Sapiens Beginner’s Guide: Ultimate Tips & Tricks for New Players
Most management simulators tend to take place during a time of industrial advancement, or a more modern time where you can make use of incredible technology to further your interests and push your budding community forward. One game, however, combines the management mechanics of city builders with the creativity and danger of early man.
This game is Sapiens, a new colony simulator game from developer/publisher Majic Jungle. In it, you will begin with a tribe of prehistoric humans and mold the world around them into a livable space while helping them to survive. This can be a tall order in an age of uncertainty, but with this Sapiens Beginner’s Guide, you’ll be right on track.
Starting Your Journey
When you first boot Sapiens, you will be greeted by the Main Menu. The only options you really need to make note of for the moment are “Settings” and “Create World”. In Settings, you can change a number of things including graphical quality and the controls.
Once you’ve altered those settings to your liking, you can now select “Create World”. Clicking this will open more options that will determine how your new world is set up, but you should leave all of these settings medium if this is going to be your first run through the game. This will prevent any undue difficulty spikes that might put a new player off.
Find Your Tribe
With your world created, you’ll now enter the in-game tutorial. In the midst of this tutorial, you will be asked to zoom in to various parts of the planet to observe and choose a tribe to begin your game. Each region will have its own unique properties, and some are more beneficial than others.
For instance, a new player should opt for a region that is labeled as either tropical or temperate, to avoid frigid winters that could bring your run to an end relatively quickly. Tropical zones tend to have no winters and lots of food to survive on, while temperate zones might have slightly cold winters with a good enough supply of food to get by on.
Something else you should be paying attention to when picking a tribe is the age of its members. Obviously, a tribe full of elderly people won’t be ideal, so shoot for young and middle-aged tribes.
Collecting Resources
Now that you have your tribe, the game can actually begin! If you like, you can pause the in-game time with the buttons in the top left corner and go through the menus and get familiar with your sapiens. After that, you’re going to want to start gathering up materials and building storage for them.
The best way to start is going to be clearing some grass to make a space to build your first constructs. You can of course build on top of the grass, clearing it will just make it look much cleaner. Clearing the grass and leaving it out will cause it to dry and turn into hay, which is useful for a number of activities, so hold onto that. You can select a large area of grass by clicking and dragging to select them, then clicking “clear” in the radial menu. You should also gather up some branches, which can be collected from trees.
Storage
This part will be fairly quick. You’re going to need a palace to put all of the goods you’re collecting, so you should build some storage. You can do this by opening the build menu with the escape key and finding the “Storage” option.
Place the storage in a location that is nearby but out of the way, and now your Sapiens will take the things they collect to that site. Perhaps build more than one storage unit.
Bedding
After a long day of work, your Sapiens will definitely want a comfy place to rest. Thankfully, you can build them some bedding using the hay you collected earlier! Just bring up the build menu once more with the escape key, then find the hay bed option. Some constructs will need many different materials and specialized skills in order to make them, but the hay bed is simply hay and basic construction, which all of your Sapiens will already have.
Go ahead and build a hay bead for each Sapien, and they will all automatically find their place and go down for the evening when night falls. This is just the first step on a long journey, but careful thought and persistence will help you and your Sapiens to thrive in no time.
