• August 14th, 2024 - first draft published.
  
• August 16th, 2024 - Added instructions on how to set up rooms.
  
• August 18th, 2024 - Changed outdated references to non-existent skills, detailed some more Stockpile options.

Now that Odd Realm 1.0 has been released to the public, I believe it's high time we start creating up-to-date materials that can guide help newcomers and old timers alike. This is a game that has gone through several stages of development and, being a small indie developed essentially by a single person, there isn't always plenty of info that's centralized or mantained by a dedicated group of people.

The idea of this guide is to start remedying this and lay out some foundations that may, hopefully, clear some doubts and entice people to try it out. It's an amazing game and it's bound to become better, thanks to Waylon and all the people who have contributed to development in one way or another.

Without much further ado, let's get started with the Gwdir.

Okay, so you've probably played with vanilla Humans and have gotten used to them, or maybe Ancients were way too slow and easy, or the Ardyn proved to be a though challenge and you needed a change of pace... Or maybe this is the first time you boot Odd Realm, you looked for an up-to-date guide and stumbled upon this one; whatever the reason may be for choosing the Gwdir, it's important to get to know them, their strenghts and peculiarities.

When we start a new game with them, this is the official lore and info we're presented with:


It's important to clarify that, as of v1.0.23.0, they harvest resources from plants and trees the regular way (that is, destroying them). Besides, their +5 bonus points to Stone Work, Carpentry and Blacksmithing don't apply to newly created Gwdir. This may be a bug or oversight

In short, here's a handy list of things that are currently unique to the Gwdir. Will keep updating the list as more features are enabled.

• Their health is average-low (50 hp), way below Ancients and Ardyn.
  
• Gwdir drink and eat just like humans do.
  
• There is a single female "queen" per settlement, but unlike Humans or Ancients this doesn't confer extra HP.
  
• They can't mate and won't ever form families; instead, they all grow from seeds.
  
• T'Thdir trees and seeds are crucial to them, they're wrecked without them. Thus, settling for the first time in any biome that doesn't have dirt soil can be immensely challenging.
  
• Just like everyone but Ancients, the Gwdir suffer from cold temperatures.
  
• Thankfully, they have access to high-quality clothes no other race has.
  
• They live much longer than humans, reaching old age at around 145.
  
• Like Ancients, they can appoint Summoners and Thaumaturges by default (as of v1.0.23.0 they serve no purpose if there aren't any Ancients in the map).

Just like Ancients work with crystal shards and the Ardyn have their own plethora of chronostuff, the Gwdir have a couple of specialized materials to their advantage: the T'Thdir tree, its seeds and the Wir. Seeds come with any embark loadout by default and they cost 1000 Ren. As of v.1.0.26.0, you can exploit this by selling one or two seeds and buying whatever you like with the spare change. 5 more settlers for the price of a single seed is a really good tradeoff.

Next up I will start detailing a standard Gwdir campaign intended for new players or people new to v1.0. If you want to take a look at more specific info, you can jump to the corresponding section on the right.

As mentioned before, if you're new to the Gwdir try going for anything that's not Desert or Deep Sea. Thanks to their unique clothes, settling in a Tundra square is viable, albeit a bit challenging (limited crops, no full metal armor for warriors).

Remember you can always migrate to another square if you feel the original embark went wrong, without suffering any losses.

If you want to fully experience trade, make sure you embark in a large island or continent with neighbors. Even though you can command your people to cross the seas, the AI won't ever conduct trade or invasions overseas.

As you can see here, we expect to receive Ardyn visitors from the south once our market is all set up.

Once you select the biome of your liking, click on "+ Kingdom Start" and get ready to set up your forest dwelling!

Once the map is fully loaded and you choose where you want your first settlers to spawn, there are a couple of things we need to check before unpausing.


She's our "queen", easily recognizable by the pink pixels on her head, which represent the Rose Crown. She's our biggest asset in town and is capable of many things the rest of the Gwdir can't do reliably, such as

• planting new T'Thdir trees from T'Thdir seeds.
  
• creating new villagers from T'Thdir seeds in a special room.
  
• make Ai'wir clothing super fast (any Gwdir with the farming skill and a corresponding workstation in their house can make those clothes, but she's certainly the best at it)

The Rose Crown confers +20 to Farming, so make sure that's her profession before moving on. Unlike Human kings and queens or Ancient Primarchs, she's not really a noble, so there aren't any additional bonuses to the realm or to her health. This item can't be unequipped or given to another entity, so if she dies by any means just plant the crown in the Brood Gardens (see "Rooms" below) and wait for another Gwnvayth to spring from it.
You may want to put her in a control group, pressing Ctrl+1 works for now.

Next step is to go to the Settler Overview screen (pressing the letter O, as highlighted). There you'll see that some of your other villagers start with random professions, such as Thaumaturge, Archer, Chef, Tailor, etc., but we don't need any of that for now, so make sure you set up your initial males to either Laborers or Farmers, and enable the Logging skill to the one who has the most points in it, same with Mining and someone else with Woodworking will help us down the road. We'll need fighters to defend the realm, so enabling those skills on at least a couple of laborers wouldn't be a bad idea either.


Don't unpause yet, next up is the Research screen.

Given that we already start with a few Agriculture tomes at our disposal, it's sensible to start researching Hunting 1 for trapping animals and interlopers in cages. Depending on RNG it can be between 1 day and 18 hours, and next up we'll continue with woodworking, for buckets and basic tools. We won't need walls this early, but it's reasonable to start thinking of chokepoints where you'll trap invaders (and start a human town) in the long run.


Now look for a small forest clearing, or make your own by logging some trees, before we go to the Build screen and plant our first T'Thdir trees. The way I like to do it is by putting them relatively close to each other, spending all three seeds this way. We'll recoup this investment much sooner than expected, but we've got to make sure our initial settlers will survive until then, because replacing them at this stage is unthinkable.


This is an easier way to create orchards and gardens, by the way, if you're into decorating your spaces beyond pure functionality.

The purple grass growing around the trees is Nelescuro, a special type of grass where we can grow our essentials. Regular plants (wild and farmland) will grow out of it too, but the trees will grow too and create too much shade, so beware of placing your farms too near. If you harvest it you'll get regular plant fibre, but you can grow it too with our other special resource, the Wir, if you don't feel like planting T'Thdir trees everywhere.

Now it's time to accomodate the Gwnvayth and set up her workplace.


The Brood Garden is a type of room unique to the Gwdir, only one can be set up at a time. In it we can restore the "queen" if we ever lose her, harvest the T'Thdir trees automatically for seeds and grow more Gwdir from these seeds. We want to have a relatively open space for growing people and a few squares touching the trunk of our planted trees, only enough to harvest their seeds. A 30 square room will suffice.

Between the trees we're going to set up our first home. We want it to be relatively big, enough for the Gwnvayth's workstation, a bed and some storage. After this, we can place lodging for the rest of our people wherever we want. Since the Gwdir never form families and morale/opinion isn't an issue as of v1.0.26.0, a little 2x2 room is enough for them.

To make sure it's always occupied by her, we're going to set up her status of Gwnvayth as a requisite (see left side of this screenshot).

Because it is still spring we won't need walls or torches for now, just make a bed in each room and we're good to go. Before planning ahead our stockpiles and start collecting resources, it's important we hunt the few creatures there are in the map. Since it's difficult to have the infrastructure to capture them before they leave the map, it's important to kill them quickly for their leather. Locate them by clicking on their icons and gather all your people for the hunt.


Since these creatures aren't hostile, you'll need to press X to enable the manual attack cursor and then right click on each of those animals. Watch out for Vythrax and other animals that are big and dangerous, Gwdir are much more frail than humans and require some degree of micromanagement.

After we've done all this, we can set up our farms. To make it easier on us and choose the crops we consider the most useful, it's a good idea to divide farms into plots (could be stripes or squares) and choose only a single crop per plot. Wheat is incredibly useful for beverages, bread and plenty of recipes, so it should be a staple, just like the berries. Everything else can be plucked from the wild at any point.


Only the stockpiles remain, they mostly depend on your playstyle and what you intend to do nearby. I personally tend to make general stockpiles for raw resources (can be picked up by anyone available) and enable stocks inside rooms only for finished goods/gear/tools. Also, stockpiles work better if they're 1 or 2 rows deep, if you try making bigger squares it tends to screw their pathfinding.

After 3 in-game days, the first T'Thdir seeds come out and we're able to expand our operation a little further. Planting another tree and growing two more villagers is just enough for now.

Now that you have ensured the basic survival of your Gwdir without accidentally wasting all the starting seeds in the process, we'll take a look at how we can grow our influence from here:

• Speed research, weapons and metalworking
  
• Walling our settlement and trapping interlopers
  
• Trading (we'll dedicate a whole section to this)
  
• Accomodating new races
  
• Preparing an expedition towards a harsher challenge.

This one is pretty straightforward. After completing the first couple of techs, we're going to speed things up through the Library research. It lasts three days, but it's all we need while our hamlet grows.
Make sure you plan your first library room near your initial workshop (a workbench and a fireplace is all you need), as they share plenty of materials. In the current game iteration tomes are not consumed and they provide a passive bonus to research. As soon as we get these, we can start aiming for the wood industry and wooden weapons.

This probably won't happen soon enough, as the first bandits may arrive by the fourth day.
Wait for them to come near the houses and deal with them one by one, if possible. The closer to our base they leave their stuff, the better.


While you wait for the library to be ready, craft some buckets (10 or 15 should be enough) at the Workshop and a Wellhouse with two wells and a barrel. I tend to set it near my crops, which need to be watered constantly anyway. Start creating rooms for the next wave of Gwdir, and get ready to improve your settlement.

By this time you may have two additional Gwdir, if Woodworking is already researched one of them can become a Builder (a very busy one, as we'll see), while the other can become a Chef. Setting up a kitchen is essential, but require some finicky steps.



By the time the Library research hits, you may have a couple more Gwdir available for soldiering and work. This race has to play defensive and smart, due to their weaknesses, so we're going to wall ourselves off little by little.


First, we're laying out the library. If you already have researched Woodworking you can furnish it with bookcases. Make these containers right next to the workstations so the production output goes directly to them instead of lying scattered all over the place. This is really important and applies to every single workshop.

TBD

Overall, I find this race incredibly promising for something that just came out of the oven. There are some features that don't work as announced yet, such as the non-destructive resource collection (which wouldn't be necessary because, in current v1.0.26.0, nature itself regenerates at a much faster pace than what you can extract from it) and the crafting bonuses. I personally feel the current state of the Neloscuro is somewhat wasted, because there's no need for it apart from being the soil where you can grow new citizens and a requirement for a single workstation. I'm hoping for this grass to either buff the Gwdir with speed/health/work bonuses, or perhaps debuff/curse other races that step on it.

As the game grows and Waylon keeps on developíng it I'm sure people can suggest or give feedback on the current gameplay loop for this race.

Now, if you find yourself reading this, chances are this guide remains unfinished. I hope all this information proved useful for either new or returning players.

Let me know any glaring omissions or changes that you find while reading this, so I can update this document accordingly.