Against the Storm does not level a settlement the way a grand-strategy game levels a city. There is no in-run tech tree and no global tier you buy with a currency. What you climb is a Hearth ladder — the Encampment, the Neighborhood, and the District — sitting on top of a meta ladder of twenty Viceroy levels and the Citadel upgrades those levels pay for. A run that stalls almost always stalls at one of those two ladders, and it stalls at a specific number: eight housed villagers, then fourteen, then twenty; four decorations, then sixteen; Reputation 4, then 5, then 7.

This roadmap maps both ladders — what each Hearth tier demands, what it hands back, the player levels that unlock the tiers, and the walls where settlements die before they reach the next step. It is a progression document rather than a build guide: if you are still choosing your opening decisions, start with our Against the Storm first-settlement primer and return when a run has survived its second year.

What this covers: the Hearth ladder (Encampment to District), the Viceroy and Citadel gates that unlock it, and the stall points where runs die. Why it matters: each tier is a hard checkpoint with a fixed villager, decoration and material cost, and most abandoned settlements miss one of them. Who should pick this: Viceroys whose settlements plateau around year two or three and want to know which checkpoint they are actually failing.

The two ladders you are climbing

The Hearth is the building every settlement starts with. It is the only structure that changes the whole settlement at once: villagers take their breaks at the nearest Hearth to warm up, eat, and fulfil needs, and each upgrade tier stacks a bonus on the entire settlement. Both the Ancient Hearth you start with and any Small Hearths you later construct can be upgraded, and a Hearth upgrades automatically once every requirement is met — there is no upgrade button to press, only a checklist to satisfy.

Separately, there is the meta ladder: your Viceroy level. The Progression Update of March 2022 moved all building, perk, trader and species unlocks out of the Citadel upgrade tree and onto level rewards, leaving the tree itself for permanent power-ups only, and raised the level cap from 12 to 15. Update 1.4 later raised it again, from 18 to 20. The two ladders meet in one place: the Hearth’s second and third tiers are not bought with in-run resources at all — they are locked behind Citadel upgrades, so a brand-new profile physically cannot upgrade past Level I no matter how rich the settlement is.

The Hearth ladder: Level 1 to the District

Level I is available from the start of the game. Levels II and III require you to unlock levels 2 and 4 of the Brass Forge respectively. Housing, decorations and service buildings only count toward an upgrade if they sit fully inside the Hearth’s radius, and Small Hearth radii (roughly nine squares) may never overlap each other or the Ancient Hearth.

TierNameHoused villagersDecorationsService buildingWhat the tier adds
Base————−30 Hostility, settlement-wide
Level IEncampment84 Comfort—+1 global Resolve, +150 corruption resistance
Level IINeighborhood148 Comfort + 4 Aesthetics—+1 global Resolve, +150 corruption resistance, +10% global production speed
Level IIIDistrict2016 Comfort + 8 Aesthetics + 4 Harmony1+1 global Resolve, +150 corruption resistance, +10% global double-production chance

The Resolve column looks thin, and that is deliberate. Update 1.3 rewrote it: the old Level I granted a flat +2 global Resolve in one step, which pushed players toward spamming cheap Level I Hearths and micromanaging villagers between them. Eremite redistributed the bonus across all three tiers instead. Level I now gives +1, and a fully upgraded Hearth gives a total of +3 global Resolve — one more than before, but spread so that reaching the top tier is worth the climb.

The other three columns are where the cost actually lives. Each tier adds a flat +150 corruption resistance, so a District is 450 points more resistant than an un-upgraded Hearth. Level II’s production-speed bonus and Level III’s double-production chance stack across every Hearth you own, which is why a tall, heavily upgraded Hearth and three shallow Level I Hearths are genuinely different economies rather than the same bonus counted three times.

What the meta ladder gates

Because the top two Hearth tiers are Citadel-gated, the level ladder is not optional background. The relevant nodes are the Brass Forge branch (which allows the Hearth upgrades) and the Vanguard Spire branch (which turns species housing into Essential Blueprints, so houses stop competing with service buildings in your draft).

Citadel nodePlayer level to buyWhat it unlocks
Obsidian Archive 044+1 blueprint choice at every Reputation blueprint pick
Obsidian Archive 055Last Stand — 30 seconds at maximum Impatience
Vanguard Spire 01–044–7Human, Beaver, Lizard and Harpy house blueprints become Essential
Brass Forge 025Hearth Upgrade: Neighborhood (Hearth Level II)
Brass Forge 047Hearth Upgrade: District (Hearth Level III)
Vanguard Spire 0610Fox house blueprint becomes Essential
Obsidian Archive 1111Essential Blueprint: Field Kitchen
Obsidian Archive 1515Last Stand extended to 60 seconds
Obsidian Archive 1919Last Stand extended to 90 seconds
Obsidian Archive 2020Queen’s Impatience growth cut by the full 40%

Those player levels are the gate, not the price: the node has to be purchased with Citadel Resources as well, and the Logistics and Balance Update of September 2023 rebalanced the lower upgrade prices specifically to speed up the first two or three levels for new players. Update 1.2 then reshuffled a large part of the tree to move the Grace Period further down, so that new players can take advantage of it sooner.

The level ladder also carries the content. Species arrive on level rewards — Harpies at level 5, Foxes at 7, Frogs at 9 — and every blueprint that appears in a settlement’s draft has to have been unlocked first. Which means a Hearth upgrade is never only a Hearth upgrade: it is a level gate, a Citadel purchase, and a pool of buildings you have to have already earned.

The milestone checkpoints

Read the two ladders together and the settlement’s progression collapses into a short list of checkpoints worth planning around.

  1. Settle and satisfy Level I. Eight villagers in housing inside the radius, plus four Comfort decorations. The Hearth upgrades itself the moment the last requirement lands, and you immediately bank +1 Resolve and +150 corruption resistance.
  2. Reach Reputation 1–3. Blueprint picks arrive at Reputation 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9 and 11, and the blueprint pools change as Reputation climbs — early pools favour construction and raw food, later pools add service buildings and species housing.
  3. Unlock Neighborhood at Brass Forge 2. From player level 5 onward the second tier is purchasable; the tier itself then wants fourteen housed villagers, eight Comfort decorations and four Aesthetics decorations.
  4. Buy Obsidian Archive 5. Last Stand gives you 30 seconds after Impatience hits its maximum — the difference between a lost settlement and a rescued one during a bad storm.
  5. Unlock District at Brass Forge 4. From player level 7, the third tier opens: twenty housed villagers, one service building, sixteen Comfort, eight Aesthetics and four Harmony decorations.
  6. Push Obsidian Archive to 15 and 19. Each extension adds 30 more seconds to Last Stand, for 60 and then 90 seconds of rescue time.
  7. Leave the settlement behind. Complete the run to bank Citadel Resources and progress the Cycle; the settlement itself does not persist.

The four walls where settlements stall

The housing wall. Every Hearth tier counts housed villagers, not villagers. That single word is the commonest stall: a settlement with 22 adults and eight beds is stuck at Level I forever. The trap is compounded by blueprint gating — species houses come from the Vanguard Spire essential-blueprint line and from level rewards, so an early profile is trying to hit a fourteen-villager threshold with a housing pool that may not yet contain the houses it needs. Frogs make it sharper still: they cannot live in Shelters at all, and the Update 1.4 notes put their essential house at level 13 (the live wiki now lists Frogs at level 9, after later reshuffles). If your population is capped, count beds before you count people.

The decoration wall. Decorations are the quiet resource sink of the whole ladder. A Bench, Barrel or Fence counts as 1 Comfort decoration for 2 Wood; a Park counts as 4 Comfort for 8 Wood. An Aesthetic Bush counts as 1 for a single Plank, and a Garden counts as 4 for 4 Planks. Harmony decorations are the scarce ones — a Fire Shrine counts as 1 and costs 1 Plank, 1 Fabric and 1 Bricks. A District therefore needs a genuine mixed economy: sixteen Comfort, eight Aesthetic and four Harmony decorations, on top of a service building, on top of twenty housed villagers. Settlements that are short on Fabric or Bricks stall here with the population already satisfied.

The Reputation wall. Reputation is the engine that feeds the ladder, and Impatience is the clock that ends it. Maximum Impatience is 14 points, and base Impatience speed is 0.255 points per minute. Gaining a point of Reputation lowers Impatience by the same amount — halved at Prestige 14 — which means a stalled Reputation bar is doubly lethal: it stops delivering blueprint picks and lets the clock run. Two levers slow the clock: a Human firekeeper cuts Impatience growth by 25%, and each Obsidian Archive level cuts it by a further 2% up to a 40% cap, for a combined 65% reduction. Losing a villager adds 0.3 Impatience (0.8 at Prestige 20), so a villager death is not just a labour loss — it accelerates the bar that ends the run.

The corruption wall. From Veteran difficulty the Ancient Hearth can be corrupted by Blightrot; when it fills, Voice of the Sealed Ones sends out three ghosts that kill three random villagers — 0.9 Impatience below Prestige 20, on top of the labour loss, which is exactly how a comfortable settlement enters a death spiral in a single storm. Each Hearth tier adds +150 corruption resistance, so upgrading the Hearth is a defensive purchase as much as an economic one. Note also that the storm is longer at higher difficulty — two minutes below Prestige 2, four minutes at Prestige 2 and above — and that a year runs ten or twelve in-game minutes depending on difficulty.

The outer roadmap: Cycles and the Sealed Forest

Above the settlement sits the Cycle. The Cycles Reforged Update of June 2023 rebuilt it around Ancient Seals: the world map gained a Viceroy’s caravancaravan. A player-driven trade convoy that moves goods between settlements — valuable, and vulnerable to attack., World Events, and eight Seal types, and the Cycle was counted in years rather than games. Two rules from that update matter when planning a settlement’s exit. Games won or lost before year 3 now always advance the Cycle by three years, and the minimum difficulty of a settlement is tied to its distance from the Smoldering City, so the map forces a difficulty ramp rather than offering one.

Reforging a Seal requires Seal Fragments gathered during the Cycle, a caravan within range of the Sealed Forest, the end of the Cycle, and the Seal’s minimum difficulty. The requirements escalate steeply by tier.

SealSeal FragmentsMinimum difficultyCycle length after reforging
Bronze4—40
Lead12Pioneer48
Silver20Veteran56
Gold35Viceroy64
Platinum45Prestige 572
Cobalt60Prestige 1080
Titanium75Prestige 1588
Adamantine105Prestige 2092

The Sealed Forest is also the one place where the Reputation ladder does not apply. A Viceroy cannot win the biome by filling the Reputation bar — the settlement must complete Seal Orders instead, four levels of them, culminating in reforging the Seal. The final stall point of the entire progression is therefore not a resource at all. It is the point where the habit the whole game taught you — feed the Reputation bar, upgrade the Hearth, ride the bonuses — stops being the win condition.

If you want the drafting system that decides which buildings you can even bring to these checkpoints, our Against the Storm cornerstone and blueprint drafting guide covers the pick order; this roadmap covers where those picks have to land.

Next read