Surviving your first week of Survival Mode

I guess I'm hardly the gamer the majority of the forum posters are. They are talking about buggy rocket launchers and starship upgrades.

I'm just trying not to starve to death.

So, I've learned a few things that might help new players (like me) get started in survival. I welcome ideas and criticism from the veterans. I could learn a lot from you.

First, you need to learn to feed yourself. As in, the game says you're starving, you have a can of food in your inventory and you can't for the Love of Grox figure out how to eat! Press 'i' to open your inventory interface, drag a food item (anything raw has to be cooked) up to your toolbar, select it, and then left or right-click on your toon to 'use' the food.

Okay! We're past the starving, drooling imbecile stage. On to actually getting food. You need to forage around a bit. In fact, you should start from the place you beamed down to, pick a direction and start going. Along the way, harvest every bush or foody-looking plant using your matter-manipulator that you find, and some trees. With the food plants, don't just denude the bushes of their fruit, but take the bush too. It yields a seed or sapling you can plant. If you keep going, you will eventually come back around to where you started. Along the way you will probably find a campsite with a (hopefully) friendly NPC and, most importantly, a campfire. Press 'e' while hovering your mouse over the fire and cook anything edible that you have. Remember this place. You will want to come back to it.

Note that you are going to have to do some fighting. I'm not all that good at it. I've learned that if you find and sleep in a bed or tent, your hit points replenish. There is also a bandage you can make in the crafting system with harvested vines that heals a little bit. Good luck! Another tip is to harvest some dirt and use it to build 'stairs' so you can get up or down any steep cliff faces you come across.

By the way: I suggest you DON'T loot every abandoned building and chest you find the first time through. You're gonna die, and when you do all the stuff you are carrying drops and you have to go back and find it. I'm not sure if loose items persist, so you might even lose it. One thing you should keep is any projectile weapon you find: throwing stones, spears, a bow (if you're super lucky). It will help you get a jump on the starvation problem. Also, if you think you are going to die, beam up to your ship (on the right-side toolbar, an icon that looks like a circle with an up arrow in it). You don't want to lose your seeds. Better to keep them on board the starship until you get around to using them.

Okay, so now you've collected some seeds, some wood, maybe a few tools. Good. You need to find a base of operations. If its not too far from the place where you beam down to, I recommend setting up at the campsite you found. Otherwise make your own base near your spawn point. Campfires are easy to make, but beds take a little more effort... and building a structure takes time. Using the crafting system, build yourself the suite of starter crafting tables, but you especially will want a Foraging Table. With it you can make a hoe, and spears. For some of these you need to make logs into boards first (or planks or something similarly named). Use your matter manipulator to make a flat spot, not too big at first - maybe a dozen blocks, and then use the hoe to till the soil. Put your food seeds (only the ones you can actually make into food) in your toolbar and then 'use' them on the soil to plant them. Some things you can't eat. For example, I have lots of wheat and wheat seeds, but I can't make any food with it. I haven't figured out how to get recipes. Maybe it has something to do with that structure I'm supposed to fix?

Now, the good news is you have food for the future. The bad news is, you are probably out of food and gonna die before it grows to maturity. The solution: hunting. That's what those throwing stones, spears, and other projectile weapons do for you. For some reason, smashing things with your sword destroys the meat. But, if you kill a beast (and especially birds) with a projectile weapon it drops raw steak or chicken. Some things don't drop meat, but you will quickly figure out what is tasty and what isn't. Around two bits of meat per day is what you'll need, and you will probably spend a lot of your time hunting just to survive. Don't forget, you have to cook your food - thus the importance of campfires.

At this point, you can survive. Barely, but you can. What you need to do is nurture and expand your garden until it is supporting you. Once you don't have to spend time looking for food, you can think about heading into the caves to find those quest-related things that I won't talk about. The idea was to keep from starving.

Good Luck and Have Fun!

 

One thing to add -- if you keep your "fed" meter full, you will recover hit points. I didn't know this for the longest time.

 

(note: im old fashioned, mobs=mobiles=monsters)


Lost items that drop on player death persist in the world, according to the notes.
One thing to note is that you can take campfires with you as placeable furniture, from there you can cook simple foods to keep them longer or fill up the hunger bar, which is effective for potatos and rice.

The player might ask himself, "well why dont I stock up on rice?" You can, but learning the recipies on how to cook can come with better foods, some with buffs that the player may find useful for that new planet or tough boss. You'll come across that when you make the kitchen counter.

Hunting- you can get steak and monster items using non hunting weapons, but the drop rate is lower than if you do. hunting spears do enough damage to one shot the mobs on your first planet, but the bow and arrow is more cost effective(plus trains you in a more viable range combat than throwing weapons)
fighting- get to know your secondary attack(or shield) well, mobs get momentarily stunned when attacked and keeping an offensive is a good way to prevent getting attacked yourself. Keep an eye on how mobs attack too, understanding it can make exploiting openings easier and fights against more than one enemy easier.

Watch out for fights with multiple enemies, or near a pit you haven't checked. Fall damage can easily kill you, but not the mobs.

 

Also, sleeping in a bed or tent reduces the rate at which you get hungry.

 

Nice! Thanks for added info. I saw somewhere a recommendation to live on your ship vs the planet surface since some creatures can teleport through walls. I haven't (in the two starting playthroughs I did) experienced teleporting creatures on the starter world, although I've heard there are such things on moons.

Living on the ship certainly isn't a bad idea, although it might be a pain to have to travel to your planetside base of operations every time you beam down.

 

As for the cooking ingredients you can't seem to use yet, you can later upgrade your Inventor's table, which will allow you to craft a kitchen counter.

Another handy tip if you're worried about losing your stuff when you die early on; build your homestead at your teleport site. Then, if you're exploring the surface and need to deposit some goodies, or your health is low, you can just teleport to your ship and then teleport back down and be right in your house. I usually eventually either live on my ship or set up an actual teleporter wherever I eventually settle permanently, but this early on your ship doesn't have enough room for all the crafting tables, plus the farm, you'll need to make!

 

I'd like to point out you do start with 4 cans of food in your ship locker, and the cans of food do fill up most of your hunger bar from the starving warning beep. And to top it off, once get to the outpost, you can buy more of them for pretty cheap 150-200 pixels per(not looking at cost currently) from the infinity express along with some other food items. Random merchants among the stars also sell food on occasion. If you don't want to start building on a lush planet, those cans of food can easily be enough to clear the mine and activate the gate. Though if have to dig to the core you might want to get some supplemental food as you go.

Though not everyone wants to live off of whatever is in those cans, they do make a nice quick solution once get access to the outpost.

 

Here are my 2-cents of things that would've made my earlier gameplay much easier.

1. You can quickly consume food by click on the food with your inventory open, then anywhere outside of your inventory panel. You can quickly plant seeds/place blocks and furnitures by click them then click on the place you want to place them while the inventory panel is still open. This frees up your quickbar for the more frequently use stuff.

2. You can stop mass crafting anytime by closing the crafting window, so if you wanna craft, say, 100-300 torches, but you have material for over 5000 of them, just click the left arrow (to go from 1 down to the maximum number), begin crafting, the press [ C ] or whatever again when you have enough or have got bored. I usually craft wooden steps or torches during the 10-20 seconds of flying time between planets

3. Carry flags with you, they create additional teleport points, kinda like save point, you can teleport to your saved teleport points even if your half a galaxy away.

4. Some friendly NPC are still hittable, like those frogman in swamps, you might wanna be careful not to swing weapons around them.

5. Keep non-perishable stack-able food on you, uncooked, like wheat, rice, sugar, etc. Eat the least fresh cooked food first, don't carry too big a batch of cooked food, it's better only a bit of cooked food and mostly uncooked ingredients, then cook the ingredient as needs, since cooking something reset its freshness timer.

6. Keep your health topped off, you won't wanna get attacked/fall into lava/fall off a cliff with only half the hp bar.

7. If you dismiss a crew member, they are gone forever || Talk to them once to get them to follow you (even off the the ship), talk to them again to tell them to stay on the ship. (oh how I miss you, my Hytotl tailor)

 

Ok, so how the hell do I upgrade the crafting tables? Seriously, do I have to defeat dreadwing?

 

open a table's UI and mouse over the 'UPGRADE' button, a window will popup displaying what is required.

Defeating Dredwing allows you to trade 3 diamonds to the bartender at the Beak Easy for a golden doubloon that you can use to recruit one of the penguin mercenaries loitering about the bar. It's possible to take down Dreadwing in tungsten armor with hunting spears but, is it worth it? YMMV.

 

I now know that I am either blind or an idiot, possibly both. Thanks

 

I learned that you have to take care what you eat. Food spoils in a day or three and will slowly poison you to death. One way to live through it is to get into bed. Your health increases as fast as the poison decreases it. (or pretty close)

I didn't pay attention to it, but it may be that you can increase your food bar by eating spoiled food, and then sleep off the ill effects. I'm not sure why you would want to do that though.

By the way, where do I get one of those things you need to make a fridge? I didn't see any for sale at the outpost.

 

It drops from (certain?) monsters. But you can also buy special Fluffalo at outpost. You can find their eggs at the Terramart. Read fluffalo eggs description - one of them yeilds static cell every time it is harvested. Just put eggs in some safe place (build some shelter for your fluffalo), press E when it starts to wiggle to crack it. Your Fluffalo will then grow and after a while it can be harvested with E to get the cell. Egg costs 2500 pixels though, which early in game is pretty much for inexperienced player. Also, Terramart is AFAIK closed until you do first mission (erichius mining facility) or sth...

Edit: just to make it clear - Fluffalo can be harvested multiple times, you only need one if you are patient

 

For static cells: use a hunting bow or hunting spears (spears are extremely effective) to hunt the following cast of characters:

Click an image to jump to the creatures wiki page

I lucked out and have Voltips living in the caves of the first subterranean layer immediately beneath the surface on my starter planet. I wouldn't be surprised if every starter planet has at least of one these guys.

 

Haven't seen any of those yet. It is a strange world where assassinating animals yields refrigeration technology.

 

well they are technical devices, so maybe thats involved in their cooling parts.