While playing The Alters, it’s very possible you’ll feel a lot of time pressure, and things will run out all at the same time, but with our guide, we’ll stop that from happening.
You see, things can happen all of a sudden, and all at once in The Alters. You’ll be mining away trying to get enough organic, then suddenly a Magnetic Storm will hit and you’ll realise you never got round to making those extra Radiation Filters. Oh no…
Thankfully, there’s a system that’s available super early on, but it isn’t explained until later, and that’s the “hold” system.
What is the hold system?
Here, you can assign a set number of your choosing for things like mush (food), filters, and even repair kits. We’d recommend having at least 2 filters and repair kits, if not more by the middle of act one.
You can do this simply by going into the correct area (like the crafting area, or the kitchen – assuming you’ve built one), and instead of select an item to build, you press the corresponding button for “hold”. Set how many you want to “hold” and it’ll mean that there is a low limit of that item you want to always have. However, that’s not all…
Delegate duties
Once you’ve set your hold numbers across things like food, gardening, crafting: you need to assign an Alter to that job.
Head into the menus and delegate an Alter to that room. They will then always go there to craft, or create, when numbers get low. You DO need to keep an eye on things, as you’ll often send the Alters to a different place, like to an outpost to get your resources up. There’s always some level of micro-management required. But what you can do, is try to keep those rooms close by, and send an Alter to craft the “hold” number of items, whenever you get low. They should even tell you when things are running out.
What it does mean is that if you just always want someone to be crafting batteries, or radiation filters, you can set a super high “hold” number, and assign them to that room, and they will just keep going.
And there you have it, you can automate production of certain items this way, hurrah.
