Farthest Frontier Sells Over 250,000 Copies in First Week on Steam Early Access

Written by Brandon Hofer on August 22, 2022

News: The new survival city-builder from Create Entertainment is off to a strong start and is getting ready for its first major update.

Crate Entertainment’s newly released survival city-builder, Farthest Frontier, has officially sold more than 250,000 copies after just seven days in Early Access. Having released on Steam ($29.99) on August 9th, it's now set to reach half a million copies sold by the end of August. Farthest Frontier invites players to protect and guide a small band of settlers to forge a town at the edge of the known world.

The Crate team has now delivered its first major community update, detailing at great length impending major improvements to the biggest player concerns, including performance and optimization, the trading post, starter experience, and game difficulty. Further fixes include:

A big boost to stone and mineral deposits, including the chance for a massive stone deposit depending on the map. This is a temporary fix as the development team plan to eventually provide late-game buildings such as quarries / deep mines to access unlimited resource deposits.

New notification when traders arrive and small portraits in top-left showing who is currently at the trading post. Merchant frequency also increased.

A new “Idyllic Valley” map type for those who have asked for more resource-abundant map options.

Key New Features:

Harvest, Grow, Craft - Harvest 14 different raw materials from wood, stone, and clay, to metal ores, wild herbs, and honey. Grow 17 types of food, including forage items, fish and game, plus 10 food crops, each with different characteristics. Produce 32 crafted items and materials in a multitiered economy.

Build and Advance - Construct 50 different types of buildings as you grow your town from a fledgling settlement to a bustling city. Your town center and housing will advance through multiple building tiers as the prosperity and desirability of your town increases. Upgrade production buildings to increase efficiency and enable the production of more advanced items.

Most Detailed Farming System Ever - Strategically select from 10 crops with unique growing characteristics and configure crop rotations to maintain soil fertility, avoid heat and frost damage, and prevent the accumulation of diseases. Cultivate your fields over time, removing weeds and rocks, raising fertility, and adjusting soil mixture to achieve maximum crop production to keep your growing population fed.

Advanced Town Simulation - Villagers actively live their lives and perform their jobs in real-time. Watch as villagers carry goods across town from remote work-sites to be processed into materials and crafted into items. See foods and goods delivered to homes, the trade post, or stored for later use. Develop roads, transport wagons, and improve storage methods to facilitate the efficient movement of goods through your town and prevent spoilage.

Randomly Generated Maps - Farthest Frontier is highly replayable and no game is ever quite the same with beautiful, completely randomized terrain generation and resource distribution. Controls allow players to specify the amount of water or mountains they desire, with extreme maps leading to unique challenges.

Idyllic to Brutal - Customizable difficulty options allow players to turn off features like invaders and disease, for a more tranquil experience or max out the difficulty to truly test their town-builder prowess.

Environmental Interaction - Develop your economy based on which resources are locally abundant and produce items for trade to acquire that which you lack. Erect fencing to keep deer away from crop fields and stop bears from raiding food storage. Manage tree cover to prevent underground water supplies from drying up. Balance the need to clear land for agriculture around vital natural resources like wild growing medicinal plants and forage items.

All Them Old-Timey Diseases - Ensure your villagers have clean water to stop outbreaks of dysentery and cholera. Collect berries and plant greens to avoid scurvy and ensure a healthy diet. Make sure villagers are properly shoed and clothed to reduce the chances of contracting tetanus, rabies, or frostbite. Build a healer’s house to quarantine the infected and provide herbs and medicine for treatment. Manage rodent populations by collecting waste, securely storing food, and employing rat catchers to ward off the feared bubonic plague.

Fend Off Would-Be Invaders - Choose to play on pacifist and avoid combat altogether or engage with varying levels of raider difficulty to raise the stakes for your town’s survival. Progress from wood palisades to stone walls, build towers and barracks, and recruit and equip soldiers in the defense of your town as rising prosperity attracts the attention of raiders and foreign armies seeking plunder.

Take a look at the trailer below and then tell us what you think. Have you tried out Farthest Frontier yet? If not, will you play it at some point?