The Trail: Frontier Challenge: The Trail: Frontier Challenge 100% Achievement Guide

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Some achievements might not be unlocked immediately after fulfilling the requirement. Visiting your Personal House in Town should resolve any delayed achievements.

You should have more than enough skill points to unlock the Masterful achievement (all skills unlocked in one career) by the time you reach the end of the Trail and finish all challenges, but generally if filling a Warehouse crate requires a large amount of skill points to unlock the recipe, just buy the item from NPCs where possible. A few items are almost never sold by NPCs though, such as Silver and Gold Ingots.

As discussed in basically every other guide for this game, theres an oversight that allows you to just farm infinite money. I independently discovered this when I reached Ancient Forest and skipped a ton of grinding. If you would prefer to be honorable working man and not a filthy bourgeois with infinite money, ignore this section.

The oversight is that any items still on the Conveyor Belt when Trading Time ends are instantly sold for their listed value on the belt instead of their scrapped value. Combined with buying and selling from NPCs and Round multipliers, a streamlined, optimal process for farming money is as follows:

Step 0: Have some starting money and pick a campsite
Step 1: During Clothing rounds, wait until it ends and buy clothes for cheap from NPCs who placed their items too late before round transitions, massively discounting the clothes.
Step 2: If the Clothing round is the forth and final round, wait until the last few seconds before placing as many of your bought clothes on the lefthand side of the Conveyor Belt, where Trading Time will then end and autosell everything for multiple times higher than you bought it for.
Step 3: Repeat
Shown above: Image of foolish NPCs selling their wares for cheap
https://youtu.be/kkLK9JHdiFsShown above: selling a bunch of stuff last second for profit
Double-clicking to quickly place items will only place them around the middle instead of the leftmost side, so I manually drag.

• You can tell the order of Rounds in Trading Time by how the different colored papers are stacked on top of one another. Green = Clothing, Blue = Tools, Yellow = Food, Orange = General. In the image below, the order is General, Food, Tools, then Clothing.
  
• You can “refresh” Trading Time by simply visiting the same (or different doesn’t matter) campsite on the map (Hotkey: M to open map)
• When opening the Map, it will either lock onto Town or your current Campsite, i’m not sure of the programming to decide which, but just close and open the map with M again until you get your campsite.
• The higher value the items bought and sold, the greater profit, thus is recommend Clothing. This works with any item though.
• Double-clicking any item on the Conveyor Belt will buy it. Faster than dragging soon-to-be-scrapped clothes into your pack when Rounds change.
• FYI, hold down the Fast Forward (>>) button next to the timer to speed up unwanted rounds. Sped up rounds will give NPCs less chance to place down goods though.
  

Trying to get the last round to be Clothing might take a while, but it’ll happen eventually.

The Town is unlocked relatively early in gameplay in the PC version after just two areas as opposed to the mobile version i remember. Achievements require you to build up both your town and your personal house. Fill crates in the Warehouse with materials in exchange for Gold (Town Currency) to build special buildings and fuel machines around town in the NPC’s houses with resources for special building materials to upgrade your house.

Become mayor of your town. THIS ACHIEVEMENT DOES NOT SEEM TO UNLOCK BY BECOMING MAYOR IN YOUR STARTING TOWN WITH NPCs. My testing is not extensive, but it appears you must become Mayor in a town with other people present in Town to unlock the achievement. Build the Stagecoach and seek out some dead 2017 guy’s town to hijack and build Town Hall in.

I recommend only going for this achievement after upgrading your House to Level 8. This is because in player-made towns you will not have every machine to produce House Upgrade Materials unless you have 5 people in the town, one of each profession. Upgrade your House in the NPC town with the NPCs machines first before leaving. A Level 8 House is necessary for the Completionist achievement.

If you have already left the NPC town without a Level 8 house, you must change careers and buy plots for any machines you need. You can only have one career and one machine at a time.

Here is video footage of me getting the achievement, after joining a random one-man town and gathering 10 Gold for a Town Hall. Unconfirmed if me being online and present for the Mayoral shift is relevant.
https://youtu.be/jwS1qnKnNEA

Buy a House. The Guide should instruct you to do so upon arriving in Eden Falls Town. Basically unlocked by default. At this point you likely choose the main career path you plan on investing skill points in for the rest of the game.

Get a house worth 20,000 Chits. You can see the value of your House in the bottom left corner whenever you are inside. The value is based on the amount of Furniture you have (Value added to your house is the same as the amount you pay for the furniture) and upgrading your House to higher Levels will grant you more space and slightly more house value. Note that to sell a furniture piece, right click it and navigate to the Information tab to sell it at 25% price. Theres not much reason to do this unless you want a clean, nice-looking house. I personally shove a bunch of perk-granting and expensive furniture into one room and leave the rest of my house organised.

Note about perk-granting furniture
Under the ‘Classes’ tab you can obtain special Furniture that grant buffs on the Trail such as increased Slingshot or Clothing durability. Class furniture is obtained by unlocking the relevant skill “[Class]-exclusive furniture” for each career. Each career’s furniture as three levels in the Almanac, with each level’s furniture being more expensive and granting greater buffs. A full list of available Class furniture is shown below. (UPDATE) Certain furniture also grants buffs without needing to spend any Skill Points to unlock.

Get a house worth 350,000 Chits. A big step up from the last one, you’ll either be using the infinite money oversight or doing a lot of grinding of crafting goods to sell. Choose your product, collect the materials in bulk, and bulk craft.

Shown: My house moments after printing 250k and filling it with Horns.

Filling 10 crates in the Warehouse. The default building in Town and a the ultimate resource sink. Scour the globe for both raw materials and fine crafts. I like to make use of Chest and Shelf Furniture to hold bulk items for bulk crafting. It is more cost effective to buy the crafted item from NPCs in Trading Time than it is to cough up 100+ Skill Points for one recipe. Chits are infinite, Skill Points less so. Certain Warehouse items, especially Backpacks, will be outright sold by Teng Fei the Chinese Hot Air Balloon merchant, albeit at a high markup. His inventory of available items differs from each spot he appears in, and his locations are marked by red pins on the map. Exiting and re-entering the Balloon will also reset his wares. Teng Fei has infinite stock.

Buy a dog. The Pet Shop has a hefty price of 15 Gold and the cute pup itself costs around 100k to adopt! Unless you plan on playing this game long term and maxxing out your Town, I recommend starting a new town with the Stagecoach so the Warehouse is easier and earning 15 Gold with early-game materials.

As my final achievement, I did just that. To save you a bit of trouble, my in-game name is ‘musheye’ and I created a fresh town named “Givedog” that is just the Pet Shop built and nothing else. Try searching the name on your Stagecoach. First guy who wants to leave will have to fill the Warehouse with 5 Gold for Stagecoach himself. 😀

I confess, I don’t know if your dog stays if you move to a different Town without a Pet Shop. I honestly don’t want to find out. Sure hope they stay, I worked to the bone to adopt the fella.

Achievements of note that you get on the Trail.

Pass the first river. C’mon, you already have this.

Win 5 Trading Times. The simplest way to win Trading Time and sell the most of the NPCs is to bulk-craft and bulk-sell items, whether its clothes, food, backpacks or whatever. The NPCs don’t really stand a chance if you plop 10 shirts on the Conveyor Belt in one round. You should just get this naturally as you keep walking though.

Answer all letters home. As you progress through the Trail, you will receive and reply to letters from your parents back at home. I believe you receive the final letter once reaching Tropical Clearing in the final area, Cerulean Bay. The lore in this game isn’t really followed up much. Have fun replying what you want.

Find your Uncle Rufus. The only hidden achievement, gained for simply getting to the end of the Trail. Your Uncle hangs out at the edge of the world, living for himself and occasionally has voiced dialog to say when you visit him at World End campsite. Fun guy. Likely got real steamy with Beatrice once upon a time. Despite canonically being completely alone at the end of the Trail, NPCs still roam all areas and corners of every campsite.
Damn.

Complete all the Objectives. Objectives are separate from Beatrice’s Challenges. You can find your Objectives under the “My Journey” Tab next to the Map Tab. Strangely, this achievement unlocked for me after completing the seventh bundle of Objectives, Become Mayor. So it seems you don’t have to literally max out the Town in the eight bundle to get this. Completing Objectives will grant you Skill Points. You cannot access the next bundle of Objectives before completing your current one, but any future fulfilled Objectives will auto-unlock once you progress to the next bundle. I am unable to look back at past Objectives to provide a full list, but they should be relatively straightforward and revolve around building your Town and House. I believe you need a Level 8 House as one of the Objectives as mentioned in the Town Achievements section. If you would like advice on a specific objective, please leave a comment on this guide.

Complete all the 126 challenges in the game. Challenges that you have not successfully completed at previous campsites are marked on your map as silver-colored skill points, backtrack anytime. There’s a wide range of challenges, from reaching the next camp with X amount of unique items, chopping more of a specific tree than an NPC, having an inventory worth X amount of money, etc. Read the fine print before you set off, and feel free to prepare necessary items in your House before accepting a Challenge.

At any point in the walk, you can click on Koko the bird in the bottom-left corner to either give up on the current Challenge or Retry it, teleporting you back to the start as if you just got up from the previous campsite. You retain any gathered items when pressing Retry.

One type of Challenge I have to point out are Speed Challenges. The other Challenges are fairly straightforward to understand and beat. How fast you walk or sprint is solely reliant on your Speed level, the amount of blue arrows right below your Hunger/Energy level. Having more weight (items) in your pack will decrease your speed, as indicated by the weight icon. You can see an individual item’s weight value by right clicking it in your Inventory.

You increase speed via clothing, food and the Increase Speed Expert Explorer Skill. Only Pants and Shoes grant extra Speed. The fastest in the game are the Adventurer Pants and Shoes, granting +2 and +3 respectively. Certain cooked foods will grant temporary speed buffs, and you can check a food’s and clothing’s buffs by clicking the Info button after right-clicking it in your inventory. Speed buffs from food do not stack on top of each other.

The Increase Speed skill under the Explorer career can grant up to +3 speed, but it is very costly in Skill Points, and I honestly wouldn’t recommend going for it unless you already invested in Explorer, ESPECIALLY SINCE YOU CAN SKIP ALL THIS SPEED OPTIMIZATION WITH BUFFALO PIE!!!

Buffalo Pie is described as the ‘Ultimate Food’ with baked-in steroids granting you a whopping +5 extra Speed and allowing you to reach Mach 5 and sprint across the Trail in a mad dash. Its just really good. https://youtu.be/1jC4qjmWRG8

Buffalo Pie is occasionally sold by Teng Fei and NPCs in the late-game. Reminder that you can buy infinitely from Teng Fei by exiting and opening his shop again.

As for the actual strategy of Speed Challenges, just leave everything but food at home, including your backpack if you wanna be absolutely optimal (clothes do have weight when worn!). Take whatever clothes you need to survive the heat and cold while having speed buffs from Pants and Shoes.

There is a single VS Gather Challenge of note in the Murky Marsh area, where your NPC opponent will run at lightspeed and pick up any Reptile Eggshells way before you. You have to outrun them every so slightly if you wanna stand a chance in that one. If you are still struggling with that Challenge, the only other thing that can help you other than Speed is the Highlight Items skill in the Skilled level of Explorer Profession, its quite costly though. One star should do.

Unlock all skills in a single profession. Note that some skills in the Almanac have tiers (stars) of quality. It is not necessary to unlock every tier of every skill for the achievement, just the first tier. You are unfortunately required to buy the expensive house upgrade to access different levels of mastery and get the achievement, including the 300 Skill Point Level 15 House. I estimate it takes about 2000 Skill Points minimum to max out a profession. Don’t worry too much if that sounds hefty now, Beatrice gives you plenty of 50 Skill Point Challenges in late-game to rack up several hundred Skill Points. After completing all Challenges and Objectives, the only way to get more Skill Points is occasionally by winning Trading Time.
A completed Tailor profession

These achievements are obtained by performing a certain action a certain amount of times, and will likely be obtained naturally while playing. They’re really easy.

Chop 10 Trees.

Hunt 10 Animals.

Craft 10 Items.

Eat 10 Items.

Complete 10 Challenges.

Chop 100 Trees.

Hunt 100 animals.

Craft 100 Items.

Eat 100 Items.

Complete 50 Challenges.

Collect 1000 Items.

Find 20 raccoons. They were minding their own business!

This game is my 21st perfect, 28/12/2024.

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