-Do trades
-Research development
-Make rations and iron
-Look at the newspaper for the next day's prices
-Increase your shipping limit in the town
-Don't ♥♥♥♥ up the interactions
-Win

To play this game optimally you should be in build mode (activated / deactivated by pressing spacebar) at almost all times, as along with building it allows you to see additional info about your farm such as the number of seeds in each depot, and it makes trees translucent so you can build behind them. Also consider using the 1-5 number keys to select tools as opposed to shift as its much faster once you get each one down. The ones you'll be using most are 1 for building, 2 for tilling soil and 4 for destroying buildings and nature. The "b" key clears the current item in your hand while using the build tool, which is nice to prevent annoying accidental building. You can also switch between the two tabs in the bottom center of the screen, buildings and seeds with the "ctrl" key, and close all overlay menus like the trades, stock market and research with "esc".

Extra tip:
If you don't like mashing your right mouse button 1500 times like a monkey for the wood cutter achievement, its fairly easy to make a macro in your average gaming keyboard / mouse software to deforest at an insane pace.

When you begin your first day, you should start by accepting the first trade offer given in the top righthand menu, and then build a couple of crop production lines. The game gives an outline for a basic line on the first day, but following the rules is for ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ so we're going to make better ones. A good crop line should be as space and power efficient as possible and transport crops quickly to a central, vertical belt that goes directly into the shipping box. Another factor to consider is upgradability using research unlocks such as fertilizer (shown in the second example), though I haven't found this all that useful as basic crops are less important as a source of income in the later game.






I've included some template designs for good crop lines, but hey I certainly don't know everything about this game so if you can come up with even better ones go for it. Credit to "Ryan Gosling from Blade Runner" (lmao) on steam for the last design. After you make a couple of these, you should immediately put in the crops required to fulfill the trade and then start growing the most expensive crop with the best margin you have available based on the current stock market price. If you see a green or red arrow next to something on the first day, that's not the right option. You want something at standard price, because it will have the best same-day profit margin. This is usually wood or cabbage, because they have high base prices. On the first day if you have the time you might also want to get a research line going, which I'll cover in the next section. Anyway, ending the day with around $300-400 is good, as you will make it through the first interaction with enough money to buy things in the town on the morning of day 2.

After the chapter 3 update added shipping limits to the game, getting research done quickly is highly important to success in the later game. The first research line you want to get practically every time is development, because it's very cheap as it takes the least expensive crop as an input and gives you access to some of the most important machines in the game. These machines make complex products, which turn low-cost basic products into a items that sell for several times more. The first one of these you will unlock is the ration maker, which takes a potato and carrot that have a combined value of $8 and turns them into a ration that sells for $30 at standard price. Iron also goes from a sale price of $3 to $15 after being put into a furnace, and also costs nothing to produce so it makes for great passive income.



After finishing this research line, you can replace the development manufacturer with an industry chip maker, which will allow you to build med kits after only 5 chips. If you make a cloth production line next to the ration maker you built earlier, you can easily combine their outputs to produce med kits which have a stable sale price of $75, offering excellent consistent income. Industry research also unlocks gunpowder and bullets, but those are for later in the game.




While your development manufacturer is working, you should start a efficiency research line in a different spot using the same design but swapping out the sulfur for iron. Though the wood input might be costly based on the current market price, with only 5 chips you get the large seed depot. These can store 30 seeds, much more than the standard seed depot's 10, allowing you to micromanage your seeds much less, which gives you more time to focus on building. The final research option is logistics, which I feel is the least useful and recommend you spec into last. The one good thing it offers is the electric generator unlock at 25 chips, which can greatly reduce your electricity bill. Consider building this after you have a lot of machines in your farm and your inefficiency is getting high due to all the small electric poles they require.

Some general strategy tips for the game:

Take every trade available with the side you choose to build up enough reputation if you want to get one of the specific endings, if you take all of them with both sides or none you will get the neutral ending.

If you are going for one side's reputation and see a good trade from the other side, you can take it and then use the strategy of accepting but not fulfilling a trade from them the next day to purposefully lower your reputation.

If you start a morning with around $300 or more, you should head to the town where you can talk to the shopkeepers to get merchant reputation which allows you to get free tiles or increase your shipping limit. You can also buy machines in bulk for a discount, which saves you money if you know what you are going to build in the future. Each machine purchase awards +0.5 merchant reputation, and buying flags also increases your merchant reputation by +0.7, but they are only useful if you are struggling to gain enough reputation with one side due to missing trades or failing night interactions. The best way to spend merchant reputation is buying +8 shipping limit increase as many times as possible, as it will give you the most profit in the long run.

Manage electric pole use to the lowest number possible, as the electric bill increases exponentially with higher numbers. You can avoid having to worry about this by researching development early if your electricity bill is a large concern.

Check the newspaper each morning to see what products will increase and decrease in price the next day. What you see in the newspaper is what you should be stocking up on to sell the next day, if you are have more than enough money at the end of the day to survive the night.

Due to the shipping limit applying percentage based taxes to products sold once the limit has been reached, you should sell your most expensive products first and wait until you've passed the limit to sell cheaper ones.

The new "shipping limit" mechanic implemented in Armaculture chapter 3 imposes a 60% tax on every product sold above a set number each day, and this is very important to your strategy. To maximize your profits, in the mid to late game you want to focus more on creating single, high value products instead of just mass producing basic products. To do this you will first need to complete a lot of research, but figuring out how to build a factory line effective for producing complex products can be challenging is well. I've included some images of fairly simple but efficient designs for these, but again don't be afraid to try to experiment and make something better than this. Designs for these complex production lines will also almost always vary due to the RNG mechanic of iron and sulfur ore placement in this game.



At this stage, your basic farm production lines can be converted using a sawmill or loom into more advanced ones, which will produce products that can be sold for much more. Additionally, after you are producing med kits you can consider setting up a gunpowder production line, which will make an even higher value product. The wood required to make charcoal for gunpowder grows slower than most other crops, so I recommend you put a fertilizer under it to make the machine for efficient. Once you're producing gunpowder, you can also connect it to a iron bar production line to make bullets, the most expensive product in the game.






Another building important for the late game is the Auto shipper, which takes in batteries to increase your shipping limit. Because this is uniquely self-contained and doesn't need to send products to the shipping box, I recommend you build these close to the corners of your grid to not get in the way of the products that need to be shipped.



For the interactions at night, if you have strongly chosen an allegiance with one side and have a lot of reputation with them, don't be afraid to take bold choices with people from that side. You will be forced to be meek and cooperative with people from the other side though. If you are more neutral and have reputation with both parties, you should likely always try to take the easiest way out of tough situations. This will often lose you a bit of money and/or reputation, but if you fail an interaction you can take much bigger hits to both of these and also have parts of your farm destroyed, which can be vary costly and time consuming.

-A good amount of the interactions and cutscenes play based on RNG, so if you beat the game once you likely won't understand the whole story. If you play the game through three times, achieving each ending and also unlock all the "War stories" bonus cutscenes by completing the medal challenges you be able to truly experience all of the story content.

-The week 6 night interaction when taxes increase and you see Karina for the second time is a turning point in the game, and determines which story route you will go down. If you want to get the true ending, you need to have a large amount of reputation with Arakasha and none with Leiden and succeed in this interaction.

-Honestly I'm pretty sure you can still just cheese the whole game if you just make a ♥♥♥♥ ton of iron bars, no need for complex strategy.

-There's a way to get free medals, but I'm not telling you it.