Before We Leave – How to Complete Getting Busy Scenario

Introduction

So you’ve decided to tackle what may be the hardest scenario. Let’s take a look at what you need to do. Each section of this guide goes into more detail the further it goes.

Warning: this scenario is long and needs you to be familiar with the game’s mechanics. To avoid wasting your time on it, I recommend you to do the other scenarios first, or at least play the tutorial until the end.

Rules and main goals

• Your population increases whether or not you have empty houses and a school.
• You have to end up with 1000 happy Peeps, and less than 200 sad Peeps.
• You only have one planet, and 6 islands (one for each biome): grassland, desert, rainforest, snow, swamp (and crystal).
• There is no space whale in this scenario, no need to worry about it

Important elements and general tips

• Time is against you in this scenario. The population will keep growing whatever you do, and while it will be slow at first, you have to keep up as it grows faster and faster. Don’t be afraid to pause the game a lot. To manually load ships when needed, to plan your roads and buildings, to think about the resources you need… Otherwise, you’ll be overwhelmed by unhappy Peeps on underdeveloped islands.
• Schools are not essential anymore, but I still very much advise you to build one on each island. In this scenario, a child who never went to school will start their adult life unhappy. If your island is correctly designed, it will become happier in time, but it will be slower and less efficient in the beginning.
• According to the devs on Discord, “the Peep spawn rate in the Getting Busy scenario is entirely based on how many peeps you have on an island” (chiefmonkey, 14/09/2021) Which means the more islands you colonized, the faster your overall population will grow.Example: 200 Peeps on a single island will probably have 2 or 3 children among them at a time, while 4 islands of 50 Peeps each would have 1 or 2 children on each island, meaning 4 to 8 children in total.
  So don’t be too eager to colonize every island! Or else your population will grow faster than you can keep up. I advise you to only colonize a new island when you need a new resource (or some space).
• More than ever, be efficient in the placement of your buildings. Place your huts/houses/apartments in clusters of at least 3 to house more Peeps. Keep your warehouses close to where they’re needed (food and drinks close to houses, materials close to their production sites…). Build your fields adjacent to houses to speed up production by 10%. Towards the end of the scenario, when your population is booming, you’re going to need every bit of space to squeeze some houses.
  Here are my islands just before winning the scenario, to give you a visual idea of how densely you have to build. I mostly built houses, and almost only upgraded to apartments when space was limited, to avoid the Gloom effect of apartments :

  

• UPGRADES. Upgrades are the key to boosting your production and keeping your Peeps happy. Maybe during your other games, you didn’t worry too much about efficiency; it’s not really the focus of Before We Leave, we’re not playing a number-crunching factory simulator. But in this scenario, you have to be efficient. The first and most important upgrade is unlocked with Irrigation; now your fields produce twice as much, meaning you need half as much space to produce what you need. Later, Automation will allow you to double the production of your factories. Upgrading your warehouses will save you space by doubling their storage capacity. Also, don’t neglect your roads: use power poles so your Peeps don’t have to manually bring electricity to their work sites; stone roads everywhere so they walk faster; and decorated roads to make them happier (more on that later).

Let’s get into details: making and keeping your Peeps happy

Of course, being homeless will ruin a Peep’s mood, some always keep an eye on the number of Peeps on your islands and build housing accordingly.

As the number of Peeps on an island increases, it will provide a negative modifier to each Peep’s happiness (60/120/180/240 Peeps = -/–/—/—- happiness). It cannot be removed, but everything you will do will help offset it.

You can also try to not concentrate too many Peeps on a single island. In the end, you need 1000 happy Peeps and you have 5 islands (6, counting the crystal one).

Remember you can depopulate an island (thus slowing its population growth) by bringing your Peeps by boat to somewhere more suited! You will have to manually move Peeps towards the end of the game if you don’t want your smallest island to be overpopulated.

Your first and main focus to please the Peeps will have to be the meals and smoothies. Meals provide ++ happiness, later upgraded to +++, AND they increase the carry capacity of Peeps. Smoothies provide +++ happiness, then ++++, AND increase the length of your Peeps’ work shift. And a happy Peep also increases the production speed of their work site!

You can unlock the Cooking technology before leaving your first island, or soon after colonizing the second one. The first recipes are very easy to make (just fruits and vegetables), so build a kitchen and smoothie maker as soon as you can. Keep upgrading them as your game goes on: lvl 2 once you get glass, then once you get access to wheat, milk, bread and salt.

Peeps consume 1 smoothie and 1 meal every roughly every 2 minutes, and fully upgraded kitchens and smoothie makers (Lvl V + automation) make up to 225 meals and smoothies per minute. So 2 fully upgraded kitchens and smoothie makers should be enough to feed everyone until around 800 Peeps, and you just have to add a third one for the final stretch.

(Oh, and you should forbid your Peeps from drinking milk or eating bread. These will be used to craft meals and smoothies, which provide more bonuses)This brings us to the next point:

You won’t be able to produce everything everywhere, and you don’t need to.

Having a kitchen, a smoothie maker, weavers and a tailor, a market… on every island will turn into a logistic nightmare. I advise you to limit the production of each type of resource to a single island, or two islands max, and then export it.

This doesn’t need to be a priority, but look into it once your meal and smoothie production is rolling. First it will help make your snow and desert islands more efficient, and also make your Peeps happy (+ or ++ happiness depending of the quality of your clothes) once you’re shipping clothes everywhere. And just like for the food, specialize your islands!

As to how many clothes you need, it’s a matter of trial and error: just check if your warehouses fill up with clothes faster than the Peeps are using them!

As always, don’t forget to upgrade the buildings once it’s possible: automated cotton fields and sheep farms, automated weavers, automated tailors.

These three negative modifiers are often neglected, but they can quickly add up if you don’t care about it.

Pollution adds up over time. Always cover the radius of pollution of your factories with a cleaner! Once you unlock chemicals and the cleaner II, upgrade it where it’s most needed (steel and iron smelter, fuel refinery…) or even everywhere if you’re producing enough chemicals.

Hard work is caused by working at certain work sites, mainly industrial ones. The only thing you can directly do about it is automating your factories: this way, they will require less workers. Besides this, the negative modifier has to be offset by any other happiness-boosting item or building.

Gloom does not increase over time like pollution, but still affect your Peeps’ mood. The main cause of gloom you will meet are the rows of houses (and later, apartments) you will be building. Upgrading your roads to decorated roads will reduce it, BUT: the power poles cancel the anti-gloom effect of the decorated roads! So decorate every road if you can, but keep your power poles only where they’re needed.

With decorated roads, you can limit the effect of Gloom to the buildings that are causing it.

If your Peeps already have meals, smoothies, clothes, nice roads, and low pollution and gloom, they shouldn’t even need these. But in case things go wrong:

• Luxury items are only consumed by unhappy Peeps as a mean to combat unhappiness. The normal version give + happiness, and the upgraded version ++. However, you still need good luxury items to upgrade your roads to decorated roads; therefore I advise you to only build a single marketplace on the planet, and ship good luxury items when you’re upgrading roads. (Don’t forget to ban your Peeps from using the items, or they will grab your fresh shipment of luxury items into their homes before you can upgrade your roads!)
• Fountains provide a nice bonus of +++ happiness in a two tiles radius, on a green tile. You can do without it, but it can help your Peeps’ mood in a depressing zone (near factories, on a high-traffic area).
• Musicians provide a small bonus of happiness wherever they go, which keep affecting the Peeps for 20 seconds after they’re out of range. Not essential, but why not if you have enough space.
• Meeting squares reset the happiness of 60 nearby Peeps to maximum. It should only be used as an emergency, when your Peeps are unhappy, slowing your production and disrupting everything. Throw a party and quickly solve your Peeps’ problem, otherwise the square just takes 3 tiles for nothing and the source of the problem isn’t solved.
• Relaxation hubs make nearby Peeps immune to one source of unhappiness. It can be useful in some situations, but again, it shouldn’t be needed and doesn’t solve the source of the problem.

Last details

• There is no space whale in this scenario. However, you can meet the Kraken if you start fishing for items in sunken ruins with submarines. Build more ships if it happens, or it will disrupt your supply chains.
• Work with a “just-in-time” production: for example, you don’t need to store hundreds of fruits, tea, wheat, milk, vegetables… to make your smoothies. Same for meals, clothes, etc. Personally, I kept 15 of each ingredient, even when my smoothie maker was asking for 60 of each per minute. As long as you have enough boats (or airships) to form strong supply chains, you won’t need to store many intermediate products. (Build one or two more ports on your island if one isn’t enough!)
• On that same note, you don’t need to build additional fields or factories if your supply chains are efficient. Produce just enough of what you need (ingredients for food, cotton and wool for clothes…), it will save you some precious tiles.
• Towards the end, if you grab enough crystal to build a research lab, do it! The repeatable researches and their bonuses will help you for the final stretch.