Farthest Frontier

Fabulous game already and the devs are still working on improvements - love the design, the game mechanics and the fun it brings. The only thing I would wish for is that devs would at least respond with acknowledgment if we report bugs or ideas for improvement

Compared to games like Banished, Foundation, Frostpunk etc, it feels very sandboxy. Like there's heaps of detail on things you CAN do, but there doesnt seem to be much reason to do it. Its like: Hey, did you know we added 15 different types of food you can grow/farm/hunt for? To which my response is: Ok great, congratulations. Heaps of them are nearly identical, what's the point?

Everything feels like content for the sake of content, not that it's actually enjoyable or adds something unique, or gives you more self sufficience for something you couldn't get before and really needed and had to trade for or suffer without. 3 years in, you're already pretty settled, and it left me feeling like i was just playing a sandbox with extra steps. Not a game i enjoy.

Farthest Frontier is one of the best indie survival city-building simulators, offering a unique blend of deep strategy, resource management, and challenging gameplay that sets it apart from other titles in the genre. The developers' commitment and the constant, though sometimes lengthy, updates contribute significantly to the game's evolving experience, ensuring it remains engaging and amusing.

Overall a 9/10

Overall this is a lot of fun in the early game but gets a lot less fun in the late game as there still isn't really an win state implemented and there's no help for trying to find buildings you've built - for example if I'm trying to find where all my coal mines that I disabled are I have to manually pan around the map.

It also has mediocre graphics and restrictive camera angles which isn't a killer but is a bit annoying. There are still some bugs for example the popup tooltips seem to break every few minutes

The final killer is that although the game performs ok while you are playing if you have a big city and you quit and want to come back later the game will refuse to load your save.

Great kind of reaistic city builder. If you like watching things grow this is the perfect game

Farthest Frontier has continued to grow with each update. It is a well balanced game. The details added with each update are great.
My compliments to all the hard working people at Crate Entertainment. This is one of my favorite city building games. Thank you!

Hours and Hours of fun!

First and Foremost you have to remember that this game is in Early Access (EA). And on that note, it is certainly something you notice occasionally, but less and less as time passes.

Let start with the bad since I love to save the best for last. And when I say bad there really is not much fault with this game at all. If you are looking to scratch that city builder itch and build a civilization up from nothing then this is definitely the game for you. It is both complex in the way of a city builder with resource management, farming, food collection, army building, combat, religion, etc. And simple in that it is all easy to manage, which is often quite difficult for these games to get the balance right... Often with seemingly impossible complex UI management. However, it is sometime simple to a fault. With an overall lack of late game building to expand with or challenges to overcome for that matter. After a certain point the challenge and real improvements seem to fall off a cliff. Another thing that I dislike is the game speed. While I enjoy the realistic pacing, the inability to meaningful increase it is at time frustrating. With 3x speed sometimes feeling like .5x speed. I also sometimes feel frustrated by the inability to scroll farther out on the map. And while some might note disappointment in lack of traditional tech tree atm, I do not mind it.


Now on to the good. This game is beautiful, fun, and offers plenty of content before it leaves you wanting more. The UI is great- one of the best I feel that a city builder can have. The initial challenge and combat are really fun and intuitive. Additionally, the maps are fun to explore, and the buildings offer interesting components to the game that increase the realism and supply chain management. The feeling of being attacked and attacking is also fun and realistic, but not overwhelming (usually haha). It is a great game to not only play full-time to build a city, but also play in the background while looking at something else if you are going for a peaceful city builder. All in all, this is the type of game many of us were searching for, something so simple, but almost impossible to find it felt like.. Especially with unfinished glimmers of hope like banished... All in all, I recommend. While end game might not seem to be all there yet, please do remember it is EA! Anyway, happy gaming friends!

Nice Relaxing game with enough challenge to stay interesting and keep replay ability.

This is the best overall city/community building strategy game I've played. I really enjoy these types of games and have my library full of them. This is not a quick flash in the pan game. There are long term strategies that need to be developed and lots of variables to always keep top of mind. It's engaging, long lasting, fun and I can't get enough. Really strongly recommend this game if you are into this type of game.

The graphics of the game are very good, the gameplay is also very engaging, and the music is very catchy. The game's strengths lie in its detailed and balanced resource management system, and game has a weather system, the seasons change in cycles. The semi-realistic graphics are not too sophisticated but are very suitable for the border setting, giving a feeling that is both rustic and vivid.

However, sometimes the AI ​​of the residents is a bit "naive" and not flexible in automatically prioritizing work, causing the player to have to manually intervene quite a lot, and the animation of the villagers is a bit stiff so it needs to be improved a bit.

The game is still in the Early Access stage, so it will continue to be improved in terms of features and performance in the future. This is a city builder game that recommend for you and should try.

i love this game so much because its feels you like a mayor of the town and your in charge of everything to provide foods shelter and soldiers to protect it to survive.

After update 0.97 my game is Lag, Food eat Fast (Have relic -15%), Some info not show like before. and loading is slow too.

I think this game is currently worth the $29.99 price tag but I wouldn't say the same thing a year+ ago. I played this game for ~40 hours about a year ago and kinda got bored minmaxxing all the shelter bonuses so took a break. I revisited this game a few weeks ago and they have improved the game a lot. The game plays much smoother and easier on my laptop. I'm already up to 200 pop and haven't run into the terrible frame skips and low framerate I experienced my first time around.

I would definitely reccomend trying the game out if you're someone that's into variety and are okay with playing a game for 50-100 hours and switching to a different game, such is the naute of EA games i think. :)

Nice city biulder in medieval ish times.
I like the peacefull mode, I have enough stress in my life as is :)
Graphics are resonable, gamplay is nice, and building is fun enough for me.
Also big thank you for the creator to fixing game braking bugs so fast, had my save break after patch , sen the save to them and the game was patched next day to fix the issue with my save!

Farthest Frontier is excellent. Great town / village builder. If you aren't into fighting - you can turn on pacifist mode for a very relaxing pace. Enough detail to be interesting. But it doesn't punish you for not min/max'ing.

Overall, the game isn't bad, but at the moment it's too straightforward. If you take games like Caesar 3 as an example, this one doesn't even have half of what that game offered. You're just building a city and struggling with dumb AI... It's not enjoyable. The trading system is almost non-existent. The combat feels no different from games made in 1998. So, overall, the game is okay, but right now it doesn't offer anything that can keep you engaged for more than the first 10–20 hours. Was it worth spending the money? That's for you to decide.

I think the game is unpolished and difficult in an unfun way. The graphics don't matter that much but it really shouldn't be stuttering with such low fps like it has been for me. Even with a 5090 and 7800x3d it doesn't stop the sutttering/poor performance.

A game with a lot of potential – it’s been a lot of fun so far, and I’m expecting great things from version 1.0.

I greatly enjoy this game. I'm a huge city builder nerd, so this scratches that part of my brain. It also has a lot of strategy involved. I would highly recommend this game to anyone who enjoys time passing games. Ready for new updates, and maybe they can give us more decorations, and more water action. They should also let you skin the bears for meat and hides. Other than that, I don't have complaints I can think of atm.

Pretty solid simulation game. Great potential! Will play more when the game is complete.

The game feels great but by late game there exists too much micro managing, and the troop management system is not that great, it could be done to be more streamlined as the orders/strategies of the npc's don't really seem to work that well. It is easy to have resource crisis, but once you get the hang of things it gets rolling. The main issue is finding common sources like clay and stone (on infinite sources) by late game because if it appears too far away it becomes hell. Overall, pretty great.

I could write a long review and tell you all kind of cool stuff about this game. But you should play the game, and experience the whole thing yourself.

lots of other early access games in this genre since the release of Farthest Frontier. I have +300 hours in this game, it's the one I always comes back to. You should too.

Buy it, play it, you will never regret it. Best game in the genre, no doubt about that.

I'm not a huge fan of the city builder genre, but this game I could nevertheless enjoy quite a bit.

Pros:
1. Graphics and audio are quite solid. The music might start to seem annoying after spending several hours in a row playing, so adding a bit more variety to the soundtrack could add a bit of a variety (e.g., change theme based on the season of a year, or based on the population achieved). Not a big deal though.
2. Challenging (in a good sense) balance of "what you produce vs what you consume". You can't just grab everything, store for later, and then decide on what to do. Things might start to spoil, or you might end up out of storage space. You need to gradually increase both the consumption and producing rates, which means manually managing the professions, adding/removing more workers or manufacturers as necessary.
3. Strategy matters. Similar to the above, but more generic: you have to always plan to future and spread your resources/activities accordingly. Wanna feel protected and build many towers/hire many soldiers to leave no chances to raiders? Fine, but now your economy is poor, you are lacking of food or other materials since you put too many people on to these professions which do nothing the majority of their time, but consume gold. Wanna make sure you have enough food, spawn a couple of more agricultural field? Fine, but now you need more farmers there, otherwise they won't be able to keep up with the workload. You also need more storage, and more manufacturers probably, otherwise things will spoil. You have to always address not only the immediate concerns, but the upcoming ones: as the population growths, you need more food, more clothes, more houses etc.

Cons:
1. Lack of explanation for how things work (or why they do not work). The game gives you some basic hints, but when it comes to some details, you can only figure them out themselves. Just a couple of samples:
- Some areas cannot be accessed by builders. You start the building, you make it important, they start to deliver materials, then they just stop working, even though nothing is indicating that something is wrong. After a while I realized they cannot access the building since there have been a couple of walls built nearby, and they probably cannot pass between them (even though they are not merged).
- "They need medicine". You have the tier 2 medical care booth built, which says it's working. Ill people are just starring at it and eventually die of hunger, unless you have the pills bought/produced for them. I would say just don't build the medical booth unless you have the pills in your stack, otherwise it just doesn't seem to produce any value, but rather makes things worse.
2. Sometimes it's not clear why you can't put a building on a particular spot. It looks flat, no water/other buildings around, you just can't place it here for no clear reason.
3. Combat system: to me it's sometimes a challenge to make someone attack and not just running around like a dumb. You have to target/click the little model of a wolf. Would be much more pleasant if you could specify the "area of action" to say "go defend this area". You sort of can from the barracks, but what if I don't want the whole roster to focus on single area. Also, if your archers run out of arrows - they start to run towards enemies/towers to attack hand to hand, like dumb. Especially annoying when you have a squad of 10+ archers trying to long range fight enemies, and suddenly 3 of them put out their sword and running towards like if they felt themselves full metal plate armored soldiers...
4. Sometimes AI behaves weird: you have 1000+ wood at the storage close to your sawmill? Nah, I would rather head to another one at the opposite side of the village to grab them.
5. Not much you can do in the game once you hit the cap (the last city I built had 1000 population cap). Would love to see higher grade content available, or ability to spawn a new "subsidiary" village somewhere around the map, with another "city center". Having the "Raiders Village", or just another village to attack at some point could be interesting.

To sum up, the game is certainly worthy. Once/if the glitches get fixed, and more late game content gets added, this may become a great one. Until then, I would rate it 7.5/10 (which is solid enough on my personal scale).

This game inspired me to write a draft of a full one man 6 Act play complete with titles and lines. Enjoy!

ACT 1: A Promising Beginning
"Ah, Farthest Frontier, a beautiful and immersive medieval city builder. Lovely visuals, intricate supply chains, and realistic survival elements. What could possibly go wrong?"

ACT 2: Growing Pains
"Okay, villagers, let's settle down. Yes, food is tight, but I'm planting crops. Relax! No need to panic about bread every five seconds. How are you always hungry? How?!"

ACT 3: The Hunger Games
"WHY ARE YOU ALL STARVING AGAIN? I BUILT FARMS! I BUILT FISHING HUTS! I BUILT A BAKERY! Yet here we are, villagers stumbling around dramatically clutching their stomachs as if I don't provide three square meals. Do medieval peasants have tapeworms or something?!"

ACT 4: Industrial Anxiety
"No. We cannot survive solely on berries. STOP PICKING BERRIES AND BAKE SOME BREAD! Oh great, now we're out of firewood. And water. How did civilization even survive the medieval period? I demand answers!"

ACT 5: Bandit Breakdown
"OH, OF COURSE, BANDITS! Just when we stabilized food production, here come the world's hungriest bandits! What's that, villagers? You're terrified? Well, TOO BAD! Everyone charge blindly at the bandits! Yes, ALL of you—blacksmith, baker, potato picker—attack them like angry ants! Efficiency be damned!"

ACT 6: Unhinged Finale
"Fantastic. We've driven off the bandits, but now half of you are injured and the entire economy has collapsed. Back to starving! But hey, at least we saved a few cabbages, right? RIGHT?!"

10/10 Would descend into madness managing villagers' appetites and suicidal battle tactics again.

fun city builder. i like the addition of combat. good implementation of houses, crops, and livestock.

love this game ,Needs alot of work. some great things about the ai but alot of bad and the building aspects are very off.terrain leveling is off,demo fences takes foerver,cant find helpers idle,bunch more but some right off top my head after many hours in so far. wish you could slow the years down or the enemy was different around the region.people leaving houses for no reason. the gold is only useful if you learn how to use the trader. wish mopre than two traders can show or find traders

So i spent many many hours playing banished, but not really any other city sims.

This game is pretty great from my viewpoint.. slightly more complicated systems, combat (kinda), but still feels and plays much the same.

Would like a bit more depth to the death messages.. lost 10% (60) of my population in one winter to exposure.. couldn't figure it out since i'd been upping clothes production.. turns out my cobbler had dropped the ball and nobody had shoes on.. I couldn't have stopped it in the moment, but at least i'd have been less confused for the 30 minutes afterwards before checking stock in trade centre.

Also feel like the flatten terrain tool could be tweaked.. having to 'flatten' the same spot over a dozen times from different angles just to be able to place a mine on a gold node is crazy... flat should be flat with cliffs around the edge.. not just smoothing it out.

Beyond that, very happy with the hours i've put in so far.

Okay I think this is THE city builder for me. Ofc there's still lots of room for improvement but the overall gameplay is satisfiying enough. It might be too vanilla but it's still a classic.

First of all I was able to play this on the Steam Deck OLED without any major issues and the trackpads were made perfect for this.

The gameplay was intuitive enough to learn without spending many hours on the wiki. But there were still a few things that left me clueless and so the need to be explained further.

I'm not the biggest fan of the combat and defensive system but it's not the main focus in this game so it's understandable.

I wish there were more options available to increasing the Desirability for houses other than the Decorations and important buildings. What if the quality of life for your population can be expressed a bit further and affecting the overall housing Desirability.

And I also want to see more variety to the Merchants that we can trade with. Maybe having a Trade Harbor for merchant ships is a good idea?

TL;DR
It's a classic survival city builder that doesn't look quirky or feel gimmicky. You can just relax and forget about the outside world. Expanding your town little by little, sustaining and managing the limited resouces in the wilderness.

So far I'm really liking this game. It seems fairly well polished for a game still in early access. It has good customization options to fit your preferred playstyle, whether you prefer fighting raiders and aggressive wildlife or enjoy a more casual city building experience. All in all well worth a try for under 40 bucks!

This is the first of this type of game I have played. The tutorial was super helpful and was a great introduction. You can Adjust the difficulty as well.

The core of a good game is in there, but is smothered by a silly tier system that locks buildings behind arbitrary population requirements. This means large parts of your play time will be spent just waiting for people to move in or grow up.
There is a fair amount of emphasis placed on fending off raids, but your defensive options are very lacking.

Really fun game. I was looking for a relaxing city builder with some light combat elements all my life and here it is!

Sehr schönes Spiel, man kann sich über viele Stunden darin verlieren, unberührte Wildnis Stück für Stück bewohnbar zu machen.

A very fun city builder, that scratches that Caesar III itch.

It doesn't have any ground breaking mechanics, but it does the standards of the genre exceptionally well, by being focused on growth above all else. Outside of the hardest difficulties, the challenge is not about survival or keeping your villagers happy, it's about deciding where to invest your surplus. Do you use your limited supply of stone to build a barn or to start digging clay? Do you put you your bricks into a cheese maker or an upgraded theatre? This results in a strong sense of progression, where a shabby village metamorphises into a handsome town before your very eyes, with a one-more-building feeling.

The game also has the right scale and sense of abstraction considering you'll spend most of the time with several hundred villagers. You have to care about logistics and having related buildings fairly close to each other (almost all buildings are movable for the cost of some labour, making such reshufflings easy). But they don't have individual personalities, so you don't have to worry about keeping Henry away from Biancha because he doesn't like the smell of her perfume or the like. This ties in with the game being mostly absent of micromanagement, outside of occasional fighting. The game provides enough graphs, menus and overviews that you can figure out what the macro shortages and bottlenecks in your village are before they bite you.

The farming system also deserves a shout out, the way you have to choose crops to balance yields, field fertility, seasonal preferences, farmer workload, and diseases is a fun mini-game within the game. Related is also the short shelf life of food that makes it inefficient to keep very large stockpiles. Put together it really sells the atmosphere as being an alternate medieval world where working the land is the biggest part of the economy.

It's currently in early access but, apart from a few balance issues and the odd minor UI bug, it already feels very polished.

its alright, can be fun. compared to other titles of its play style, it comes across as pretty average. still managed to kill a few hours on it.

Serviceable city builder with some complex systems (and some not so complex).

Overall, not disappointed, but just a little sad that the dev behind GD would make such a vanilla city builder experience. There are so many period-esque city builders and this one doesn't really do much to differentiate itself, even with it's attempt at complex systems.

I almost want to say they should have gone the direction of making this a city builder in the world/atmosphere of GD with all it's weird occult, aether, magic elements developed into builder systems as opposed to whatever this is.

I have always been a big anno fan so coming to a game like this by chance was amazing! I really like the resource management and combat differences. So much more to explore and cannot wait... currently addicted :)

Haven't got to much experience with city builders but really enjoyed this one. Really like the way fields and livestock works.

I'm on and off the game but when I'm back on I'm stuck in my seat for a few hours. Its a nice cozy little city builder that does get progressively challenge as you advance in it but still solid enough to get the hang of it as you go.

Just because you have an "early access" plaqe, does not mean your game can be as raw as it is in this state. IF you are comfortable with charging full price for the game, then be prepared to recieve appropriate ratings. There are so many problems with bugs, optimization and core mechanics. But there is potential in this game, which is why I have a lot of hours in this game. If things change, the bugs get fixed, the game provides more information about which buildings you have and which workers work there I will change my review to positive. Untill then I cannot reccomend this game.

Beautifully balanced game, would like to see more complex interaction with bandits in the future

Love this as a city builder vibe. It can be very challenging at different times and forces you to learn. Also make me get excited when I learn about a new strategy I can try, so I start over to see if it pays off. UI take a bit to get used to, but nothing crazy. One of my many go-to's to scratch the "start from nothing" itch since it was early access. Excited to randomly run into new things from time to time as it gets updated.

The game isn't bad, few minor bugs, the "normal" campaign is way to easy, I have not been wiped out a single time nor didn't I restart the map, not a very good sign to me. I will try the hardest play through available and see what happens.

It's a good game, but easy. I recommend it as a chill game.

The game is awesome!!! However, automatic management of rodents by individual housing is a must. I should have to hire, in gold, these people. The farmers should take care of diseases, rodents, crop rotation by the schedule I set. Mountains shouldn't be hard to carve to get to a stable resource. After I press the bell for citizens to hide and protect, everybody in the town should be in a defensive or fighting mode. ETC...

The game is AWESOME, though!!!!

A very good game all in all. Not for a weak PC. I love the progression, buildings, the map, visuals, ways of decoration. This game has its flaws as well, there are quite a few from my point of view. Totally deserves a try if you're familiar with such games, but not ideal.

After more than a year of early access, there have been no real improvements. Yes, they fixed massive oversights and errors that should never have been there in the first place (e.g. a band-aid fix for the lack of stone, minimal control and AI improvements), and added some new luxury goods, but it still feels shallow and clunky to play.

The food and farming systems are great, but all other systems keep shooting themselves in the foot. Everything about roads is a fail: They often won't align with the grid that all other buildings use. You can only delete full segments of a road, so if you want to remove that 1 tile that's sticking out too far, you need to tear down a much longer stretch of the road. You cannot build stone roads on top of dirt roads. You can build diagonal roads, but not diagonal walls.
Raiders and Raider camps force you to deal with the terrible combat system. They're not really challenging, just annoying to deal with. The game is trying to take inspiration from RTS with its different unit types, formations and the general controls, but doesn't have any depth, is clunky to control and doesn't make fights feel rewarding.
You can't get a proper overview of your population stats such as education, age, etc.
Workers will run across the entire map to collect resources from a mine instead of taking it from a nearby stockpile, and literally freeze to death on the way during winter. Many parts of the game lack explanation and useful tooltips.
After the early game, most of your time is spent waiting for your population to grow with very little to do. Once you've unlocked and built all the buildings once, there is no replay value and nothing to achieve.

I still have hope that the devs can turn this around, but it will take a lot of work.

This game is really good if you looking for a balanced strategy survival game. It has one of the best landscape in it's category. There are a lot of things to discover and there is something to do all day long without getting bored fast.

This is an awesome little medieval city-builder game, where you have to manage different economical and people-oriented supply chains. The graphics are cute and the game is overall very easy to figure out. The trick comes from managing the needs of your population against the constraints of supply and time, and as the city grows, so does the difficulty. While the game is still early-access, it's definitely playable right now, and the devs are very active in discussion chats.

I especially like that you can tweak the settings to give yourself an easier - or more difficult - setup. Highly recommend.

Only played 4 hours but i can say it does what it say on the tin. It's reminiscent of other medieval survivals, but with an RTS touch to it... so far, so good!

this is really quite beautiful <3
If you like building and resource management this isnt a difficult challenge, but a really nice one