Improved Silos in Sector 1, take 2

Our previous attempt was good, but there's room for improvement.
Today I've got a layout for Sector 1 that encompasses 7 improved silos to 19 farm (2.71 farms per silo), 2 storehouses and 1 field.

Here's the layout:

Click to enlarge

The 7 improved silos go in the squares marked in blue.
The 19 farms go in the squares marked in yellow.
The unmarked squares towards the edges were longer than a minute walk so weren't included.

For those of you interested in the maths involved, here's what my sheet looked like I was working from:

Column A was each possible walk distance, B was how may squares contained that distance in the current map.
Columns C and D were how much wheat is consumed/refilled over 24 hours for a level 5 building.
Columns E and F I type in how many of each building at each walk distance I want to test with.
And, columns H and I calculate how much they produce/consume in total and give final totals.

For this layout, the farms are going to be pulling out 10,670.71 wheat per day on average, and the silos are going to be filling 10,675.56. The silos will stay slightly ahead of the farms, so the field will remain nice and filled.

The average walk time for the farms is 49.3 seconds, pretty decent overall.

Happy Settling.

Easter Approaches

The Easter event is almost upon us, and will go live on the 9th of April.

Collectibles

Continuing the trend, there will be Easter specific collectibles. Egg Paint, Wicker Baskets and Simple Egg's. You need 25 of each item, and then can convert all of that into 10 actual eggs in the mayors house. Also, these collectibles are rather tiny, I'd certainly call them harder to notice than the Christmas ones.

There's also some other new collectibles on the test server, wine barrels, fur bundles and a few others that make a few new things, but these aren't specific to Easter, and won't necessarily go live with the event.

Explorers

Similar to Christmas, your explorers will be able to find eggs in additional to regular loot they might find when out on searches. Very long searches are certainly capable of bringing back 50 from testing, but much more would need to be done to get an idea of the amounts at different search times.
Now, if you've invested in the Sturdy Shovel skill on explorers (+9% treasure on explorer searches) like you may have if you've made an Artefact Searcher, you'll also find that the egg count gets increased by this skill also.

You can also get a few hundred eggs by completing the quest line.

Now, what can you shop for?

Buying eggs

First, as always, you can spend some gems to buy the holiday resource.
In this case, the small egg basket contains 100 eggs, and the big basket contains 300 eggs. Initially, this seems to make no sense. If you buy 3 small baskets, you can have 300 eggs anyway, but that way would only cost 885 gems. A small discount, but still, cheaper that way.

The Specialists

The Master of Martial Arts (2,395 eggs, max 1): He's the new big ticket item for the event. He holds 220 troops which may not seem like much next to the Veteran, but, as a unit himself he's quite a powerful force. He is a first striker himself, and swings for 450 - 500 damage per blow at the weakest enemy units. Basically he's like having around 50 cavalry in the battle on your side, which are immune to typical enemy first strikers.
Battles you typically wouldn't send cavalry into can now be fought as if you did send some. He will mix things up, and there will be battles that he makes easier (but it is a lot of eggs).

Veteran (1,545 eggs, max 1): Ah, the Vet. If you don't have one, you should consider him an important goal. His 250 troop capacity will help a lot on adventures, reduces losses considerably over your regular 200 generals. If you already have one, an argument could be made for getting another, it's still an additional troop transport in the worst case, and there are some adventures where a second veteran works out well. We at this stage can't be sure if people will be able to get a vet for eggs again if you got one last year for eggs, but last year you could, so it seems plausible that it will work out again.

Experienced Explorer (475 eggs, max 1): Experienced Explorers are like Savage Scouts, and allow you to go on treasure/adventure hunts in half the time, very useful. If you aim to get him early, you can also of course put him to work exploring and finding eggs for the remainder of the event. In previous years, you could get 2 of these, the dropping to 1 probably related to the inclusion of the Master.

The Buildings

Watermill (275 eggs, max 5): The Watermill is always a nice necessary item after a point on your island to reduce the amount of wells you require. Historically however, the amount of cash you could get for 275 eggs was greater than what you could just buy a watermill for, so they tended to not be worthwhile.

Floating Residence (75 eggs, max 3): At level 5, a floating residence holds 80 population, although similar to nobles, it tends to be most economical to get them to level 3 for 60 population. Especially useful as by going on water, they're living on space you couldn't use for anything else anyway.

Rabbit Farm Field (75 eggs, no limit): A field containing 6,000 wheat. Almost certainly not worthwhile.

The Buffs

Rabbit Lucky Charm (145 eggs, no limit): 3x output for a building for 48 hours
Mineral Rabbit (75 eggs, no limit): add 6000 coal to a deposit
Chocolate Rabbit (45 eggs, no limit): Halve production time on your provision house for 12 hours
Inspirational Speech (245 eggs, no limit): "Increases the production of all buildings in a 3 radius square by 3, for 12 hours". Now, this one requires further explanation.
Firstly, you need to remember that typical buildings are 2 squares across.
Secondly, you can't aim for the side of a building to increase the radius, you select a building, and then it counts 3 squares out from the centre of the building.
Thirdly, you must click on a buffable building, so you can't hit a storehouse to get everything around it.
If you had such a layout, this does mean you can hit up to 9 buildings with this buff.

Here's an example:

I can aim on the cutter in the centre, and it will hit the 8 surrounding cutters as well. This is nice, but I'd tend to value getting buffs below getting specialists and buildings. Also, you probably aren't going to have 9 buildings in a tight layout like this, there's probably going to be a storehouse in there somewhere.

The Decoration

Raving Rabbid Statue (195 eggs, no limit): Pretty little statue, also screams a bit when clicked on. That is all.

The Surprise Box

Paula's Surprise Box (145 gems, no limit): Similar to the Master Architect box from Christmas, this box contains an assortment of buildings and decorations. The list of things you can get are fairly similar too. The Xmas tree and Improved storehouse are out, and in their place you can get silos and Bone Churches. Bone Churches seem incredibly rare though.

So the list is:

• Angel Monument (decoration)
• Arctic Iron Mine (level 5 Iron Mine, doesn't return to star when depleted)
• Bone Church (decoration)
• Dark Tower (100 population)
• Frozen Manor (140 population)
• Pavillion (decoration)
• Pirate Residence (50 population)
• Raving Rabbid Statue (decoration)
• Silo (Replenishes wheat fields at the same rate a equal level farm depletes it)
• White Castle (50 population)
• Witch Tower (100 population)

Personal notes/suggestions:

If you're new, and don't have a veteran yet at all, you really should place some priority on getting him. He helps reduce losses in adventures so much, and you'll miss having him later in the year if you leave him now. Even though he's great, a case could be made for first focusing on getting the explorer, so that you can use him to go get more eggs for the rest of the event. That would be my main suggestion in that case, get the explorer, then the vet.

Eggs permitting, move onto floating residences.

For myself, I already have a veteran so initially intend on saving up for explorer, and then the master of martial arts. I have 8 explorers currently, so the egg income should be reasonable. After that, floating residences, and then perhaps even the veteran if things go super well.

Let me know what items you're looking to pick up below.

Happy Settling.

Current changes on Test

Other than the Easter Event, there's a few other things that are currently up on the test server that seem worth mentioning/looking at. Note that these things aren't inherently related to the Easter event, and may be released earlier, or later, or never.

Upgradeable Village School

Village schools can be upgraded to level 5!
A level 1 school was already pretty good, upgrading them to level 5 is amazing value.
This will mean at level 5, each one will give 5 settlers every 2 hours, so, 60 per day.

To make 60 settlers with bread from your provision house costs 1500 bread.
A level 5 bakery produces around 1000 bread a day (unbuffed).
This means that a single level 5 village school is worth 1.5 bakeries, and, since the bakeries need buildings themselves, also worth 3 mills and 6 farms. Assuming you use bread to help produce troops, this makes a level 5 village school equal to 10.5 buildings. This also doesn't take into account the wheat field and well the bread system needs.


White text in the chat window

There's a toggle button to change all chat text to being white. This has been a long awaited addition to the game I hope comes soon. This will be especially useful for the extremely difficult to read pink text on the whisper chat.

Both very nifty things that will be nice to come over to live. Depending on just how prevalent schools are, this could potentially trash bread prices. I have 4 myself, so that will be quite a lot of extra settlers from the schools (240 a day).

I'm also doing up a list of the Easter goodies for you all to look at, should be up in the next few days.

Happy Settling.

Improved Silo Cluster

Hiya Settlers,

Tonight we have a cluster that you can place in a few places. It will certainly fit

> in front of the mayors house

> surrounded by the trees in sector 4

> in the clearing at the bottom of sector 5

You may also find other locations, but those are the 3 that are apparent to me. The set-up will involve 3 improved silos, 1 regular silo and 9 farms.

Here's the general map with walk times being used:

And here's how you should fill it out:

Should be mostly self explanatory, the yellow F squares are your farms, the blue IS squares are improved silos, and the white S is your regular silos.

In this layout at level 5, your farms will overall consume 5110.63 wheat over 24 hours. Your silos could otherwise refill 5117.33, so with the silos slightly overproducing, you'll never need to replace the field.
Your farms in this layout have an excellent average walk time of 40.88 seconds.

Happy Settling.