There’s definitely some. But not a huge percentage.
Was feeling pretty good about myself with my acorn armor and pebble axe, so while I was looking for the explosion at the oak tree, when I came across an orb weaver, I decided to test my mettle. I came up wanting. When it became clear I was hopelessly overmatched I tried sprinting away, zigzagging to avoid the web shots. In the end I was, and I quote, “ripped apart.” I was honestly disappointed at how not-scary it was. Oh well; I don’t need fear to be engaged since I’m mostly into the building aspect anyway. (I will say that the crow makes me very uneasy.)
Speaking of building, I have my own little walled off area with a couple doors, workbench, lean to, cooking pit, and a couple lamps. I don’t love how floors / ceilings are as yet unavailable. I feel like basic building components should be available from the beginning. Then again, if I restarted and raced to where I am now, pretty sure I could regain all this progress by day 2. (It’s been a whole bunch of days in my game, maybe even a couple of weeks.)
I’ve gotten somewhat of a handle on food and water, generally waking up at 6 and being fully fed and watered by 7, ready to tackle the day with an extra roast packed away in my inventory. That’s typically how I leave the game when I save.
At this point, you’re still in the tutorial. That starting tent should do until you progress a bit more. Don’t wait too long to seek out the explosion. It might help to climb something tall so you can get a better view.
The grass palisades… I don’t think they serve much purpose yet. They’ll keep out the ants, but at this point as long as you aren’t wearing acorn armor, or going into anthills, red ants should be neutral.
~Max
Just because it’s something that took my group days to figure out - have you tried blocking?
I’ve found that it’s pretty hard to block spider attacks. Not for full blocks, at least. There’s no way I could kill an orb or wolf spider with a pebble spear. Maybe if I throw a whole bunch of spears I can kill a single baby. But there are some people who can get the timing down for blocks.
~Max
Yep! Fortunately I happened to notice the tooltip that came up the first time I equipped a weapon that said “Use LT to block”, so I immediately started blocking in my very first fight and have been using it ever since.
Works great against the weak dudes like ants, but was predictably feeble against the orb-weaver. I don’t even have a shield anyway, so I’m just blocking with the axe itself. I am assuming shield blocking is more effective than blocking with your weapon, but I have not yet found the creature I need to kill to make a shield.
I did just now finish exploring the oak tree lab. I bought weapon upgrades, building upgrades (floors and ceilings), food upgrades, and collected all three quests you get at the start. I am dangerously close to firing up creative mode to design my “perfect” base, but I’m trying to resist the urge until I get further along in the story. I haven’t done enough to even know where I would want to build it yet.
I’m kind of stuck. Food and water is a non-issue, I have a reasonably safe home, and I have a bunch of objectives to fulfill. But I feel like I’ve plateaued with my pebble axe and ant armor, and I don’t know what weapons and armor I should be striving for to get to the next level.
One soldier ant (or two worker ants together) is basically the baddest thing I can kill. A stink bug can easily take me down, as can a ladybug or spider.
It seems like either I’m not high enough level to make better gear, or I’m not strong enough to kill the things required to craft the better gear. If it’s a level issue, I do not currently know how to increase my level. Can anyone nudge me in the right direction before I start wading into the wiki and spoiling myself?
I ended up dropping the difficulty level because of that issue, so I’m not sure how much help I’ll be. I will note that ant armor isn’t very protective, though. Its main features are that soldier ants won’t aggro when you’re fully kitted in it, and each piece lets you carry an extra grass plank/weed stalk.
Head towards the oak tree.
Edit: nm I see you did that. Have you crafted the wooden armor? I think acorn?
Oh shit, sorry, I’m wearing acorn armor, not ant armor. I thought this comment seemed weird since ants seem to find me delicious:
Is melee viable in this game? Do you have to use a bow to make any real progress? I have a fairly strong preference for melee, but range isn’t a dealbreaker.
EDIT: Wait, I have an actual idea now. One of the issues with the stink bug is that there’s a line of ants in between me and it. As you might imagine, with my acorn armor it’s kind of tough to get to the stink bug unscathed. Now I’m thinking if I craft ant armor, I can pass through unharmed. And then if I can craft a range weapon, I would bet a dollar I could range down the stink bug by kiting it. Maybe that’ll help level me by giving me more parts to research, allowing me to make a better weapon and switch back to melee. Certainly worth a try.
Tier 1 bow is terribly low damage. It’s useful for downing gnats and such, but it’s hopeless for killing things like stink bugs or orb weavers unless you are super cheesy. Camp somewhere they can’t reach and pepper them. Even then you’ll go through entire bundles of ammunition, and there’s a decent chance at some point the critter will get far enough away from you for damage to reset.
Shield and melee weapon with the correct damage type (read bug descriptions) is the only way to kill anything in a reasonable amount of time. I think at regular difficulty you’re supposed to have to use the various smoothies and such for buffs before fighting larger things.
Oof, thanks very much for that tip. Just saved me a very frustrating experiment.
Different tact: By the oak tree, and a couple other places, I’m seeing burrowing things that I’m unable to interact with. I’m assuming if I make a shovel and dig on them, that’ll make them surface so I can kill them? Haven’t bothered trying yet because that seems awkward as hell.
You are correct about the procedure, but it’s actually really easy.
Excellent. That’s something I can actually do.
Also, I’ll probably make a bow just to harvest more gnats. Those are a pain in the ass to get with melee weapons.
Okay, significant progress in terms of seeing a path forward.
So I made a red ant club (tier 2 weapon, finally!) and a shovel and headed out toward the oak tree looking for grubs so I could make a shield. Unfortunately I got jumped by an orb weaver (possibly jr, not sure…) and got murdered most foul. Even worse, I had initially tried to run away and ended up going in a bad direction, deeper into spider country before I crumpled.
When I tried to go back for my backpack, I kept running across an orb weaver JR, which I am almost strong enough to kill. Died like 5 times trying to kill it, but multiple times it only had a sliver of HP left. One more hit for sure would have killed it. I can definitely kill that dude once I get a shield going, which will mean more stuff to research.
Finally I gave up and just went Usain Bolt on my backpack, darting in to grab it and sprinting back home. I had a spider hot on my heels all the way back to my base, but when I closed the door behind me it appeared unable to get me. Scary music slowly faded and all was well.
Also, I finally realized that you can research the stuff you craft, which immediately gave me some “free” research material while opening up an avenue for much more research going forward. As opposed to having to kill bigger and badder enemies for every research.
So yay! Back on track. That red ant club is a nice step up in power compared to the pebble axe, and I can’t wait to get a shield.
EDIT: I learned the hard way that you have to repair your gear when you keep kamikaze-ing an enemy that keeps killing you. On the plus side, I learned that you can repair your weapons and armor, which is a new concept for me in survival games. You couldn’t repair shit in Raft when it came to equipment. Gear would just get used up and disappear.
This game is starting to feel like one step forward, two steps back. So I got the weevil shield, which seems to block 100% of all damage from anything, which is nice. But the red ant club is a two-handed weapon, so I can’t use it and shield block. That leaves me with my crappy pebble weapons: axe, spear and hammer. I have learned to identify enemy weaknesses and choose which of those pebble weapons to use for each fight accordingly. All good there.
The stink bug I did a fair amount of damage to – maybe a third of its hit points (leaving 2/3) – but it keeps gassing me to death. So that seems above my pay grade for now. No worries, fair enough. (And I may want to craft up like a dozen spears to huck at it. Melee seems ill-advised for this encounter.)
Ran across an infected larvae, which again the shield apparently blocks 100%, but if it gets me while I’m not blocking it does like 95% of my health bar in one hit. I hurt it a little, but that seems even harder than the stink bug. Again, that’s fine, no worries, I’ll come back to it when I’m not still so weak.
I did run across a lightning bug and managed to kill that fairly easily. It hurt a lot when it hit me, but I was able to withstand two hits and stay alive, which was all I needed to kill it.
Tried a ladybug with my pebble hammer. Was fairly easy to block, but took like 7,000 hits to get it down to half health. Unfortunately it managed to hit me twice in that marathon battle, which was sufficient to kill me. This one feels like I should be able to win, but the crazy amount of hit points and damage reduction feels unbalanced. And I’m starting to get that feeling in general.
So then I started thinking about upgrading damage. I have unlocked being able to build the Smithing station or whatever, but I don’t have the materials to craft one. Apparently I have to explore ant hills for the brittle stuff, which should be doable, so that’s next on the agenda.
It also seems like I need to start using potions for everything. I get the feeling that just swinging away with regular damage without quaffing a potion first is something that is just not done. Generally speaking, I really do not like the mechanic of needing to temporary buff for every fight. So that’s discouraging me.
Yeah, I’m starting to see the wisdom of that decision. Unfortunately that’s not something I generally am willing to do. If I can’t beat it on normal, I’ll try to git gud. If I still can’t beat a game on normal after getting good, generally speaking I consider the game poorly tuned and abandon it. That’s starting to become a real possibility here. Maybe it’s just not balanced in a realistic way for solo play.
One of the things I have very little patience for in gaming are HP sponges, where it feels like you’re chopping down an oak tree with a nail file. I’m starting to get that feeling a lot with grounded, which does not bode well in terms of fun factor going forward. I particularly do not like exploiting AI, where an enemy is unable to reach me so I can just plink away forever until it dies.
Oh yeah, I looked and looked and looked but I was never able to find the orb weaver Jr again. Fairly confident I could use and abuse those guys now, but I guess it no longer is where it was when I found it that one time. All the ones I see are full grown.
I think (though I’m not sure, because I never tried turning the difficulty back up) that the difficulty scaling improves once you’re into higher tiers. As in, killing things required for tier 3 gear with tier 2 equipment isn’t as bad as killing things required for tier 2 gear with tier 1 equipment.
However, the game was obviously balanced by someone with different views from me on what combat should be like in a game like this. I don’t mind unforgiving combat necessarily, but this is practically Souls-like in its style of combat, and I have no inclination to spend hours tuning my reflexes to time block/riposte moves so I can inflict 40 hits while taking 0 in order to kill a big baddy. Hence, easy mode, which is still difficult enough that it doesn’t make the game feel like a pushover. It would be nice to be able to tune the difficulty a little more, because I think I’d enjoy the game more if I could just decrease enemy HP without nerfing their ability to damage me, but I’ve come to accept that people have different opinions on this sort of thing.
How do I give you a tip without spoiling anything? Generally in this game you know (or quickly learn) what enemies/areas you can take on and what is currently out of your reach. There are expert techniques that allow you to kill stinkbugs and ladybugs at this stage, involving kiting and perfect blocks, but that’s for experts, not normal progression/gameplay.
At your tech level you should be able to take on the hedge maze, like the robot in Oak lab suggested. Tip: watch your water meter while you’re up there. “Dungeons”, meaning labs in this game, sometimes have useful loot that would otherwise be very difficult to obtain for the first time. Not just on the shelves and such, but sometimes from killing creatures or breaking things. You can also unlock things by making story progress.
Also,
~Max
Well, I did see in-game that easy mode was recommended for a first playthrough, but I basically just ignored that tip. I generally play normal because that’s the standard difficulty. If easy is the standard difficulty for your first playthrough, well, that seems to be what my logic dictates I should play. I may restart in easy.
Regarding my progress, first off let me say that we’ve been getting around five lightning storms a week all summer long, and it’s starting to annoy the crap out of me. I don’t really like playing a game during a lightning storm, so they keep interrupting my gaming time. Today’s lightning storm finally ended around an hour ago.
Last few sessions have been in creative mode trying to come up with a base design. Surprisingly (to me), the biggest hurdle has been locating flat ground that isn’t cluttered with indestructible leaves and sticks. I was originally thinking one large centrally located base, but I got the impression from reddit that multiple small bases is the smarter play. I’ve only been reading topics akin to “I’m a new player, give me tips but don’t spoil anything!” And of course, dopey redditors will include brand new player tips along the lines of “you want to use this weapon for the black widow queen” or some shit. Like, dude, read the room; brand new players struggle with ladybugs.
I’m also starting to make peace with the idea that I’m going to have to learn how to “perfect block.” That kind of thing isn’t really my forte, but hopefully the timings don’t have to be super precise.
If you want flat, use foundation pieces. They snap together. I think you have to research it. Clay is the lowest tier but pebblet looks better. You can cut the dry grass right next to the starting tent and it’s a sizeable flat area, even with pebblet tools. But let me tell you, you want to do the hedge lab before significant base building.
You don’t have to learn to perfect block. You just aren’t equipped to take on a ladybug right now. Sure, you could do it a few ways - perfect blocks, other clever mechanics I won’t spoil - but it’s not expected.
~Max