What you actually do in Wild West Pioneers
It is a single-player city builder with an adventure on top. You found a frontier town, keep your settlers housed, fed and watered, and build production chains to supply them. Then you send scouts across a world map to find new places to settle. A story about a debt and your missing father runs through it, but you choose what to chase next.
What does a session look like?
A typical game runs in this order:
- Found a town Start small: first buildings, roads, and whatever resources are lying around.
- Meet needs “You will need to provide shelter, food, water, and services like church, saloon, barber shop, and more.” Decorations help keep people content. More on needs and whims.
- Build production chains Collect materials from the surrounding area and turn them into goods, then make sure everything gets where it needs to go. The food chains page shows one chain end to end.
- Pick a goal on the Journey “This is the heart of your playthrough.” Almost everything you do earns journey points to spend on new buildings; see journey points.
- Explore Send a scout expedition out, meet characters, find resources, and settle a second town. The scouts page covers what that takes.
Can you slow it down or speed it up?
Yes. “Of course, you are in total control of time. Don’t worry, it’s not a game where time is your enemy.” You can speed things up, or sit back and watch the town run.
How free is building and road placement?
Fairly free: you can build roads and place buildings freely, and there are three kinds of road: “a wide main road, a standard road, and smaller paths”. Buildings can snap to other buildings or to roads, or you can turn snapping off. Building snapping and road snapping are exclusive, so only one can be on at a time.
Deleting part of a road is still settling. A playtest fix was meant to let roads be trimmed anywhere along their length; the team later said it is still looking into trimming in the middle. Try it in your own game before planning around it.
Two things are not free, and both are worth knowing before you build. Farms and ranches cannot be moved once their fields are in, the fields cannot be removed, and a farm cannot be torn down. A hotfix added the reason, not a way out: “The Move button now explains why Farms and Ranches cannot be moved.” And players report that the wide main road only extends from one end: “I can only seem to build from where I built it last.” Both are covered on moving and demolishing, along with deleting decorations.
How big can a town get?
250 residents, for now. An official forum account put it plainly: “settlements are capped at 250 residents right now”. Once a town is close to that, no more settlers arrive. Early Access also has a second settlement, Sand Storm; founding Sand Storm covers how. If satisfaction is high and settlers still stop coming well short of 250, that is a known bug, covered on crashes, bugs and saves. What brings new residents in the first place is on how to get more settlers.
What is the story?
Two threads. The money one: you need gold to pay off a debt, covered on the gold page. The personal one: “But why did your father never return? Beneath the struggle to build new settlements lies a personal journey to find him and keep the promise you made.”
The main quest carries the story and leaves the systems to you. Side adventures tell you upfront that they branch off the main line, so you can take them now or later. Along the way you step into dioramas, scenes “where you can interact with the environment or meet the people who traveled there before you”.
What is not in it?
- A combat system. None has been announced. Bandits do appear in the story: there is a Bandit Camp, an End of Bandits quest that involves “sending off armed people”, and cutscenes for the death of bandits. As a system, the publisher said: “We have ideas for bandits and we need to plan when we can deliver them.” It is considering making them optional, but that “isn’t set in stone at the moment”.
- Multiplayer or co-op. “As of today, there are no plans for coop or multiplayer.” Details on the multiplayer page.
- A fixed path. The game rewards progress toward your own goals “without forcing you to follow the main storyline”.
What kind of city builder is it?
The team’s one-line answer: “Wild West Pioneers is a city builder for adventurers who want to explore the Wild West.” Players on Steam tag it with these, top ten in order:
- Early Access
- City Builder
- Simulation
- Colony Sim
- Sandbox
- Strategy
- Exploration
- 3D
- Atmospheric
- 4X
Further down the list come Survival, Historical, Mining, Transportation and Western. It launched in Early Access with upgradable buildings, several biomes and a world map linking your settlements, and the team expects to stay there for about a year. The Early Access page has the roadmap, and games like it lists other city builders to weigh it against.