The first time it rained in Doloc Town, I ran outside to celebrate. Free watering, I thought.
It was acid rain. By the next morning, most of what I had planted was gone.
I went into this game expecting Stardew Valley with a little rust on it. What I got was something softer and stranger, a farming sim that hums along quietly while also expecting you to think a week ahead.
So here is everything I would tell a friend who just started. None of it is complicated. I just learned all of it the slow way.
What is Doloc Town, anyway?
You play as Proti, coming back to her hometown in a valley that a war left in pieces. The villagers hand you a patch of contaminated soil and ask you to make something of it.
The catch is that the ground itself is poisoned. So instead of tilling neat rectangles of dirt, you farm upward, stacking planters on platforms and scaffolds.
If you have played My Time at Portia, some of this will feel familiar, and that is not a coincidence. Pathea is one of the publishers, and you can feel it in the crafting and the town rebuilding.
It left Early Access on August 5, 2026 with the full story finished, so this is a good moment to jump in.
Don’t plant everything at once
This was my first real mistake. I got a handful of seeds and put every single one in the ground on day one, because that is what you do in every other farming game.
In Doloc Town, every crop you plant is something you now have to water, shade, and protect. Your capacity for all of that is tiny at the start.
Pick one or two crops and grow those well. Expand once you actually have the covers and the water to back it up.
Build up, not out
Vertical farming sounds like a gimmick until you realize it is the whole economy. Your usable space is defined by how cleverly you stack planters and platforms, not by how much land you own.
Leave yourself room to walk. I built a beautiful tower early on and then could not reach the middle row without tearing half of it down.
Same goes for machines. Give them a clear path in and out before you start stacking things on top of them.
Learn the weather before it teaches you
The year runs on four seasons of about four weeks each, cycling through mild rain, heavy rain, mild sun, and heavy sun.
Heavy weather is where crops die. Acid rain burns them, heat waves dry them out, and thunderstorms will wreck a harvest if you have not put up a lightning rod.
The fixes are simple once you know to build them. Plastic covers for acid, shade for heat, rods for storms, and tents or shipping containers when you want something fully sheltered.
Weather gives back too. Normal rain waters everything for free, storms feed electricity into your batteries, and long stretches of rain make mushrooms spread across the valley.
Check the forecast before you sleep. That one habit saved me more crops than any upgrade did.
Inventory space is your real first upgrade
If you take one thing from this guide, take this. Backpack space comes first, before tool upgrades and before expanding the farm.
Proti starts out able to carry almost nothing, and you will spend your first few hours walking home half-full because there is no room for the good stuff.
Carry cardboard boxes with you when you go out. You can drop wood, stone, and fiber into them in the field and keep going instead of hiking back.
One small quirk to know: a box with items inside will not stack with an empty one in your inventory. It shows a number on it instead.
Get the pickaxe upgrade early
Once your bag is sorted, the copper pickaxe is the tool to chase. Ore gates almost everything on the tech tree, and the starter pickaxe makes mining feel like a chore.
The sickle is the other one worth grabbing sooner than you think. It harvests everything in range at once, which turns a five minute morning routine into about thirty seconds.
Fishing is free money
Nobody told me this and I wish they had. Fishing needs no bait in Doloc Town, which makes it the most reliable early income in the game.
When scrap runs dry or you are saving for an upgrade, go sit at the water for a while. It costs you nothing but time.
It pays off later too. Fish feed into cooking, and eventually into fish breeding tanks that keep earning while you do other things.
Talk to people, even when there is no quest marker
The villagers are not just set dressing. Skipping their dialogue quietly locks you out of recipes and rewards you would otherwise get for free.
Visit Licca on Sundays. She has food, early crops, and spare seeds, and it is worth building the trip into your weekly routine.
Sacco is your other regular stop. He buys what you bring in and tells you useful things about harvest cycles.
Beyond that, Mayor Claud, Lank, and Kasia all open up as you give gifts and raise friendship. The story goes further when they like you.
Let the drone do the fighting
If you saw the word combat and got a little nervous, I understand. I did too.
You are not really the one fighting. A combat drone handles the hostile machines for you, and it can auto-fire while you focus on staying out of the way.
You can rebuild it however you like by swapping the chassis, barrel, and battery to change how fast and how hard it hits. Manual aiming is there if you want it, and ignoring it is completely fine.
Just keep the batteries charged and pack repair kits before you head into the Wetlands or the Old City Ruins. Those places are not gentle.
Spend your tech points on the boring stuff first
The tech tree runs on gold plus tech points, and you earn skill experience passively just by farming, mining, and crafting. You do not have to grind for it.
What you do have to do is resist the shiny unlocks. Storage, water, and power are the ones that quietly change your day.
Sprinklers and renewable energy are the big two. The morning you stop hand-watering every planter is the morning the game opens up.
Cook before you explore
Stamina is what limits your exploring, and cooked food is the answer. Even simple meals stretch a ruins run a lot further than an empty stomach will.
Fill your plastic bottles and watering can at ponds while you are out there. Drinking restores health, and it is free.
I usually cook at night after everything else is done. It is a nice way to end a day.
Save the gene system for when you’re ready
Somewhere in the mid game you unlock crop mutations, where you combine gene modules to change how a plant behaves.
This is the real long-term answer to acid rain and heat. You can build plants that shrug off weather that used to ruin your week.
It looks intimidating the first time you open it. Do not feel like you need to touch it at hour three, because the game does not expect you to.
Give yourself a slow first week
The thing that finally clicked for me is that Doloc Town rewards a careful week more than a busy one. Rushing produced dead crops and an empty bag. Slowing down produced a farm that ran itself.
And then there was that first big storm where I had actually prepared. Rods up, covers on, batteries filling with lightning while I stood there watching from the doorway.
Nothing died. In a game about a valley that got wrecked and is trying to come back, that felt like more than a good harvest.
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Images are from the Doloc Town page on Steam and used under Fair Use.