Some hard learnt early-game tips

[Fractal]

Players, myself included, get tripped up on a lot of non-obvious characteristics in the early game stage.

Some hard earned tips (feel free to add your own):

- Flags are incredibly useful. They save you heaps of time travelling around the map and they act as respawn points when you need to chip away at the health (kill) or stamina (capture) of strong opponents in early-game. Carry at least one flag with you at all times - that way you can park a flag at the furthest point-of-interest you've explored and come back later. Rabbits are simplest way to get the hides for flags but chasing after them is waste of time with bad early arrows - better to use traps (4 - 6 traps is sufficient, replenished per day) which have modest resource requirements.

- The wooden workbench is vital; build it as soon as possible. You'll need it to build the Stockholm Syndrome cages and various workcamps (logging, mining, harvesting, etc) that reduce the burden of resource collecting by using recruits. Crafting is proximity and container based - you need to select the container before the craft menu changes and populate it to enable craftable items.

- Skills point accrue at a slow and steady rate (assuming you pick berries, etc). What to allocate them to is a matter of personal taste, but I recommend prioritising harvesting (resource) and carrying (captives) as these are force multipliers to get your camp up and running faster.

- Night time is a handy time to pick off the residents of an encampment one-by-one, but you can also use the aggression distance of each opponent to lure them independently during the day. Which also provides the convenient role-playing excuse of "they attacked me first!". Kiting bears, etc works but is pretty risky.

- Until your camp is much larger - set recruits to 'survivor' mode, that way you aren't stressing as much about raids before you are ready. Remember to use the move -> location sub-menu of the recruit to prevent them from wandering back to their initial spawn point. If you can't find your NPC, bring up the friends menu (once you have one ;P) and favourite the NPC, they will be starred in the map. If they aren't at the marked location, you may need to save/quit/reload.

- If your camp has male and female NPCs and you want to control who romances who, NPC-to-NPC love (and hate) relies on proximity and you can restrict their ranges from overlapping through judicious use of 'move' menu options. Not sure if the 'Allow Love' option blocks NPC relationship growth, or also PC relationships. Elsewhere in the forums is a guide on how to reduce some of the kinky-time censorship.

- The user interface takes a while to get used to. A recruit's clothing is in the equipment panel, not their inventory. Grappling can inadvertently grab your follower instead of your opponent, so setting a long follow distance (or dismissing them) can be prudent. You can move with the WASD keys while the map is open. Stacks and the shift key are your friends for moving items and bulk crafting. The game has one the better pause menu (ESC) behaviour I've seen - you can craft, review the map, check NPC settings, etc. while paused.

- Allocate 5 - 10 hours to experiment and learn the game in a save file you are willing discard later (due to bad placements, resource spend, NPC relationships, role-play mistakes, etc). Cheats can also make the investment in learning the dodgy UI easier - with the caveat of not really learning the game mechanics.

[Fumo Bnnuy n Frends]

my main thing i'd give new players is:

1. upgrade to iron tools asap

2. invest heavily into speed and strength as health is basically armor and once you get good at blocking M2 or strafing just heavy attack then run away before the enemy hits you with your speed buffs you can hit and run tactics.

3. invest into heavy strike skill to lvl 6

4. Get natives ASAP and let them work in food collection harvest logging pig raising / animal raising and excevate to get the resources passively over time

5. tables > walls as enemies cannot go through them lol. They also cost a hell of a lot less than walls to place

6. spikes on tables

7. lvl up only 1 character and use berries to lvl up the other later

8. Shift + P to unlock scenes

9. speed run to a well a food box shelter and beds to make time go faster more raids crops grow faster etc.

10. incap animals and put them in pens to get eggs premium roast pork milk etc. All filling food items that will help you fight enemies and keep you well fed

[Miko Miko Spark]

- Roast chicken is a life saver for if you use fast travel a lot. The only ingredient is a rooster so if you're laying traps you can stock up on this real fast.

- Keigo is very handy to have. He will most likely have a higher attack stat than you even at low lvl, he moves fast and he can carry quite a bit. A must have companion in the ruins.

- Early game skill point allocation to aim for: Harvest lvl 2 or 3, Heavy Strike at least lvl 2, Carry to lvl 2 and Leadership to lvl 1. Harvest is obvious. Heavy Strike to get the ability to cancel mid-animation. Carry so you can quick travel with a NPC. Leadership so you can use Keigo.

- Skill point allocation you can avoid. Stomach, if you don't eat anything that causes food poisoning you won't have to worry about it. Swim, other than collecting coral to make dye bench and unlocking mermaid you don't need to get into the water and both are easier to do with a boat.

- Get to the ruins ASAP. The enemies aren't too hard to deal with and you'll gain levels fast. Just don't try the Floor 5 and 10 bosses unless you're confident.

- Spider Cave is a great place to collect iron and stone in the beginning. After some lvls, head to the south mine as there is tons of iron formations. If you run them both, you can get a few hundred iron and stone in the span of 5 to 10 minutes.

- Keep a separate save file before you make decisions. If it turns out differently then you expected, you won't lose too much progress.

[Gabiru The Brave]

Also worth making like 4-5 bear traps relatively early, as you'll get basically all the food and leather you need for a long while having those around.

[cyan027]

Did you guys try to equip your natives with bow and arrow? See how powerful your "Archers" can defend your base?

Of course, Iron arrow only. 1 arrow for each archer is enough. They can "retrieve" arrow they fire away (won't consume arrow).

[Thomas_Phoenix]

Originally posted by cyan027:

Did you guys try to equip your natives with bow and arrow? See how powerful your "Archers" can defend your base?

Of course, Iron arrow only. 1 arrow for each archer is enough. They can "retrieve" arrow they fire away (won't consume arrow).

How do you equip arrow, first slot inventory of native or last one?

[cyan027]

Originally posted by Thomas_Phoenix:

How do you equip arrow, first slot inventory of native or last one?

Uh, sorry, I just found that you don't need to give your archer any arrow. Give them a bow and they come up with their own arrows.

I found this by mistakenly took arrows from one of my archer's inventory and she can still shoot arrow, then I realise I was wrong :/