Morass GamesWiki
Spoilers ahead. Each guide gives the whole route to an achievement: the build order, its timings and the result. Guides contain solutions and may reveal encounters and progression.

Bressnath · Wiki

Old Ways

Winning with no specialists: the autopilot plays, and every Guildhall foundation it lays is pulled down.

Old Ways achievement emblem

Old Ways
Win a run, no specialists trained.

Specialists are trained only at a Guildhall (and its upgrade, the Scriptorium), one every 700 ticks while Orders → Specialise villagers is on. The count never goes down, so one specialist anywhere in the run ends the attempt.

Why not just turn Specialise off?

By hand you can: switch Orders → Specialise villagers to no before any Guildhall is finished, and win. With the autopilot at the wheel you cannot: it rewrites every order each tick, so Specialise goes straight back to yes. What a player can still do beside it is pull buildings down. So the recorded run leaves the autopilot to win, and pulls down every Guildhall foundation it lays before one is finished.

The run, in order

  1. New Game, seed 7, Begin. Press F1 for the autopilot and 3 for speed ×8.
  2. Watch for a Guildhall foundation. The first came at 6:10 (tick 2,221), among the houses. Point at it and press X (demolish under the pointer) while it is still a site: a Guildhall takes only 95 work, so do not wait.
  3. Keep doing it. The autopilot lays another as soon as it can afford one: the recorded run pulled down 112 in all. Each one gives back half of its cost, so the run is slower than a plain win.
  4. The Causeway stands at 36:44 (tick 13,229), with no specialist trained.
The holding at tick 8298, mid-run, under the autopilot
Tick 8,298: the autopilot builds; every Guildhall foundation it lays is pulled down.

The recorded run

One game on seed 7 from a fresh profile, played by the game's autopilot (F1) at ×8, with each new Guildhall foundation pulled down with the pointer and X, from the first frame of the fen to the Achievements screen. The badge on every frame says so; the game's own music, no commentary.

The end screen: The Causeway Stands, 13229 ticks, 36.7 minutes, 25 new
The Causeway Stands at tick 13,229.
The Achievements screen, The Crossing tab: Fen Made Quiet, Old Ways, Swift Passage, The Wide-Crossing Way and Unbroken lit
The same profile's Achievements screen: Old Ways lit, beside four more from the same win.

What goes wrong