11 Top Tips for Beginners

The game has a lot of subtle mechanics you need to keep in mind in order to survive. I've put together 11 tips for the early game that will help you get off to a good start in the game.

Introduction

Hello!

Today I'd like to share some tips on how to get off to a good start when playing Survival Fountain of Youth.

The tutorial is pretty good at introducing the basics of gameplay so I won't repeat anything that's already covered there.

But the game also has some subtle mechanics that might not be obvious and it can be frustrating to watch your guy racking up sunburn, indigestion, and a whole bunch of other illnesses and slowly die as they get worse.

I'll cover some of the things that really helped me stay alive in the early days. Hopefully these tips will also help you live long and prosper as you look for the Fountain of Youth.

This guide is the text form of the youtube guide I published recently:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uujARaFtWG0

It contains footage of what I'm describing in text here

1. Get the backpack

Just a quick one to star with, but get the leather backpack at the start of the game.

When you leave the ship you'll get the choice of two items. Some are weapons, some are medicines or extra food, or utility items like flint and steel. You can also get a heavy coat or even a gun.

The weapons you can craft on the island are pretty good already, and the medicines are not too difficult to make.

Food would be nice to have but not essential. Thirst is the bigger issue.

The coat is great but we can make clothing out of leaves early on, and the materials you need to repair it are pretty advanced.

I'd recommend the leather backpack. It allows you to double your carrying capacity and that makes a noticeable difference in the early game. You'll eventually be able to make a similar size backpack from animal hides, but just like with the coat it'll take a while to get to that tech level.

For the second item the flint and steel is good because at low skills it can take a while to start fires, but it's not essential.

2. Avoid sunburn

The sun is brutal in this game and sunburn is the first risk you'll have to deal with. Just a few hours of being out there looking for things to scavenge is enough to give you sunburn so knowing how to deal with it is important.

One of the subtleties of the game is that the shade you see in the game isn't just a cosmetic thing. If you move under the shade of a tree or behind a rock you'll notice that the "Burning Sun" condition will disappear. This will slowly reduce the meter.

So you should always be looking for shade as you scavenge. Sprint from shade to shade if you have to.

And make sure to only craft in the shade. But also make sure that your shade is not going to disappear as the sun moves across the sky if you're going to craft for a while.

That's enough for the first couple of days, but you want something better and that's clothing. The easiest to make is leaf clothing.

Grab yourself 7 narrow and 7 wide leaves. You should have enough narrow leaves from just scavenging the beach but if you need more you can harvest palm trees.

For wide leaves you can harvest the ferns near to the grotto.

A full set of four pieces of leaf clothing should give you 100% sun protection. Even three pieces should be enough to allow you to move about without worrying about sunburn.

Later on you'll find clothing that protects you against other conditions, but protection against wind and rain isn't as critical as protection against sunburn.

3. Collect rainwater

At the start of the game you'll be able to drink from green coconuts to keep you hydrated. But that's not going to last more than a few days and they take a couple of weeks to replenish.

The first island you start in does have a couple of sources of water you can find, but when you start playing you might struggle to find them. But thirst doesn't wait. You need water and it's very easy to die from lack of water.

Make a coconut water collector and make it your priority once you've made your set of leaf clothing.

You'll have to make a hammer and that needs a big branch and either a stick or a massive stone.
Massive stones spawn on rock formations. They look like stone balls and there should be one right ahead of the grotto cave.

The big branch is a bit trickier. You need to find the abandoned encampment in the forest where you found the first cartographer tree. It's in a small ravine and you should be careful of snakes and other animals.

There should be several big branches scattered around. Make sure you keep at least one for the hammer. If you run out there should also be a grove of trees further into the forest where you can harvest big branches.

While you're at the encampment make sure to grab the lianas scattered around. They're also critical.

Along the edge of the forest you'll come across some ferns that you can harvest wide leaves from. Get a couple at least.

Go back to your base and make a stone hammer and three liana ropes.

Take ripe coconuts and ropes, and make two coconut flasks.

Then make the coconut rain collector and install it in a place that's exposed to rain.

Water will evaporate so make sure you move it to the coconut flask to avoid losing it.

One collector and one flask should be enough to keep you alive early on, but you can make more if you need them.

4. Keep fires alive

Starting a fire is not easy early on. Things will become easier as your skill goes up, but it's always going to be a bit of a struggle so ideally you want to take as much advantage of fires as you can.

Make it a habit to collect sticks for firewood as you travel and keep them near the fire.

When you start a new fire make sure you cook as much food and other things as you can. Upgrading the small storage box to preserve food will double how long your food stays edible.

But compared to starting a fire, making torches and lighting fires from torches is much much easier.

Whenever you travel or go scavenging, you can light a torch from the fire and take it with you. It's not just great for carrying the fire with you, it's also great for lighting on days when it's overcast or at night.

At the moment you can't light torches with torches, so when your torch runs out the only way to keep the fire going is to light a campfire and then light a second torch from that fire.

I've suggested that the devs add the option of lighting torches with torches, but on the meantime you can pre-build campfires throughout the island to use for this. Make sure they're sheltered from the rain at least and the wind too if you can find a good spot.

As your skill goes up it will not be as important to carry fires but early on it can be very important. You don't want to starve to death or die from poisoning or disease because you couldn't get a fire started.

5. Watch and Listen

The most likely way you'll take damage in the game is from animals and pests taking a bite out of you.

But if you get bit it's because you weren't paying attention because you're always warned in some way before you get close enough to take damage.

The first hazard you'll meet are the short eared dogs. They give little barks when you get close.

Same with snakes. You'll get that rattling sound if you get too close.

And with harpies, jackals, and other animals. They all make distinctive sounds when they're getting aggressive.

Stop when you hear those warnings. Maybe even retreat a few steps away from the sound. They can be pretty difficult to spot but make sure you know where they are before moving on. If you get the higher tiers of the Concentration perk it can really help.

The other hazard tends to be scorpions and spiders in caves or as you harvest in the forest. This is where a torch comes in really handy.

The obvious use is to give you enough light to spot the pests in caves. Then you can either kill them or avoid them.

But you can also get bit while working in areas like the forest or jungle. And it's especially annoying to get bit because you have to start the harvesting again.

But fire can keep pests away while you're working. If it's a short piece of work you can just hold the torch in your hand, or you can build a fire to make sure you'll be undisturbed while butchering a boar or something that takes a few hours.

6. Make crafting benches

The first time you play you won't realize this but crafting benches open up a lot of new crafting options and it's important to explore them as soon as you can.

Higher quality items also have higher durability, and this is important because repairing reduces the maximum durability of that item and limits how many times you can repair them.

Repairing is a lot cheaper than making a new item and low quality items break more often, so the game makes investing in higher quality items more worthwhile than in most other games with crafting.

For instance a stone spear does twice the damage of a wooden spear. It does take more complex resources like liana ropes to make, but repairing it only takes a single stone. That's similar to the long stick you need to make a new wooden spear.

So not only do you get a better spear, it lasts longer and it's just as cheap to maintain.
Another tip is to keep your old stone cutters and use them to make new stone spears.

The first bench you should make is the regular workbench. That will allow you do make a stone saw.

Next make the carpentry workbench. The split logs it produces are needed to make everything else.

Go chop down a tree and bring it back. Avoid chopping down coconut or date palms.

Split that log and use it to make the log carrier. That allows you to carry up to 6 logs at once and if you're going to do any construction it's well worth it.

Ideally you'll want to harvest from as far away from your home as possible. The maghogany forests are a good option.

As you explore you'll also come across animals like boars that you can hunt for meat and other materials like hides and tendons. You'll need them to get to the next tech level.

But to process those materials into something useful you'll need the tanner. And with it you'll be able to make processed hides and tendon threads.

That's enough to make the raft and travel the seas. But if you also get the skin drier you'll be able to make dried hides that allow you to make things like leather.

7. Carry repair items

Your tools will break and at low tech they'll break often. Harvesting a single boar will break two stone cutters, and harvesting 5 or 6 lianas will wear down your stone axe by a lot.

The days in the game aren't long enough for you to have enough time to go back and get repair materials so make sure you carry at least enough to repair all your tools once. And if you use stone cutters carry a couple of extra stones to craft more because you'll need them.

This might seem obvious but until you get into the practice you'll be facepalming at how often you need to waste time going to harvest more stones or long sticks just because your tools broke.

8. Prioritize mapping

The tutorial teaches you how to map so you'll find out how useful it is to see the locations of resources.

The tutorial tells you to climb a tree to map, but you don't have to. You can map from any location. You just get better results if you're higher up. So make sure to also map any spots that are not covered by the trees.

But there's a couple of extra benefits that will come in real handy as you play.

One is that when you die you drop your loot. You'll be able to see the location of the bag in your map.

Another is being able to see the locations of artifacts and special locations.

It's important to find and explore these sites so being able to see where they are instead of blindly trying to stumble onto them will save you a lot of time.

9. Create small camps

The starting island is not massive, but at the same time the days are short enough that you don't want to travel all the way home every day.

A good spot to set up your initial bed and campfire at is below this overhanging rock. You're sheltered from everything except the wind but you should be fine until you find the grotto.

One useful tip with the grotto is that the entrance doesn't have scorpions. Move the stone campfire closer to the entrance and set up your bed in the pest free area and you'll be fine to use this as a base.

As you explore you'll come across good locations like shallow caves or old temples where you're sheltered from multiple types of bad weather. The temple high above the beach where you find the spyglass is a good location for an early base on that side of the island.

As you play you're probably going to have a main base where you have all your workbenches and all your importatnt items. But it's not a bad idea to also build small shelters with a bed to sleep in and a campfire to cook food at locations throughout the map.

It might not seem that important but when you need them you need them. And if you build them when you've got the time and spare resources you'll avoid having to scramble to find the materials to craft them.

If you space them out nicely you can also use those campfires to light new torches as your current one is about to burn out. Beds show up in the map so you can quickly see the location of the nearest shelter.

10. Go after perks

The game has a skill and perk system and they can give you a lot of important benefits.

Skills will increase just by doing things. If you craft then your crafting skill will go up, and so will harvesting and swimming, and just running around will increase your strength and athleticism.

You generally don't have to worry about deliberately increasing skills, but for some important ones like starting fires you can deliberately start and put out fires just to increase the skill. But only do this if you've got some spare food, water, and you're not sick.

Perks are different though. You get perk points by finding native chronicles like murals but you also get them by doing survival tasks.

A fair number of them are pretty easy to do.

If you made the coconut rain collector as I suggested earlier you did one of the tasks and got a perk point.

Perks give you some special abilities like poison and disease resistance that can make survival much much easier. And the earlier you get them the easier it'll be to focus on other tasks like exploring and hunting.

So it's important to get them as soon as possible.

I'd particularly recommend investing in the learning branch. The first perk gives you more skill experience, which is always handy. The second perk gives you an extra perk from every 5 survival tasks you do.

If you also follow the quests to find the spyglass and look for the murals on the beach and the temple near the harpy nest you should have enough perk points to get both levels.

11. Dying and Living Water

You start the game with the "Near Death" condition and your maximum health is reduced. The figures are for normal difficulty

Every time you die you'll drop all your items and respawn at the nearest bed. You'll get the near death condition again just like when you woke up after the shipwreck. If you already had it then your near death condition will worsen by another -15.

The only way to remove the condition is to drink living water and each drink will reduce the penalty by 30. Basically one living water equals two deaths.

When you start the game you'll find one flask of living water in Ponce de Leon's grotto. There's only so many in the world so don't drink it right away.

Wait until you die a second time to get the maximum value out of it.

[Arima]

When leaving the ship, I grabbed the fishing pole and the leather backpack. Then I made 3 coconut flasks and let the rest of the brown coconuts rot. The rotten food is fish bait, and fish gives good stats when roasted (35 food, 12 water). Dried dates are a good early game food (59 food, 12 water), and date palm juice is a good alternative to clean water when you can't find water right away. I could only abide just so much coconut juice!

[Nitervolus]

I went to the corner of the beginning map were there is a box that i store things in.

[Lanthrudar]

Oh, and I am not sure if the leather bag is the best option since all clothing degrades, including the bags and things over time. More concerning is the medicine since people might not actually check the crafting area to see what resources they need for the various medicines available.

Experienced players of the genre will 'cheat' a bit to check what items they need in what critical order to get to next level items, or solid resources for survival but new players may not. The medicine may save them long enough, or cover a goof, until they get more of the mechanics down. :)

[Lanthrudar]

Nice guide. The part about needing a fire to light torches isn't valid currently. Not sure if the recent build changed it (I'm fairly new currently) but you can light torches now with just a fire starter in your inventory. That helps a lot.

Otherwise, great guide. Only other thing to ad is: 1) read the map closely! I lissed a number of resources because I didn't actually check what the actual icons meant... lol... 2) EXPLORE. Just don't get too far away from shelter, at minimum a place to sleep. I usually carry a green coconut with me and one piece of food, plus the portable bed if I roam far away, but I like the idea of mini-bases to rest up better.

[Kibbles71]

Also, don't assume you have to store everything in a chest. I put small things and a few larger things in chests. The rest is in separate piles outside by base.
Additionally, I've tried this so you don't have to but don't try to keep a cart for carrying items on your ship. It won't be there when you get to your destination. Including any items left in the cart. At least, that's what happened to me.
#11 on the above list is a great/helpful recommendation. As you fight harder and harder animals you'll find that your health will often get pretty low. As long as you stay relatively close to 90 available health (meaning some of your health cannot be revived without living water) then you should be ok. Focus on armor and stronger weapons. Practice using each weapon on something like a crab or chicken until you know how far away you have to be to hit it or to throw at your target.
This game is phenomenal in my book for lots to do, craft, explore, kill and just have fun with.

[AlexTheSkjegg]

As it stands the learning branch of perks ends up saving you a single perk point in the end. There are 19 survival tasks, so it only ever nets you a total of 3 points, two of which are used to purchase the skill in the first place. This does not matter so much on Normal or lower difficulties, but on Hard and Very Hard there are better choices to be made with the first three points.