All Will Fall looks like a normal city builder for about ten minutes. Then your colony folds in half and slides into the ocean.
This physics-based survival builder from All Parts Connected and tinyBuild drops you into a flooded post-apocalyptic world with three squabbling factions, real structural physics, and tides that giveth and taketh away.
It is genuinely one of the most interesting takes on the colony sim genre in years, but it absolutely punishes new players who treat it like a standard grid-based city builder.
These tips are aimed at brand new colonists who want a smoother first run. None of this is advanced strategy, just the stuff worth knowing before you place your very first platform.
Build Wide Before You Build Tall
The biggest beginner trap in All Will Fall is the urge to immediately start stacking floors. Space looks tight, the ocean looks scary, and going up feels productive.
The physics engine does not care about any of that. It cares about weight distribution and load-bearing supports, and weak foundations get punished hard.
Spread your starting raft or platform outward before you stack anything on top. A wide, well-supported base gives you somewhere stable to build upward later.
If you start aggressively going vertical in the first hour, you are going to watch a lot of beams snap and a lot of colonists go for an unscheduled swim.
Keep an Eye on the Stress Overlay
The stress overlay is the single most useful tool in the game, and a lot of new players just never turn it on.
It visually maps pressure across your entire colony, showing exactly where load is concentrating before anything actually starts to wobble.
Get in the habit of checking it after every major placement. If a beam is glowing red, that is the game telling you a collapse is incoming unless you reinforce that exact spot.
The good news is that the game gives you a warning timer before a failing structure fully collapses, so there is usually a window to react. The overlay is how you spot the problem before that timer even starts.
Get Food and Water Going Immediately
Your very first build priorities should be a Fishing Pier and a Rainwater Collector. Nothing else matters until those are running.
A hungry, thirsty colony tanks morale within the first few in-game days, and once morale starts dropping you are already playing catch-up.
Once food and water are flowing, layer in basic shelter for each faction and a Recreation building so morale has somewhere comfortable to settle.
This early loop of food, water, shelter, leisure is the foundation everything else gets built on. Skip a step and the whole thing wobbles.
Understand the Three Factions
Your colonists are split into Workers, Sailors, and Engineers, and each one does something the others cannot.
Workers are your general labor force and the only faction that can deconstruct parts of the map to salvage raw materials.
Sailors operate boats and are how you reach distant floating resources or set up trade.
Engineers handle advanced construction, run cranes, and staff the research station.
Every faction tracks morale separately, and each one wants its own faction-specific buildings. Get those up early so no group feels neglected, because a single unhappy faction can stall your entire colony.
Watch the Tides
The dynamic water level system catches almost every new player off guard at least once.
When the tide drops, new areas and resource nodes get exposed and you can scramble to harvest them. That part is fun.
The part that is not fun is that the sea is also acting as buoyant support for some of your lower structures. When that water disappears, those buildings can suddenly snap under their own weight and drag chunks of your city down with them.
The rule is simple. Anchor your permanent, load-bearing foundations in dry, moss-free zones only. If you need to build near the waterline for fishing or gathering, put those structures on cheap, easily replaceable platforms.
Don’t Let Morale Spiral
Morale problems escalate fast. A small dip becomes a strike, a strike halts production, halted production creates shortages, and shortages tank morale further.
The fix is consistency, not heroics. Keep food, water, shelter, and entertainment topped up at all times instead of trying to fix things in a panic later.
Watch the trend lines, not just the current numbers. If morale is slowly drifting downward, that is the moment to act.
Once morale actually crashes, fixing it takes way longer than just maintaining it would have. Strikes can hit out of nowhere and hammer critical production at the worst possible time.
Spend Influence Wisely and Save Before Storms
Influence is a slow-building political resource and one of the most valuable things you have. Do not burn it on basic stuff you can solve other ways.
Save it for faction leaders, major events, and permanent upgrades. That is where it pays off the most.
The other half of this tip is mandatory: manual save before any storm warning.
Storms apply massive lateral force to your colony, and they will snap weak vertical structures in seconds. The physics system is complex enough that it can be genuinely hard to tell which specific support beam is carrying the critical load.
If a storm wipes you out, reload the save, identify the beam that failed first, reinforce it, and try again. Harsh way to learn structural engineering, but it works.
Research the Right Things in the Right Order
The research tree is full of cool stuff and it is tempting to chase the flashy unlocks. Resist that.
Research works best when it directly fixes whatever your colony is currently struggling with. Unlocking something you cannot support yet just adds pressure without solving anything.
The reliable order for a first run looks like this:
Stabilize food production first. Improved Fishing is a strong early target and takes a lot of pressure off your supply chain.
Then unlock materials that support your next planned expansion, like concrete and better foundations for going vertical safely.
Hold off on exploration tech until your base colony is actually self-sustaining.
Try to keep at least one Engineer assigned to the research station whenever possible. Starving the tech tree hurts more than a short-term crane delay.
Slow Down and Use Pause
All Will Fall rewards control, not speed. The strongest colonies are not the biggest or the fastest, they are the ones that stay balanced while every system is trying to push them off the edge.
Pause often. Look around. Check the stress overlay. Check faction morale. Only then place the next thing.
Most failed runs do not come from one big disaster. They come from small problems quietly stacking up until everything fails at once.
Movement delays, slight morale dips, weak supports, slow research, all of these compound. Catching them while they are small is the real skill.
Final Thoughts
Collapses are part of the learning curve in this game. Even disastrous runs tend to make for great stories, and every failure teaches you something specific about the physics system.
Stick with it. Build wide, check the overlay, keep your factions fed, and pause often. Once those habits click, the game opens way up.
From there you have eight handcrafted scenarios, a full sandbox mode, and Steam Workshop content waiting. Each scenario throws something different at you, from oil rigs to tanker ships to incoming tornadoes, so the early-game lessons keep paying off in new and stressful ways.
Now get back out there and try not to drown.
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Images in this article are from the All Will Fall page on Steam and used under Fair Use.