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How to forge ahead in Pocket Village - hints, tips, and tricks

Speed up your game with our handy guide

How to forge ahead in Pocket Village - hints, tips, and tricks
|
iOS
| Pocket Village

So, you're thoroughly enjoying that Pocket Village game from Wooga, eh?

Takes all sorts, I suppose.

My biggest criticism of this game is that there are too many walls in place to slow down your progress. Artificial walls, that is. Artificial walls, in fact, that have been put there to extract money from you.

With this in mind, I've compiled some tips for avoiding a few of the time sink pitfalls that block your way. This will enable you to enjoy this colourful freemium world builder significantly more.

Aren't you lucky?

The warehouse problem

One of the largest issues you're going to run into is how quickly the amount of space you have for resources will be taken up.

In this game, you are offered a tiny warehouse in which to stock everything you gather. So, one of the first things you should do is expand it via the use of Coins. This should give you a little wiggle room, making the game more forgiving if you're careful with what you gather.

Because here's the big secret about Pocket Village: it's unlike builders of a similar ilk in that you shouldn't try to collect as many resources from the environment around you as possible. Instead, you should take what you need. Oh, and a smidgen more on top, just in case.

Rather than chopping down the big trees, harvesting the large berries, or mining the huge rocks, then, take what you need from the smaller ones. This way, you won't end up with too much of one resource clogging up the space you have. That will enable you to build more types of items and buildings, each with its own separate material requirements.

The trader

Though you can, of course, purchase Coins with IAPs, the only way to accrue this soft currency organically through the game is to sell items to the trader. You can find the trader in her hot air balloon, from where she is usually looking to trade four combinations of items in exchange for the valuable hard tender.

Before giving a trade the thumbs-up, go through all of the objectives you'd like to accomplish, and ensure that you're not about to sell off something you'll desperately need further down the line.

If the trader's looking for Nails and Berries, and you'll need those nails to construct a building you want, for example, consider how quickly you can produce more of them, and whether the trade is therefore worth the wait.

The best approach is to trade scrap items, i.e. resources that you don't need and that are taking up valuable space in your warehouse.

Another tactic you can utilise - which isn't conveyed in the game particularly well - is to trash the individual trade requests from the trader, and ask her to come back with another. If you can't sell anything and need space for different resources, then this is a life saver. You will, however, need to wait a little while for the merchant to come up with a new offer.

Worker efficiency

You don't need to use all of your workers all at the same time. As mentioned above, having too many resources is as bad as - if not worse than - having too few. Also, some actions can take extraordinarily long amounts of time to complete, so if you've got loads of Pockateers locked up in tasks, you won't be able to quickly react should you need to.

All of this advice doesn't apply to Tools, though. These are items like Spoons, Nails, Hammers, and so on that take ages to make. You'll rarely produce many of these, as you use them up quickly making other buildings.

You construct these Tools in the Workshop, from where you can purchase extra queue slots to create multiple types of items. Neat trick, huh. So, if you need both Spoons and Hammers, you can request them to be made simultaneously, as long as you have one of these extra slots.

Got any tips to share? Let us and the rest of the PG community know them by leaving them in a comment below.
Peter Willington
Peter Willington
Die hard Suda 51 fan and professed Cherry Coke addict, freelancer Peter Willington was initially set for a career in showbiz, training for half a decade to walk the boards. Realising that there's no money in acting, he decided instead to make his fortune in writing about video games. Peter never learns from his mistakes.