How to stabilize yourself?

[timonauta]

What I mean is, how do I get a steady food source, get recipes for usable stuff, stop getting killed by everything, get gear and generally start playing the game proper? How exactly do I "get gud"? Because I'm at a loss and don't know what to try next.

I have three characters and they all just keep dying and starving because I run out of food and have no gear. I figured I can get somewhat decent income by selling wood, but the journey back and forth to the tinker's camp keeps resulting in my eventual death again.

[Iyasenu]

Mushrooms are an easy answer to Food.
They grow in just a single day, so get to the ability to Farm ASAP.
This will require a Hoe and a Shovel, which are made using the Tinker's Table.
And the Farming skill can eventually be learned at the town of Yowyn, northeast of the starting Meadow.
But, if you can't get a Farm up and running before hunger turns into a real issue, don't be afraid to live off of Berries, Crim, and Api nuts either.
You don't have to cook everything you eat, it's just better.
Also, if you happen to have Fire Magic, you can blast raw ingredients dropped on the ground to cook them into a basic dish.

As for not dying, do not travel alone.
Always take your starting pet with you.
Also, part of the tutorial should give you a Resident ticket, good for 1 free citizen hire, via the Quest Board's recruitment tab.
You might only be able to bring 1 ally with you atm, without risking the "Crowded" debuff, but boosting your CHA will allow for more allies at once.

And if food is an issue for allies, they can't die from Starvation like you can, so always feed yourself over any allies.
Starvation just halts their natural HP/Mana regen.

Also, why are you traveling to sell wood?
The tutorial quest will eventually have you make a Shipping Box, which is where you dump the stuff you want to sell every day.
Selling to NPC shops is actually less money than shipping it off using that box.
You should not need money so desperately this early that you'd be selling to NPC vendors.

[Tenoshii]

When I started recently these are the things that tipped the scale in my favor (in no particular order):

• Equipped myself and my party members with boomerangs
  
• Realized you can eat flowers
  
• Realized that you have a near infinite source of flora to harvest by zoning into nearby tiles
  
• Repeatedly farmed the Puppy Cave for drops to sell (some eventually become gear you can wear) - Seems expensive from time to time, but it is worth paying the Mage at Tinker Camp to identify items before selling
  
• Started eating kibble (30 Nutrition food made from corpse/fish + tree bark in a Millstone that doesn't decay)
  
• Started using the naturally present crafting facilities in towns rather than delay using them trying to tech up myself

There's a lot more than just that, but those are the most impactful highlights at the start.

[Just Some Random Kid]

I'm gonna take each question one at a time.

Steady food source can come from a few different areas.

1. Flowers count as food, mushrooms are on every map, and you can find apni nuts and various barries on almost every tile as well. These however Aren't great because they don't train your stats.

2. Farming, get yourself a sickle at some point and start a farm. Crops are some of the best ways to get early game food through cooking (one of the best skills in the game to train). You can get through through either going to towns and reaping their crops for a slight karma penalty or you can do a crop harvesting quest and take some seeds back with you. You can also get mushroom seeds which grow year round.

3. Once you're off the ground and have some money get yourself a baker at your base as they tend to sell inexpensive but much better food then anything you can make early on. You can also go to various towns to buy stuff as well.

When it comes to recipes there are a few ways of getting them.

1. Buying them from NPCs.

2. Getting them in the chests at the end of dungeons (Nefia).

3. Getting them randomly by completely certain actions like digging.

4. Leveling certain crafting skills like Carpentry and Cooking can sometimes unlock new recipes.

When it comes to not getting killed by everything.

1. Make basic armor and use the gallows to train your defensive skills.

2. Save up money, go to a nearby town and buy gear from blacksmiths, blackmarket sellers, or the exotic merchant from the Merchants Guild.

3. (possibly the easiest and simplest one) Get yourself a good baseline companion usually coming from an animal tamer shop or by worshiping a god. Buy yourself a decently tanky companion who can carry you through early levels. I would recommend something like a bear (usually costing between 7-9k orens) or if you can save the money a t-rex will be your best friend for hours of gameplay as a new player (usually costing around 20k orens).

When it comes to getting gear.

1. Really it just comes down to capital and influence. The best way to get good gear is to invest heavily in a town (preferably yours with the help of a secretary) and in a specific shop to increase the quality of gear given. Then you need influence in order to reroll that shops inventory to hunt for good items. This is gotten by doing quests for a specific town even your own. After that you just keep doing content, investing more in shops, and occasionally getting decent drops from higher level dungeons.

2. The other option are niche but VERY important aspects of the game. The easiest and lowest requirement one is Miral's workshop south of Noyel in the north east side of the map. This shop sells artifact weapons (and a helmet) that are great early-mid game weapons for a currency called small medals. You can occasionally get them through completing dungeons but the easiest way to get them is through fishing (which detailed guides on how to do that exist here, I even made one myself from a week back).

3. God weapons/armor. When you worship a god alongside getting the stat bonuses you can also get a follower and usually a weapon but for some of the gods you get a weapon AND armor. This is done by offering a certain amount of stuff that they like. Every god likes corpses but they also have specific like. The goddess of luck likes fish and Lulwy likes alcohol for example. For this reason it is highly advised to get the model follower feat early on into a run to automatically train the faith skill as you need to be faith level 15 in order to get rewards from gods.

When it comes to playing the game proper.

Do what you find interesting. I myself like life skilling (fishing and the like) so I like doing large amounts of that stuff. Some people like adventuring and ignoring their base unless necessary while others enjoy building up an empire. Choose a route you think is interesting and pursue it until it no longer interests you and you can work on something else.

Here are some generic tips though.

1. Food is important. It's doubly important for followers as it's much harder to properly train their stats then it is to train yours. However don't stress about constantly needing to feed them stuff, it's to much of a headache for a new player.

2. Start farming early, if you don't want to bother with the manual labor get yourself a farmer or two and go ham. If you do start farming make sure you have the weed pulling policy for your town active 24/7 unless you want to remove every single grass tile on your plot (like I do). Natural weeds, flowers, trees, etc. all lower the fertility of your land and can cause your crops to die if now managed constantly.

3. There is a term used from back in Elona (this games predecessor) called DYS meaning Double Your Stats. And while this isn't a hard rule of thumb it's good to go into the game with the mentality of "well ♥♥♥♥, I hit a wall, guess I just need to power level for a bit or do other activities until I've passively gotten stronger".

4. Don't be afraid to die a ton. The punishment for dying is basically non-existent even after the 90 day grace period. If you're worried about losing your money use an item call the piggy bank which will store your money and then when you throw the item on the ground it will break open. This will prevent you from losing your money on death and you can die as much as you want (within reason of course). You do lose a TINY amount of xp in your stats but it's so tiny I have yet to see anyone lose any stats from it (and this discussion has been had before).


I know this was long but I hope it was helpful. A big part of this game is experimenting with stuff and finding ways to mess with the game (at least for me). So I would suggest getting your barrings and then exploring on your own and don't be afraid to fail. If you have any other questions though me or any of the other regulars around here would be more then happy to answer them.

[Dwarvin' Marvin]

When you're strong enough to reliably kill things, you can get the anatomy skill from the tinkerer's camp and get corpses to eat fairly frequently. You can just carry a campfire with you and cook them whenever you get hungry, granted you refuel it every once in a while.
Before that, though, if you just scavenge through tiles you can keep a big supply of berries/crim/bamboo shoots that take forever to decay in the cooler box. It's pretty easy to prevent starvation if you know what you're looking for.

For gear, do dungeons and get the appraise skill from the tinkerer's camp. Doing a bunch of quests to get platinium coins which you can give to a trainer to improve your skill potential is very good for focusing a skill. I don't believe there's any other way to get high quality gear at the moment, outside of investing in merchants.
There's basically no weapon forging at the moment. You want to look for unidentified gear, and bring the stuff you appraise as higher quality to a mage to be identified. The strength of dungeon gear scales with dungeon level, so it's always worth doing unless you're focusing on the base-building. Even if you don't get anything especially helpful, you'll get a ton of free potions/staves/spellbooks from just running the dungeons with the appraise skill.

At the very beginning, you're incredibly weak. Run, take advantage of stairs/the edge of the map to meditate and heal where it's safe, and abuse range like spells, boomerangs and spears. Use magic spells to deal with enemies with high evasion. Allow your follower to face-tank enemies until you have a high enough endurance and PV stat to take it yourself.
Make sure you aren't dual-wielding weapons unless you're specifically built for it. There's a massive accuracy penalty.

[The Grand Mugwump]

Originally posted by timonauta:

What I mean is, how do I get a steady food source, get recipes for usable stuff, stop getting killed by everything, get gear and generally start playing the game proper? How exactly do I "get gud"? Because I'm at a loss and don't know what to try next.

I have three characters and they all just keep dying and starving because I run out of food and have no gear. I figured I can get somewhat decent income by selling wood, but the journey back and forth to the tinker's camp keeps resulting in my eventual death again.

Here's what I did.

Always ask your starter pet to join you and follow you around. They are more than enough to deal with the random stuff you'll encounter in level 1 plains areas, especially if you're nice enough to give them some weapons and armor (yes, my puppy can swing a sword, shoot a bow and wear full body armor). This can also be automated by setting a chest to shared along the right side of its inventory. If you put equipment into a shared chest, your residents will automatically arm themselves based on their questionable decision making ability ( they seem to choose based on the monetary value of gear instead of its stats, so don't put silver weapons or panties into the chest or they'll take off their good stuff to use that instead).

The crafting skills may not seem important to combat, but practicing them improves the stats that combat skills also benefit from. And if we go into neighboring zones and strip harvest them, we'll never run low on food at least. The neighboring zones will also reset whenever the screen shakes and the log says "WRRRRR...." I gathered everything I could and put it into chests. The flowers are especially valuable and should go in the shipping box, and using the shipping box will be a primary source of gold ingots, which are super important for developing your base and unlocking the tinkerer and mason tables.

Then I followed the crafting rabbit hole by using benches to make more benches until I got the mason's table to make a stone weapon using basalt, which can rarely be found on the plains around your starting area. The higher the hardness the material you use, the better the stats on the item will typically be. The difference between a stinky granite weapon and a basalt weapon is night and day at the beginning. A rosewood training weapon is also a moderately decent substitute if you haven't unlocked the mason table yet.

Then I take that basalt weapon and start doing some quests for platinum coins. One of the biggest hurdles when starting out is not having the skills that make you actually decent at combat, like tactics, two handed, etc. Do quests, and when those start feeling easy, go try a level 2 dungeon to find some good armor to go with that basalt weapon (it'll be better than almost everything else that drops in a level 2 dungeon).

Then you can start travelling to other towns (stick to the roads or run away if you get ambushed by scary critters). Prioritize getting new skills from trainers over improving existing ones with platinum coins. This game is tad cruel in that you won't gain xp or improve at something until you "learn" it from a trainer or book. So unlocking that is a crucial first step.

Edit: Oh, and don't forget to check your abilities in the upper right of the screen. The hand crafting up there lets you make bandages from bark and resin, which will be your primary source of healing for a very long time. And you can give a stack of bandages to your companions so they'll automatically heal themselves.

[Waffles]

Basics to get you up on your feet:

Keep your starter pet around.

Stick to Olvina, Willow and Mysilia.

Do escort/delivery quests between these three towns. Savescum quest rerolls for them if you need to.

Once you do those, buy the most expensive food you can from Mysilia's innkeeper. These are great for stats and hunger. Not too expensive as well.

Get the Gourmet feat. It helps identify what foods provide the right stats for your build, so you don't waste money on innkeeper food building STR when you're a mage, for example.

Just doing these will be enough to begin your journey with confidence.

[Explicitly Offensive Cuneiform]

You should try to join the merchants guild asap, and instead of living in the settlement right away, work between the three southern towns. When you get into the merchants guild, invest in the innkeepers so that the get better food. This will help you out quite a bit. the food is how you level up your stats.

Now, there are a few things about investing that people don't realize: it increases influence in a town, and you can recruit those shopkeepers for your settlement.

with the correct whips you can even give them very useful jobs.

you will want fiama in your town asap, because of the things she sells. do not throw away deciphered books, because when you start ranching, you will be turning those into h-doujins which sell very well, or give permanent damage bonuses, even to gods.

Now, the true power of the settlement is the quest board, because those are procurement quests, so when you have a furnace and black smith table you can be making free platinum coins by turning in: junk, bolts, nails, leaves, and furniture. this levels up your stats and your crafting skills.

with enough people i can get 100 platinum coins a week just by doing home quests where they take my surplus stuff.

[Explicitly Offensive Cuneiform]

also, don't eat your crops, work on leveling the seeds. I think the max level is 38? max level vegetables are far more nutritious than the lower level ones. Sleep in the king and prince beds in towns, as those give the best bonuses. You get furniture tickets for mysalia from home quests, so do enough of those and mysalai quests and you get a kings bed, which if you have barbie arms you will have to throw towards the shipping box.

[Explicitly Offensive Cuneiform]

the build board is one of the most powerful items in the game. if you have a monster on your town, you can go to the build menu from the anvil icon at the bottom bar, raise it's elevation to 9, then pickpocket it karma free AND cast all sorts of status ailment spells to level up. DON'T cast those spells on you, because i think they cause either disease.

[Zalzany]

Fun facts to add. Your pet RIGHT NOW don't rot so I pick every mushroom, berries etc and have my little girl hold it. Later on you can make a cutting board at the tinker bench and turn vegetables into salad for more filling I think not sure at min more cooking skill it takes every time i get cooking skill to chop up all the bamboo chutes and mushrooms I got on the little girl lol

But yeah for personal food your pet is key if you got more then one sadly you do got feed them all here and there, but other wise I just wait for it to no longer say "filled" on my screen then trade with little girl and grab some food. Like I haven't had issues since I found out about that loophole that exists right now not sure if it will be permanent. Or not

But yeah crops like others said I just sickle them over and over till they get higher up and you get farming from using a water can so if you can make it asap I always end up using a copper one at first as metal scrap is pain for me to get, and hardness is so low its only got 10 charges, but yeah watering every day is a lot farming exp in long run.

Not sure people mentioned it mushrooms don't need sunlight I think not sure if tent has light but for 15 gold bars you can get a small tent I put a bed, chopping block then a mushroom farm on the rest of the tiles only using farmed seeds that are better then wild mushrooms just sickle a few of them to get your seeds back for replanting harvest rest. Also when you get the +1 seeds its RNG what state they get, so some them are better like I gotten some that do charisma some will I do succubus charisma heavy builds a lot like I like mind magic and summoning so charisma bonus hell a good so is willpower as its succubus weakest starting stat. So getting either one those is really nice to have and I debate if I should just focus on willpower at first or not..

[The Grand Mugwump]

Oh right, and if you do find yourself in a situation where you have enough money to pay taxes for a while and aren't starving, don't underestimate the value of spending a couple days practicing with a training dummy. It'll help get your skills and stats with the weapon you're using (including unarmed martial arts) up to where you have a fighting chance against low level monsters.

[gimmethegepgun]

1. Don't pick all the mushrooms/berries in Meadow right away. They'll rot in your inventory faster than you can reasonably eat them, and won't rot if you leave them unpicked.
2. Don't cook everything as soon as you pick it up, either. Newly-cooked food always comes out 100% fresh unless one of the ingredients is rotten, in which case it will be rotten. You can use this to extend the shelf life of food in your inventory by prioritizing cooking things that are stale, and only cooking when you need to eat.
3. Try to always cook food before eating. You can carry a Bonfire around with you, loaded with fuel, and use that to cook Meat, Fish, Fruits, and Eggs that you come by, as well as convert any Grass into food in a pinch. You can also cook Vegetables like Mushrooms using the Camp Pot in the Tinker's Camp just north of Meadow.
4. Aim to craft/buy with tickets/steal a Cutting Board to carry around with you as well so that you can prepare Vegetables
5. Do the Puppy quest to get access to the Cooler, a lightweight container with 9 slots that greatly slows the decay of stuff put in it. Change its settings to maximum priority and only take food, and retain the setting that makes it so it only takes stuff that can rot.
6. Collect food in nearby zones if you need more. Both flat and wooded areas have lots of Berries and Mushrooms in them.
7. Innkeepers and Bakers sell lots of nonperishable food, some of which is at very low cost and can easily be afforded with the most basic level of income.
8. Definitely don't eat flowers except when it's an emergency. Throw them in the shipping chest for money instead. A few flowers can easily buy a Pile of Bread worth ~5-7x as much nutrition as the flowers.
9. Offal and Mushrooms of any variety can be turned into Bait, and the recipe doesn't care what the freshness status of the ingredient is, so turn Offal and rotten Mushrooms into Bait to go fish instead of selling them or whatever. You can also use Bones or Hearts, but you need Bones for Nails unless you find a lot of Scrap, and Hearts are worth good money if they aren't rotten.