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  • General Surface Steambot Needs
  • Worker Steambot Needs
  • Engineer Steambot Needs
  • Aristobot Steambot Needs
  • Scientist Steambot Needs
  • Steambot Needs - Underground

Steamworld Build is a hybrid city builder, RTS, and Tower Defense game where you have to build and grow a city on the surface. Meanwhile, you have to harvest valuable resources and defend your operations underground.

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The game has a cast of Steambot classes, each equally important in your efforts to escape the doomed planet, but with varying demands to keep them happy. Keeping them happy will keep the population and revenue high and operations at peak efficiency. With this guide, you’ll have all the info you need on what each type of Steambot needs and what buildings can give it to them.

General Surface Steambot Needs

In the city-building portion of Steamworld Build, you are tasked with growing and maintaining the population of each type of Steambot. There are four kinds, from the most basic to the most advanced: Workers, Engineers, Aristobots, and Scientists.

The higher the level of the Steambot Residential building, and the greater the Satisfaction level, the more taxes they generate.

To keep them happy, you’ll need to meet their needs. Each class of Steambot has its own unique set of needs, though there is some overlap between them. In general, the needs of each Steambot can be classified as either Goods or Services.

As you reach new Milestones, the needs will grow. While this makes maintaining them more complex, it also increases population and tax revenue.

Services are generated infinitely by Service buildings but are only effective within a certain distance from the client Steambots’ residence. Goods must be generated from raw resources and can be used up. Assuming you continuously produce a needed resource, you'll need to scale up production as you produce more units that consume that resource.

You can extend the range of Service buildings by upgrading the roads in your city.

Worker Steambot Needs

Workers have simple needs that will not develop past Milestone 3. All their needs are relatively easy to fulfill, though you’ll want to keep an eye on Charcoal supply, since it gets used in one form or another by most of the other Steambot classes as well.

Milestone 0

General Store

Service

Milestone 1

Service Shop

Service

Milestone 2

Cactus Water

Goods

Milestone 3

Charcoal

Goods

Cactus Water

Goods

Engineer Steambot Needs

Initially simple, The Engineer ramps up the complexity in terms of their needs, requiring you to delve into the Dusty Caverns to fully meet their needs by Milestone 8.

You can get everything you need on the Surface on Milestone 5, but you’ll need Ironium (as is or as Sheet Metal) or Scrap for everything beyond that.

Though all buildings need to be connected by road to the Train Station, only Workers and Engineers have it as a Need. This just means that you get bonus money and population for having them connected to a road, not that you need to build them within a certain distance from the Train Station.

Milestone 5

Train Station

Service

General Store

Service

Charcoal

Goods

Moonshine

Goods

Saloon

Service

Milestone 6

Surveyor Office

Service

Milestone 7

Spare Parts

Goods

Milestone 8

Robo Burger

Goods

Water

Goods

Wash Service Shop

Service

Aristobot Steambot Needs

Aristobots introduce the need for Plastishrooms and Plastics into the mix, necessitating that you go down to the Marshy Ruins to cultivate them.

Their needs increase in complexity to Milestone 13, and a lot of them are made of further refined resources of resources that were already processed.

For example: Wood into Charcoal, mixed with Sulphur (from Gas) to get Black Powder, which is needed to make Guns.

Milestone 10

Waxing Shop

Service

Wash Service Shop

Service

Moonshine

Goods

Water

Goods

Milestone 11

Sheriff's Office

Service

Diesel

Goods

Hats

Goods

Milestone 12

Robo Cuisine

Goods

Milestone 13

Guns

Goods

Casino

Service

Scientist Steambot Needs

The most expensive and resource-intensive class of Steambot, the Scientists are an endgame unit that are difficult to develop and maintain. Their needs cap off at Milestone 18, after which you have to build, fuel, and escape with the rocket.

All of their needs after Milestone 15 require Vectron Scraps (refined into Vectron Parts), found only in the Crackling Depths, the deepest part of the Underground. They also require a surprising amount of Plastics and Plastishrooms.

Milestone 15

University

Service

Sheriff's Office

Service

Waxing Shop

Service

Water

Goods

Robo Cuisine

Goods

Milestone 16

Sparking Diesel

Goods

Lab Equipment

Goods

Milestone 17

Art

Goods

Large Stuff Collider

Service

Milestone 18

Observatory

Service

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Steambot Needs - Underground

The needs of Steambots in the Underground portion of the game are much simpler. They require no maintenance other than living quarters, and you can only lose them if you let them get eaten by a Worm or delete their living quarters below the amount needed to support them.

Each type of Steambot in the underground has an associated living quarters, and you gain more by building more living quarters of the specific type. You need a minimum of nine tiles of living quarters for any given Steambot type and they all must be touching to count. You get one Steambot per six tiles after the initial nine.

Applying the Recruitment Bonus Item to living quarters will give you three of the given units, independent of the number of living quarters you have. Removing the Item will also remove the bonus units.

Miner

Miners are cheap to employ, and you’ll need a good amount of them to get through the game. They do their jobs faster the more of them there are, but depending on how aggressively you dig, they won’t always be working.

  • 75 Money
  • 1 Gold Nugget
  • 1 Board

Prospector

Pricier than the Miner, but the total cost is offset by the fact that you don’t really need that many of them. You only need one Prospector per node you’re harvesting, since they don’t seem to operate any faster when you have a surplus.

  • 125 Money
  • 2 Nuggets
  • 1 Board

Mechanic

Mechanics are relatively pricey specialists who get more valuable the further you get into the Underground. In the Dusty Caverns, you only need one or two, since all they do is build a few things.

However, further down, your Guards and turrets take damage from enemies that only Mechanics can repair, and the more Mechanics you have, the more units you can repair at a time.

  • 300 Money
  • 1 Gold Nugget
  • 1 Tool

Guard

The most expensive and arguably most important Steambot in the Marshy Ruins and Crackling Depths, Guards are your first and last line of defense against enemy attacks. The more of them there are, the better.

Because of their Plastic requirement, you shouldn’t advance too far into the Marshy Ruins until you get a Plastishroom Farm and a Polymerization plant going.

  • 225 Money
  • 2 Gold Nugget
  • 1 Plastic
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