Farthest Frontier: How to get heavy tools in the new survival city builder
You need heavy tools to make iron bars. But you need iron bars to make heavy tools. How's that work?
In Farthest Frontier, heavy tools are an important resource for producing items for your settlement and even for building certain structures. Heavy tools are used as a resource in buildings like the sawmill, glassmaker, furniture workshop, foundry, and the blacksmith's forge, which are all necessary professions for advancing from a charming little village into a booming city.
But as you're growing your village and unlocking new tiers of progress, you'll eventually stumble across this paradox: To make heavy tools, you need iron ingots. But to make iron ingots, you need heavy tools.
In fact, to even build the foundry that produces iron ingots from ore, you need heavy tools. It's the only instance in Farthest Frontier I can think of where the product you need to produce relies on the product that produces it.
So, how can you get Farthest Frontier's heavy tools? At first, you'll have to buy them.
How to get Farthest Frontier heavy tools
With no way to produce heavy tools yourself, you'll need to purchase them from a visiting trader. That means you should build a trading post in your town as soon as you can. With the trading post built, you'll start receiving one or two visiting traders a year.
As I mention in my Farthest Frontier beginner tips guide, keep a close watch on your trading post at the beginning of each year. As soon as the snow melts and the weather warms, the traders' wagons will head to your town and park at the trading post. They only stay there for about 30-60 days, which pass very quickly in-game.
Not every trader will be selling heavy tools, and you may need to wait a while—potentially several years—for the right trader to stop by. That's why it's so important to keep an eye on the trading post and make sure you don't miss a chance to buy the heavy tools when someone has them for sale.
Once you've got a small supply of heavy tools, you'll be able to build the foundry to produce iron ingots, and then you can build the blacksmith forge where you can turn the iron ingots into heavy tools. After that, you'll be self-sufficient.