Sokpop S09: Pyramida Beginner’s Strategy Guide

A brief overview of the most important things to know in playing pyramida. I will do my best to mark spoilers, answer common questions, and offer some immediately-useful strategies.

First Steps

You start with two adults and a child, housed in the building which doubles as food storage. This building will likely form the core of your expanding village.

Goals

By the end of the first day, you should aim to have created at least a log shed, but if you micromanage your villagers well, you could feasibly begin working on a crop field and hay barn as well. Build the log shed next to your small shed. Placing it near forests is unnecessary because they will be quickly depleted. Place your crop field so that at least a corner covers part of a pond (it will say “place irrigated field” instead of “place”). Place the hay barn between your field and your starting home. Feel no need to rush. While there is technically a maximum time limit to the game, you are very unlikely to reach it.

Opening Moves

Immediately send one of your villagers to explore in the downwards- and left-direction. Keep them searching (even through the night, if need be) until they find the ruins of the pyramid. Continue to search until you find the alien nearby. Say hello to the alien, and they will join you as a third adult. This is more valuable than anything that exploring villagers could have done on the first day.

While one villager explores, the other should begin to construct a log shed. Micromanage this person to skip the period wherein they try to deliver the goods to storage, instead of walking directly from foraging to construction. Thereafter, I personally like to assign them to collect berries to keep the food bar more full, but if you’d rather begin field construction, feel free to do so.

Do not bother constructing the archery hut before the first night. While you may be naturally inclined to do so in order to defend yourself against the skeletons, the hut is expensive and the fight will be rough with only 2-3 villagers. Save it for later.

What to Build, When, and Where

These are all of the buildings in the game, listed in order of recommended construction.

• Wood shed 1/1: This ought to be your first building, you will need only one throughout the game, and it ought to be close to (or even touching) your starting home.
• Hay field 1/4-6: This ought to be your second building, likely the first of four, and should be constructed around the nearest pond to your home. Be careful not to place it in such a way as it is un-irrigated (it will not grow back otherwise), and be careful to place it in such a way that you will be able to fit more beside it. An optimal setup is described in the “How Not to Starve” section.
• Hay barn 1/2: This ought to be your third building, likely the first of two, and should be constructed between your field(s) and your home. This will maximize the speed of your future dedicated baker(s).
• House 1/4: This ought to be your fourth building, kids take a little while to grow, and will require food immediately. Be prepared to rush the construction of the next two buildings once you have completed the house.

At this point gather a lot of wood. You will be using loads of it.

• Sawmill 1/1: This ought to be your fifth building, which you need for creating more advanced buildings, but of which you will only need one. Build it next to your woodshed, though perhaps with a 2-meter gap between them, so that a villager does not immediately turn all of your logs into planks if left unattended.
• Windmill 1/1: Construct this as soon as you have the sawmill. This processes hay (wheat?) into bread and will be your staple food for the rest of the game. Simultaneously, build…
• Hay field 2-3/4-6: Two-three hayfields (and two people working in them to gather hay) works at roughly the same rate as does one dedicated baker. This is discussed more in “How Not to Starve.”

Walls and gates: Build walls to enclose your village as soon as you can tell what the general shape will be. While you should eventually enclose the whole thing, focus now on insulating your baker and two farmers from even a whiff of danger. It is better to wait for the rest of your villagers to recover from being bludgeoned than to put your food production in danger. Keeping skeletons out is ALWAYS more important than killing them.

• Archery hut 1/1: I don’t think archery is important, but it’s certainly fun. It was my first building on my first run, but on my first win, I never built it at all. In general, archery can be a distraction from what you’re good at. Fighting skeletons is more dangerous than walling them off, hunting antelopes is less reliable than baking bread.
• Mine camp 1/1: Build this to produce stone and to begin the construction of the pyramid which, upon expensive completion, will return the alien to their flying saucer, kill all currently living skeletons, and destroy the incoming comet, winning you the game. It is now good to assign a dedicated miner.

At this point, the order of building is largely irrelevant. Do everything that follows in whichever order you desire.

• Masonry 1/1: This carves stone into pyramidal shapes. This is mostly for building the pyramid but is also necessary for the workshop. Built it next to the mining camp.
• Workshop 1/1: This makes every action faster! It’s expensive but useful. Do it when you aren’t pressed for wall or food production.
• Hayfields 3 & 4/4 (or 4, 5, & 6/6) + Haybarn 2/2: Food is good, more food is more good. The extra hay barn is as insurance. If skeletons manage to knock out your dedicated farmers/bakers, you don’t want to be left with no backup. A reserve barn for making emergency bread will make everything easier. Hayfields 3 and 4 allow for the dedicated labor of 2 more farmers and 1 more baker, doubling the population you can support without strain.

Roads: Build these, at first, between your fields, windmills, and home. Then, between your mining camp and the pyramid. The speed increase is slight, but they are cheap, and the bonus is worth it for the sake of food production and for the many treks your many laborers will make to and from the pyramid.

• Houses 2, 3, & 4/4: You can beat the game with 6 people, so these extra houses are just to make farming, mining, and building the pyramid a less micromanaged process. I typically like to have a total population of 12, but frequently increase this in the last stages to speed up pyramid construction and automate the second farm.
• Pantry 1/1: Build at least one pantry before your third and fourth houses. If you don’t build at least one, even a single upset to your bread production process will end your game.
• Well: Build this at your farms if you have more than 2 at a single pond. If you have multiple ponds and choose to spread out your farms to make walling easier, skip building a well.
• Watchtower: Don’t bother. Since it does not improve archers’ accuracy, killing a skeleton before it does serious damage still requires a group. The only use is in shooting over walls, but there is no danger posed by skeletons that stay outside the walls.
• School: Also don’t bother. It’s expensive and available only later in the game, the point at which children age into productive adults is less important. The change of rate may be big in the code, but it isn’t all that noticeable in-game. If it improved their productivity by giving them an education, that would be something else, but as implemented, it isn’t worth it.
• Brick roads: Also also don’t bother. By the time you have plenty of stone, you ought to be using it to build the pyramid. The change in movement speed isn’t worth the cost. It looks pretty though, once you’ve beaten the game, it’s nice to use them to redecorate.

How Not to Starve

Antelope is unreliable, berries are unsustainable, bread is forever.

Once you’ve set up two hay fields next to a hay barn and windmill, staffed by three villagers, you have created the core of your solution to famine for the rest of the game.

This three-person crew (2 farmers, 1 baker) can keep ~10 people alive for the whole game, so long as they are never interrupted. Think of the antelope meat as a bonus for filling reserves and berries as an emergency food supply. If you can automate your bread production, you will win the game given enough time.

Once this is set up, build a pantry. Hunt for antelopes (don’t bother with large hunting parties, antelope carcasses do not rot and their health never refills) to fill that pantry. Build another pantry, repeat. Ideally, you will always have plenty of reserved food, since unlike in real life, that food will never spoil. An interruption in food production is the most likely cause for an end to your village.

Antelopes, as a food source, can fairly easily be foregone entirely, but more on that in the vegan, pacifist, and metropolis section.

Berries are early-game food, which should be sought after whenever a villager is not otherwise busy.

Once you have made your first core farm (2-3 fields, 2 farmers, 1 hay barn, 1 windmill), double everything but the windmill. Either around the same pond or another one nearby, build another 2-3 fields with a hay barn. After that, assign 2 more farmers to the new fields and 1 more baker to the existing windmill.

Skeletons & Death

Building walls is better than running, running is better than fighting, fighting is better than interruptions to food production.

A villager can be knocked unconscious by a single hit from a skeleton. That villager will remain unconscious for just under half a day. That villager will still consume food as if they were functioning normally. This means that if a significant proportion of your population is knocked out by a skeleton (as can easily happen, since the villagers have no sense of self-preservation), you must immediately drop everything and devote yourself to acquiring food. If a villager is knocked down on the first night, you might as well restart.

Killing skeletons is the only way to remove them, but they will respawn. Their bones cannot be removed during the day. There is a maximum number which can exist at any given time, though. So if you’re careful, you can corral the skeletons into a single spot, making the rest of the map safe.

Winning the Game

Step 1: Build the farms (2 dedicated bakers, 4 dedicated farmers, 4-6 fields, 2 hay barns, 1 windmill).

Step 2: Build the houses (third, fourth, possibly even fifth house for dedicated builders and miners).

Step 3: Expand your walls to include stone deposits (while single cropping can be enough to build your buildings, the pyramid will gobble through most of the stone on the map).

Step 4: Avoid crying when you have to say goodbye to the alien to whom you had given a name and grown attached.

Vegan Run, Pacifist Run, & Metropolis

What may seem like the hardest achievements (those which require eating no meat and building no archer hut), in fact, make the game a lot easier.

Since you need not even consider fighting the skeletons, that mental energy can be spent on designing the walls in more intelligent ways. The resources which would’ve been required can easily build all of your necessary early-game fortifications.

Never killing an antelope (and thus never getting the meat) is also more of a relief than a burden. The payday in food is great but supremely unreliable. Each unit of bread provides less food, but with a dedicated baker and farmers, it is a constant supply. Even a dedicated hunter does not reliably provide food, as the chance of hitting the antelope is low and the end of a chase is frequently far from the village.

Combining these two achievements (Vegan Run and Pacifist Run) is both fun and even potentially the easier way to win for the first time. Absolutely A+ game design.

The Metropolis achievement, though, is nerve-wracking and should be completed only after completing the pyramid. Without at least one pantry, it is literally impossible: the people’s consumption is too great. To prepare, you should build several pantries and immediately devote the whole of your adult population to agriculture. Maintaining a game with 30 villagers is simply too much to not be unwieldy, so the goal should be to build all the necessary houses, pray that your food supply does not run out before all of the children spawn in, and declare that save finished.