Part 1: https://youtu.be/QLNQG7WJ2GI (60 Beginner tips that pretty much teach you how to play)

I have also written tips for Part 3 (Advanced) and Part 4 (Master) sections.

If you don't want to watch the video, here's the entire guide written down:

Intermediate Tips ★

(The em dashes – were written by me, not AI.)

1.    Wacky Biomes
The last 4 biomes released as of 2026 all require unique strategies and a lot of practice to master.
Don’t be afraid to run a couple of “empty cycles” on the actual world map to practice, as doing Training Expeditions offers no rewards. There is no downside to losing, unless you are working towards your next seal.

2.    Blueprint Madness
When starting a new settlement, don’t pick your building blueprints immediately. Check your first cornerstones, cut into your first glade to see what resources you have, or even wait for the first group of Newcomers after 10 minutes to see what species you have. All of these can assist in picking the right starting blueprints.

3.    When should you take orders?
If you recently started playing, select orders as soon as possible. This way you make progress on non-retroactive actions such as opening glades.

4.    Timed Orders
Unlocking Timed Orders in the citadel changes everything.
With timed orders unlocked, you should wait until the second year to open your first orders to stockpile some resources for potential timed orders. Also maybe finish any ongoing glade events first.

5.    Auto Pause
Newcomers visit your settlement every ten minutes, which is easy to tell on lower difficulties, as a year is also 10 minutes long. Above Prestige 2 however, the storm is 2 minutes longer so it’s hard to keep track of Newcomers.
Luckily, you can turn on the menu option for pausing the game at various events, for instance when you get Newcomers.

6.    Quick Cornerstones
Unfortunately, there is no pause option for when you get your yearly Cornerstones. In general, you should pick these up as well as soon as you get them, but we’ll talk more about Epic and Legendary cornerstones in the next video.

7.    Foolish Actions
Remember from the first video, the Queen’s Impatience is the red bar in the bottom right, that fills up passively over time and causes you to lose the game if it fills completely up.
Certain foolish actions also increase Impatience in big chunks, for instance losing villagers, calling for traders instead of waiting, or attacking them outright.

8.    Hostility Recap
Like I mentioned in Part 1, Hostility of the forest itself is the other negative force in the game. Let’s talk about Hostility for the next few tips.
I messed this up in the first video, so let’s recap: Higher Impatience will lower Hostility. This is good because it often prevents you from snowballing into a loss.
Hostility itself does not affect Impatience generation at all, so it’s always a good idea to minimize hostility as much as possible.

9.    Hostility UI
Hovering over the Hostility UI it will tell you all the actions which make up Hostility, so you know what to look out for if you want to reduce it.

10.Resolve and Hostility
Hostility causes two debuffs that reduce villagers’ global resolve.
The first one simply called “Hostility of the Forest” is active from Hostility level 1 and will decrease the global resolve of your villagers by 2 throughout the whole year, for every hostility level.
The second one called Looming Darkness is active from Hostility level 0, and will decrease global resolve by an additional 4 during the Storm season alone, for every hostility level.

11.Confusing Hostility
The previous tip is a bit confusing, so to give a useful example, imagine that you are at Hostility level 2. How does this affect your villagers?

a.     During the drizzle and clearance seasons your villagers have a -4 resolve debuff from two stacks of Hostility of the forest.

b.    During the storm season your villagers have a -16 resolve debuff; -4 from Two stacks of Hostility of the forest and -12 from three stacks of Looming Darkness.

c.     Also, Foxes are immune to Hostility of the Forest, so they have a -12 from the Looming Darkness in the storm season alone.

12.Please, No More Mysteries
Forest Mysteries are randomized positive and negative buffs you get every settlement.
The positive mysteries are active in the Drizzle season, and on higher difficulty levels you’ll only get 1 positive mystery.
Negative mysteries activate in the Storm season with after reaching various Hostility levels, with the more impactful mysteries needing a higher hostility.

13.Meaner Every Year
Hostility increases annually by a large amount. Annual hostility on all difficulties is 50% more than cutting into a single large glade.
Since Hostility and Impatience constantly increase by a large amount, the goal of Against the Storm becomes clear: win every settlement as soon as possible, before you run out of time.

14.How quickly should I be winning settlements?
The answer is: about Year 7.
So, try to achieve this pace with your settlements before tackling higher difficulties, because impatience and hostility might just be too much to handle after this point.

15.The Prestige of Prestige
There are 20 prestige levels at the time of making this video, and you must win on them sequentially to unlock the next level. Each of them stack with the previous levels and all of them are devastating in their own way, but in my opinion, these Prestige levels are the skill gates of the game:

a.     Prestige 1: Longer storms

b.    Prestige 6: Buildings cost more

c.     Prestige 10: Trading nerf

d.    Prestige 19: Glade tax

16.Shortcuts: B, Alt
Learn these shortcuts: B, Alt.
B will show you all the resources on the map.
Alt can be used to check which villagers are assigned where, and you can just left and right click to reassign them.
For more information on using the UI, check out my User Interface Tips and Tricks video**.**

17.Useless Cornerstones
When picking cornerstones, orders and perks, always check the natural resources on the current map. For instance, there’s no use picking the Dye Extractor on Royal Woodlands where insects don’t exist as natural resources.
Small tip: Instead of escaping out the cornerstone menu to check the resources on the current map, you can just hover over this icon to check them.

18.Common Species Interests
Aim to fulfill the common interests of the races you have. If you have both Harpies and Bats for instance, they both like Paste, Coats and Education – At least at the time of making this video – so try focus on creating these first, to knock out two birds with one coats.

19.Double Yield or Production Chance
There are various villager buffs that help with production, like the speed of the activity or increasing the villagers’ resolve when performing the activity. One of the most important villager buffs is increasing the double production bonus, and there are various ways to boost this. If your villager has a 10% double production bonus, they might harvest 2 herbs instead of 1, or create 4 planks instead of 2 one tenth of the time. In theory this is a 10% production bonus, but it’s actually even better, because it costs no extra input resources when crafting.

20.Complex Needs not created equal
You already know complex needs such as food, clothing, and services give resolve. But did you know they give different amounts of resolve?
Porridge – a fairly cheap food – only gives 4 resolve max, where else Pickled Goods gives double of that.

21.Complex need buffs
You already know complex needs give a different amounts of max resolve, but did you know they also give other buffs?
Food gives +5% to the double production chance, services give +10% to the double production chance. Clothing gives an extra 3 resolve boost throughout the Storm, whilst Boots give a whopping 15% extra movement speed bonus at all times.

22.Favor boost
A very powerful Intermediate tip for Against the Storm is Favor boosting. Favor species to push them over the resolve generation threshold, or to keep them from leaving in the storm season.

23.Villager Numbers
When there are multiple species just under the resolve threshold, favor the species with the higher population first. As explained in the first video, their resolve threshold will grow anyways, so you’ll need to play a balancing game between multiple species throughout the lifecycle of your settlement.

24.No idle hands
Generally speaking you should have 0 idle villagers at all times. I like to leave at least one or two villagers unassigned constantly to be builders, but otherwise everyone else should have a job, or be at the very least warehouse haulers.

25.Warehouse Haulers
Resources will not count as such inside gathering or production buildings, until they get carried to a warehouse.
Assigning villagers at the main starting warehouse or the built smaller ones will help with taking back gathered or produced items.
It’s hard to test how useful haulers are in terms of total production speed.
They have been buffed in 2026, so now you can click on the Hauler tab in the warehouse and set priorities.

26.Farm Haulers
2 farmers might be able to seed your plot of land in the Drizzle season, but you will most likely need assign 2 additional “seasonal farmers” at temporary farms to collect everything in the clearance season. Keep an eye out for how many tiles of produce is left.
Alternatively, you can set farms to be a priority for haulers.

27.Small glades, large hostility
Small Glades are generally a noob trap. Cutting into them, you’ll only get half as much hostility as large glades, but they have fewer than half as much resources as large glades. So don’t be afraid of dangerous or even forbidden glades, and only open small ones when your species tell you there’s farmland or a geyser.

28.Glade Cutting Good Practices
Finally, let’s talk about good practices when it comes to glade exploration.
We talked about finishing settlements under 8 years, but how many dangerous or forbidden glades should you open, and when should you open them?
Most players would tell you to open one large glade every year. This always feels a little hectic to me, so I only open the next large glade once I used up most of the resources in the previous ones.
Don’t be afraid of Forbidden glades, just treat them like Dangerous ones.
Skip them in the first 2 years though to build up the complex resources often needed for the Forbidden events.

29.When should you cut into large glades?
In the lower difficulties it really doesn’t matter, but later on when glade events require more time and resources to complete, time your woodcutters to cut into them early in the storm season.
Why?
You can use the current storm season to figure out crafting the glade event requirements, and actually do the event over the next drizzle and clearance seasons.
Glade events often give a resolve penalty whilst doing them, so doing them in the storm season is a death sentence on higher difficulties.
Make it a habit to cut into large glades in the storm season. There’s even a cornerstone for it. [Improvised Tools]
Just make sure you don’t accidentally increase your hostility to the next level.

30.Training Expeditions Prestige Presets
Training Expeditions are only useful when you want to start with a specific caravan or combination of races to test stuff.
You can replicate Prestige difficulties on the Training Expedition tab, but it’s fairly unintuitive, because some Prestige debuffs have to be set manually.
If you want to replicate Prestige 5, 10, 15 and 20 and save them as template presets for later use, I won’t talk about it in this video, because it would be too long, but here are the on-screen instructions explaining it.

a.     In case the Prestige difficulty settings change in the future, open the Hooded Horse’s wiki about Difficulty and scroll down the Prestige Difficulties section to check the debuffs.

b.    Open Training Expeditions in game and start creating the presets.
Make sure to select the Forsaken Altar (bottom right, scroll down to Prestige) with every prestige preset, and select only 1 positive forest mystery (left, scroll down to Forest Mysteries).

c.     For Prestige 5:
We’ll have to set the Prestige 1 and 2 debuffs manually:
18 reputation points
Storm season 4 minutes
Then select these Prestige 3,4,5 debuffs (in the bottom right under Forsaken Altar).
Save template as Prestige 5.

d.    For Prestige 10, just load Prestige 5 and select the next 5 prestige debuffs in order.
Save template as Prestige 10.

e.    For Prestige 15, load Prestige 10 and we’ll have to replicate Prestige 11 manually: Set blightrot footprint to 200% and corruption to 150%. Then just select the next 4 prestige debuffs in order.
Save template as Prestige 15.

f.      Finally for Prestige 20, just load Prestige 15, select the remaining five prestige debuffs and save template as Prestige 20.
This way you can have custom games on four different prestige difficulties.

g.     Right now Difficulty is bugged, so even after loading a prestige template make sure you manually select “Viceroy” under Difficulty to get those debuffs as well.