Pan’orama: Achievement tricks and workarounds

I will start this brief guide by outlining why I’m making it, because I’ll be highlighting what’s evidently unintended by the developers.
I really quite like the game and have enjoyed my time with it. I like the changes made to the Dorfromantik formula and would even go so far as to say I prefer Pan’Orama.
But I also enjoy collecting achievements and Pan’Orama does not respect my time when it comes to achievements (Dorfromantik had the same issue).
The tricks I will outline is the result of my frustration at the prospect of spending tens, if not hundreds, of hours doing the same thing over and over again working towards unlocks and achievements. My mind starts wondering if there are any way to cheese or cheat the system.
And I found a few…

Why:
Playing challenge mode it became immediately obvious that actually winning wasn’t possible without first gathering a good deal of perks. Something that would take a very long time. At first I contemplated restarting the game after building the first monument, continuously farming the first one until I had everything unlocked and a real shot at actually winning.
Even this would take a long time, so I got curious on how earning perks actually worked and discovered a trick…

Trick:
Perks are earned when you build a monument and saved immediately to your account.
This can be exploited because we have an Undo-button.

– After building a monument and choosing your Perks, hit the Undo-button. The last tile will be returned to you and the monument ready to be built again immediately. Simply place down the tile again and the monument will grant you a new choice of Perks. All Perks chosen this way is saved.

Why:
As we all know, playing a game of Pan’Orama will easily take an hour and A LOT more if you are actually doing well. This is not an issue, unless you want the achievements.
When I looked over the achievements and saw that they were to finish 60 sessions, 30 with a score above 4550 points and 5 wins, I got a little bit annoyed. That’s a lot of time invested.
I fully intended to use a trick I discovered in Dorfromantik, which had the same egregious time requirements on its achievements.
But I found a better way in Pan’Orama.

Trick:
Sessions are counted for the achievements when the end screen pops up, be that “Game Over” or “Congratulations”.
The trick I used to count my sessions multiple times in Dorfromantik was simple. Make a copy of the save before you finish the session.
Finish the session, delete the save and replace it with the copy, open up the game and you can finish the same session again. Delete that save and replace it again, as many times as you like.
I set it up at my first win, made the copy and finished the session, but this was after my discovering the Perk trick, so I got curious…

– After you finish a session by building the final monument, click continue and undo the last move. It will return the last tile and remove the monument, leaving it ready to be built again. Every time you build the final monument, you win the game and it counts as a finished session.

Why:
Game has a tendency to crash once the map starts getting big and for whatever reason, this can sometimes disable your perks. This is annoying on its own of cause, but doubly so since it likely means that it’s no longer possible to win the session. Hours of progress made worthless because of a crash.

Workaround:
After discovering the trick to unlocking all Perks and finally getting a real shot at winning Challenge mode, I gave it a good think and planned my approach to structures. I came to the conclusion that the best use of monuments were to set them up early, but not actually finish them until later.
My game crashed and I lost all my perks, but since I had unfinished monuments and a trick to unlocking all Perks…

– Keep a monument ready to build until the very end of the game, never actually build it unless you absolutely need to. If your game crashes and you lose your perks*, apply the unlocking all Perks trick described above. Make sure to undo the monument again after you’ve reclaimed your Perks, so it’s ready again in case of another crash.

*it can be difficult to tell if you’ve lost the perks or not. The easiest way to see is completing a quest. Without Perks it will award about 25 points and with Perks it will award about 50 points.

Why:
I won my first session on Challenge Mode, applied the Multiplying Sessions trick to wrap up the last achievements and discovered that I hadn’t gotten the Landscape Winner achievement. I was 73/73 and had won, so I had obviously unlocked all structures. It was clearly not working.

Workaround:
I went online to look for clues on how to unlock it. I didn’t find any answers, only other people experiencing the same or similar issues with Landscape Winner. Originally I thought the issue might’ve been me playing on Challenge Mode, but these people had issues on Standard Mode too. Made me think, with the other tricks you could do with the Undo-button, might be there were other unintended interactions…

– Landscape Winner (Unlocking all structures), can be achieved in Creative Mode.

I’m in two minds about making this guide.
On one hand, the tricks are exploits, bugs used to expedite/remove the the grind. It’s cheating, plain and simple… and I’m sharing how to do it.
On the other hand, the achievements and the Perk grind simply does not respect my time. A bit of napkin math and it’ll take about 60 hours assuming 7h for each of the 5 wins, 1h for each of the 30x 4550pt games and no time for the 60 games with no requirements (deliberately lose immediately).
This is of cause low-balling it massively, every failed attempt to win will add a few hours to the counter.
I deliberately used the words tricks and workarounds, because I feel the exploits are justified with the current requirements. I don’t like cheating, but I also don’t think the time investment asked of me to unlock the perks, achievements and masteries is fair.

I hope you will see this guide for what it is, criticism of the perk and achievement system as well as a bug report. I do sincerely hope that you’ll take both under consideration. By all means fix the bugs I’m exploiting, but please address the perks and achievements that made me seek them out in the first place.