I feel compelled to write a review about this marvellous game I've currently spent 166 hours on. More than that, this one is my first review on Steam!

TL;DR:
- an amazing sandbox with building and map-generating versatility
- one of the best city-builders I've played in my life (others being Pharaoh, Tropico, SimCity, Frostpunk and several more)
- absolutely worth the price
- regular (every 2-3 months) and substantial updates

Some more details about things I deem impressive:
- The speed with which the game captivated me was incredible. It's one of those games when you seat yourself at your PC one evening with a thought, "Alright, let's check this one out", and barely leave at 5 o'clock in the morning as now you HAVE TO go to bed to be more or less adequate for the upcoming working day. But you feel ultimately happy as you've found a gemstone!
- The pacing feels comfortable as you develop your town, and I loved how the developers lock some of the buildings until you've constructed the essentials: this way it works like a rapid and effective tutorial, demonstrating the must-haves and then letting you decide the path on your own.
- The agricultural system felt so fascinatingly complex! Maybe some other strategic games had a similar one (Banished?.. I was late for the party), but for me it was such an exciting novelty. Up until now I spend lots of time lovingly calculating how to exploit the fields in the best possible way.
- The overall atmosphere and conformity of the buildings are just so pleasant, so bucolic! This makes me really consider my town a real place, and therefore carefully ponder on the placement of houses, decorations, amenities and industrial quarters.
- Very clever and methodically upgraded AI of your townsfolk. Once, in one of my first and not very successful runs, I observed how an elderly woman was ensuring her own and the two of her relatives' survival for 20 minutes straight! They were the only ones alive after death and decay massacred hundreds of their former neighbours. That was a show, I'm telling you: how she went foraging, then collected water, then picked medical herbs, then brought firewood... And that was patches ago!
- I feel very thankful to the developers for the things they've been adding to the game: new ways to embellish the town, deep mining, relics, animals, etc. Looking forward to more!

Before this becomes too long to read, I would like to throw in some suggestions in case this catches some attention from the team.
1) On my laptop a thunderstorm with lightnings causes a massive FPS drop which makes me restart the game. This method helps, but hopefully this glitch is resolved in one of the future patches! So far it's the biggest issue I've discovered.
2) It would be absolutely wonderful to get a refined terraforming tool. With not-so-flat terrains and the tool's 10x10 limitations I find my aesthetical life in Farthest Frontier miserably unfulfilling at times. :( Please?..
3) Bridges! I'm begging you. Some maps are merely bombastic and gorgeously interspersed with curvy lakes – only for me to reroll the map seed as it would be utterly impossible to plan a town where willow and many other resources are plainly out of any reasonable reach.
4) It looks like compost yards began to malfunction in the last patch, refusing to dump the 'treasure'. Could it be that I'm missing something?..

To sum up: Farthest Frontier is already a charming, solidly crafted strategy game that you definitely ought to give a go if you, like me, love city builders. It would be fair to mention that I play on Pacifist mode only.

The final point: most of my playtime was streamed, and should you be interested in my gameplay, you're very welcome on my YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@andy_lighthouse

This is a lot like the game Banished except with a military aspect that was lacking in the old game. A good deal of fun if you like city builders with all sorts of variables and challenging problems for the survival of your people. Highly recommended!

The game has been in early access for two years now, and it still lacks meaningful progression. While basic features like building and farming are present, the gameplay feels shallow. You can quickly become wealthy by selling rocks and planks at the trader station, and then buy everything you need from there on out, but there's little else to do afterward once your town is established.

Several aspects are frustrating as well. For example, placing a hunter's station results in constant notifications of being attacked every time an animal is hunted. With five hunter stations, these alerts become almost nonstop.

The villagers are coded well for harvesting, but their behavior regarding desirability is problematic. They frequently move out of buildings, and when I check, the buildings are still at tier 2 desirability.

The enemy AI is poorly designed, consistently targeting the same few buildings. As a result, placing these buildings in the center of your town makes you nearly invincible since the enemies get destroyed by towers or guards as they approach.

Overall, as a city sim or medieval builder, this game is underwhelming. Save your money for the full release, which might be another five years away at this point, and hope it improves by then.