#SURVIVING THE AFTERMATH RANCH HOW TO#
#SURVIVING THE AFTERMATH RANCH PLUS#

Cores can be collected from fallen blight creatures and found in caches on the world map. You will need to collect thousands of blight cores to advance your research, so it will take a long time to move forward. You don’t need to do anything with the lab other than collect blight cores, which are automatically ingested into the lab to unlock each subsequent tier of benefits.

#SURVIVING THE AFTERMATH RANCH HOW TO#

Once built, you will have access to a tech tree that provides advantages to your colony, like stronger guard towers or resistance to blight infections (which are fatal to colonists if caught before you have researched how to stop it). You don’t even need to staff it, because that lone scientist survivor you found will run everything without counting as a colonist.

#SURVIVING THE AFTERMATH RANCH PLUS#

This allows players to construct a Blight Lab, which requires basic resources plus a connection to the power grid. The scientist will offer to set up a new lab inside your colony to continue his research. The lab was trying to study The Blight to find a cure, but someone got infected, and the entire thing suffered a violent and bloody collapse. There is a mission on the world map that begins the Rebirth DLC quest chain where you follow some blighted creatures back to a ruined lab and find a single survivor. After an attack, specialists can collect blight cores from fallen enemies which can be spent later on a whole new tech tree. Thankfully, it does a good job of balancing those attacks so that you won’t be overwhelmed so long as you invest somewhat in defensive structures. That will become a recurring event in Rebirth, with more and more waves of creatures eventually attacking, and more powerful creatures too. Eventually, some blighted, giant wasp-like insects will attack the colony and will need to be fought off by guards or specialists. Players will likely first notice it in some stunted trees and ruined ground around the colony. In Rebirth, the wasteland is afflicted by a fungal growth known as The Blight, which is not unlike the fungus that destroyed the world in The Last of Us, although it’s just kind of getting started in Rebirth. In fact, the plot as well as the overall look and feel of Rebirth fits in perfectly with the post-apocalyptic theme of the title. Thankfully, the Rebirth DLC does not feel like an add-on like Shattered Hope did and is not predominantly external like New Alliances. Let’s find out if Rebirth falls into that same trap. The second DLC was called Shattered Hope and was arguably the worst of the bunch because it tried to add an Anguish mechanic on top of the already-existing Morale mechanic, which just made the settlers even more whiney than they already are. It added new societies and kind of gave it a Civilization vibe, although most of the new content was outside of the main colony on the world map other than a trading post and a society interaction building (which let you construct a few helpful buildings inside other colonies). The first DLC, New Alliances, was available when we conducted the original review of Surviving the Aftermath. Today, this review is focusing on the Rebirth DLC, which is the latest one released, and which is arguably the best of the bunch. This way, players can enjoy Surviving the Aftermath where certain DLCs have influence and others are completely inactive. The reason that being able to activate different DLCs is important is because the quality of each of them varies by quite a bit, and they also tend to really change the character of the core game.

So, players can choose to play the core title alone, one with just certain DLCs activated, or everything at once. Once you have access to the DLCs, you can activate or disable each one from the title screen at the start of every new game. Since the title’s release, developer Iceflake Studio, which has since been officially acquired by publisher Paradox Interactive, has released three DLCs for Surviving the Aftermath. You can check out that review to read about all the core gameplay mechanics, but suffice to say, if you like city-building and light tactical combat, Surviving the Aftermath has a lot to offer. The core game earned 4.5 GiN Gems in its original review. Surviving the Aftermath offers a really interesting take on the city-building genre, combining traditional elements like having to provide enough housing and food for residents with a post-apocalyptic world where players also have to scavenge for resources and defend against raiders and other wasteland bad guys.

Surviving the aftermath ranch