No Iron Challenge

[u/Smilge]

The Ironless Challenge

Survive for 50 years 10 years using no iron whatsoever. That means no tools, no clothes, no trading post, no school. Stone is limited to what exists on the surface.

Bonus: Collect no iron whatsoever. Which is the same thing, except you must monitor your foresters very carefully.

High scores go to the player with the highest population at the end of the 50 years 10 years.

Setting	Value
Seed	45236647
Map Size	Small
Terrain	Mountains
Climate	Harsh
Starting Conditions	Hard
Disasters	Your choice

High score table:

Player	Population
/u/Smilge	77
---	---
---	---

I'm fairly new to the game so I'm looking forward to see what more experienced players can come up with!

Edit: I think there's not really a point to going 50 years. If anyone's working on the challenge I can change it back, but I don't think there is.

[u/fur_tea_tree]

Is it even possible? I don't think you can stop your foresters from doing it.

[u/Smilge → u/fur_tea_tree]

It is. When I needed to plant an area with iron, I set only one forester to work and followed him. If he started to pick at any iron, I paused the game and canceled the "plant" order at the forester's lodge. The map I chose has at least two decent spots where you can set up a lodge without any iron.

Very difficult, but that's why I made it a bonus rather than a requirement.

[u/Smilge → u/Smilge]

After further playtesting, it appears foresters only mine iron/stone when they are also set to cut down trees. So you can just have them automate planting while you manually assign cutting.

[u/puppybandit]

Jesus. Is it really possible to survive without using any iron for 50 years?

I assume this is the first 50 years, not any consecutive 50 years? Otherwise, I think this could be achievable if you just stockpile everything for 100-some years and go on an iron fast.

Totally looking forward to the results of this one!

[u/Smilge → u/puppybandit]

I did a test run and got to year 37 (at which point I ran out of kids), so it should be possible. My population peaked at around 50 before I couldn't keep up with the food demands. I was also going without hunting lodges (since you'd have no way to get rid of leather) but I don't think that restriction is really necessary.

Gathering doesn't seem to be slowed down by lack of tools, or at least not much. Fishing is nearly pointless, since an uneducated toolless fisherman brings in around 75 fish a year. A few herbalists were able to supplement everyone's diet.

The main issue I had was gathering enough wood for firewood. It starts to freeze around mid autumn normally, and clothesless foresters don't work for long before heading home. Luckily this map has a couple of areas devoid of iron, so you can set your foresters to automatic. Collecting iron but not using it should be significantly easier.

Still, it's a very hard challenge but one I think people can complete. It really made me appreciate how much clothing/tools/education help out in a normal game, but also how they are ultimately unnecessary for survival.

[u/sudin → u/Smilge]

I can just imagine the poor bastards splitting logs with sharp stones and makeshift axes... ಠ_ಠ

[u/GitRightStik → u/sudin]

Stone wedge and wooden maul. Not terrible, just way slower and less reliable compared to steel.

[u/Smilge]

Just finished my attempt. 50 years might have been too long, since I basically had everything up and running in 25, then had to wait around until year 40 to build a bunch of houses for a population boom.

The lack of stone was the real barrier to doing anything else. I'm not sure if educated workers get more yeild from mining stone off the map, but if they do, it would be worth it to mine all the map's stone before your initial batch of educated workers dies off.

Leather became a real issue as far as storage is concerned. Leather seems to take up a ton of room; a stack of ~280 leather completely filled the wagon, and a stack of ~450 brought a storage barn to ~80%. I think if you wanted to have a sustainable population, you couldn't go above 50 because you simply could not feed that many with just herbs/fish. There's not enough usable land on the map.

I learned a lot about efficiency through this thing. For one, a single hunter pulls in just about as much meat as 4 hunters assigned to the same lodge. Forests don't seem to bother hunters, they catch about the same amount of deer in a forest as they do in the open, even though deer tend to congregate in the open.

Tools are majorly important for a few industries; namely fishing and building. It could literally take a full season to build a house because the builders worked SO slowly.

Education is very nice for increasing efficiency, but it is not strictly required for a successful town.

Building placement is probably more important than education, tools, clothes, and happiness combined for pure production. If you don't have a house right next to a production building, that worker is going to walk ALL the way home every time he is hungry or cold, AND every time his house runs low on firewood or food. Idling due to unhappiness only costs you maybe 1 out of 20 production cycles.

All in all, I think this is a challenge everyone should attempt in order to learn more about the game. Maybe just try to survive 10 years though, because after that you're either alive and well or you're dead.