I’ve worked with wikis for quite a long time. It started out with a certain FullMetal Alchemist, a manga that ended fifteen years ago. Since they though, I haven’t really done anything “new”. I do a few different wikis, but primarily my work is on RimWorld. And even though I’ve been playing that game since the alpha version, and it’s had DLCs that I have, most of my work there has been on older stuff, nothing brand new. However, I’m kind of hoping that will change, that I can go back to the FullMetal times I had. And Farthest Frontier is the game I hope will change that.

If you don’t know Farthest Frontier, it’s a city builder–or maybe a town builder–where you start out as a small group of people who went into faraway lands in order to start a new life. Quite a lot like Banished, a game I wrote about earlier in the year. And something I plan to write a longer review about once I’ve played it more. It’s also a new and fresh game. There’s been a beta version for a few years, but it’s been out in full for less than a week. I also haven’t played much, recently. Back in the spring I decided it put it off until the 1.0 so I could get the full game, bright and shiny. I put that off a bit in late September, because I felt that going in, I should have some feel for it. So I did a really quick run, just about half a decade. And during my playtime, I Alt+Tabbed to the wiki a lot. And while some of it is great–seriously, the farming guide is a novel–some of it is also, meh. Except for the super important buildings, a lot of its 275 pages (at time of writing) are blank.

Take the windmill page, for example. Nothing on it. It’s a fairly early building, but it requires something you can’t produce until a lot later: heavy tools. So often among the community you’ll hear the question “where can I get heavy tools”? And the answer, is through trade. Like the farming guide, the trade page is pretty good. But while the heavy tool page does at least have something in it, including their need to be purchased to build a windmill, it’s still only a couple sentences long. It would be excellent for all these things to link to another, rather than the heavy tools page just linking to the trading post page and the currently empty windmill page. Each, in a way, needs the others. Maybe less so for the trade page, but if it just had a sentence that said “btw you’ll need to use this to build your windmill”, it would help a lot of new players out.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not planning to go hard on the wiki. I’m not even planning to have the windmill page up and running two weeks after the game’s full release. Someone might even have it up before me, who knows. Because, thing is, I’ve never even built a windmill in Farthest Frontier. Crazy, I know. But I have played enough, gotten enough traders, seen enough questions answered online, that I knew the answer to how to build one. And that is a great part of participating in a wiki that you can’t really do with an older game: learning.

As I said, I have worked a bit on the DLC pages of RimWorld wiki. But generally, that’s for stuff I’ve played for a while. Stuff I learned a while back, saw wasn’t there, and felt I should add. With a new-ish game (remember, Farthest Frontier has been on a beta for a few years), I can do things right away. I can not know something, find out that the wiki doesn’t have my answer, and have to figure it out myself. Then, I can put that onto the wiki. And writing about it might even make me learn more, because even for a strategy game, thinking while writing is different than thinking while playing.

Maybe now that the game’s left beta, the steam will get rolling and I’ll be behind enough in playing that I wouldn’t be starting anything, and just polishing up stuff like I do with the wikis of older games. Like I said, I don’t plan on being #1 wiki-er here. But I’m planning, or at least hoping, that I’ll learn enough about the game simply through playing that I’ll be able to help build it. Because that will give me two types of learning, the wiki, and the game. And while I can have that with any game, any wiki that’s already in full force won’t give me the exact same experience. Even if the wiki were fully complete, and I never used it, the learning by playing would be different. I would probably still figure out the connection of traders to windmills through purchased heavy tools, but I wouldn’t look around for an answer that wasn’t there, or at least not on the wiki. Would these two learn by playing tactics actually change how much that I learn? I don’t know, but I do know I’m excited to have this kind of learning experience.

Even just writing this, I got a lot more into the game than I expected. I was originally planning to have it as a Quick Thoughts, which I try to keep under 500 words. That’s long past. I think it’s telling of how much I want to play Farthest Frontier, though. And of how much I want to write about it on the wiki. Don’t expect a review right away, but you can definitely expect one. And maybe, just maybe, the things I learn with the wiki will make me think a bit harder on that review.

How about you? Do you like learning new games? Do you ever participate in wikis? Tell us in the comments below, or on our Facebook page!