Westbound Guide – Finding Westbound’s Most Important Resources

Roughly $20 can nab you the resources necessary to create a large, bustling settlement in Westbound, and creating your dream town without spending a single dollar requires a fair amount of resource collection and management. Still, with a little planning and some patience, your settlement can be the envy of your all your friends, and this guide can help.

Below, you’ll find some general information about Westbound’s most important resources, including where to find them and how to best utilize them. For help with your most important resource—time—check out my Time Management guide.

Pickaxes

Pickaxes are perhaps the most important and rarest of Westbound’s resources. While you start with a handful, you’ll find that they are quickly used up by clearing out the canyon for buildings, opening crates that float down river, and exploring the mine.

Most quest lines require one of the above actions, so progressing can quickly come to a halt when you run out of pickaxes. Worse yet, pickaxes are the only required item that you can’t produce yourself; you can only gain pickaxes from leveling up, winning them in the Daily Bonus, finding them in random chests and crates, or receiving them from friends.

Pickaxe management early on

It’s important to make the most of the pickaxes you have. When you first settle in Westbound, be sure to only clear out the canyon and explore the mine when it is vital to quests. While this might make your town a little cramped in the beginning, you’ll find that every few hours, a quest will ask you to break down the canyon to receive key items; breaking down the canyon without a quest prompt will often result in no items at all and a wasted pickaxe.

You can make the most of your pickaxes my tackling only a few quests at a time. It’s tempting to begin every quest you are offered, but this will burn through pickaxes in an instant, leaving you with none to use on longer (and sometimes more rewarding) actions, like breaking down floating crates. Try following one quest line through before you go on to the next, such as the quest line where you try to find Ruby’s missing daughter in the canyon.

Whatever you do, save those pickaxes!

Silver

Silver is used in virtually every facet of production in Westbound. Constructing buildings, mining iron, collecting adobe, planting crops, cutting down trees; all of it requires silver. Luckily, silver is also rewarded for a variety of actions, and collecting enough to afford your next project usually doesn’t require very much time.

You can earn silver from planting crops, breaking down debris around your town, visiting friends’ towns, and completing quests. Most buildings also toss out silver every hour or so, giving you a fairly reliable income.

Using trees to collect silver

Still, one of the easiest ways to collect silver is through planting a variety of trees. Not only does lining your town with trees make it more attractive, their fruits and nuts can also be harvested and immediately converted to silver.

The orange tree, for example, rewards you with 40 silver while only taking eight minutes to harvest. The tree does have a seven minute cool down between harvests, but you can circumvent this by planting extra trees. With eight orange trees, you can have your four settlers hop back and forth between the trees and collect over 1,100 silver in an hour (not including the other silver that is automatically churned out by your buildings).

Try using different trees with longer and shorter refresh times depending on your needs. Check out my Time Management guide for more silver-making tips!

Tonics

Tonics, which let you instantly finish any project or work, are a handy resource to have. They share a direct relationship with the time left on a project; the more time left, the more tonics you’ll have to spend to instantly wrap things up. Unlike pickaxes, tonics are given out fairly regularly, so you shouldn’t have a second thought about spending them if you’re in a bit of a hurry.

In your own town, the homes you construct will regularly churn out tonics. The quantity and time between shipments can vary, but the nicer houses—such as the Arrow House—offer over 1,000 tonics a day. You can also visit your friends’ towns to quickly gather tonics.

Tonics also appear to be the most common reward in both the Daily Bonus and random chests. Most days, you’ll stumble across hundreds of the magical purple drink without much effort at all. Again, if you want to speed up the construction of a building or the harvesting of your crops, don’t hesitate to use the tonics!

Gold

Gold bars are used to purchase some of the more extravagant buildings, houses, and crops found in Westbound. They can also be used to purchase new town helpers and additional spins on the Daily Bonus wheel. Gold is strictly given out as a reward, so collecting it isn’t quite as simple as other resources.

The easiest way to procure gold is to level up. Each time you level up, you’ll receive a few bars of gold for your trouble. Gold is also a fairly common reward in chests and the Daily Bonus, so every day you’ll usually earn at least three to five bars. It’s not much, but it slowly begins to add up.

Thankfully, unlike the pickaxes, you don’t ever really have to spend gold, so if you have a particular item in mind you want to build, saving up isn’t much of an issue.

Wood, Iron, and Adobe

These resources, while not as important in the daily operations of your town, are often needed to construct buildings and complete quests. Thankfully, there are facilities that produce each of these resources.

Very early on, you will be asked to build the Pine Thicket. Here, you can spend silver to chop down trees. At its first level, you’ll get one piece of wood every five minutes. With a few upgrades, though, you can get up to 20 pieces of wood in only an hour.

Similarly, the Iron Mine is discovered during another early quest. In the beginning, you can gather one piece of iron every 10 minutes. Once it reaches level four, though, the Iron Mine will spit out 20 pieces of iron in only two hours!

Finally, there is the Clay Hill. Depending on the order you tackle Westbound’s quests in, you may require adobe before you actually discover Clay Hill, but don’t fret; eventually, a quest will ask you to find it by exploring the canyon. Like the Iron Mine and Pine Thicket, you can procure adobe by spending some time and a little silver. When you first discover the Clay Hill, you can collect one adobe every 15 minutes. After you upgrade it a few times, you can gather up to 24 adobe in only four hours.

To maximize your time spent collecting these resources, be sure to upgrade these facilities when you have spare townspeople that don’t have other tasks to do. You’ll be thankful later on when you don’t have to spend all day slowly collecting resources to finish a quest!

Now, get out there and begin making your mark on the western frontier. And don’t forget: save those pickaxes!