Ark of Charon has a very fun “Oxygen Not Included” style of controlling your characters by giving them generalized orders and they more or less use their AI to move around the map. You can prioritize and macromanage your entire fleet of golems in Ark of Charon to build a base on top of a moving world tree.

The game has a sinister desire to punish overthinking it and overprepardness. Depending on the RNG of the maps you pull and how you use your wood, your room is nearly predetermined on how successful you’ll be.

Let’s get into how to win.

Wood is Finite

You can grow trees, yes but this is difficult and you use your precious wood on farm tiles to grow them on the world tree. Think of your wood as an extremely limited resource. It’s only plentiful on some maps and other maps have almost none of it. Wood is ammo for ballistas; meaning trebuchets are better in the long term as stone is plentiful.

Preplan all of your wood usage and rush to stone buildings as soon as possible. By map two you should only use stone to build out your base and conserve every bit of wood for either building trebuchets or ballistas.

Late game technology is a bad idea early on, especially in the demo where you’re never going to farm up enough to really build into it. The cannon, while you can build the supply chain, has terrible aim with the AI is and so utterly costly that lining the entire roof of your base with trebuchets is so much better.

Manual Cannon

Getting the Cannon and then manually using it is going to carry you through the game. One cannon is enough to hold off most enemies and what comes through you can use your ammo on. Manually using a resource doesn’t consume ammo, meaning that you don’t even need to build out the tech for the ammo to get the power of the cannon.

Build the cannon as soon as you get iron going.

Food is a Problem, Solve It Fast

Build nothing but tomatoes and lettuce on the first two maps, from end to end. Make a farming plot and assign it. Sure it takes awhile for them to get everything planted, but you get a long enough time for everything to grow before the storm comes, especially in the early maps.

If you can save up enough food, wood and stone in the first few maps, you won’t have to stop and do much on the later few maps in the demo / early game. Maps without regular soil will starve your golems unless you build farm tiles which are expensive. Ten farm tiles is enough to carry you through if you build them early enough, however, wood is very finite.

Demo Only Strategy – Rushing

If you build 3 ballistas, four trebuchets, a cannon and stone barricades then you can use one final trick to push to the last map and claim victory – ladders. Form a wall of ladders on the outside of your base to absorb the exploding minions. Manually drive your cannon and let your ballista go. Stop on the last 3 maps to only farm any available wood and do nothing else, just go as soon as you can.

You can run out of food and it’ll be fine, you can create new golems and with fewer golems what food you can snag on the maps will last longer / your own farms will be more effective.