The survival kit (how to scavenge/pack/survive efficiently for beginner)

Don’t let the looks fool you, underneath the cartoonish art style the game is a very realistic experience at core. As such, if you want to make it far down the river, you better have all the tools at hand to deal with most situations, that’s why beginners feel left out, especially as it can be a very unforgiving experience at times (anytime, actually). This guide is not meant to be the ultimate guide, because every player will have different priorities about their inventories, some will focus on repairs and upgrades for their raft, others on hunting or medicine and clothes for instance. There is no right or wrong, only a kinda-good or less-than-ideal approach to each situation. This guide is about understanding the core mechanics of the game so you can be better prepared to face any of them.

As of now it's pretty rough, as I am typing this guide, but, I'll add new section as they go, then to flesh it out and add some images over time.

Humble beginnings

First thing first, take advantage of camp Pinewood, the zone you begin in, to familiarise yourself with your inventory, by scavenging everything the zone has to offer:

• 1 charcoal (by the fire, vital for water filter)
  
• 1 sapling (by the lodge where you begin)
  
• 4 cat tails (2 by the puddle on the right where you begin, 2 after the chest)
  
• 1 chest (containing 4 objects, 1 jar, 1 water filter and 2 random survival objects)

Feel free to mess with your backpack at will (especially if you have stocked up Aesop from a previous life, more on that later), since time is ‘frozen’ on this location, and your stats won’t start bleeding until you get on your raft.

This starting inventory won’t get you anywhere, but you can grasp the basic survival potency of any object:

• Charcoal is a given, since you can found one piece at almost any campfire. As a result, it only serves one specific purpose (filtering water), which does limit its potency.
  
• The sapling is basically worthless alone but is crucial in creating tools and contraptions to kill or capture game. It’s your cat tail’s best bud, widely available during early game, but scarcely distributed and heavily guarded by foes at some point during mid game. Stock up wisely!
  
• The cat tail has the Bear Grylls label of quality written all over it. It serves so many purposes I’m surprised it’s not used to upgrade your raft as well. You can use it to craft dry tinders (firestarters), braid cords (used to craft anything, from tools to water filters, or contraptions), and if you happen to have a few of them in spare, you can even chew on them to gain +5 hunger. It’s your go-to survival plant, and you can’t go wrong by having some extras in inventory, so do yourself a favour.
  
• To call the jar your lifesaver would be an understatement, since you mainly use it to store liquids, from good, thirst-quenching water, to a variet-tea of decoctions (get it?), or even gas to fill the monster they call engine on your raft, should you choose to have one installed. Hoarding on those bad boys can be a good idea, especially early on where you get a lot of opportunities to fill them up. Keep them handy by having three of them in constant rotation, one used for anything you need for the time being (except for sumac bomb, please don’t do that, it should be a crime to waste a perfectly fine jar this way), one filled with clean water kept tight on your raft for emergency, and another in your inventory kept empty at most times, because you never know when you’ll stumble upon perfectly good (and free) clean water to fill it with.
  
• The water filter is for all of those times you won’t be able to get free clean water (rain, well or pump) when you need it the most, and they’re likely to happen a lot, especially in late game. The downside? The filter has limited use, allowing you to clean three jars of polluted water before vanishing away, and to craft one you’ll need two pieces of charcoal (easy peasy), two cat tails (ditto), and a rag, which isn’t only fairly uncommon, but also used to get other medical supplies that can save your bacon when you’re in trouble (splint, bandages). So be careful with this one, and in case of extreme emergency you can always drink polluted water, if you don’t mind the new ecosystem living inside of you.
  
• The 2 random items are mainly obtained to give you an edge in case something goes south, so you’re likely to have some medical supplies (splint, bandages, penicillin) or emergency food (jerky). If you just started the game, it’s also a clever way to learn how to craft the said objects, since you unlock the recipes by scavenging them (something that’ll soon prove obsolete as you’ll know by heart every important crafting combination, but still, pretty nice).

Once you’ve dug up nicely in your backpack, it’s time to fasten the straps and jump on your raft for a (rather tense) journey down the river.

Tug away (you’re on a raft, look at you you’re on a raft)

Now that you’re set and ready, familiarise yourself with your raft. Note that it is better to play with a gamepad during this phases, regardless of what your weapon of choice usually is. The raft has a radio control scheme (also known as ‘tank controls’), which means that even with the aerial camera, you control it like you would control a car in a race game. Think of it like MicroMachines V3 back in the days (for you old timers out there), or early Resident Evil titles: pushing the stick left or right makes your raft swivel in that direction, but it’s not tied to camera angle. Meaning that pushing the stick left will always make your raft face left, not matter what; if you are in a right corner for instance, the camera will then face the right side of the boat, so what appears to be up to you is actually on the left of the raft, you have to take this into account when you move around obstacles. Pushing the stick up gives you a slight acceleration, pushing it down allows you to ‘hold back’ (not stop, but decelerate quickly) and take on corners and dangerous terrain with a better margin of error.

By pressing ‘X’ (default on Xbox gamepad), you can have a boost, thrusting yourself in the direction you input with the stick. Be cautious with this one, more often than not, boosting imply dramatically crashing into the scenery if you don’t know how to use it. You can have three of them before your stamina (the little blue bar above Scout’s head) is depleted, then you have to wait until it fills up again. Boosting isn’t really what it appears to be, since it doesn’t give any significant edge in speed (you can boost upfront, but your raft has to be perfectly lined up with the current to gain a slight nudge, otherwise you just bump yourself and take the risk of losing your course), instead use it to avoid close obstacles in rapid waters, by dodging left or right. In case of imminent impact though, push the stick down and boost as hard you can, this will alleviate your speed, reducing any potential damage and allowing you to stay on your raft without getting wet or suffering a broken bone, and to keep control over the boat to avoid the pinball effect.

The best advice I could give you about rafting, beside spending a bit of time to familiarise yourself with the ‘feel’ of it, is to stay level-headed at all times. You will at times feel the need (for speeeeeeed) to go faster, or to go across the river against the current just for a piece of loot, it’s natural, just resist theses urges, you will be fine anyway. The best achievement you can get is to take yourself from point A to point B without sustaining any single damage, whether it be on you or your raft. If you happen to scrounge up some stuff or find a good spot along the way, good for you, but don’t put yourself in harm’s way just for it, 95% of the times it’s not worth it (the reminding 5% stand for the late late game, where you have to be either incredibly stupid or desperate enough to try anything). Another quick piece of advice: learn to read currents (the white lines on the surface of water), how to ride them, to escape them, but don't try to fight them, you'll just lose a lot of energy; and fix your gaze upon the horizon, just like you would when you drive a car. Don’t stare at your raft, you’ll end up trying to escape every obstacle coming at you, without having any idea of where to go, and eventually crashing onto a rock; by looking at the upper part of the screen, your brain will register any danger and course shifts, and you’ll have a better chance at deciding how to avoid danger. When you have to navigate through tricky parts, fixate the front of your raft (again, not the raft), don’t look at the obstacles (it may sound counter-intuitive, but when you focus on something your brain cares about it above anything else, meaning that everything in the peripheral vision gets rejected away, the moment you start focusing on an obstacle, you’ll just end up hugging it big time), and use boost wisely. Keep calm on row on, you’ll find out that if you don’t derp it by not giving it enough attention, rafting is actually a pretty exhilarating piece of the game.

The scavenging hunt (first two days)

So you just got to your first location without taking any single damage, yay! Now you only have to worry about not getting ripped to shreds by wolves or starve to death, this should be easy (not). The first thing you want to do once you set foot on land is to scout the place. Sure, you have enough inventory slots to take everything the place has to offer, but it won’t last, so you’d better start to get some good habits. Start by mapping the place, going in circles from the outside to the inside. You’re likely to meet zero opposition during your first days, but the idea behind spiral mapping is that it can help you get the hang of the place without alerting any predator. If you come across a wolf or a boar, easy, just circle back in the opposite direction, most of the times if you were careful enough you won’t be noticed (as opposed to rushing in the middle of a patch, alerting anyone in the way), leaving you free to explore and scavenge the other side of the map. Pinpointing predators, objects and points of interest is actually 80% of the work in exploration, by doing so you can lay traps and lure enemies into them, scavenge in peace, and in case you’re attacked and need to flee, you know your way back and/or the stuff you have to pick up along the way.

It can be tempting to snatch any item you see at first, but if you pace yourself, and learn to say ‘no’, you’ll get better at prioritising and rationalising your decisions under pressure. Since you just started the game, you’re pretty green and you shouldn’t have to worry about anything in particular (yet), which means it’s the best time to pack an optimal all-around bag. Of course, you have no control over what you’re going to stumble upon, so you’ll have to push your luck. This is what a good starting bag looks like:

• 1 or 2 stacks of cat tails
  
• 1 stack of dry tinders
  
• 1 stack of braided cords
  
• 1 stack of saplings
  
• 1 stack of charcoal
  
• 1 water filter
  
• 2 jars (1x clean water, 1x empty)
  
• 2 flints
  
• 3 mulberries

If by day 2, or even better, the sunset at day 1, you managed to collect everything on this list, you’re golden. You’ll likely have 1 or 2 free slots that you need to keep this way in order to avoid the constant inventory shuffling while you scavenge. So, where to find any of the items on this list? Pretty easy, except for the flints. Cat tails are found everywhere you can see puddles of water on the ground, so you’re bound to find a few of them anywhere you go. Dry tinders and braided cords are crafted from cat tails, so fire away. Saplings are pretty common at the beginning, you can find them in forests, camps, scrapyards and bait shacks. Charcoal may be the easiest item to find, since there’s one at almost any fireplace, so anytime you pass by one of these, remember to take a piece (don’t overdo it though, one stack is the most you should have on you at all times). Unless you did something horribly wrong with your water, your debuting water filter should still be holding a few uses left. Jars are a bit tricky, you will find them in chests and cars, so be on the lookout for churches and scrapyards, giving you the best shots to find one. You still can make it only with your starting jar, but the added convenience of a second one means that you can spend a day rafting down the river without worrying about water. Flints are man-made items (how fitting in a post-societal America) typically found in chests and car trunks, so look out for the locations giving you the best odds: scrapyards, churches, stores (hardware or gas stations), and sometimes camps. Finally, Mulberries seem to be found in the same areas than Saplings, so you shouldn’t encounter too much trouble looking for some. Mulberries are great for snacking, so feel free to eat a few of them anytime you need a boost in hunger and thirst, but try to keep a few of them handy for the long haul (more on that later).

If you have paid attention this far, you should have a clear roadmap of you first day in mind, and it should go something like this: Depart from Camp Pinewood – Scavenging in forest – Scavenging in church or scrapyard – Inventorying and sleeping in camp or bait shop. If you can’t find any of these places on your way, congratulations on being the unluckiest person on Earth, there’s a pack of black cats that’d like to have a speak with you. If you came across these locations but had no luck in finding all the aforementioned items, no biggie, the game is pretty sweet on you so far and you can rinse & repeat during day two without fearing for too much confrontation. So let’s get to work!

On when to say no (or give your best stuff to Aesop)

At this point, you must be thinking I’m a madman because I have nothing to eat or so little to drink. Well, that’s my style, I like to live on the edge, Bro. Seriously though, you shouldn’t worry too much about hunger and thirst on your first day, here’s why: you get to start with full meters, a jar of water that should help you get through the first day, and there’s plenty of snacking options on the way. Until you can have proper meals made of rabbit/boar/wolf meat, you’ll have to resort to snacking, which be as convenient, except that it can take way more space in your inventory. Since you don’t have many slots left, it’s a good time as any to begin organising the several means of storage you have.

You proceed by organising your stuff into three separate categories:

1. The vital stuff (aka ‘I need it now’) and the stacks of craft material: these ones stay in your backpack, for obvious reasons, as you’re likely to need them at any time through the quick inventory (quick inventory only includes items on your bag, not Aesop’s bag), or you are constantly picking them up. This includes snacking food, such as grubs, night crawlers, yuccas, dandelions, mulberries, jerkies (given in order of priority, save your jerkies for emergencies only), jars and water, contraptions, and cat tails, saplings, charcoal, cords, tinder. I once tried to give all my crafting stuff to Aesop, since he’s always with me and he proves convenient when you want to craft something in the spot, but that means you have to always be shuffling items between your inventory and his. It’s more time-wasting than anything, so don’t bother.
   
2. Instead, do give Aesop all your medical supplies, and your water filter if you have one. I would normally not trust a shady dog with sunglasses on that doesn’t appear to need any food whatsoever, but extreme situations need extreme measures. You may already know this by now, but when you die, the content in Aesop’s bag is carried over to your next play through. Which means you want to give him rags, bandages, penicillin or stitching kits, or event flints and water filters, so you can start over with a leg up the competition in case something goes terribly wrong, terribly fast. The other thing to keep in mind is that you don’t need these items for an express use via quick inventory (except for maybe bandages and splints), but you can technically use them whenever you want, you just have to go through your full inventory. Now, when you are attacked by a boar, get broken bones and start limping around, you’re thinking maybe you’ll want a splint ready to go. No. When attacked, your first preoccupation should be to flee danger, not to cure yourself, only to be left exposed at another attack. So take a deep breath, try to avoid any incoming danger until you find a safe spot, then heal yourself. Two things you have to keep in mind here: curing afflictions on the spot is inefficient, and Aesop is possibly the best Saint-Bernard you could ever dream of, given the circumstances, so give him all the stuff you want to have handy at any moment, but don’t need to use in urgent situations.
   
3. Finally, the raft is where all your high-value gear belongs for the long haul, so anything you don’t need to craft on locations, such as raft parts, frames, schematics, lumber, nuts & bolts, spare water filters, should be here. Later in the game, once you get comfortable, you’ll also want some emergency supplies in there too, so you know you can’t accidentally use them.

By organising everything you have into three separate storages, this should give you about 6 free slots in your bag you can use to pick up snacks. To help you determine what is snack and what isn’t, give yourself an ultimatum: anything extra in your backpack has to be gone by the next docking, so you can have again a handful of free slots for scavenging. There’s a bunch of dandelions waiting for me in that puddle over there. Sure I can take them, but I’ll have to eat them all before exploring another location. Ooooh, sweet, an aloe plant! Do you plan on stepping onto fire in the next ten minutes? If so, please help yourself, if not don’t pick it up, you have other priorities as of now. The only exception you should make is for devil’s trumpets, since the more you have, the more you can make tainted baits and turn into a ravenous, zany, murderous psychopath killing anything in sight. So go team devil’s trumpet, Nature’s best psycho killer factory. So use your rationalised thinking (except for the killing part maybe, but you know best) and take what you really need right now (i.e. now or in 10 minutes’ tops). There is no point in hoarding up a ton of splints unless you’re Sam Jackson in Unbreakable.

Note that this really should be your early game state of mind. Sure, you’ll sometimes step on bugs and think “why didn’t I take that aloe up the river?”, and sure, it can be frustrating, but not as frustrating as having to constantly organise your inventory because 5 of your slots are taken by meh stuff that you think will be handy should the situation arise. If not, you’ve just rambled on with some extra weight for nothing. Since you can’t afford to predict what will happen during early game (mainly because of the limited room in your inventory), the best thing to do is to react properly to any situation. If you have broken bones and no splint, for instance, you can either be lucky and find one in the next location (given you know where to look for it, or anything to craft it), or just be careful and wait it out. My point is you’ll have plenty of time later in the game to pack a bag full with food and medical supplies, right now your only concern should be what are you going to do in the next couple minutes.

[Reianor]

What you really want to store on the dog are the crafting supplies, NOT meds or water filter.
Crafing checks dog's inventory, most parts of the game don't, and crafting supplies are the ones you want to "pass on" the most. Especially saplings.
Give me enough saplings and I'll move the world.

[Bad Aim Bandit]

I'm playing this game again. This will be very helpful!

[Mudtowner]

Overall a good guide. Thank you!

Slightly disagree on which controls work better for rafting, but whatever..

[Ye Olde Foxeh]

The lastest patch supposed to prolong the calmer times on the beginning. I literally met a boar at broad daylight in the FIRST place I went. GJ...BTW no, it is not a realistic game, the same huge problem is here: the hunger, thirst and sleep meters go down extremely fast. They should have removed half of all the items (and enemies!) and make those meters go half as fast down. It's like Don't Starve again, constantly have to feed the character like some kind of maniac... losing the fun of exploration to "OMG I'm starving again"...

[Axlfire]

the only thing totally unexpected was the thing that the dog's inventory content will be on the next game, the rest of the guide just confirmed what i was already thinking could be a great option, thanks for that.

[Bani-chan]

Thanks for this great starting guide. I was feeling a bit overwhelmed, but this definitely helps!

[Tolkien]

Toma... With all due respect, your criticism is ridiculous. OBVIOUSLY choosing to start a new game starts A NEW GAME i.e. a complete fresh start. You'd have to be a doughnut to not understand or expect this since it's a common feature in most games.

I found this to be a great guide for a noob like me so cheers muchly for taking the time to write it up :D

[Toma]

Like every frikken other person talking about this game, they make sure to mention that the dog can carry items after you die,and tell you that you should definately do that, but completely neglect to mention that if you start a new game without dying, YOU LOSE EVERYTHING!

Why does no one mention this? If a person wants the best start, they would OBVIOUSLY gather all all the raft upgrades. Then, after the dog's inventory is full, a reasonable person would want to start a new game. These useless guides and comments made sure that I lost 10 hours of playtime gathering the raft materials for upgrades.

[Healthful Zgr]

do you know how to use quick slots ?

[Noodles.TTV]

I am too lazy to see if anyone has mentioned, or if you even plan to update this, but you can craft directly from the dogs pack now :P