Sunrise Village Beginner’s Guide: Tips, Tricks & Strategies to Build Your Village and Uncover Exciting Mysteries

Sunrise Village is a village management and adventure game from InnoGames, very similar to the likes of Klondike Adventures. In this game, you reclaim a village from a mysterious, ominous fog and slowly rebuild it to profitability. As you do so, you must also go on an adventure to find several magic stones to place on a mysterious array of stones that heralded the arrival of the fog, to destroy said fog once and for all.

In your way is the rather thick, obtrusive terrain of the world, which you must cut through using your energy reserves, while you collect them to bring home and use as materials to rebuild the ruined Sunrise Village.

Take note that this game is meant for the long haul: While you won’t play it for extended periods of time due to the energy system, it has a very long campaign  that isn’t meant to be rushed. You will likely play Sunrise Village as a way to relax, as you spend a minute tending to your village and clearing some brush in between say, work assignments or chores. That being said, there are quirks in this game meant noting so you can make good progress even with your small energy bar, so let’s get started!

VILLAGE MANAGEMENT

When you’re out of energy, you will mostly spend your time either waiting for it to come back, or by filling our orders in Sunrise Village’s Order Board while keeping your production structures running. Here are some tips to keep the village afloat and hopefully, get your energy bar back up via a big fat shiny level up, along with some more general tips that have overlap with adventuring.

Make ‘Em Work Overtime!  

Once your stamina bar is spent and you can’t recharge it in any way other than waiting, it’s a good idea to plant some crops. Ideally, you plant whatever it is takes the longest to grow, especially if it’s your last login for the day. That way, you’re making progress even if you’re away from your phone. Come back later, and bam! You have corn waiting for your sickle!

This goes for your factory buildings too: If you have the resources to spare, keep their queues full so by the time you come back, you’ve got food for your farm animals and construction materials for your next building project. On the other hand, while you’re online, it helps to constantly spam the faster growing crops to make sure you have a surplus of them.

This also applies to your farm animals: Never log off with their food trays empty. Make sure they’ve got at least some food in the tray before going off, so you always have milk, eggs, and other stuff waiting for you when you log back in.

You won’t need a completely full tray early on though, as each animal only eats enough to make three units of their product before they stop eating, and they’ll only start eating again when you come to collect. And if any of your animals get tired in your sleep, that’s extra energy to start your next login fresh!

Energy Sources

Apart from waiting, you have several sources of energy. First, you can recharge your energy bar by leveling up. The easiest way to do this is to grind the Orders Board, since that doesn’t require any Energy, just a lot of patience, since you’ll need to farm crops and wait for your animals to make their products.

Your animals also give you energy periodically: As they produce things like eggs or milk, their own energy bar fills up. Once it’s full, the animal gets tired, but you get a stipend of Energy. You can then wait for the animal to finish resting, or use some coins to wake them up and get them going again, you slave driver.

There are also Energy vials littered and hidden around any map you’re in. Finding them gives you energy, so look around carefully behind trees, rocks, and anything else that looks suspicious. Always look for a shock of bright blue, since they’re shown as glass beakers of blue liquid.

Then there is the Sweet Shop, which lets you convert various fruits and berries to Energy, with every 45 energy made necessitating a break for the Sweet Shop, since the ones running it need to clean out their stove after all the sticky mess.

One more way you can unlock is the Friendship Garden. The Friendship Garden allows you to generate Friendship by picking an NPC as a buddy. They’ll help you chop down obstacles (though this is cosmetic: It’s still your energy getting spent!) and once they collect enough hearts, their Friendship level will go up, and you get rewarded with EXP and a pretty hefty tipend of Energy.

And finally, adventure maps may or may not have structures unique to them that make various Energy-filling food items, like the Hut in the Woodlands area, which converts Mushrooms to Mushroom Soup.

All Best Friends

When making friends in your Friendship Garden, it’s usually a good idea to keep their Levels roughly even. That’s because of the energy reward: The lower a Friend’s level, the faster you can fill up their meter, so keeping it even means your energy rewards are a bit more steady than trying to focus one NPC down to as high as they can go. This allows you to adventure for longer and more consistently.

There are a few ways to increase an NPC’s Friendship Level. The first way is to Buddy Up with them from the Friendship screen and simply destroy obstacles. Another way available later on is to fulfill Friend Orders from the Order Board, which while sometimes more difficult than normal Market Orders, gives EXP, Coins and a healthy amount of Friendship EXP.

You can also construct Houses for them once you hit level 11, which allow them to generate Friendship Points for as long as they live inside. You’ll need to buy Friendship Fuel to keep Houses generating Friendship though. Friendship Fuel is sold by the Travelling Merchant, located north of Sunrise Village.

Burning Steel And Fruits, Small Ones Last

Forge-style structures like the Sweet Shop, Bonfire, and, well, the Forge, work differently from other manufacturing structures. They have a bar that fills up as you pour materials into them, with each tier filled up giving you whatever resources they make. Then they burn up after 3 tiers and need a break for a few minutes or so, presumably as the operator puts out that fire you just caused by overusing them.

As an example, the Forge makes Iron Bars, and you can fill the bar using small bits of ore, and larger bits of ore you find from mining rocks and such. To avoid wastage, always use the large materials first, then towards the end, use the smaller materials. That way, you don’t get any overfill, since that wastes part of the material you just used.

Save Your Speedups, Especially Fertilizer

There are various speedup items in the game., namely Dry Ice, Hourglasses and Fertilizer. All of them take only one use to instantly finish a task, so use them wisely.

For animals, it’s best to wait until they’re almost tired before using them, essentially turning them into spare energy packs, or on animals that take longer to make their products. Particularly, when you need that last bottle of milk to fill an order.

Also note that it’s best to use Hourglasses on your most advanced animal: Chickens only give out 3 energy everytime they get tired and they make Eggs fairly quickly, so you certainly don’t want to waste any Hourglasses to rush them.

For Dry Ice, you generally won’t need to use them at all early on, especially if you play in bursts. Most structures that use Dry Ice early on only have a several minute cooldown or so, which is a lot shorter than the time it takes to fill your Energy bar while you’re away from your tablet. You typically only need to use the Forge-type structures right when you need them.

As for Fertilizer, only use them for advanced crops that you can’t wait for, especially if you just want to fill out an almost-done difficult order to get that sweet sweet EXP. Wasting Fertilizer on grains, peas and grass is exactly that: A waste.

Also, using gems to speed up any production is right out the window: You’ll need them for Heated Crop Beds, which make twice the crops in the same amount of time as a normal Crop Bed. Heck, even Dynamite is a better deal, and it’s a pretty bad one all things considered!

Never, EVER Sell Anything!

The game allows you to sell supplies and materials from your inventory. Never, ever do this, ever. You may get tempted to sell all those twigs, wooden logs and rocks you’ve gathered, but you’re gonna need them very badly later on!

The amount of coins aren’t worth what you can get simply by filling orders for a while, or what you can get for melting down Gold nuggets. You’ll always need those materials to construct buildings or achieve quest objectives, so keep them in your pack for a rainy day and just grind those Orders.

Keep The Factories Close

Try to keep your structures organized, close to each other when you can. It would be unrealistic to cram all of them into a single screen early on since there’s a ton of bushes blocking the way, but do your best to have several structures within view at any given time.

Particularly important is keeping your farmbeds together so you can plant everything with a sweep of the finger, then cut them down in one fell swoop with your scythe when the harvest is ready.

It could be a good idea to organize your farm into several sectors. One sector for planting crops with your Farmbeds and Greenhouses together, another sector for food processing structures like the Dairy next to the crop farm, one more for construction materials like the Sawmill, another zone for Forge-bar structures like the Crucible, Forge, and Sweet Shop, and the Feed Mill standing next to the pre-placed animal pens, which you can’t edit. That way, you immediately know where to go depending on the task at hand.

Single Stage Structures First

When viewing the material requirements to construct a building, especially the ones you’ve found by exploring and clearing Sunrise Village, you’ll notice a section on top that tells you how many construction stages a structure needs to finish. If it tells you it only needs one stage to finish, then make that structure as your first priority.

That way, you can avail of its service immediately, which may help you construct the more difficult structures you’ve uncovered. Failing that, you should focus on structures one by one, prioritizing structures that make construction materials when available. That way, you won’t get caught off guard when a food-processing structure suddenly asks you for materials you’re not able to craft!

No! Denied! Go Away!

At one point, you may get given Market orders that ask you for materials that come from structures you haven’t completed yet. Don’t leave them sitting there, reject them instead! While you build a structure to make that material, focus on the easier orders you CAN make for the moment, until the structure is done.

That way, your leveling is consistent and you make progress as you play. A canceled order only takes 30 minutes to refresh, but a new structure can take several hours worth of material hunting and crafting to make. You don’t want an unfillable order wasting space for that long. If all your orders stink, don’t hesitate to refresh them all and wait for your Energy bar to fill up.

THROUGH THE BRUSH AND THE TREES AND THE ROCKS: ADVENTURING

Apart from managing Sunrise Village and clearing it of debris, you’ll go on an adventure to find the Magic Stones you need to clear out the thorns and fog once and for all. As you clear obstacles and get through your quests, you’ll find loot and treasures, which can help you restore Sunrise Village to working order. Here are some tips related to adventuring and energy management.

Don’t Know Where the Loot Is? Ask The Challenge Screen

Behind bushes, obstacles, trees, and perhaps even your own newly unlocked structures may be treasures hiding within. Be it a box, vase, a vial of Stamina, if it even looks remotely like a container of some sort, nab it! It might have energy, food, or materials inside that you can use.

The game will helpfully mark out containers if you tap the Challenges button to the bottom left of your screen, then tap the challenge involving looking got loot. Note that this only works for Adventure maps, and not in Sunrise Village itself, as the village does not have a challenge button.

Walk For Boxes

All that being said, having the treasures marked out is no good for you if there’s a ton of junk blocking the way, stopping you from tapping it directly. To make those treasures easier to tap, walk your character very close to them. This will reveal them with a speech bubble even if you can’t see them directly (Like a treasure hiding behind the sign around the Dockyard in Sunrise Village).

Then you can simply tap the speech bubble and take the stuff. Try zooming in too so you can move your character more precisely. You can also use this to search suspicious places in Sunrise

Material Priorities

When unlocking cloudy side-paths, you have a couple of priorities to pick how you break through an area: You can either pick a path that happens to have materials you need, or you can pick a cheaper path only blocked by smaller obstacles. You can go for the cheaper path if you’ve got few things to build at the moment, and just want to clear a quest as efficiently as possible.

On the other hand, it may be worth going though all those tough rocks and trees if you’re suffering from a wood shortage and you’ve got a bunch of new buildings to set up. This goes in hand with the next tip, which prevents you from needing to make guesswork.

A Cloudy Tipoff

If you tap on a clouded area, a bunch of obstacles will be highlighted all at once. Knocking down the highlighted obstacles will usually clear the fog, provided it’s next to the area you tapped, since you can’t just tap extremely deep into the fog and expect an easy cleanup. Though the obstacles highlighted don’t show the cheapest way to open the area, but the fastest by walking distance.

That being said, this function is still highly useful: If you think the obstacles highlighted are a bit too energy intensive for your taste, you can simply move your character to a position you think will get a better suggestion. Say, facing a couple of small bushes rather than those rocks and trees. That way, you can get a cheaper map reveal rather than chopping madly at the bushes, rocks and trees with no idea which will open up that part of the map.

You can also do it the other way and move your character in such a way as to highlight the stuff you need instead: That way, you kill two birds with one stone, getting that precious wood and quartz while clearing the fog in that area. Of course, your energy bar will get dented, but hey, priorities.

Early On, Laser Focus On Quests

Early in the game, don’t go around wrecking bushes and trees willy-nilly. Obstacles cost energy to remove, and you’ll need to reserve your energy for finishing Quests, removing only the obstacles you really need so you can unlock the Sweet Shop as fast as possible.

The Sweet Shop converts food items like Berries to Energy, allowing you to explore more readily rather than constantly waiting for the stamina bar to fill up. Once you have the Sweet Shop, you can start gathering resources and clearing your home more comfortably.

Slow And Steady Through The Map

Once you enter a newly unlocked map, the previous map will be locked after 24 hours. Knowing this, explore a map thoroughly before leaving for the next one, and make the most out of it. This goes double for any map that has an energy-producing structure or anything else that makes certain resources cheaper to come by: You’ll lose access to it once the map closes, so make sure you explore the map for the materials it needs and work it until it’s well and truly unusable.

Thus, you get as much energy and resources out of the map as you can. One good goal to fulfill before leaving a map for good would be to complete all of its Challenges, which can be checked by tapping the lower left of the screen while in an Adventure map. It’s that button that looks like a pile of rocks.

GENERAL TIPS AND TRICKS

These are a couple things to keep in mind that fit in neither of the categories above, or at least have enough overlap with each other that they might as well get their own spot.

Play In Bursts

The stamina bar you have with you isn’t particularly long, starting at 60 energy, but recharges fairly fast as far as energy bars go at 90 seconds per unit of energy. That being said, it doesn’t charge fast enough for you to just play the game for hours on end.

You’ll be playing this game in bursts, planning out the use for your energy, gathering resources for a while, then exiting the game only to be back about an hour or two later. This is especially important early on before you unlock the Sweet Shop, which is your main way of getting energy during gameplay.

One good way to know when it’s time to log off is when you’re out of any crop more advanced than peas, grain or grass: Even if you’re out of energy, you can still grind out Orders and farm grains and peas for EXP and coins, and if you level up, you get an energy recharge.

More advanced crops like corn and sugarcane take long to make though, so if all your orders require those and you’re all out, it’s time to leave, plant some slow crops, and wait for the energy bar to refill.

Don’t worry too much about running out of animal produce though: Early on it can be a pain, but as long as you keep those animals fed, you’ll eventually get a pretty hefty surplus of their respective materials.

Join A Team

Teams, this game’s equivalent to Guilds, are at first nothing more than a place to chat with other players. It allows you to unlock the Exploration Tower though. Once completed, it allows you to help your Team with Exploration quests, a new map area with loot to take and resources to gather. You can get Exploration points by fulfilling tasks in the Exploration map, which then give you various rewards.

And this ends our Sunrise Village beginner’s guide. We hope this guide helps on your quest to bring Sunrise Village back from the brink. If you have tips of your own, don’t hesitate to share them with us in the comments below!