Ostriv — Your First Town: the camp opening, the first winter and year two

Ostriv starts you in March with 2,000 coins, a tent camp and a fixed pile of materials that is only just enough to get nine houses built before the first winter. This guide is the order to spend those materials in, the exact cost of every building you will place in the first two years, the production ratios behind the early chains, and the traps that end first towns.

Written for Alpha 5 patch 9 hotfix 63 (28 September 2026). Alpha 6 is in development — the developer's own notes say it will add an option to start with a pre-built settlement, a tutorial, 24 new buildings and 42 new resources — but none of that is in the game yet. Everything below is the current build.

What you actually start with

A new game drops a camp on the map. From the community wiki's camp pages:

Two caveats. First, the wiki's figure for the starting Thatch (1,200) is the one number current players contradict: comments on the Alpha 5 steam guide say there is enough thatch in the camp to build all nine houses, and an Alpha 4-era recorded playthrough shows roughly 4,000 thatch and 11,000 wood on hand. Treat the wood and thatch totals as approximate and the iron and nail totals as firm — the same playthrough shows exactly 1,000 iron and 1,600 nails. Second, the wiki's older pages (villagers 20-32, food for 20-22 months, start date March 1721) date from Alpha 2 and have not been re-verified; the number of families and the food stock differ per start.

The game starts at low speed. Pause before you reposition anything — the steam guide's first tip is that restarts carry the old speed over, and an unpaused minute can cost you a week of the build season.

Picking the camp site

The site matters more than any later decision, because everything you must build in year one is distance-limited.

• Forest adjacent. The Forestry feeds Wood, Firewood and Bark, and it works off nearby trees.

Workers walking a long way to logs is the single most common reason a first town starves for wood.

• Open flat ground for 9 houses plus a market centre. The dev notes for the current build added

an overlay that marks the dwellings affected by a polluting building, which is a reminder that layout has consequences beyond travel time.

• Near water, for reed. The Thatchery needs reed, and reeds only grow on the edges of water bodies,

especially shallow marshy areas.

• Check the map's entry points. Land and river traders arrive from fixed map edges. On some maps

you are effectively forced to one side of a river, because everything enters from one point. The map selection screen also lists which deposits each map has — Map 2 and Map 3 have unlimited Iron ore, the rest have finite stone and limestone and no ore at all.

The first twelve months, in order

The rule that governs year one: nine houses before December. Families still in tents when winter lands pack up and leave, and each family that leaves is a worker you never get back. Houses need wood, clay and thatch, so the production buildings that make those come first.

The order below merges the steam guide's Alpha 5 plan with the corrections its commenters made for the current build:

A village house takes about 1.5-2 weeks to build when the delivery routes are short, and houses without gardens are quicker than houses with gardens because there is no fence for builders to walk around. Nine houses with gardens is described as very close to the deadline — the ninth finishing in the first or second week of October. A mix (4-5 with gardens, 4-5 without) is the safe play.

Houses with gardens cost the same materials plus 50-100 extra Wood for the fence, occupy more land, and pay land tax on the garden area — but they grow their own food (onions, cabbage, carrot, beetroot, cucumber, raspberry, garlic, peas, pumpkin, marrow, horseradish and honey from beehives) before any farm exists. That food does not enter the market on its own: a Granary, Trading post or Trading dock with purchase from citizens enabled and at least one worker has to buy it.

The nail clock

Nails are the resource that ends first towns. You start with 1,600 and every building consumes them. The wiki's Nail, Smithy and Iron pages lay out the arithmetic, and it is worth writing down:

That is already more than you have, before you build anything optional. The escape route is the Smithy: 2 Iron + 200 Charcoal produce 10 Nails (1 Iron = 5 Nails). With 1,000 starting Iron you can, in principle, make 5,000 Nails — if you have Charcoal, workers and hauling capacity. Iron, though, is not producible at the start on most maps: it comes from trade, or from an Iron ore mine plus Smeltery on a map that has ore. Which is why the Trading post is not optional:

• Trading post: 24,300 Wood, 486 Nails, 7,000 Clay, up to 6 workers, and it needs a Manager

before it can send or receive a single trade messenger. Manager jobs require education, so the Primary school eventually matters.

• Trading dock (river trade): 466 Nails according to the wiki's Nail page, but it needs a lot more

Wood and a workable river placement, and it stops working when the river freezes.

• A messenger costs 5 coins per day of travel: 40 to Balakliya (8 days), 80 to Derkachi (16 days), 95

to Merefa (19 days). Traders only come after the deal is agreed, so shoes ordered from a 10-day neighbour turn up around 20 days later.

The soft-lock to avoid: starting Nails spent before the Smithy exists and trade is open, starting Iron spent before trade is open, carts broken with no Metal parts and no Carpentry, or Charcoal production with no free Labourers to fill the piles. Any of those and the town can no longer build the buildings it would need to recover.

Firewood, Charcoal and heat

Firewood is a required household resource from the moment the game starts — it was moved from "nice to have" to "food, water, firewood" in the early patch cycle, and households that cannot buy it in winter leave.

The Forestry makes Firewood from logs at 1 log = 1,500 Firewood (and 1 log = 1,500 Wood for construction, plus Bark as a byproduct).

Charcoal is made by burning a Charcoal pile, and the pile is all-or-nothing:

Two consequences. First, a single full burn eats 10,000 Firewood in one go — do not let charcoal production empty the household firewood stock before winter. Second, a single pile is a risk: when it is spent you wait for another pile to fill and burn before any charcoal exists again. Two piles is the standard early build, and the wiki's Charcoal page notes that most "the Smithy is idle" problems are actually charcoal problems.

Water: wells are not platforms

There are two water resources and they do not substitute:

A Well holds 1,000 Drinking water and refills slowly from groundwater. Practical rules from the wiki's water pages and the wiki's older strategy page:

• One well per 4-5 houses, and keep wells inside the housing cluster — path distance is what counts.
• Do not build wells at the water's edge. A well placed too close to a riverbank, lakeshore or wet

ground pumps water that is not fit for consumption. It has to be demolished and rebuilt further out.

• Do not tick production or animal use on a residential well. Industry will drain it and citizens will

complain about water while a well is visibly standing right next to them.

• The Brewery is the exception among industry: it needs Drinking water, not platform water.

Food: what to eat in year one and two

The camp's food runs out eventually, and a tent family with no food leaves. Three sources, in the order they become available:

1. Garden houses. Cheap, immediate, random. A garden house starts producing food in its first growing season. This is why the layout advice is to get the first houses down close to the clay pit and forestry — current-build commenters report getting three, sometimes four, houses finished by the end of May, which is early enough for those gardens to feed the town in autumn and attract migrants.

2. Fishing. A Fishing dock (8,100 Wood, 162 Nails, 1,000 Thatch) plus a Boatyard (6,700 Wood, 134 Nails). Boats are ordered from the dock's own panel and built by the Boatyard at 2,000 Wood each; the dock holds three boats. Two numbers are worth knowing:

That catch figure is the one number in this guide the sources actively disagree on, so plan for the low end. Salt is import-only until you build a Saltworks, which needs two horses or two oxen, dry ground in the right spot, and 30 Charcoal (or 90 Firewood) per 100 Salt. Fishing stops entirely when the water freezes, and boats cannot be delivered in winter either — keep one worker in the dock through winter to turn Threads into nets for spring.

3. Farms. A Farm (8,200 Wood, 164 Nails, 1,100 Clay, 600 Thatch) does not grow anything by itself; you must designate fields and assign them. Field rules:

• Fields must be square, 15 to 50 units per side (maximum 2,500 units of land per field).
• A farm can manage up to 6 fields and employ up to 5 workers.
• Most crops arrive at the farm as harvest and must then be threshed by farm workers into the

usable resource. If a Windmill, Brewery or Oil workshop is idle while the farm is full, threshing is the first thing to check.

• Sowing happens in spring; harvest runs from August to the end of November; **anything still standing

in a field at the end of November is lost.** Sowing that finishes before the end of March gives a better harvest than sowing that drags into April.

• Direct food crops are Potato (0.08) and Buckwheat (0.10). Wheat (0.10) becomes Flour at a Windmill,

Sunflower (0.10) becomes oil at an Oil workshop, Flax (0.10) and Hemp (0.08) become Threads and Textile at the Weaver's workshop, Barley (0.08) becomes Beer.

Crop rotation uses three soil nutrients — red, green and blue — and this is the table the wiki's Crops page prints, with the unploughed cost in the last three columns:

A rotation that never repeats a crop family across three fields keeps fertility stable; the community rotation guide on r/OstrivGame derives the same percentages from Alpha 2.1 and recommends potato–buckwheat–potato or wheat–buckwheat–potato chains for food, with hemp and flax followed by fallow. Ploughing restores about 15% of the nutrients before sowing — and it is not free: a plough costs 2,000 Wood + 20 Metal parts at the Carpentry and needs two oxen on the farm.

What a household eats: the wiki's older strategy page gives 100 food per adult per year and 50 per child. That figure is from the Alpha 2 era and the steam guide's author was still hunting for a verified nutritional value in the current build, so treat it as a rough planning aid only.

Year two: farms, fishing and the town hall

With nine houses standing, the second year is about making the town self-feeding and giving it a management layer. The plan that follows is the steam guide's, and its numbers check out against the wiki's building and recipe pages:

Please note on storage: the wiki's Granary and Farm pages still print the old Farm storage capacity of 10,000. The developer's own patch notes for 31 March 2026 say Farm storage capacity increased from 10000 to 15000. Where a wiki page and the developer's notes disagree, follow the developer's notes.

Seasonal hiring is the year-two unlock. With a counselor at the Town hall you can set every building's season at once, so that in March and August the whole town — everyone except the fishermen and a builder or two — drops to "off season" and becomes labour for sowing and harvest. That is how you get 4 × 50×50 fields sown before the end of March. Keep at least a couple of labourers free at all times: charcoal piles, hay mowing, mining and hauling all compete for the same pool, and the wiki's Labourers page suggests leaving roughly 20% of the adult workforce unassigned.

The later chains, and what feeds what

The first two years are wood, clay, thatch, nails, food and water. Everything else hangs off these recipes. Percentages and ratios below are from the wiki's building pages; where two pages disagreed, that is noted.

Two structural facts that catch people out:

• Hides must be salted before they can be tanned. Since Alpha 5, animals slaughtered at the

Slaughterhouse produce raw hides; hides need 1 Salt per 20 units (Salo needs 1 per 10). No Salt, no Leather, no Shoes.

• Bark is shared between the Tannery and the Ashery. Running both chains on one Forestry will

starve one of them; and Potash has a disastrous final yield — 25 Potash costs 1,600 Bark.

Money, wages and tax

The Camp center cannot change wages, prices or rent. The Town hall can, and its economy panel controls basic wage, managers' wage, labourers' wage, local market prices, purchase-from-citizens prices, rent, land tax, apartment tax, wealth tax and private business taxes (Tavern, Barber Surgery).

The wiki's older strategy page suggests a deliberately flat economy to keep the treasury steady:

Tax guidance from the current wiki's Taxes page, which is more careful than the old table: raise the wealth tax first (it only hits families above a threshold — threshold 50 and tax 1 means families with more than 50 pay 1 a month), keep rent and land tax at or near zero in a young town, and watch the wealth distribution panel rather than the treasury. Families that leave because they had no money are an economy problem you can still fix by cutting taxes; families that have money but no food, firewood or clothes are a logistics problem that no tax change will fix. Also note that a high local price is an indirect tax: citizens buy their essentials from your market stalls.

Town-hall jobs (managers, counselors) require primary education. The Primary school (20,100 Wood, 402 Nails, 4,300 Clay) takes children aged 10-15 and holds a maximum of 10 students, and children aged 15-18 can work as Labourers at reduced productivity.

Traps

1. Spending nails before the Smithy and trade exist. 1,600 starting nails cannot cover houses plus

Smithy plus Trading post. Build the Smithy early and open trade before the iron is gone.

1. Treating starting Iron as a resource rather than a recovery fund. It is the only Iron you have

until trade or a mine-plus-smeltery exists.

1. Lighting your first charcoal pile before checking the firewood stock. 10,000 Firewood goes in at

once, and household heating comes out of the same store.

1. Only one charcoal pile. When it is spent you wait half a month plus fill time for the next batch.

The Smithy stalls and so does construction.

1. Wells at the water's edge. Unsafe drinking water; the well has to be rebuilt further inland.
2. Letting industry drink from residential wells. Citizens then complain about water with a well

standing next to them. Give industry a Platform.

1. Assuming a Platform supplies drinking water. It does not, and the Brewery specifically cannot use

one.

1. Building a Clay pit you later want to move. The wiki is inconsistent on whether a clay pit can be

demolished — its own pages say both, and current-build patch notes mention a demolish crash being fixed — so treat placement as permanent and put it near your construction area.

1. Sowing late. Sowing that finishes by the end of March gives a good harvest; sowing that runs into

April does not. This is the strongest argument for seasonal hiring.

1. Harvest left in the field. Everything unharvested at the end of November is lost. August to

November is the window; the steam guide's line is "dead plants in December make dead colonists in April".

1. Forgetting threshing. Crops sitting at the farm are not usable resources. A full farm storage or

too few workers delays the step silently.

1. Fishing docks with no nets. Nets are Threads made at the dock; 50 Threads each, 20 trips each.

No Flax or Hemp means no fishing next spring.

1. No Boatyard on the same water as the dock. A Boatyard can only service docks in the same body of

water, boats cannot be delivered in winter, and a Smeltery dam blocks river traffic. Decide the river order — trading dock on one side, yard and fishing docks on the other — before you build.

1. Building the Smeltery between your own river buildings. Its dam stops boats.
2. Polluting your own housing. Smoke from the Smeltery and other polluting buildings lowers health;

the current build added icons that show exactly which dwellings a polluting building affects. The old trick of putting a charcoal pile next to the houses is now actively harmful — Alpha 5 introduced per-citizen health based on food and environment.

1. Pigs before food surplus. A full pigsty eats about 3,600 units of food a year (15 per animal per

month), and the old wiki verdict stands: pigs mostly convert food into less food. Cows need 25 hay and water per month each and can graze a fallow field; sheep need 15.

1. Underestimating hay. One hay dryer produces 400 hay a year, and only between May and the end of

September. Ten cows need about 2,000 hay for the non-grazing months — five full dryers. Hay must be stored in a hay barrack (1,000) or big hay barrack (7,000).

1. Ordering carts, ploughs and wagons too early. Each one eats Metal parts, which compete with

Nails for the same Iron and Charcoal. A cart is 1,500 Wood + 15 Metal parts to build and 500 Wood + 5 Metal parts to repair; a plough is 2,000 Wood + 20 Metal parts + 2 oxen; a wagon is 3,000 Wood + 30 Metal parts + 1 draft horse, which itself needs 1 Horse tack and 4 Horseshoes.

1. Opening trade too late on a map with no ore. On maps other than 2 and 3 there is no unlimited

Iron ore. Importing iron ore and smelting it locally is worse value than importing finished Iron (0.05 × 5 iron ore, plus 5 Charcoal at 0.07, against 0.12 for a finished Iron) — the Smeltery is a strategic fallback, not a money-maker.

1. Assuming a trade offer is always there. Trade demand and proposals change over time, only five

simultaneous deals of a type are allowed, and trade goods come from a fixed list per town (Balakliya, Derkachi and Merefa trade over land through the Trading post; Lymanivka and Barvinkove are reached by river through the Trading dock).

What is not verified

Where the sources disagreed or were silent, this guide says so rather than rounding to a number:

• Starting thatch and wood (wiki 1,200 / 10,000 vs current player reports of enough thatch for nine

houses and an older playthrough showing ~4,000 / 11,000). The iron and nail figures are consistent.

• Food consumption per citizen (100/adult/year, 50/child/year) comes from the wiki's Alpha 2-era

strategy page and could not be confirmed for the current build.

• Fish per fishing trip — the wiki's own page gives 20-40 in one table and 9-15 in another.
• Well and Stone well costs. The Well page is consistent (2,000 Wood + 40 Nails, 1,000 capacity).

The Stone well page contradicts itself (a 400 Stone + 1,700 Wood + 34 Nails infobox against a 2,000 Stone table), so no stone well cost is quoted here.

• Weaver's workshop and Tailor's workshop costs — each page's infobox and its cost table disagree,

so no cost is quoted here.

• Alcohol consumption is a wiki planning estimate of roughly 10-15 units per citizen per year, not

an official figure.

• Trade prices come from the wiki's Trading post table (Iron 0.12, Charcoal 0.07, Nails 0.05, Clothes

0.25, Shoes 0.32, Flour 0.15, Dried fish 0.15, Sunflower oil 0.18, Beer 0.21, Window glass 0.26, Lime 0.20). Prices have been changed by patches before; check the trade screen.

• The wiki itself carries a banner stating that many pages retain old or incomplete Alpha 5

information. Every figure above that also appears in the developer's own patch notes has been taken from the developer's notes.

Sources

Game version this guide was written for: Ostriv Alpha 5 patch 9 hotfix 63, released 28 September 2026 (the newest post on the developer's blog at the time of writing; hotfix 62 was 24 September 2026, hotfix 61 on 7 September 2026, hotfix 60 on 13 August 2026).

Sources actually used:

• https://ostrivgame.com/blog/ — developer's blog index, used to fix the current version and the

hotfix dates.

• https://ostrivgame.com/alpha-5-patch-9-hotfix-63/ , /alpha-5-patch-9-hotfix-62/ ,

/alpha-5-patch-9-hotfix-60/ — current patch notes (smoke pollution icons, barber prices, Alpha 6's planned pre-built settlement start).

• https://ostrivgame.com/alpha-5-released — the Alpha 5 feature list: rowhouses, stone well, dairy,

cheese/butter/smetana, brickworks, brewery, distillery, hopyard, sand pit, iron ore mine, health, food spoilage, and the note that charcoal piles near houses are now a health problem.

• https://ostrivgame.com/ — the current alpha's stated content (60+ buildings, 7 maps) and the roadmap.
• https://ostrivgame.com/faq/ — support and save-file locations.
• Steam community announcements for Ostriv (app 773790) via the store news feed — used for the

31 March 2026 note Farm storage capacity increased from 10000 to 15000, the June 2026 Firewood stall, the March 2026 rowhouse/tavern firewood fix, and the livestock feed-issue notifications.

• https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3086265662 — "Starting out in A5" by Jaymz:

the year-one and year-two build orders, house build times, sowing/harvest windows, hay and livestock arithmetic, floor prices for crops, and the cart/plough/wagon material list, plus its comments (thatch is sufficient for nine houses; finish sowing before the end of March).

• https://ostriv.fandom.com/wiki/ (the Ostriv Wiki, 310 pages) — pulled as raw wikitext through the

MediaWiki API. Pages used: Tips & Strategies, Camp center, Camp storage, Village house, Village house with a garden, Well, Water, Drinking water, Stone well, Forestry, Logs, Firewood, Charcoal pile, Charcoal, Smithy, Nail, Iron, Iron ore mine, Smeltery, Clay pit, Clay, Thatchery, Reed, Carpentry, Cartwright, Cart parking, Farm, Farm planning, Crops, Seasons, Windmill, Flour, Granary, Smaller granary, Market stall, Tavern, Brewery, Dairy, Cowshed, Pigsty, Sheep farm, Stable, Horse, Slaughterhouse, Tannery, Weaver's workshop, Tailor's workshop, Shoemaker's workshop, Oil workshop, Lime kiln, Limeworks, Saltworks, Glassworks, Pottery, Ashery, Potash, Brickworks, Brick, Stone mining camp, Stone, Stone storage, Iron ore, Orchard, Hay, Hay dryer, Primary school, Housing, Laborers, Manager, Counselor, Town hall, Economy, Treasury, Taxes, Trading post, Trading dock, Fishing dock, Boatyard, Maps, FAQ, Buildings, Resources, Buildings Profitability, Roadmap, Alpha 5 patch 9, Patch 9 release notes, Resources, Wood, Salt, Milk, Cheese, Butter.

• https://en.namu.wiki/w/Ostriv — independent cross-check of building costs and mechanics (Alpha 4):

village house 4,200 Wood / 90 Nails / 1,200 Clay / 400 Thatch, Tavern 12,500 / 250 / 5,200 / 1,900, field size 15-50 per side with a maximum of 6 fields per farm, well capacity 1,000, orchard peak yield at 5 years, hay mowing May-September.

• https://www.reddit.com/r/OstrivGame/comments/bwgohs/crop_rotation_guide/ — crop nutrient percentages

and rotation sequences (Alpha 2.1), used as the cross-check for the wiki's nutrient table.

• https://www.reddit.com/r/OstrivGame/wiki/farming — field assignment, plough behaviour (2 oxen +

carpenter), managers enabling automated 4-slot rotation.