 3x4 space with some gaps. It could be cheaper to simply bring the resources, but each building can be upgraded twice, and high level Architects and Engineers can build or deploy buildings in one turn. Mobile buildings are especially nice in that you can move them to new resource deposits once you've exhausted the previous ones. For example, if you plan to go bakeries, a mobile farm can save you a lot of wood down the line. That wood is also time spent by a worker that could be doing something else, and eats food while collecting said resources. On the flipside, I wouldn't bother with a mobile lumber mill because they're so cheap (only 40 wood to build).

-On the topic of buildings, only the first instance of deploying a mobile building will give engineer exp. You cannot cheese the exp by repacking and deploying the same building over and over during the same halt. In addition, buildings have a proximity bonus of 5% for each building next to them. Workshops double this bonus to 10%. It has no effect on how much resource is taken out of the hex.

- Workshops can be upgraded to allow two workers to work out of the same building. This can be helpful for a number of reasons, but above all, it also allows two workers to work the SAME hex.
**Careful with pastures upgraded to store the wool on the hex. it will not sum up the old amount with the new hex. Instead use both workers to drain the amount in pasture, then let the game use ONE worker to instant-harvest a new path into the pasture.

- If you see a lot of protected halts, investing heavily into a druid may save your butt. The council has a 350 parchment upgrade "Kindness", which is effectively the same as the druid lvl 2 skill that allows you to sooth without channeling. Permanent soothing and a council can effectively neuter a protected halt's negative effects. The caravan upgrade soothing beast is also an option, but because there are vagaries that will reset auras, they will reset the aura that was soothed by the beast and then you'll have no recourse but to use a worker every 20 turns again anyway. In addition, you will lose one space to put your camps/councils/workshops on.
**This ability is unusual in that the council does not have to stay out for it to apply to your pupils.

- If you get the hills adaptation upgrade, you can use councils/workshops/camps/markets to turn them into plains by constructing on them and then cancelling the construction. It seems to be a bug because reloading the game will turn them back into hills

- Fire is very buggy in the game. If a building gets caught on fire, if at all possible, avoid leaving the halt with it still on fire, or potentially consider leaving the building behind. If you leave, it will tick all the fire until it goes out, and the building's HP can potentially go negative. This will make the building unworkable and unrepairable, but it will still take up a cell, hurt anyone walking through, and potentially make your worker bug out. Reloading will make it worse.

- If you see amnesia as a vagary coming up, using the workshop to save your parchments is an option. Build it the turn before, then cancel the construction to get your parchments back.

The Council is an exceptionally powerful tool for smoothing out the RNG on your journey. Find some time to build one when you can, it might not see much use but during the last halt, it can make or break the game because you can delete pesky vagaries like -20 turns, or rodents. However, upgrades are NOT cheap, so be judicious in your purchases.

Make-over (500) is completely random, so you may or may not get a better roll.

Kindness (350) at level one basically removes the channeling cost of soothing auras. Great combo with permanent soothing druids.

Solid Structures (40 ore, 400 parchments) reduces building damage by 50. This trivializes a lot of the building damage vagaries, a great investment.

Ritual (300, 500, 800) deletes the next vagary. This is especially useful for pesky building damage vagaries, vagaries that eat your resources, or worse, ones that add additional resource requirements to leaving. Best combined with a visionary or the prediction below.

Prediction (300), which predicts minor vagaries 5 turns earlier. This lets you queue up minor vagaries to see which ones are worth spending Rituals on.

Finally, end game One for All (900, lvl 3) reduces ration requirements by 6, effectively giving you a free worker. Note that this will also decrease the wool requirement for north tribe members.

Personally, I have found Fervor (450, lvl 3) to be of very limited use because A) you're not guaranteed to get auras at all in later halts, AND getting a matching aura with lots of that resource spawned in the same place is very RNG.

South Tribe has a tendency to give you very ♥♥♥♥♥♥ traits in exchange for more experienced pupils. In addition, you start off with a camp for the 4th person, remember to plop it down! South Tribe is mostly learning to deal with pupils that have bad traits, not that much harder than normal.


East Tribe starts you off with only 2 people, one with the trait that takes up 2 housing. That means plan accordingly, so try to go for paths that require the least quantity of resources until you can increase your pupil and housing count. You need a decent start to get to the same level as before, so it's quite likely you will spend most of the 180 or so turns each halt collecting resources.

On the flip side, every pupil you recruit on this path will have the trait that gains 20% less exp in exchange for getting it as parchments. If you are able to get your pupil count high enough early on (say 5 or more by halt 3), you can generate some obscene quantities of parchments. On the long path I was consistently generating 3k or so parchments a halt, easily removing any annoying vagaries and was able to double the stack size for 3 different resources (pipkins, food, etc)


North Tribe's increased wool and wood cost is extremely taxing to deal with. You almost certainly want a mobile pasture here because you'll need wool every stop. Wool will most likely be your limiting factor, not the turn time. When you get a nice stop, you will need to look ahead and plan accordingly. See that the next path will require 700+ of a certain resource? Better try to bring at least 500 of that resource if you can, in case it spawns with 200 or 300 only.

North tribe will require a dedicated wool gatherer, a dedicated woodcutter or a fully upgraded mobile kitchen (-8 wood a turn is unsustainable otherwise). You could also try to pair a mobile gathering hut with an agile character or use a fully-upgraded gatherer (which could get -6 food costs). Interestingly, lowering the food cost will also lower the wool requirement for a pupil. North tribe recruits will tend to have good traits.

Mobile buildings here are a hit or miss, because the 5 turn deployment cost can be very taxing vs just collecting enough wood to build a permanent, if you have a decent woodcutter. It may not be much but due to the tight demands of wool, you will need every pupil action to survive. And a bit of luck too.

Harmony is barely touched upon in the "tutorial" of the game, but it is a pretty significant role in avoiding being overwhelmed by vagaries. Unfortunately it is a hidden stat and the indirect way it affects your journey makes it difficult to determine if it's a huge deal to worry about.

Nonetheless, from the wiki and other players, here are thing things you ought to do:

- try not to erase resources by settling on them
- try not to use the market
- try not to plunder the sacred sites

+ Rhinoffalos are an extremely versatile and easy way to raise harmony and increase your storage space. Each one will roughly give you two resource's worth of space, increase your harmony, and (maybe?) leaving them behind will decrease harmony instead.
+ Pray or Offer to Sacred SItes
+ Help other caravans if able