Do you get anything for playing the Daily Challenges?

[Awesome Sauce]

I know milestones give you better gear when you start a new game. Do Daily Challenges give you permanent bonuses?

[Drathy]

Not currently, no. We are planning at overhauling the Daily Challenges. Currently, as it stands, it's basically a non-savable, harder, faster version of the main game.

[Awesome Sauce]

oh ok. So far this game is pretty brutal. the tutorial is cool and all, but, it took me 3 new games before I could get to the part where you learn how to cook food and get purified water.

Since I was new, I'd use an axe on stone, a shovel on tree's (because my axe broke) and so on and so forth. For the life of me, my first game, I couldn't find sharp stone or regular stone anywhere. The island was completely void of stones... I died of dehydration.

I still have not completed the tutorial because other things come up, spiders poison me, zombies destroy my walls, hunger sets in, dehydration, etc.

This game is still a lot of fun.

How do I stop zombies from breaking into my home??

I mined a tunnel through a mountain with 3 deadfall traps, a raging campfire, and me decked out with bark armor and stone spears... I died. I didn't land a single hit.

[Drathy]

Traps are a good first step! Fire won't do much, but doors, walls, and barricading yourself within (deep) water are all things that can help as well. Instead of going to defensive route, you can also think about going the protective route and crafting a set of leather garments to effectively negate zombie damage outright. Or maybe a little of both. Hope is never impossible within the game, but sometimes the solutions are less obvious.

Speaking of which, the Starter Quest mentions if you start in a desert, foresty, rocky areas are always located to the north, or north east. I would recommend making the travel if your starting location is less than ideal.

[Caerold]

Using a stone axe for mining isn't the worst thing you can do, really. Cheap +3 blunt tool that also works on trees, and they can get really nice once you have the shale and skills to make high durability and super-light. I generally use my shovel to harvest the first few trees as well, since it has a nice tool bonus and is easy to replace.

Leather armor is rarely a good idea for a new player, as it takes a lot of killing to gather materials for a full set and you usually want to wait and save it until you have reliable water containers and purification first. First priority for me is water, next is backpack and bag. Leather armor comes last and has high skill requirements to boot.

Always have two or three exits from any "safe point" -- it's more important to have a path of retreat than to lock down all the possible entrances. Also gather some flowers, thistles or roots to make healing water for emergencies.

Remember, it isn't worth dying to protect your crappy wood chest full of unused bark and strings and heavy rocks. Forges and such are also easy to remake. Learn to live like a hobo until you have the skills to backup your claim. Those zombies aren't gonna hang around after you're gone, anyway.

[stratovarius30]

I think on the opposite that it's a good idea to start working on leather armor quite soon, it don't need to be the whole set but some kind of protection early like leather is pretty usefull. I do agree that water is a high priority but it is also extremely availiable if you find a cave.

Living like a hobo early game i do agree. The biggest mistake new players make (myself included) is to try and make some kind of static base. It's not impossible but to be able to make a base in the early game, bothany is a MUST to lower maligny. so basically i see 2 choices for early games

- Get combat ready with gears and move around the world a lot (no bases)
- Make a base by starting to plant a lot of stuff and use a lot of fertiliser to get as much plants as you can to control maligny.

[Caerold]

I think it's mainly a matter of where you get your leather and how much challenge you are comfortable with. Even with the malignity reductions for defending yourself vs hostile creatures, you might well gain malignity from skill increases, assuming you survive.

If you go after passive rabbits and the like instead you will certainly increase your malignity (and thus the NEED for armor) a lot before you have assembled the 13 leather or so you need for a full set with bags, so you better not be slacking with your other preparations and might want to take it slow. I too make leather armor one piece at a time, I just do my best to avoid hurrying the transition.

Granted, an organized and well-informed botanist can easily reduce the malignity and thus challenge to effectively zero, so there's that. I try not to use it as a crutch, though, and only harvest/fertilize what I need, since the impact to negative malignity is so heavy.

I believe there have been studies that show that going into a confrontation armed drastically increases the odds you will act to escalate that confrontation. I find it much easier to play pacifist style while running around mostly unarmored while scouting. It helps with weight, too.

Generally I try to avoid spiders and snakes and fight only hostile rats when they start chasing me. I'm mainly concerned with using the first couple days ingame to establish a safe water source, scout out the overworld for iron and limestone/coal/talc, gather a bag full of sandstone and several lightweight piles of sand for glass, and harvest a few cotton and food crops.

In the end its all just playstyles. The tools to balance your own game are there now, so do what you enjoy!

[Awesome Sauce]

Thanks for all the advice. I'm thriving now that I have a good sized garden. keeping my malignity down is huge. I built a base out in the sea with 1 tile gap bridge(easy access. less swimming) so I am protected from wandering monsters. I made a tunnel that leads away if I'm ever cornered. I also built another backup cave with two exits.

Am I correct in assuming that monsters cannot go into or come out of the caves?

[stratovarius30]

Yes you are right in your assumption. They cannot go in and out of caves but it don't despawn them so it can give you a good escape but the monster is still there.

[Sidechain]

Wait... there are zombies?!

[stratovarius30]

Yes ... Yes there are ...

[thegreatpie]

Sheesh the zombies are nothing compared to the mother frackin' krak-crap I didn't mean for that to rhyme. Krakens. Uuugh

That said, if you don't WANT to run around like a hobo, my playstyle involves only moving around until I find a place that has trees, ocean, sandstone, and stone - which hasn't been too hard - and there's usually sand too. I find a patch of sand that digs to clay, I build a kiln next to it, I dig up the clay, and start building my home out of clay. Clay throwing in bulk lowers malignity fairly well, too - though it takes a LOT of time to make a house so you can make a little one out of something else, wood or stone or sandstone, first. If you hoarde pineapples and keep a cycle of eating and planting them, that offsets the time it takes to get your clay house with malignment and also drives down the pressing need to find water. So during your shorter hobo time, pick up a bunch of pineapples, and coconuts too if you can find them since they quench better though you can't plant 'em. Even cacti can help, though not super well, but it's nice to have a source of needles. As I jump right into clay, it doesn't take long to make clay jugs and thus get your still. (I hate the stone still because fire and will jump straight to the solar one by melting all the friggun sand I get, and then either making a flask or a solar still. I've got sand to waste...though limestone tends to be another matter.)

Course it sounds like your water fortress is a pretty good setup!