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archaegeo

The "Things I Wish I Had Known Sooner" thread....(whats yours)?

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(Lets try to keep this to things that actually help people play the game, and not "wish i had known not to buy an EA game" type posts.  Ill try to keep the list updated with additions.)

This is meant to be a list of things the game doesnt tell you but that is very helpful to know.

  • Get water to drink by hitting X and lmb on grassy area and do a short minigame, you will get about 60 units.  If you use a shovel to do the minigame you can get about 600 units.  These cant be used to fill waterskins
  • You can use a grapple to get flotsam rather than jumping into the water.
  • Fire arrows do amazing damage to most critters and pc and set things on fire, including oil globules (Greatly nerfed but still useful)
  • Bees give up chasing you if you jump in water.
  • A level 2 pig is a different level of difficulty compared to a level 2 bear. 
  • You can respec 1x/level for free by hitting the respec icon above your XP bar when you hit I.
  • Respec potions are sold at freeport for 250g
  • When you have the map out, holding left-ctrl turns the compass into a poor mans spyglass and camera
  • You can search for items in the skill list, crafting search field, to find the item and what skill / station it uses (works for almost all items)
  • There are more attacks than LMB and RMB, and some give combo bonuses.
  • Starting in tundra = death due to cold if nothing else, dont go there till you have furs or can take the dying.
  • Putting food on your hotbar in same order as the vitamins lets you keep track of what food you need for the Equilibrium bonus
  • Eating in this ratio keeps vitamins balanced: 5 vege / 1 meat / 5 fruit / 1  fish (assuming not prime or cooked meals)
  • A sloop with a single medium speed sail placed far back position will let you solo sail it without moving from wheel position. (still not as efficient as having a PC or AI crew member)
  • You can build platforms even on sloops, and other ships, to let you place forward facing cannons (making it a glass cannon boat).
  • You can sort your inventory by weight, ascending or descending
  • Hitting T while moused over an item in inventory/container will transfer all of it.
  • Hitting O while moused over an item in inventory/container will drop all of it.
  • Build with defenses in mind, AI NPC's and pets will defend your area with cannons, weapons, or themselves.
  • Not all islands have all materials, its intentional, but can be brutal aka Tundra where fiber is missing or very rare (modified some to make tundra easier)
  • Different biomes have different materials, i.e. Sap is found in temperate regions.
  • You can only equip one back item at a time (bow/spear/shovel/etc)
  • Metal Tools from Advanced Tools should be first priority, you can build a smithy on a raft to make them.
  • Holding H without a tool out shows you info about the world and any buffs/debuffs
  • Holding H with a tool out shows what can be gotten with that too from the current thing you are aiming at.
  • Freeport decay rate is super high, it is not a "safe" place to leave your ships overnight.  This is intentional.
  • Blueprints with numbers in upper left like 24x means you can use it 24 times.
  • You can use a shovel to dig for potatoes pretty much anywhere there is grass and potatoes are a vitamin A food. I found keeping vitamin A in check to be super frustrating until I knew this.
  • Also taking all three vitamin decay skills and pumping fortitude to at least 20 if not 30 changes vitamin management from a time consuming PIA to extremely manageable.
  • When a blueprint says 2x or 3x of a mat it means you need 2 or 3 different kinds of that mat category.
  • Luring wolves and lions into the water makes them easy to kill.
  • Levels don´t mean that much. A level 30 character still dies really quickly to a level 1 predator.
  • You can cut up your own corpse for free skins and meat.
  • Water barrels fill with rain even if you don't see rain.  Open the lid to collect it, close the lid to stop it depleting. (Same for reservoirs) 
  • You can prone to deplete vitals slower / recover stamina faster
  • Your ship gets slower when it gets heavier, weight sails combat this.  (There are 3 types of sails, speed, handling and weight)
  • Don't build too close to water as you can get sieged by ship cannons
  • Pressing the " ` " key give access to commands. Type "gamma 4"  to raise brightness and make night time nicer, type "gamma 2"  to lower it in the morning. (or use gamma slider)
  • Ride bears and right click to farm fiber. You can get about 3k fiber in like 10 minutes with one. (Elephants for wood, etc, if needing mass materials, tames help)
  • You can whistle T at your boat to get the ladders down and Y to roll them back up.
  • The transfer all inventory arrow that's in top right and top left when accessing an object with storage. 
  • Giant whale tails are a surface only animation that slap the ever loving hell out of your ship. Serious damage.
  • To get new players into your Company, have them spawn at a Freeport that is open, you die and set that Freeport as your home region, invite them to Company, then both die and respawn at your base beds
  • When you craft an item from a blueprint, it will tell you how many times it can be upgraded and then show how much gold and mats required for each upgrade
  • Ships have robust customization, from where the sails go to being able to build walls and platforms on them to mount cannons in positions they normally wouldnt go.
  • A sloop can be configured to sail solo easily by putting a medium mast in the aft most position and the wheel right behind it.  Then you just let go of wheel, adjust sails, regrab wheel, no movement.
  • Instead of spamming left mouse button on a tree to hopefully get wood...use left and right mouse button one after another to use your magic punch and get more resources
  • When anchored, NPC crew will do repairs if removed from sail/cannon and set to neutral and not follow (it looks like they are sweeping the deck)
  • In the Captaincy tree there is a ship storage chest that NPC's will use to conduct repairs, along with a Mess Food Locker that they will eat from
  • With a NPC on sails, Z is full stop, SPACEBAR is full go, LEFTSHIFT-A and LEFTSHIFT-D rotates sails.
  • Turning General Shadows to Low removes weather Fog (not fog of war)
  • When on the wheel of a ship, hit X to drop anchor and close sails at same time if you see the light grey anchor symbol on right indicating its shallow enough
  • You can make folders in your inventory and storage chests.
  • Double Tapping M only takes out the compass,  Holding M only takes out the map,  Pressing M Once takes out both the Compass and Map
  • When placing items on a ship they look different than using them for a building.
  • When placing any item, hit T to see if it has different functions (ie a wall is a doorway and a railing and a halfwall, etc)
  • Where you place the Wheel for your ship becomes its pivot point.
  • Crew Storage Boxes do not have a maximum capacity will stack every resource up to 500,000.  Use this to hold all of your harvestables instead of large boxes.  These guys only hold harvestable material and gold.
  • Shift-Drag on any stacked items only drags half of them,  Shift double Click retrieves 5 instead of 1.
  • Craft wall hooks. Attach them to any surface on land, put torches/lanterns there. Craft and put somewhere a lever. Set the same pin code to lever and hooks. Now lever control all light on hooks with same pin code
  • You can put skulls on wall hooks.
  • If you screw up the rifle mini loading game just drew your one handed weapon and it will cancel the load. You don't lose ammo.

List your TIWIHKS items and Ill add em to the list.

Edited by archaegeo
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  • You can use a shovel to dig for potatoes pretty much anywhere there is grass and potatoes are a vitamin A food. I found keeping vitamin A in check to be super frustrating until I knew this.
  • Also taking all three vitamin decay skills and pumping fortitude to at least 20 if not 30 changes vitamin management from a time consuming PIA to extremely manageable.
  • When a blueprint says 2x or 3x of a mat it means you need 2 or 3 different kinds of that mat category.
  • Thanks 1

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  • Luring wolves and lions into the water makes them easy to kill.
  • Levels don´t mean that much. A level 30 character still dies really quickly to a level 1 predator.
  • You can cut up your own corpse for free skins and meat.

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Water barrels fill with rain even if you don't see rain.  Open the lid to collect it, close the lid to stop it depleting.  I haven't seen a Barrel fill when on a Raft though.

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  • You can prone to deplete vitals slower / recover stamina faster
  • Your ship gets slower when it gets heavier, weight sails combat this
  • Don't build too close to water as you can get sieged by ship cannons

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Pressing the " ` " key give access to commands.

type "gamma 4"  to raise brightness and make night time nicer, 

type "gamma 2"  to lower it in the morning.

 

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You can use a grapple to get flotsam rather than jumping into the water.

Fire arrows do amazing damage to most critters and pc and set things on fire, including oil globules.

 

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One note for new players on PVP: Stone is King.

Forget NPC defenders, setting up mounted guns, taming wolves, or such.    Just build a base out of stone that's not easy to target from the water and is enclosed on top, preferably put it against a large rock/cliff.    Then surround it with behemoth gates which also count as stone.

This is not completely impregnable, but it's -very very hard- to break through.    Unless you seriously anger someone who's willing to grind and use a ton of mats to assault you, your base is safe (except from insiding, careful on recruitment).     The only real danger is a current exploit or hack (not sure which) which some tribes are using to shoot sleeping players through walls.

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If you are using a keyboard with a different layout than "QWERTY" and rebound your keys to move your character, it will erase the keybinding to control your ship.

Since the game doesn't allow you to have multiple actions bound to the same key (like it was on the default settings), you will need to have 2 sets of movement keys with one being specific to your character and one for your ship (which is very much not ideal).

Suggestion : the "shift-alt" shortcut cycle through your keyboard layouts, so I would suggest that when you launch the game you switch your keyboard to QWERTY

Edited by Nhaga

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  • In the current build the aggro radius on the Damned for sloops is WAYYY smaller than you expect, like, under 60ft, you have to almost run into them to get aggro.

Our company was on the verge of giving up following their introduction; remembering vividly the Night of Blood when they were introduced. How they would relentlessly chase stuff the moment they entered line of sight, how they'd mercilessly bombard the shore, and how they sank like 95% of all ships in the game in the space of 24 hours.

 

We were all shell-shocked survivors of Wolf 359, turns out we're now in the Voyager timeline and they've been reduced to total pussies.

Edited by RyuujinZERO

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You can whistle T at your boat to get the ladders down and Y to roll them back up.

Edited by Caveat
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The transfer all inventory arrow that's in top right and top left when accessing an object with storage. 

Giant whale tails are a surface only animation that slap the ever loving hell out of your ship. (Serious damage.) 

Yeti are NOT friendly. 

Grappling hook OP. Your walls are meaningless. 

Mortar OP. Your ship is deleted. 

Ranged OP. You wasted all those melee skill points. 

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8 hours ago, LIttlePatience said:
  • Luring wolves and lions into the water makes them easy to kill.

I think this is the most useful tip of them all!  Stay near the coast and if anything attacks you, get into the sea as fast as possible.  They'll swim out after you, and you can turn around, run backwards to kite them, and get easy head shots!  Once you're a bit more settled, hide armor will make you a bit more robust, and with Plate you can just immediately just turn and start putting arrows in their head, even if they get a couple attacks on you.  Even in plate, try to avoid packs of wolves!

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1 hour ago, TheSzerdi said:

Ranged OP. You wasted all those melee skill points. 

Especially Flintlocks.  I wondered if they were worth it and was told they were.  I had a pistol in each hand and when I one-shotted a lvl 26 Croc in the head I was very impressed indeed!  I haven't bothered with melee skills yet, as mobs are dead long before they get to me, with a bit of kiting.

In some ways Fire Arrows are possibly even better.  It's great seeing mobs burn and the fire is catching to other mobs which can be both good... and very bad.  😄

Edited by Coggage

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3 hours ago, Domino said:

I think this is the most useful tip of them all!  Stay near the coast and if anything attacks you, get into the sea as fast as possible.  They'll swim out after you, and you can turn around, run backwards to kite them, and get easy head shots!  Once you're a bit more settled, hide armor will make you a bit more robust, and with Plate you can just immediately just turn and start putting arrows in their head, even if they get a couple attacks on you.  Even in plate, try to avoid packs of wolves!

100% not true.  We use plate, and if we are not using pistols, the wolves and lions are a major pain.  There also seems to be little difference in power of a level 2 vs a level 56.  They kill with about the same amount of bites.  Anyway, while the tip was true...yes the water is good for killing wolves and lions, the issue is that you can't hide by the shore all the time.  Other than stone, there usually isn't anything there.  Most of the resources you need, on our island, are inland, in valleys that funnel these predators to you.  You can stand on a large rock, look around with the spyglass, see no lions or wolves, or see them in the distance, then get down, mine the rock, and just as you finish, you turn to see the face of a lion or wolf.  If you are lucky, you can get your boy and arrow, or other weapons up to shoot.  I have learned that when they are charging, there is a point where you think you have time to shoot, but you don't.  The wolf/lion hits you are the same time as you are shooting, and it makes you shot miss.  Now you are screwed.  You have to take the next hit, often, so that you can line up on the bounce back because if you rush the shot, you miss again as their hit makes you turn slightly just as you are shooting, so you miss again.  So what makes this whole thing so frustrating is that they heal every time they hit you.  That's absurd and needs to be removed.  This whole aspect of the game is draining the fun.  I have talked to many people about this, in and out of the game, and they agree that the predators, and the sheer amount of Alphas ruins the game for them.  As one of my friends stated...if he wanted to do this, he would just stick with ARK, because at least those creatures are more diverse and interesting.  In short, he didn't come to this game to have his focus be on wolves, lions, tigers, crocodiles, etc...

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New tip:

To get new players into your Company, have them spawn at a Freeport that is open, you die and set that freeport as your home region, invite them to Company, then both die and respawn at your base beds.

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