TerraGenesis: Landfall Beginner’s Guide: Tips, Tricks & Strategies to Ensure Your Settlement’s Survival and Steady Growth

City-building simulation games have their way of stimulating a player’s creative juices as well his or her skills in planning and executing designs. The idea of having an abundance of freedom relative to how you build and continuously develop and manage a seemingly boundless area of land is sure to keep players immersed and engaged in the undertaking. For the most part, the city-building aspect of games within the genre employ concepts and mechanics players are familiar with, attached to what can be normally experienced in the real world.

TerraGenesis: Landfall, just like its prequels, takes the city-building experience to a whole new level. In fact, TerraGenesis: Landfall lets you build and develop your very own new world in space. From choosing an otherwise barren planet to inhabit down to creating a new civilization for mankind to thrive in, TerraGenesis: Landfall lets you experience a completely unique experience, simply incomparable to any other city-building sim game. Strategize on supporting life and providing basic needs for your colonists, research new technology to improve living conditions, and explore the vast unknown to discover resources you can use or sell.

We can consider TerraGenesis: Landfall as the polar opposite of idle clicker games in numerous respects. For starters, this game has its share of unique gameplay mechanics that require some time and immersion to fully comprehend. While the city-building aspect of TerraGenesis: Landfall also involves the need to earn and invest currency to sustain its growth and expansion, there are more critical factors to take into consideration like the survival of your growing metropolis’ population.

TerraGenesis: Landfall provides an introductory tutorial that walks you through the basics of building and expanding your base camp, along with conducting research and venturing out for exploration and gathering missions. While there are also objectives or missions that help guide you towards moving forward with your colonization of the new planet, TerraGenesis: Landfall still requires players to make an effort in exploring the different menus and features of the game as they move forward.

TerraGenesis: Landfall might not be a game for everyone considering its theme, depth, and relative complexity. With the abundance of freedom it provides players, you can similarly expect that it also takes a lot of patience, planning, and effort for your civilization to sustain its needs while also delving into exploration, research, and sustainable expansion.

There will certainly be a lot of things to learn and understand along the way and if you are one who prefers knowing more before starting your adventure or while you are at the early part of it, then you came to the right place as our TerraGenesis: Landfall Beginner’s Guide has all the basic information, tips, and strategies you need to help you build the best colony!

1. Let The Challenges Guide You

TerraGenesis: Landfall certainly offers an immersive gaming experience that aims to be as vast as the virtual space it lets you venture into. Although you can proceed to start your exploration in a wide variety of ways, TerraGenesis: Landfall is designed in such a way that there are right and wrong ways to go about things. The introductory tutorial actually helps you set up the basic necessities enabling you to perform your most basic tasks. Once you have completed it, though, you should not feel like going through more complex matters blind as there are missions available for you to accomplish.

TerraGenesis: Landfall actually provides players with challenges they can accomplish for extra resources as rewards. The challenges can be seen at the left side of your screen and clicking on it can show you a full list of missions you can accomplish as well as the percentage of completion whenever applicable. Challenges are actually not just an extra means for you to obtain additional resources but are more importantly a guide you can use to best progress your adventure.

Challenges in TerraGenesis: Landfall are not always as straightforward or as clean-cut as you might expect. Taking on the first challenge you will have following the completion of the tutorial as an example, you will be required to increase the population of your settlement to 60 people. As simple as that seems, recruiting more people has a lot of requisites, so adding even just a handful of people should have you check and look through its different effects on your settlement.

The basic requirement for increasing population is a rocket available for launch. A rocket launch will always require clean water to run for its trip back to Earth as well as cost you some credits based on your orders. Each trip also takes time to finish and while you can spend Genesis Points to cut down waiting time, we do not recommend it.

Increasing the population can mean simply recruiting more people to live with you in your new settlement. However, one important detail to consider is that there are basically 3 types of people to recruit in TerraGenesis: Landfall, based on the kind of work that they do. There are scientists (blue), engineers (orange), and workers (green). Although each area or job you need to deploy them to follows rational considerations, you actually do not need to memorize it as structures with lacking manpower will have a highly noticeable icon indicating the need for more manpower.

Some structures can function below a hundred percent capacity without enough people but some will simply not be operational. Similarly, rovers and other transport vehicles require a full roster of personnel to function. With these considerations, it is highly recommended to take note of the needed personnel first before even launching the rocket or at least before ordering it back with the people you need. It can happen that you will have more of one type than your current needs and that is okay but efficiency dictates that each inhabitant in your settlement should do their share of the workload to keep everyone happy.

2. Ensure Survival Above All

TerraGenesis: Landfall starts you off having built your command center as well as all the basic facilities you need to sustain life within your settlement. From basic structures that provide your settlement with oxygen, water, food, and electricity down to exploration and mining operations to sustain basic growth, you are certain to move steadily forward with little concern by maintaining the status quo.

Your first big challenge, however, invites you to add more people and increase your settlement’s population and, as we discussed above, it goes much farther than simply sending a rocket back to Earth to recruit more settlers.

Beyond identifying specific manpower that you need as well as credits to finance the rocket trips, you also need to ensure that your settlement’s current status will suffice to provide for the needs of the additional roster. There are a lot of resources to manage and kept in balance in TerraGenesis: Landfall and although you will be notified of potential adverse effects of having additional recruits, there are clear indicators of each one you can readily check to ensure that your settlement’s functions will not be hampered.

Status of resources and other important factors affecting your settlement are always available at the bottom of the screen, so make it a habit not just to check what can be seen outright but the details contributing to each status as well. You can click on each icon at the bottom of the screen to check important details and click the icon again to close it down. Understanding how each resource is generated and retained leads to determining the appropriate structures you need to build and maintain as well as the manpower requirements for each project.

Power is evidently an important resource to keep your settlement functioning. The solar panel will be among the first structures you will build to generate power. There is night and day in TerraGenesis: Landfall, which means that no power will be generated at night but consumption will continue regardless. You will need to research and build a battery to store collected power to ensure that a sufficient amount will be provided at night time. Later on, you will naturally need to have additional solar panels and batteries as your settlement adds more structures, especially ones that consume more power.

Oxygen stands as yet another basic commodity that your settlers need. Oxygenators generate oxygen for your settlement over time while Oxygen Tanks serve as its storage. Note that while Oxygenators generate 900 oxygen per minute, they can only store 50 and consumes 60 power. Oxygenators require a scientist and a worker for it to function. Oxygen Tanks also consume oxygen and power over time and requires a worker for it to function.

Like oxygen, you also need to ensure that sufficient clean water is available for your settlers at all times. Water Recyclers help ease down on the water that becomes dirty as a result of having settlers but your main source of water actually comes from ice that needs to be processed by an Ice Processor. When you have low water supply, be sure to consider looking into Ice Processors for extra supply as well as Water Tanks for extra storage.

The next resource on our long list is food, which is generated by an Algae Farm and processed by the Cafeteria. In addition to both structures, you should also consider researching and building an Algae Tank to have increased storage for food and avoid wastage of excess production. With each new settler you welcome into the colony, ensure that all these resources will be sufficient to avoid any problems.

The next icon you can see at the bottom of the screen is the Happiness of the settlers. Although happiness is influenced by a lot of factors like random events and your facility’s layout, you can still easily have it under control.

For starters, ensuring that the basic needs of every settler is met should keep the level of happiness on a positive ratio. There are gyms as well as other structures you can provide for your settlers to boost the level of happiness. Happiness affects productivity and lack of it will not just hamper operations and production. Unhappy settlers may also cause more accidents or even leave the settlement.

The number of settlers in camp is evidently something to be well maintained too. Ensuring you have a ready job for each person is important to keep everyone happy. We mentioned earlier that structures with lacking personnel can easily be spotted. As much as possible, you should have the rocket ready and on standby recruit personnel you need for vacancies and expected expansions in your settlement. Likewise, extra personnel who are idle will also not be good and may impact happiness levels.

Finally, you need to provide Hab spaces for your settlers in TerraGenesis: Landfall. These Habs serve as bunks, bedrooms, or resting places for each settler. These are structures you will consistently need more of the bigger your settlement gets so make it a habit to take note of available space and build accordingly before recruiting more people.

3. Be Flexible In Production Resource Gathering

Ensuring the colony’s survival is just the first step towards fully achieving your long term goals in TerraGenesis: Landfall. While the idea of reaching a stage where all basic needs are met sound easy, actually maintaining the status is in itself a huge challenge. TerraGenesis: Landfall employs randomness in that fortuitous events consistently happen within the settlement. There are breakdowns, accidents, and even vermin scenarios that constantly throw in a wrench on your supposedly perfectly oiled machine.

There are always preventive measures you can take to ensure a steady flow of operations in line with these random events but survival coupled with constant preparation for events that may transpire still hardly makes up for the entirety of what TerraGenesis: Landfall has to offer as you will constantly want to improve your settlement with research and construction. Both these activities, just like sustainable living requires the mining and consumption of resources beyond the basic needs of your people.

Exploration is a big part of your adventure in TerraGenesis: Landfall and towards the latter part of the tutorial session, you will experience exploring with rovers deployed into areas of interest followed by shuttles that mine and transport production resources. You can access the exploration mode via the map icon at the lower right side of the screen, just to the left of the build button.

From time to time, new areas of interest will spawn within the exploration area. These areas are marked with a question mark and once you see one, you will want to send a rover over to investigate. Traveling to an area of interest takes time and a rover also requires 5 personnel for it to fully function. Once the assigned rover reaches the area of interest, you need to click on it again to investigate.

In some cases, areas of interest grant you instant resources or credits as rewards but what you should consider as more important than outright rewards are mining points where you can continuously gather production resources.

Ice, iron, and copper stand as the most basic resources you can gather from explorations with ice being the most important as it is a resource you require to produce clean water. Iron and copper are used to produce other materials like steel and copper wire, which are needed for constructing different structures as well as initiating research. These items form part of the gear inventory you can readily see on the lower left side of the screen.

Once a mining site has been discovered, you will need to deploy or assign shuttles to haul resources from them back to the site. Shuttles, just like rovers require 5 settlers to function and while you will only have 2 of each to begin with, you can have more later as you expand your settlement.

When a shuttle has been assigned to a specific resource spot, it will continue to haul in resources until the max capacity limit for the resource has been reached or if the mining spot has been emptied. Keep in mind, however, that you can always reassign shuttles to a different mining spot based on your changing needs.

Back at the settlement, you can access the gear production menu via its icon just above the map icon. Although you can readily see the available resources you have on the lower left side of the screen, the gear production menu provides additional details that can help you forecast supply versus demand information.

As production also takes time, you also have the option of instantly finishing production by spending Genesis Points although we recommend saving premium currency and only using premium currency on dire situations.

Once you have researched and built a Surface Scanner, you can start using it to focus more on finding areas of interest that have specific production resources. On the exploration screen, you will know that the Surface Scanner is ready to use when it is blinking. Once you click on it, you will be asked to choose 1 of the different available resources. After the scan, one or several areas of interest may appear and the Surface Scanner will become unusable for a fixed duration of time.

4. Learn To Prioritize Research Based On Your Needs

Research is expectedly a key function in TerraGenesis: Landfall not just to sustain and support the basic needs of your growing settlement but to also provide consistent growth and development of the settlement. Research can be considered as the first step towards expansion as you will need to learn more about various structures and operations before you can actually build and operate them. The microscope icon on the lower right side of the screen is your key to the research menu and TerraGenesis: Landfall provides an abundance of items to research on.

Research items are categorized by functionality and are divided into 5 separate tabs in the research menu. These are Life Support, Exploration, Industry, Infrastructure, and Commercial. Since survival stands as the most important objective to consider, research on Life Support is a typical priority. Current needs for one player may vary from time to time and specific needs may also vary from one player to another. In this sense, a careful review of what each research item does is important before actually conducting any research.

Under Life Support, Basic Life Support, being the first research item will be covered in the tutorial session. Batteries are important as you will need to store energy generated by the solar panels for night times. The same idea works for Oxygen Tanks, Water Tanks and Algae Tanks as you would want extra storage space for the basic resources your settlers need to survive. New Algae Species, Algae Wall, and Chemical Filtration all improve how the basic resource generators produce basic needs and can be considered as second priority research items.

For Exploration, The Shuttle Pod and Rover Garage become necessary for you to be able to deploy additional rover and shuttle teams while exploring. Having 2 teams for each to begin with is already viable but if you want to speed up exploration and production material mining, then you should consider investing in both. The Surface Scanner, as we mentioned earlier, allows you to focus on specific material needs. It may take a lot of days for a resource spot to finally be dried out of resources so you can research this at a later time.

Under Industry, you will only have Impurity Identification & Removal as a tier 1 item to begin with. You will be able to produce steel from steel ore without conducting research but this will decrease the required number of iron ores to produce still making production more efficient.

For Infrastructure, you can research a Gym, a Mining Outpost, a Storage Yard, and Efficient Junctions. The sole purpose of the Gym is to boost the happiness levels of settlers living close to where it is located. The Mining Depot serves as an extra storage for the various ores you mine and items you produce using them. Note that there will be instances where some of these resources can be stolen or destroyed at random when you do not own a Mining Depot.

The Storage Yard works the same way for other items that cannot be stored in the Mining Depot such as Repair Kits, Electronics, Shuttles, and even Rovers. Finally, Efficient Junctions allows junctions to not count connection distances, enabling much better resource transport across the facilities.

For Commercial Research items, these can either grant you instant lumps of credits upon completion or enable your settlement to generate extra credits over time. Be sure to take note of the per minute benefits of some items here as they will certainly be more beneficial for you and your settlement in the long run. Taking the Algae-Grown Meat as an example, it costs only 10 crops and takes 30 minutes to complete but will net you 5,000 instant credits upon completion as well as an extra 50 credits every minute moving forward.

5. Prepare Well Before Building

We have now covered surviving on a new, previously barren planet, took on the basics of exploration and resource gathering, and tackled research as a step forward towards expanding the settlement. While construction of previously researched facilities naturally follows, however, there are plenty of preparations to be made first before we begin construction.

Prioritization of construction is very important since you can only construct one structure at a time and it requires steel and credits that also take time to be replenished. With regard to structures that need to be manned for it to function, setting up your rocket for pick-up back to Earth takes 2 trips, each requiring some time to complete as well and costs resources.

For starters, while the current production and storage rates of power, oxygen, water, and food may suffice for the current settlers, one, a couple, or all of these may be impacted by the addition of a new structure or facility. Each new facility definitely has its own power consumption and other resources may be needed as well for structures that require personnel. As we mentioned earlier, it is important to determine your manpower needs early on as you would want to recruit more settlers with ready jobs waiting for them instead of leaving them idle.

Although it is okay to bring in some extra hands as reserve personnel as backup for random accidents and mishaps in the settlement, keeping the numbers within manageable levels are important. Extra personnel mean extra consumption of water, oxygen, and food. This also means that you need to ensure that each new settler will have his or her place in the available Habs, else you will need to build a new one first.

Considering all the above, failing to provide sufficient resources or basic needs for your settlement can lead to problems that often lead to a negative domino effect. For example, if your settlers’ food consumption grows larger than what you can currently provide, food supply will run out and your settlers will be dissatisfied. Disgruntled personnel may just leave the settlement, leading to a lower efficiency rate of a structure or its complete shutdown. Those who continue to work will likewise be less productive and accidents will follow more often.

Failing to meet just one of the many basic needs required to properly shelter your settlers can lead to utter chaos and once multiple facilities begin loosing people, it become more and more challenging to turn it around. Beyond the adverse effects that can happen as a result of not preparing well enough, a bigger settlement also means that random breakdowns and accidents will also happen more often.

6. Employ Additional Advanced Strategies

TerraGenesis: Landfall can be a challenging adventure for complete beginners but after immersing yourself in its universe for a while, you will naturally get the hang of things. Mastering all the basics all seem like a long ride on its own but really spending time to understand each structure, resource, and in-game menu will prepare for you for bigger challenges ahead of the path.

There are still plenty of discoveries to be made beyond what we have covered so far and in preparation for even bigger challenges, you need to start employing more advanced strategies to ensure a steady flow of operations and development. At this point where survival and production should already be ironed out, your next focus should finally be efficiency while still clamoring for even more ambitious expansions.

To start off, you should make a habit of always prepping the rocket for immediate needs. Just like the initial arrival of the rocket on Mars at the start of the tutorial session, what should follow is its immediate departure back to Earth to stand ready for your next order. Whenever you need more people, resources, or other gears from Earth, the rocket should already be there waiting for its journey back to Mars.

The rocket has limited carrying capacity, which means that you should also manage your needs to be within a single trip at a time. Although more people are what you will be needing for the most part, there are also instances when you can spend some extra credits to order resources and items that you consistently need.

Back at your settlement, you will ultimately reach a point where all the tier 1 research items will be completed and you might wonder as to how the next tier of items can become available. Additional research items can only be unlocked after building a Laboratory Module. This is neither a product of research nor a structure you can build with the usual function. You need to tap on your Laboratory and click the “Add” button beside the Laboratory Module option. This will take time to complete and will require additional scientists to function.

Random events in TerraGenesis: Landfall may be seen as largely unfortunate for the uninitiated. System and structural breakdowns, accidents, and even vermin-related incidents can cause minor problems that can sometimes grow bigger over time if left unattended. TerraGenesis: Landfall, however, is not just using random elements to wear you down as there are plenty of random events as well that enable you to earn extra resources and currency to support your settlement’s growth and development.

You will surely notice a trail of mail icons lined up at the top of your screen. Clicking on the mail reveals different messages, which are often updates on pending activities and projects. Sometimes, these messages contain good news as extra resources can be earned based on some fortunate events that transpired within the colony. In some cases, these messages can contain offers from other colonies where you can trade one type of resource for another.

Considering that you can play and enjoy TerraGenesis: Landfall without ever spending any real money, it should be no surprise to also discover ads contained within it. There are, however, no video ads that play randomly while you are playing and every video ad forms part of an ad campaign designed to help you make better progress in your space venture.

When you see a credit symbol along with the mail at the top of the screen, it means that there is an ad offer waiting for you. These are transmissions that can reward you with extra credits immediately after playing a short video ad. These ad boosts are certainly worth the effort each time as the credit rewards also seem to increase based on your average earnings per minute.

One of the unique structures you can build early on that can help your settlement flourish even faster, is the Export Hub. This building certainly isn’t tier 1 importance like the ones that generate and store basic needs but once you have accomplished operational stability and can focus on increased efficiency, this structure should be among the ones to consider building and managing.

The Export Hub lets you sell some extra resources for credits. Although the trade offers are almost as random as the ones you receive via mail transmissions, it still helps to peek into what is being offered to you through this structure. Depending on how you prioritize and operate, it certainly can’t be helped that you will have an overabundance of some resources more than others.

In this sense, the Export Hub stands as your key towards converting excessive resources and materials into credits, which is a basic currency, and have more funds to sustain your settlement’s growing needs.

It can be understood that city-building sim games often impose a sense of prudence among its players. While letting go of some hard-earned resources can be habit-forming, keep in mind that the currency you receive in exchange for them can be used to order resources that you need more of via the rocket. With this in mind, you will certainly be able to appreciate the value of the Export Hub, and begin to take advantage of offers that you can readily complete.

TerraGenesis: Landfall has certainly been a challenging yet rewarding experience for us and we hope that you will revel in excitement with every minute you spend in its world. Although this is where we wrap up our TerraGenesis: Landfall Beginner’s Guide, we are fairly certain that there are more content waiting for your discovery as you delve deeper into it. If you happen to spend a lot of time in the game and have unraveled some of the mysteries it holds, do not hesitate to share your discoveries and experiences with us in the comment area!