Farming is a great way to gather resources in The Wandering Village. Here's a useful guide to get you started.
The Wandering Village is an indie city-builder in early access on PC. After poison and plague create an apocalyptic setting, you’re tasked with building a village on the back of a mythical creature known as an Onbu. It’s a quirky little game with a lot of heart, stressing just how important it is to form a symbiotic relationship with the surrounding environment. However, the game will give you the option of exploiting the Onbu for resources at the cost of its health and trust.
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For the most part, you’ll want to acquire your resources through farming, scavenging, and working in harmony with the Onbu. For the purposes of this article, farming is going to be the main focus as we try to keep your villagers fed and happy.
As mentioned above, you’ll eventually have the option to harvest blood from the Onbu. You can use the blood to make black pudding, which villagers can eat. You can also use the blood to create water in a laboratory. Sometimes water gets scarce and can be one of the most valuable resources in the game. However, for the purposes of this guide, it’s ill-advised to harvest the Onbu’s blood under any circumstances. If you hurt the Onbu and lose its trust, it will be unlikely to follow your instructions.
This could lead to the Onbu falling asleep in a poisonous cloud, or crossing into a desert biome when you needed it to turn toward a lush biome. While you might save some villagers by hurting the Onbu, you may just be better off losing some villagers in the short term to preserve your relationship with the Onbu in the long term.
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Berry bushes grow naturally on the Onbu’s back and will be essential when you’re first starting your village. While not really farming, you will need to gather berries. Villagers will happily eat unprocessed berries in the beginning of the game, which will give you some time to build up your farms and kitchens before people become unhappy.
However, be careful when in poisonous areas. Unlike a farm where you can build a new plot, you can’t replace berry bushes. So, be sure to avoid poison as much as possible to prevent you from losing this free and plentiful resource. If you do happen to lose some berry bushes, don’t worry too much, as more will slowly grow over time.
The first thing worth mentioning here is that you’re going to need air wells and storage tanks to harvest water from the air. You’ll want a lot of these, as both farms and herb gardens use water to grow their crops. Some crops can take quite a bit of water, and you’ll always want to have enough stored up for a drought. Lush biomes are plentiful for gathering water, while deserts will require you to dip into your storage tanks. In deserts, you’ll also want to farm cactuses and collect water from oasis locations through scavenging. Even with cactuses and oases, you’ll often find yourself struggling for water if you spend too much time in the desert biome.
You don’t need to research anything to start building your farms, so go ahead and start farming as soon as possible. Once you build your farms, you need to assign plots for the villagers to begin farming. You’ll also need to select which crop you want to grow. Different foods thrive in different biomes, so you’ll want to pay attention to where you are and which crops you’re growing. As your village grows, your villagers will also demand a wider range of foods, both processed and unprocessed. For that reason, you’ll want to grow a variety of crops at all times. As you reach over one hundred villagers, it will most likely be useful to have at least one farm for each type of crop.
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In the beginning of the game, you’ll have fewer farms and fewer farmers. As a result, you’ll want to shift what you’re growing as you cross biomes. While you may be growing beets in a lush biome, you may want to switch to corn if you see yourself crossing into a desert biome. While this won’t help with the demand for variety, you will ensure that your crops are always growing and preventing villager from starvation.
It’s much easier to deal with an unhappy villager than a starving one. Beets thrive in the lush and mountain biomes. Corn thrives in the desert. Tomatoes thrive in lush and desert biomes. Cactuses only thrive in the desert. Wheat, your most valuable resource, can grow in any of the biomes but not in patches of extreme weather. As you begin to cultivate a variety of crops, you’ll also want to begin processing a wide variety of foods.
This is one of the most important parts of farming, because it turns your hard-earned crops into meals for your villagers. Your best crop is always going to be wheat. It can grow in any climate and will yield the most food (in this case bread) from your raw ingredients. You’ll also want a variety of kitchens where villagers can drop off corn, beets, tomatoes, and berries to be turned into meals for your villagers. Making sure there’s enough food and variety will ensure that you maximize villager happiness and productivity.
NEXT: The Wandering Village: A Guide To Poison
Matthew (he/him) is an Evergreen Article Staff Writer at DualShockers. He has been an avid gamer all his life, starting with his original NES. He has spent his life eagerly recommending games of all sorts to his friends and anyone else who would listen. After graduating from Stetson University with a degree in English and Creative Writing, he went on to receive an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University. When he isn't playing games on his PS5, Series X, or Nintendo Switch, you can find him here at DualShockers writing about games.