It’s easy enough to jump right in and learn how to plant your first irradiated potato but mastering the trade and feeding the local townsfolk will take a lot of practice and discipline. This blog will help you learn the basics and get you well on your way!
When you start the game for the first time, a friendly farmhand will teach you the basics of how to break ground, plant seeds, water and harvest. Easy peasy. After the tutorial, you can explore your farmstead before jumping into your first year on the farm. Years are divided into five seasons with each season consisting of three days, starting with Spring and getting progressively more challenging until you arrive at the dreaded Nuclear Winter.
Each day is divided into day and night cycles. Your crops are safe in the daytime, so once you’ve got a decent plot, it’s time to venture out to the outer biomes where you’ll find hordes of mutant critters guarding precious seeds, powerful upgrades, and special camps with valuable rewards. You’ll want to explore as much as you can in the time that you have in order to grow better crops and power up for the upcoming battles.
Defeat as many enemies as you can while the sun shines, for once night falls, you’ll want to skedaddle back to your farm and get ready for mayhem. Each night a horde of mutant critters will invade your farm and try to take out both you and your crops. Defend against each enemy wave and harvest as many crops as you can before day breaks!
Once the sun starts shining again and the enemies scurry back to their homes, you’ll hitch a ride back to the local town and automatically sell every crop that you harvested for cashews AKA money; sell a substantial amount and you’ll be rewarded with random upgrades and cornucopias (more on those later). Now you have options of what to do with your cold-hard cashews. Do you purchase more seeds and pickaxes to expand and grow more crops? Do you buy a more powerful gun and upgrades to defeat your enemies with greater ease? Each option can play into your strategy – it’s up to you how you want to proceed!
If you also found and grew some roses, go have a chat with some of those purty-lookin’ eligible bachelors/bachelorettes on the east side of town. Gifting them your roses is a good way to build a relationship over time and score more upgrades. Give somebody enough roses and they’ll accept your hand in marriage, becoming a powerful ally on the farm and the battlefields!
Then it’s time to fly back to the farm and start a new day! Your farm will be exactly as you left it that morning, ready for another hard day of planting, harvesting, and exploring. But beware the end of the third day when a powerful boss enemy will join the invasion alongside the enemy horde. Your survival skills will be tested; pass though, and receive a bountiful drop of fertiliser, a heartbeet, and maybe some other goodies too.
Successfully survive all five seasons? Accidentally catch a rogue bullet in your bubblegoose and finish early? Either way, heading back to your farmstead between runs is where you’ll get to spend all those cornucopias you might have collected. Any special characters you rescued will set up shop here and sell you powerful permanent upgrades that carry over across runs. Or you can spend them all on adorable cats which will win your heart over with their precious mews.
Satisfied with your upgrades? If you beat Year 1, then go ahead and give Year 2 a run! Each year increases in difficulty but yields more plentiful rewards and higher score multipliers for the local and online leaderboards (online leaderboards will be coming soon after launch).
Well farmhand, that about wraps things up here, so go forth and show those critters you mean farmin’ business! Think you’ve got what it takes to be the Chief of Aggro-culture? Jump into Atomicrops on Xbox One and show us your skills!