Hell Architect Beginner Guide

Hell Architect is a new Indie title from Woodland Games and Leonardo Interactive. Built as a simulator game in Hell Architect you get to be in charge of your own new circle of hell, periodically you'll get new Sinners to join your ranks and while you are responsible for keeping their sanity in check while tending to their basic needs, you'll also need to ensure that these Sinners are getting appropriately punished. As you generate more resources you can then upgrade what tools and buildings are available to you to torture these sinners in new and creative ways. On the Steam Page the developers liken Hell Architect to games like Oxygen Not Included and Dungeon Keeper if you're familiar with that title. In this Hell Architect Beginner Guide, we'll be going over the different resources that you'll be trying to build up, information about your Sinners that you should be paying attention to, and what you should do when loading up your first game to get your Sinners stable.

Hell Architect Beginner Guide - Resources and their purpose

At the top of your screen, you'll notice a sizeable amount of different resources to be collecting. They can be broken up into a variety of categories based on their importance and what they're used for.

The first of these resources is for maintaining your population, these population resources include the following:

• Food
• Drink
• Ingredients

You will be able to obtain ingredients such as mushrooms and meat from buildings, these will be added to your Ingredients list. From here it's then up to a Sinner to work at a building like the Food Truck to turn the raw ingredients into food. You'll always want to make sure you have Food and Drink available for your Sinners so that they can attend to their needs. Each of these menus can be expanded, this will help you figure out why your Food Truck (that needs Mushrooms and Meat) might not be producing any Food for your Sinners.

For building, you have a whole different list of resources, the majority of which you can mine out of the ground. As the game is 2D sidescrolling you can actually view all of the resources in your circle of hell from wherever you are. This helps a lot if you know you're only after a certain resource and where you can find it. There are also Crystals that you can pick up that allow you to research new projects to build giving you access to more advanced structures. The final type of building resource is those that you get from the Sinners directly. This includes Suffering, which is accumulated by putting your Sinner through torture, and Essence, which you get for sacrificing a Sinner.

• Normal Materials
  • Dirt
  • Coal
  • Metal
• Research Materials
  • Blue Crystals
  • Green Crystals
• Sinner Resources
  • Suffering
  • Essence

Hell Architect Beginner Guide - Sinner statistics to keep an eye on

The Sinners are your workforce in Hell Architect, while you only start with a few your Sinner count will continuously grow over time. Let's just say Hell isn't about to run out of newcomers. It's your job to monitor their stats, put them to work, and make sure that they have an agonizing time in hell. There's actually quite a lot to pay attention to when watching over your Sinners so we're going to try to break it down into what is needed to keep them alive, and what you can do to emphasize their production.

How do I keep a Sinner alive in Hell Architect?

Each Sinner has a few criteria that need to be constantly met in order for them to survive. Those criteria are; How much food they've eaten, the water they've drunk, how much rest they've gotten, and if they've been to the bathroom recently. If there happens to be low food, or not enough beds to go around you can let one of these needs deteriorate for a little bit, but if these needs are not met then that sinners Sanity begins to go down. Once the Sinner's Sanity hits zero they drop dead and are removed from the game (there is a way to bring them back though.) It's of utmost importance at the beginning of the game to build up a stable base of these resources for your Sinner because what is Hell if there's no Sinners?

One of the Special Builds that you can make in the game is called the Limbo Gong. With this item you can bring any of the Sinners who have passed on in your Circle of Hell at the cost of additional suffering. This price increases with each sequential use.

What makes each Sinner unique in Hell Architect?

It's not just enough to keep each Sinner alive in Hell Architect, it's also about optimizing how they're used. A Sinner can have certain skill levels in Cooking, Construction, Digging, and Brewing. Each of these skills will influence how good they are at certain tasks. Obviously, a Sinner better at Cooking will be able to cook faster/generate more food. In the short term, it means that you can put a better digger in the mines and progress faster while the chef stays and cooks for the colony, but Sinners can also level up their skills. Even the worst digger with enough practice will be mining with the best of them!

Each Sinner will also have a Trait and a Sin. Traits are extra benefits, usually related to a Sinner's torture of preference. The Iron Maiden is a bleeding type torture, so a Sinner with the Bleeder trait will earn double the amount of Suffering when inside. The trait will help speed you up, but the Sin will normally do the opposite. These are randomized hinderances on your Sinner like "Will lose Food twice as fast" or "Digs slower than others." This will help inform you of what situation you want to keep that Sinner away from.

The best part of all of this is that it allows those who want to get really into the optimization of Hell Architect a chance to do so, but if you want to just let your Sinners run wild you'll likely have a slightly slower time advancing in the game, but you'll get the same enjoyment out of it.

One of the special buildings you can create is the Hell-ployment Center, with this you'll gain the ability to lock Sinners into or out of specific traits. If you have a Sinner with a really poor digging statistic then you can make sure they never pick up a shovel again. Just another way that you can really narrow down the field of play and optimize your Circle of Hell. 

Hell Architect Beginner Guide - Starting Steps for Stability

1. You want to get together all of the resources for keeping your Sinners alive, this means a place for them to eat, drink, relieve themselves, and sleep. As you’ll be getting new sinners joining routinely definitely smart to build up food supplies that will last for a bit. It doesn’t have to be good food, you just want to be churning out a steady supply.
2. Once all of your Sinners are able to maintain themselves you’ll want to start building Torture devices to start building up suffering
3. If you have extra Sinners around now is the time to be mining for some dirt, ore, etc and building up your base
4. Once you have some Suffering built up begin upgrading food production and other resource providers. Also good to upgrade what’s providing you suffering too.
5. This should be enough to start earning you a stable environment

You'll want to wait until you have a healthy income of both Suffering and Sinners to have built the Limbo Gong before you'll want to start actively accumulating Essence.

Hell Architect is available now on Steam. If you're not too sure whether you'll enjoy the game or not there's also a limited free-to-play version of the game called Hell Architect: Prologue for you to try out.