

The wood block on Refugees is so extreme and you will need every wood source the game makes available to you.Īs for the thumpers. On refugees I actually think it's worth researching both while also going for a wood outpost. I generally rush wall drill in ANH, my build is typically (Beacon, Drawing Boards, Wall Drill) or on Extreme (Drawing Boards, Wall Drill, Beacon) as removing that early game wood-block is so crucial to avoiding snowballing sickness and starvation. A pair of wall drills also only requires 2 heaters or 2 automatons (if you decide to go that way). Wall drills have the added benefit of being static, so it's easier to stack buffs from efficiency/heat buildings on them than your constantly relocating sawmills.

Mass sawmills work out to more total wood produced in the long run, but wall drills generally result in more wood earlier given your limited worker count. Wood is the resource you need the most of early on.* And early on you also tend to be population blocked. 10 workers in a wall drill produce the same as 20 workers in sawmills. The big advantage you get from wall drills is their worker density. They will remain in the same place for the entire scenario, but you can only build as many as there are slots for them (2 on ANH). However Wall Drills have a base efficiency that is twice that of Sawmills. Wall drills require researching Tier 1 and consume a steam core. You will however have to frequently deconstruct and rebuild sawmills as they'll chew through patches of trees fairly quickly. You can build as many as you can keep heated and staffed. Sawmills are a Tier 0 tech and they're cheap to build. Sawmills again comes down to the scenario and what the rest of your build looks like. I assume if you make a higher difficulty run it will change.ĭrills vs. But it is still weird that drills for instance I did not have to use at all, since there was plenty of forest in the New Home. That there is a need to do that to survive, so I researched a lot of stuff. My main mistake, from what you are saying, is that I thought that I should use everything in my play through.
