Just Finished: Strategy Advice and Tips (SPOILERS)

[jenn]

I just completed the game with all eight survivors and thought I would offer up some advice to others. I restarted the game once and had to course-correct, so mostly this is a list of things I did differently the second time around.

General Advice

Don't hoard items. / Keep your states low.
You are much less efficient at tasks when you have maladies so, for example, if you're depressed, just eat that freaking candy box. The moment my characters could use the entirety of something, I used it. Don't save things, since you're handicapping yourself every turn its just sitting in your inventory. Also, the higher your maladies are, the faster they increase each night. Efficiency is everything in this game, so keep your states in check always.

Research and craft as quickly as possible.
The game difficulty changes dramatically at two points a) when you can fish and cook and b) when you can heal your injured (the last research thing). Hitting these points ASAP should be your main objective (along with keeping your people alive), and your game will go much smoother.

Avoid eating raw food.
For a while, you will HAVE to in order to live, but as soon as you are able to cook, you should try to ONLY eat cooked foods. Sickness is annoying. Once I gained the ability to cook, I stopped eating any raw fish or meat, cured everyone of all sickness and pretty much didn't have to deal with that state for most of the game.

Research and Crafting

You don't get a choice in what you research, it's all linear, but in terms of what you should craft, you should mostly go in order. Two exceptions: the hunting bow and the drying rack. You can put these off a little. Why? Fishing is better than hunting (explained below) and drying your food is annoying because you can't do as many as once, and it's not that crucial.

Rocks and Rope
There's no point in harvesting a) stone or b) rope after you've crafted everything. There's no use for them.

Fishing vs. Hunting
You really only need to do one of these (if you have two people assigned to it), and it should definitely be fishing. Fishing results in NO fatigue gain and does not result in injury the way hunting does. Injuries are really annoying and will quickly kill your character, especially because finding cures for injuries are the hardest in the game.

Stat Allocation

The characters start off pretty well-balanced, thankfully, so for the most part you can just keep adding on to their given strengths. For high intelligence characters, you can probably give them a few extra skills. For low intelligence ones, you probably want to keep building on what they're already good at. Here, I'll mention a few important stats that you should give special consideration to.

Intelligence
Intelligence should be added towards the beginning levels. Most of my characters reached around level 9-11 by the time I won. You gain stat points each time you level, depending on your intelligence, up to 15 points (for 100 intelligence).

Discussion
For the most part, I left this alone and let it accrue naturally around the campsite, other than for Jacob and Yuri. Discussion impacts the the effectiveness of talking (which decreases depression). If they're depressed, they are more likely to have negative interactions with others. Good relationships is needed for effecitve talking. So, discussion impacts talking two-fold; they need at least a little or else it will be hard to manage their depression.

Constitution
Constitution is important for everyone since it affects how well they rest.

Stealth
Activities outside the camp are great for getting unlimited cures for your maladies (and even agility from playing with monkeys!), but you need stealth or else you're more likely to get injured. I gave two of my characters lots of stealth (and later also the little girl since she has high IQ so lots of extra stat points) and let them benefit from that stuff, but I think there's a lot of ways to play this.

Overall Strategy

Basically, I tried to research and get to the point where I could a) fish and b) cook as quickly as possible. I think this happened for me around Day 15, but that could be wrong. From there, my daily process was to have two people fish in the A.M. and one person cook in the P.M. I supplemented my food by exploring and harvesting.

Once I finished researching everything and crafting everything, I just cured the two fishermen of ALL states and left them fishing all day long. I had one person cook in the P.M. A bunch of stuff would spoil at night, but it still allowed for a healthy amount of extra food in reserve just in case. If there were ever more than 13 fish by the P.M. then I'd cook them and dry the extras.

Finishing the Game
Once you've explored all 100 squares of the island, the path to completing the game is pretty obvious and not a long ways off. You just have to finish a few quests and off you go.

Characters Killing Each Other
This wasn't really a problem for me. I kept their maladies/states pretty low once I researched everything so I'm guessing if they're depressed they're more likely to do something crazy? I'm not sure what triggers this. I had my people working in all sorts of combinations and it wasn't a problem. (Edit: Okay, after reading the comments it sounds like they kill each other based on somewhat more complicated conditions such as certain combinations having intense like or dislike, but other things as well)

[witchyspoon]

Very nice, thank you!! I would like to add one thing about the last part though, it does have to do with relationships but not necessarily like you would think. A developer explained it to me in this thread: (SPOILER!) http://steamcommunity.com/app/384310/discussions/0/520518053440292631/

[Thurman Merman]

I just finished and I agree with everything but the characters killing each other. Jacob killed Bob for no reason at all, except that I think he had a crush on Alice. Jacob went through a "bad seed" dialogue, in which he talked about killing Bob. Two nights later he killed Bob. I had plenty of food and nobody had any maladies at the time. In fact, Jacob's relationship with Bob wasn't even that bad. I think he's just a psychopath. I killed Jacob through exhaustion after that because he had also gone through the “bad seed” dialogue about the little girl, and I didn't want to risk him killing anyone else.

[witchyspoon]

Originally posted by Thurman Merman:

I just finished and I agree with everything but the characters killing each other. Jacob killed Bob for no reason at all, except that I think he had a crush on Alice. Jacob went through a "bad seed" dialogue, in which he talked about killing Bob. Two nights later he killed Bob. I had plenty of food and nobody had any maladies at the time. In fact, Jacob's relationship with Bob wasn't even that bad. I think he's just a psychopath. I killed Jacob through exhaustion after that because he had also gone through the “bad seed” dialogue about the little girl, and I didn't want to risk him killing anyone else.

the relationship thing seems to be quite complicated...maybe he has to like bob a lot? or not like alice very much? for me though the whole jacob killing anyone didn't happen at all (I had problems with Julia). Maybe you have to get his discussion skill up? hmmm curiouser and curiouser...:)

[jenn]

Originally posted by Thurman Merman:

I just finished and I agree with everything but the characters killing each other. Jacob killed Bob for no reason at all, except that I think he had a crush on Alice. Jacob went through a "bad seed" dialogue, in which he talked about killing Bob. Two nights later he killed Bob. I had plenty of food and nobody had any maladies at the time. In fact, Jacob's relationship with Bob wasn't even that bad. I think he's just a psychopath. I killed Jacob through exhaustion after that because he had also gone through the “bad seed” dialogue about the little girl, and I didn't want to risk him killing anyone else.

Hmm that's interesting. For me, Jacob went on and on about it for a few nights and finally says that he thinks he wants to get rid of the little girl, but then never did anything?

[naillio_nuit]

Awesome advice! Thank you! Furthest I got was day 42, before everyone died of dysentary. The last person offed themselves due to depression. </3 Sad day.

[[Prometheus]]

Just spent the entire bank-holiday weekend playing this game... overnight... it's so good! Fantastic guide! Just one little caveat where you are leading people astray...

- Discussion -

Discussion not only assists with healthy relationships (at a certian point I ignored this as I cross-skilled many of my characters so when I sent off the 'A Team' on a task such as Scavenging to rest or heal, I would put my 'B Team' on it to give me the resources I wanted. This involved many different combinations of characters more often than not liking each other, even Jacob!

Discussion ALSO increases the rate of Depression reducing during talks, which I found invaluable. Once you have your guys at a nice steady equalibrium the game becomes much easier, but you need to keep on-top of micromanaging all their needs, espcially depression and fatigue.

*SPOILERS*



I had to rush to get 3 high \ very-high level explorers around Day 60 as Julia had eyes to kill Bob, or Jacob, and often killed one of them between day 80 and 89, I did however get around this by keeping Julia Exploring and Jacob doing anything else away from them so I could finish my first playthrough to day 102 (just to be sure;)), all surviving and all map tiles uncovered.

Anyway great game and I'm glad other people are enjoying it! :D

[nicki]

The main thing which helped me to stay alive was to increase stealth to 100 for everyone (one by one and point by point). Later then doing this 3 actions: sitting on the bed near skeleton gives +10depression and -15fatigue, swimming in the laguna with fishes -10depression and healing near plant decreases 1~5 injury, so you will only need to eat (of course if you heal them all from sickness in time). And if the person have 60 stealth points and you already open the map with this 3places, then other 40 points easy to get, 5encounters gives +1point (it only take a lot of time).

[Andersen]

Afer you have cooking pot you can just play untilm end, last 40 days was bit boring cause of this

[Kiseki]

One big change I made that made a big difference was to keep everyone's states in the green instead of riding them hard. If you keep states in the green they won't take as much of a skill point ding. At first it will feel a little slower, but over time the lack of penalty adds up.

[Rambutan]

I just got to the end of the game. I have no words.

[jenn]

Originally posted by Prometheus:

- Discussion -

Discussion not only assists with healthy relationships (at a certian point I ignored this as I cross-skilled many of my characters so when I sent off the 'A Team' on a task such as Scavenging to rest or heal, I would put my 'B Team' on it to give me the resources I wanted. This involved many different combinations of characters more often than not liking each other, even Jacob!

Discussion ALSO increases the rate of Depression reducing during talks, which I found invaluable. Once you have your guys at a nice steady equalibrium the game becomes much easier, but you need to keep on-top of micromanaging all their needs, espcially depression and fatigue.

Hey thanks for pointing this out, you're totally right, I edited my original post, so hopefully that clears up the relationship between dicussion/depression.

[existential crisis]

Really nice write-up! I've been following tips from https://www.fadedandblurred.com/dead-in-bermuda-guide/ with decent success too.

[snow_golemTS]

I'm playing through for the first time so take this with a grain of salt. The Int stat determines how may skill points you get when you lv, so I've been dumping points into int for everyone. I've gotten them all to 81 at least. Now I have plenty of points to put into the character's key stats and their other stats that are important. It's working out pretty well so far. I'm also assigning stats to deal with with the map locations that have a multiple skill checks like stealth before scavenging an item. It seems like I've been getting more loot that way. Having 3 or 4 characters who are good or decent at a task lets me rotate some one else in when one person needs to rest from fatigue. I'm getting enough fruit so I only occasionally have to fish, although now I have a drying rack so I'm building a reserve.