The Wandering Village: Toxins Guide

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  • How To Avoid Toxins
  • Dealing With Poison
  • Containing Toxic Plants

One of The Wandering Village's most significant challenges is the toxic pollen that has spread throughout the world. The pollen's poisonous spread is what forced your village to travel before the chance encounter with Onbu at the beginning of the game. Though you can find refuge on its back, you haven't escaped the poison just yet.

Throughout your journey, you'll find yourself dealing with its deadly effects, from your villagers and Onbu suffering in polluted air to dealing with toxic plants spreading across your scarce land. You'll never fully escape, but this guide will help you survive.

The Wandering Village is currently in Early Access on Steam and as such, the content is subject to change. We will update these articles as required.

How To Avoid Toxins

You can check the area's toxicity level in the toxicity indicator on the right of the temperature indicator. It tracks air toxicity and ground toxicity. The former indicates what your village experiences while Onbu is standing and on the move while the latter indicates what your village will experience when Onbu is resting or sleeping.

Ground toxicity is higher than air toxicity. Keeping Onbu moving through toxic areas is essential because it'll both let you get away from the toxins and will expose you to less toxicity in the immediate term. This is where having Onbu's trust and managing its sleepiness becomes important.

The pollen hasn't spread across the entire world just yet. Each of the game's three biomes has its own toxicity levels to be mindful of.

JungleJungles are the most toxic biomes. Even laying on the ground will expose your village to high levels of toxicity. As if that wasn't bad enough, jungles are the most likely biome to have pollen storms that bring the most toxic air possible.
MountainsThe cold mountains are not free of toxins though it is not a significant threat. There is a much lower probability of encountering pollen storms in the mountains relative to jungles
DesertDeserts are the least toxic biome in the game, being practically free of the worst effects. Pollen storms won't cross your path in the dry desert, though staying long-term is not usually a viable solution.

Dealing With Poison

Both your villagers and Onbu itself will become poisoned as they spend time in toxic air and, if left untreated, they'll lose health and eventually die. Fortunately, all you need to do is provide herbs through Village Doctors and Onbu Doctors to alleviate the symptoms. You need to build Herbalists to grow herbs. It functions similarly to a farm, just limited to growing herbs. They need workers to grow them and take up water and land, two resources that can quickly become scarce.

Onbu's treatment is expensive but relatively simple. Just order the Onbu Doctor to provide an antidote to lower its toxicity level.

Poisoned villagers will quickly become a liability. They are less productive than healthy ones, interfering with your village's ability to remain functional. They even spread their illness to other villagers, making prevention and treatment incredibly important. Once they become badly poisoned, they cease work and wait to be cured.

You'll want to be mindful of where you build Village Doctors as it takes time for them to travel to and treat their patients. If you end up with a quarter of your village sick and dying, every second counts. Building them near highly populated areas would be a good idea. You can also speed things up by building them close to Herbalists to help them get herbs faster.

Poison can spread among your villagers when infected individuals arrive at Onbu even if the air is free of toxins. Poisoned scavengers or sick nomads are likely transmission vectors. Be careful where to accept new people from!

Building advanced housing like Huts and Cottages will mitigate the effect of poisoned air on your population, though it can be expensive to house everyone in such buildings.

Containing Toxic Plants

Poison plants will quickly spread through Onbu's back in highly toxic environments. These plants will infect trees, crops and bushes while making it impossible to farm on infected land. Infected plants cannot be harvested, rendering any investment in them worthless. Your villagers will also get sick if they spend time near these plants. The longer you leave toxic plants alone, the harder it will be to remove them from Onbu.

You have two options when it comes to removing them. The first is ordering your workers to harvest the poison plants by hand. This method is so slow that you are unlikely to stop a spreading infestation. The second, and much more advisable option, is to research and build Decontaminators, a structure that allows your villagers to don protective gear and carry flamethrowers to incinerate the plants.

If manpower is an issue, you can disable Decontaimators when you don't need them, freeing up labor.

Decontaminators need a lot of fuel to work. They use Biogas, made from Dung at a Compost Heap, or Bile, extracted from Onbu. It's best to have reserves of either resource because you'll never be able to avoid poison plants forever.

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