I've run probably a few hundred simulations at this point, and the single biggest mistake I see new players make is dumping all their points into strength and wondering why their "perfect fighter" dies on day four. So here's everything I wish someone had told me when I started.
The Four Attributes β What They Actually Do
Each tribute gets four stats, all on a 1β10 scale. The sim weights outcomes based on these numbers, so they're not just flavor β they genuinely change what happens. Here's my honest take on each one:
Strength
This is the obvious one. High strength means your tribute wins fights more often, especially in the early Cornucopia scramble. A 9 or 10 in strength will tear through weaker tributes in the first couple of days.
The catch? Everyone else with a high-strength build is going to the same place. The opening bloodbath becomes a coin flip between your powerhouse and theirs, and if you draw bad RNG, your strongest tribute goes home on day one. I've had 10-strength tributes eliminated before the first night. It happens more than you'd think.
Best paired with: Speed (7+), so your tribute can actually close the distance or retreat when things go sideways.
Speed
Speed is underrated. It covers two very different situations: catching someone who's running, and getting away from someone chasing you. Both come up constantly.
A tribute with high speed and low strength isn't going to win many direct fights, but they'll survive a lot of situations that would kill a slower tribute. Think of it as a "get out of jail free" stat β the sim gives speedy tributes more escape opportunities in dangerous events. If you want a tribute to make it deep into the game, speed is probably your most efficient investment.
Intelligence
This one's weird because the payoff is delayed. Intelligence barely matters in the first three or four days β the early events are mostly combat-focused and it doesn't help much there.
But run a 14-day simulation with a high-intelligence tribute, and suddenly they're finding water sources everyone else missed, setting traps that take out fighters they couldn't beat directly, and surviving arena hazard events through what the log describes as "quick thinking." It's genuinely satisfying to watch. Intelligence-heavy tributes produce the most interesting simulation stories, even when they don't win.
Best paired with: Survival (8+). High intelligence without survival is a tribute who keeps making smart decisions right up until they bleed out from an earlier wound.
Survival
If I had to pick one attribute to max out, it's survival. Every other attribute helps you win specific situations; survival helps you not die in all of them.
The mechanical effect is that high-survival tributes are more likely to walk away from near-fatal events, recover from wounds between days, and keep functioning when the arena throws environmental hazards at everyone. In a long sim, low-survival tributes just quietly die to things that high-survival tributes shrug off. You often won't even notice it happening until you check who's left.
Build Templates That Actually Work
Here are the four builds I come back to most often. These aren't the only viable options, but they're reliable enough that I use them as a baseline when I'm trying something new.
The Early Aggressor (STR 9 / SPD 7 / INT 5 / SRV 7)
This build is designed to win the first half of the simulation. Your tribute dominates the Cornucopia, picks off weaker competitors in the first few days, and has enough survival and speed to avoid dying to random events. The intelligence is low, which starts hurting around day 7β8 when the field thins out and events get more environmental.
Good for: Short sims (3β7 days), when you want a specific tribute to win and are willing to accept that they might not outlast a smarter opponent in a longer run.
The Survivor (STR 4 / SPD 9 / INT 7 / SRV 8)
My personal favorite for longer simulations. This tribute skips the early bloodbath entirely (too slow to compete), gathers resources, and just... doesn't die. The high speed means they can dodge most dangerous encounters. The intelligence keeps them useful as the late game shifts toward environmental events. The survival means the wounds they do take rarely finish them off.
The weak point is low strength, which means if this tribute gets cornered by a combat-heavy opponent in the late game, they're in trouble. But they'll win more simulations than you'd expect just by being the last one standing.
The Late-Game Scholar (STR 3 / SPD 5 / INT 10 / SRV 9)
This build is bad at everything that matters in the first three days and great at everything that matters after day 7. It's not for competitive play β it's for when you want an interesting story. Scholars produce more unique event chains than any other build type: they find things, build things, outwit opponents, and survive on pure cleverness.
Run this in a 10+ day sim and don't be surprised when your 3-strength tribute is one of the last three standing.
The Balanced Build (STR 6 / SPD 6 / INT 6 / SRV 6)
Less glamorous but more consistent than any specialized build. A 6/6/6/6 tribute won't dominate any particular event type, but they also don't have a hard counter. In a mid-length sim (5β8 days) with a mixed roster, balanced tributes quietly outlast their specialized counterparts more often than the stats would suggest.
I also use this as the default when I'm putting in a character I want to feel "normal" β not a hero, not a victim, just someone who had a realistic shot.
Roster Composition: The Part Most People Ignore
Individual tribute builds matter, but how you combine them matters just as much. A roster full of 9-strength tributes produces a boring, fast bloodbath. A roster full of 8-survival tributes produces a slow, grinding simulation where nobody dies for days at a time. Neither is particularly fun.
The most interesting simulations I've run use a mixed roster: three or four aggressive builds to clear the early field, a handful of balanced tributes for the mid-game, and one or two high-intelligence or high-survival outliers who shouldn't make it to the end but sometimes do. That variety is what produces the memorable moments β the unexpected survivor, the early favorite who goes out in the first day, the quiet tribute you forgot about who ends up winning.
The Seed System: Your Secret Weapon
One thing that doesn't get enough attention is the random seed field. If you enter the same seed and run the same tribute configuration, you'll get identical results. This is useful in ways that aren't immediately obvious.
Try this: run a simulation, note the seed, then change a single tribute's attributes and re-run with the same seed. You can isolate exactly how that attribute change affects the outcome. Raise a tribute's survival from 5 to 8 and watch them survive an event that killed them in the original run. It's the closest the simulator gets to a controlled experiment, and it's surprisingly useful for understanding how the engine actually weights things.
A Few Quick Tips Before You Start
- Start everyone at 6/6/6/6 on your first run to get a feel for the event pacing before you start optimizing.
- If your simulations keep ending in 2β3 days, you have too many high-strength tributes. Pull the aggression down or increase the day count.
- District assignments don't affect mechanics, but they change how the log reads. Pairing tributes from the same district creates an implicit alliance narrative even without any special logic behind it.
- Upload real portraits. The simulation genuinely feels different when you can see faces β especially when your favorite goes out early. There's something about seeing the actual character that makes the outcomes land harder.
- Run the same roster twice with different seeds before deciding a build "doesn't work." Some builds look weak in one seed and dominant in another. Two or three runs gives you a much better read on actual performance.