Outlanders Guide: Tips, Cheats, and Strategies

Our Outlanders guide will help bring you up to speed with the new town building sim on Apple Arcade. We’ll walk through how it all works before moving onto some more specific tips and tricks that should help you during the most difficult levels.

If you grew up playing sims like Caesar, SimCity, or the more recent Cities: Skyline, you’ll be pretty comfortable with Outlanders. It features a bunch of different levels that each come with their own main and optional objectives. These range from stockpiling food to keeping your citizens happy.

Let’s take a look at how it all works before moving onto some more specific tips and tricks that should help you master it.

Outlanders Guide – How it Works:

Outlanders plays much like any other city building sim you might have played before. It’s all about gathering the resources necessary to feed your citizens and build stuff.

During a typical level, you’ll start by gathering resources. You’ll place a Forager’s Hut to gather mushrooms to feed your citizens and a Lumberjack’s Base to gather wood.

Using that wood, you’ll build a house so your citizens don’t have to sleep on the ground, and a Sawmill, Quarry, and more buildings that require wood to start gathering up more resources.

Soon enough, you’ll have a lovely, bustling village, with your citizens living comfy in big houses, eating crops from the local farms, and every single one of them having a valuable job to perform.

Keeping your citizens happy is a big part of the battle, and this requires putting together a village that functions well. Everyone needs a fulfilling job, which you can assign them to by tapping on a building and then requesting a worker.

They’ll also need ample housing. Given how quickly the population can grow over time, it’s worth building more houses than you need just in case a baby pops up while you’re in the middle of another job.

You’ll also need to provide a steady stream of food. Early on, a Forager’s Hut suffices when you have around 10 citizens, but when you’re pushing 50 you’re going to need multiple farms popping out produce to feed everyone.

Then there’s just being nice. Build roads between the buildings to allow your citizens to get around more quickly, and place stockpiles near every single resource-producing building.

A stockpile is where your citizens store the goods they produce, and you’ll seriously slow them down by making them walk the length of the village with huge planks of wood to pop them in a stockpile.

Outlanders Tips and Tricks:

Now that you understand the basics, let’s take a look at a few more specific tips and tricks:

• Get the physical needs sorted first: Housing is nice and all, but food is essential to life. Get a steady stream of food on the table immediately whenever you start a new level. Your citizens can starve to death if they go too many days without food, and you don’t want a shortage to hit when your population starts to boom. Build up a decent stockpile of food as your first order of business.
• Keep your citizens happy: Once your citizens are safe, move onto the next priority: keeping them happy. This involves housing them, ensuring they never go a day without food, and ensuring every single member of society is employed. We’re not sure if roads between buildings and placing stockpiles near their place of work is important, but you might as well make life easy for them just in case.

• Place ample stockpiles near resource producers: Stockpiles are where your citizens place the resources they gather at work. We recommend building these right next to their places of work – with the exception of farms, which need that room for fields to grow crops. That way they won’t need to walk the length of the village, wasting precious time to gather more resources.
• Destroy and relocate Forager’s Huts and Lumberjack Cabins if they’re low on nearby resources: Keep an eye on your Forager’s Huts and Lumberjack Cabins to check that they haven’t burned through the natural resources nearby. If they’re short on mushrooms and trees, destroy the buildings and relocate them to an area more rich in resources.
• Keep an eye on the optional objective: Each level has an optional objective that you can complete. We recommend keeping an eye on the progress of this, and beating it before the main objective where possible. Once that main objective is complete, the level ends and you’ll have to start all over again to beat the optional objective.
• Decrees can help you complete objectives, but they’re risky: If you’re short on beating an objective or low on resources, you can issue a decree to encourage or discourage certain behaviours in citizens. This includes eating less food or having more babies. Be careful though: more babies means more housing and food needs, so make sure you have the resources necessary to survive the baby boom.

Glen Fox

Head of Editorial

Glen has over a decade's worth of experience in gaming journalism, writing for Pocket Gamer, Pocket Tactics, Nintendo Life, and Gfinity. When he's not badgering everyone about the dangers of passive text, you can probably find him playing Wild Rift.