Roots Of Yggdrasil: 8 Beginner Tips

Roots of Yggdrasil sees you repeatedly striving for Valhalla as you hurriedly build settlements and industry ahead of the pursuing Ginnungagap. Oftentimes, you'll only be a turn or two ahead of total disaster, forcing you to balance the deckbuilding elements with planning around the space and natural resources you have available.

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This guide will go over a few general and specific tips for how to consistently reach Gimle ahead of Ragnarok's encroachment, as well as how you can fill out the character kinships and the Trials of the Gods. With the right approach, just about every situation the game offers is winnable.

Plan Around Your Scion Abilities

The different scions lean into specific playstyles that will affect what items and cards you want to pick up in a run. You'll start the game with only Thrasir, but will unlock more quickly as you progress through loops.

Scion

Playstyle

Powers

Deck

Thrasir

Thrasir wants to clear levels quickly using his bonuses that activate on each island's start.

In the first two turns, everything costs half the supplies.

Short-term cards like clearcut mill and iron extractor give massive amounts of resources immediately, letting him build full settlements while his starting discount lasts.

Keeping a lean deck ensures you draw something useful in those first two turns.

Lif

Lif's scaling income boosts can snowball to near-infinite amounts of supply to overwhelm problems with sheer economic might.

Lif grants a multiplier on income based on how many trees and ores and in use (not counting destroyed ones).

Forestry buildings are especially valuable as they can be packed much more tightly than mining cards.

Kare

Kare builds around military income instead of supplies, letting you quickly explore the islands and make full use of their resources.

Kare doesn't have as many of the resource manipulating mechanics that the other scions have but instead focuses on draw power and hand manipulation.

You can build a more unwieldy deck and rely on his scion power if you need to search for a specific card.

Kare draws a card when destroying threats, incentivizing you to keep some around for use when you want to draw more cards.

Eir

Eir wants to stall each island as long as possible. She is the only character whose income boosts stack between islands. You'll often want to let the Ginnungagap encroach right up to the ship so you can recast her power repeatedly.

She gains passive might income each time her scion power is used to spawn a threat.

Eir can ignore most military buildings and focus on taking cards that improve supply production. Her passive might production can do most of the work in exploration and fighting draugr.

Its also worth remembering how the scions interact with different housing types. Thrasir's scion power can construct a single house every few turns. Playing with hall houses, this can save potentially triple digit amounts of supplies but has to follow their unique rules for building placement.

Some Buildings Are Better Off Destroyed

Some buildings give their benefit for as long as they're standing, while others will give you a single boost once when they're placed. The second type can actively benefit from being placed on unstable grounds like flood plains as this lets you rebuild them later to stack the benefits.

In the starting deck, the barracks is the only card that functions in this way. You'll get a lump sum of might but be prevented from placing a second barracks too close to the first. Destroying it lets you draft soldiers from the same household multiple times.

The Guild Halls are especially good choices for this, giving you massive lump sums of supplies but tying up the nearby buildings until they're destroyed. Enhancers similarly give you their income boost for the entire island, even if the original building is destroyed or swallowed by darkness.

Take On Extra Challenges Often

The Trials of the Gods let you choose difficulty modifiers for extra challenge, and they're needed for both progressing character stories and gaining extra upgrade resources. Knowing which ones you can easily turn for a run is a good way of progressing through the upgrade tree more quickly.

• Lethargy increases the population costs of new cards. If you're using heroic homes, which can produce a near-unlimited population, this modifier becomes irrelevant.
• Bad Draugr can be crippling if you explore too quickly on a character who doesn't have the Might to fend off the expanded threats. If you're playing as Eir or Kare you should be able to swat draugr as they appear, regardless of their size.
• Thrasir aims to complete every island before night comes, making Time Pressure irrelevant outside the final level.

Even if you stack too many trials and are unable to make it to Valhalla, you'll find the multiplier to Holt Matter will bounce you back quickly.

Each scion's final kinship requires you to reach level five challenge with them. Starting this early will save you time in the long run.

Explore As Early And Often As Possible

Each island starts you with a rather small space and requires you to pay might to expand into more territory. With exploration taking two turns at baseline, you can run out of space and resources if you don't start exploring on turn one.

Often, it's worthspending on further exploration rather than defeating nearby draugr because of the time delay. Some draugr towers aren't worth clearing at all, such as ones that block building types you aren't using.

You'll be able to see the locations of saplings before you explore them. Spend the first turn examining each sapling so you know which ones you'll be able to complete.

Depending on the island, you'll need either two or three out of four saplings. The easiest are normally the ones that require a flat sum of resources, such as supplies, might, explorations, or events. The hardest are typically the ones that require specific building types, as you'll need several turns to build up a settlement around them.

Start your exploration towards the saplings closest to the Ginnungagap, as these can become unobtainable if you wait too long.

Artifacts that can speed up exploration are among the best in the game. If you're offered any of the following, you should normally accept them over alternative rewards:

• Wheel of Dawnflame, which lets you explore twice as fast in the first five turns of an island.
• Explorer's Boots, decreasing exploration times by one turn.
• Wand of Malevolence, which lets you spend population to explore instead of might.
• Hati's Mane, which triggers might income when you complete an exploration. On a character like Eir this is enough to fund the next several explorations.

Prioritise Unlocking New Housing Types

The default housing type is the hardest to use in the game. It's the only building that changes shape drastically each time you build one, and that makes it difficult to pack them tightly.

It also is the most expensive to increase your population with, making some saplings very difficult to obtain. Additionally, it has no secondary mechanics where all three of the other houses give some form of secondary benefit.

• Nomadic homes give might, meaning you'll always have use for surplus supplies. They require distance between each other, making convenient gaps for amenities and other buildings.
• Heroic houses grant population whenever you use an action card. This provides a benefit to the otherwise useless curse cards and lets you build up your population without spending supplies.
• Hall Houses grant income over time across supplies, might, and Eitr, depending on their upgrade level. Often you might want to deliberately hold the hall at a specific level to avoid losing might income for Eitr.

Check Your Milestones For Clues To Progress

Large parts of the progression will be made easier if you accumulate milestone upgrades. The way these work is only explained after a few loops once Kare joins your scions, but you're actually able to use them beforehand by checking the compendium from the Holt. Milestones offer a bunch of different benefits:

• Simple milestones give you extra resources for obtaining upgrades.
• Kinship milestones allow you to construct unique Holt buildings that give you permanent upgrades.
• Each building-specific milestone increases your chance of drafting the building's upgraded form in future loops.
• Locked milestones can give you hints about new approaches you can try. They can also tell you how to progress character Kinships when you're struggling to make progress.

Plan Ahead When Building On The Holt

You'll be able to add new buildings to the Holt between each run, gaining permanent bonuses for all your future runs. There are a few different considerations that will affect what buildings you want to use on the Holt, as not all of them are strictly beneficial.

• There's no benefit to having more than two berserker camps on the Holt, as there are only two starting cards they can upgrade.
• Scavenger posts add supply shortages to your starting deck in exchange for upgrading any card. This is going to badly hurt your consistency on the first island until you can get the curse removed. Typically, you'll want to use other upgrade buildings.
• The Trader's guild adds retain as a keyword in your starting deck. This is normally an upgrade but can hurt you if you attempt the Cursed Trial or carry the Cursed Key, as retaining a burden card will badly hurt your draws.
• Clearcut mills have no housing requirement, making them very cheap to build lots of. Their bonuses are small but add up.

Always Take The Cursed Key

You'll start each run with the Norns offering a choice of artifact. Rarely this includes the cursed key, which gives you multiple permanent unlocks if you are able to carry it for an entire loop.

The key reduces the number of cards you draw, making Kare a good candidate to counter its debuff.

The rewards for finishing this quest are rather significant and let you advance a good deal faster. Alongside gaining your fourth scion, it gives you access to the Market at the Holt so you can convert resources and not worry about collecting too many of the wrong acorns.

Once you've completed this quest, the cursed key should stop being offered by the Norn.

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