BEGINNING YOUR ADVENTURE: Ho hum, another day, yet another survival game, but it has some differences you need to hear about. You start out on a dying planet with a few possessions including a frying pan that can not only cook food, it also doubles as your primary weapon. You'd be advised to spend the day searching for dying trees and a really good place to establish your base. There are new ruins that can help you tremendously that may or may not be riddled with pesky mosquitoes. Hopefully you'll have collected enough wood to make a bunker before night falls and the nightly mobs come out to play. Oh, and if you find a pool of water somewhere, that would be a great place to set up your first base and get some fishing done.
COMPLETING THE QUEST: Although this is your primary goal, there are heaps of things you need to accomplish before you can take on that final challenge. Read all the quests carefully as they are not only designed to keep you occupied, many of them are filled with useful information that could help your progress. Visiting new worlds to plunder their riches should be a priority as that is the key to progression. One more thing, although you can complete the final quest on the Winners Circle page without completing every quest in the book, be assured that the book can be completed 100%, in fact we give out a completionist ribbon for those persistent contestants that do manage to finish every quest.
DISCLAIMER BOOK: As always, we've provided a disclaimer for your reading pleasure. If you're playing alone, you'll be able to read it in complete safety as opening it freezes time along with those nasty mobs. There's a lot of information in it including some that might even be a bit helpful, but we aren't passing out guarantee's, just letting you know the lay of the land so to speak. We do however highly recommend you read it sooner rather than later so that you don't miss out on any unexpected bonuses that you might stumble upon during your upcoming ordeal.
FOOD: Food is still a requirement for survival, and you'll likely spend the first few weeks on the brink of starvation. Luckily we've created a recipe using cooked fish and monster jerky that should be a priority while you progress through other challenges designed to help get you established enough to want to automate some of your growing number of daily tasks.
Our chef has managed to make recipes more convenient this season by including consumable containers for every recipe so that you won't get any leftover containers floating around in your inventory taking up valuable space.
There are some crops that are only obtainable offworld so you'd be well advised to do the quests that will help you travel to new worlds as soon as possible. In the meantime catch and cook fish to combine with monster jerky and keep eating those Zombie Steaks until your new player threshold has been reached.
Hopefully you'll last long enough to get started on your new crops and make all the wonderful recipes our chef spent creating during our 'off' season. He reckons some of them are to die for. Not sure what he meant by that remark, hopefully its just a metaphor and not to be taken literally. Eventually you'll be able to grow prodigious quantities of regular crops when you ramp up to mass production. This is a good thing as there are quests where you can earn magnificent rewards for handing in your surplus produce.
Did I mention the hidden recipe treasure hunt? No? Well its not quite the same as last season when we gave out hints, but I think its best to let you discover it for yourself after you get started. Oh, and we've changed the secret recipe challenge this year so that you actually have to make the secret recipes.
MOBS: In this game you get rewarded for killing mobs, in fact we've included even more mob quests than in previous episodes so you won't get very far playing on peaceful. This is not to say you'll be spending every waking hour defending yourself as there's lots of other things you'll need to accomplish before you can put your feet up and relax.
ORES: You need to complete a repeatable quest in hopes of obtaining the five different varieties of oreberry bushes that you can grow for their precious metals. Other ores will become available once you go offworld. Some of them can initially be blasted out of the ground by the friendly locals or using TNT. All can be removed using various level pickaxes, but you'll find out more as you progress through the game. To simplify the pickaxe progression system we've reduced the number of mining levels to just four.
REWARD BAGS: The reward bags have been specially designed to help improve your lot in life. They can help you immensely, or just a little bit. How useful a reward is often depends on how advanced into the game you are when you receive it.
So what about when you band together with other adventurers to form a pack? Well as this pack is primarily designed for single players, we wouldn't want multiple players gaining an unfair advantage by rewarding every one of them with reward bags just for completing the same quest. Instead we thought you'd prefer to decide for yourselves how you're going to share around all that lovely 'free' loot.
Although there are a limited number of reward bags, we've been generous enough to include a second tier group of reserve bags that never run out thus ensuring that whatever bag you were meant to get, you'll never come up empty handed.
RUINS: There are heaps of ruins scattered randomly about that may or may not contain hidden treasures and of course not so hidden adversaries. As this world has multiple biomes, you'll discover that some ruins and plants only spawn in certain biomes, like cactus in desert regions. Traveling extensively will expand your chances of finding items that will enhance your chances of survival.
TOOLS and WEAPONS: Although there are a variety of tools and weapons you can make or find throughout your adventure, Tinkers still remain the primary source you'll probably use. This season we've reduced the number of upgrades tinkers has along with how they are upgraded. All TC tools and weapons now gain extra modifiers at random intervals which gives you the freedom to add the modifiers you actually want them to have. You can also add extra modifiers at any time by using any of three available 'special' recipes in a Tool station. We've included a 'TC Upgrades' book for completing an early quest that explains all available options.
WATER: Water is still a requirement for survival, but its now much easier to make water. Just hang any spare slime gel you get and they'll turn into waterdrops that can fill an empty bottle in your inventory. In the meantime there are two really early quests that give free water to get you started. Keep a lookout for any quests that will help you to automate your water production.