My first run in Patron was mostly a trial, as is the case with any systems-heavy game — you’ve got to just kick the tires and get your bearings, so to speak. So when my first community failed miserably, I felt that I had, at the very least, come to learn something that would prepare me for my eventual success. And with my newly found knowledge and improved leadership skills, surely my next village would flourish and stand the test of time, right?
As an example of my initial failings, I was foolishly placing structures in a way that was more visually pleasing than efficient. But putting a Hunting Lodge in a woodland area, as opposed to a more sparse grassland area, increased its efficiency tenfold. Which of course only makes sense; go where the animals are (you can even see little bears and deer running around in the game). Once this (fairly obvious) revelation dawned on me, I felt I was ready to conquer the world.
And at first, I was humming along, singing a song, and walking in a winter wonderland, so to speak.
Out the gate, I grouped my citizens’ houses sort of southwesterly from the Townhouse in a compacted cul-de-sac-style layout with a nice little well as a centerpiece. I felt this would let them congregate and build a strong sense of community, while keeping them at arm’s length from the industry zones. I built the appropriate pathing network to help guide them to their places of work while also keeping a keen eye on where to build out future leisure additions.
All seemed well.
I sort of built a rectangular pathing loop from the Townhouse, which swept past the path that branched off to the housing area before looping back to the Townhouse. I placed my Lumber Mill on the loop opposite of the Townhouse, and from there built a Fishing Lodge on the easterly leg of the loop. And then I added a Security Tower both by the housing area and also by the fishing area, to help cover the spread.
All seemed well.
I built a Hunting Lodge and Gatherer’s Shelter in the wilderness to the north of the Townhouse, with a depot along the stretch between these two structures and the Townhouse, to keep things efficient. I also added a second depot closer to the Fisherman’s Hut, since I also built my Forester’s Hut nearby (that was where I found the highest percentage of yield within a reasonable proximity to the rest of my buildings).
All seemed well.
I next added the Herbalist’s Hut, in close proximity to my Hunting Lodge and Gatherer’s Shelter since there was a buff for doing so. Further north from the Hunting Lodge, I built a Quarry and a Coal Mine, and even further north I built an Iron Mine. I also added the requisite depots along this corridor to help cut down on the amount of legwork needed to transport these goods. Since all depots seem to share the same resources, it is always a good idea to build depots so your builders don’t have to walk the length of the map to get a few stones to complete construction; they can instead just acquire stones from the local depot, even though those stones were deposited into the depot closer to the Quarry. Think of depots as sort of community chests with a mycelial network between them.
Needless to say, all seemed well.
I really felt like I was leading this community toward the promised land. Most of my stats like happiness and security were north of the 80% mark. My food coffers weren’t bursting at the seams, but they also didn’t seem like they were at risk of running empty. My coal production felt a little anemic compared to the projected yields, especially considering I hadn’t yet built any structures that required coal for upkeep like the Clothes Shop, but it wasn’t constantly running on empty. So I didn’t pay it too much attention; I just let it do it’s thing, hoping it would either suddenly pick up or, if need be, I could focus more time on adjustments down the road.
All seemed well.
And then I started to really dabble in researching. I had been researching the basic branches of the research skill tree throughout this new build, which is how I got the Fisherman’s Hut and the decree to give a 10% boost to food production or some of the more cosmetic items, like the Small Park which I placed adjacent to the well in the center of my housing area. I also was picking up new citizens at a decent clip, going from the ten adults I started with to the 24 that would end up being my peak, not including children and infants.
All seemed well.
And then, suddenly, the alerts started to pop; we where experiencing unexplained food shortages.
All was not well after all, it would seem.
“Food shortages?!” I thought to myself, feverishly. “How could that be?” My provisions buildings were at ridiculously high production percentages; I had upgraded them all mostly to their highest levels. My supply chain was supported by what I felt was a strong depot network. My food banks had been consistently stocked, yet they were now barren; cavernous were the echoes of my people’s hunger pangs.
So I quickly dispatched the construction of a second Hunting Lodge, hoping this might stem the tide. But before I could realize its production input, people rapidly started dying. And once that domino starts to fall in Patron, you have but a short window to turn things around. Because when even one person randomly dies, it is more than likely that they are an important cog in the production chain whose absence will only contribute to things spiraling even more wildly out of control.
Let’s say the person that runs the Lumber Mill dies, and you only have one person working that position. Guess what? You no longer have lumber churning out. And with no lumber, that usually impacts the upkeep of your food production lodges. And if those slow down, this will only exacerbate your food production issues, which was what started this mess in the first place. And so as random people die off, it’s tough to anticipate which jobs will suddenly be left unfilled, which means you are now not only trying to remedy the initial issue of a lack of food, but are now also trying to plug holes in other parts of the hull, and much like this analogy, things quickly spin out of control and it’s next to impossible to stop the bleeding.
Needless to say, I booted up an older save file, determined to keep Newton, my township, from the brink of destruction. Hoping that with the knowledge I had gained I could proactively fill my food shortage stopgap before it ever became an issue to begin with. And even though I managed to get the lodge up and running and plugged into the supply chain, it was for naught; food depleted, people began dropping like flies, and the proverbial fire raged, unabated.
I rebooted that same previous save file in the hopes that I could perhaps buoy the already established production chain itself with more workers in key roles, instead of solely building an additional Hunting Lodge, but the seeds of chaos had already been planted at some unforeseen point well before that last save point, and that seed had already begun to take root. I would need to abandon all hopes of a rally for Newton and plot my next excursion in Patron from scratch. Thus I would found Newton II in an attempt to find that seemingly elusive utopia.
And so as it turns out, things were not well… not well at all.
