Commonly Asked Questions

The following is not a formal guide for the game. Below are some questions answered by Developer Grim in regards to gameplay. More information can be found in the Card Survival: Tropical Island forums located under the Discussions tab on Steam.

## Survival

### Season and Rain Frequency

There is 3 different season. Each one during 30 day. Once you complete the 90 first days then it roll again.

1. From day 1 to day 30 : Temperate season. During this season, weather is balanced. Sun, clouds and normal rainfall alternate. You can have a storm once a week (if you are in stormy locations, check the map)
2. From day 31 to day 60 : Stormy/Heavy rain season. During this season the weather is mainly raining or storming (if you are in a stormy locations, check the map)
3. From day 61 to day 90 : Dry season. During this season there is no rain and only scarce clouds hence it need to be anticipate in order to get enough water to pass through the drough.

### Water

***First basic need**.* The main water source come from the sky and it is easy to catch with coconut shells, clay bowls and other containers. But there are a few alternate sources of water:

* Banana Trees: You can chop down banana trees, they will produce water time if you store a bowl inside.
* Cave Puddle: The dark cake in the wetlands contains a puddle that refills itself over time. If you discovered the dark chamber, there is a bigger underground lake as well. Both are unsafe water so be sure to filter it first.
* Palm Sap: Palm Sap can be extracted with a Palm Station, and drank as sap or palm wine.
* Perforated coconuts: Always a good source of water as long as you don't drink too many in quick succession.

### Hunger / Malnourishment

**Second basic need.** Malnourishment can kill you if the bar drops to zero, so make sure to stop it before it gets too low. This mean keep fed as much as you can.

*Notice that when hurt or sick you burn extra calories, so that can eventually result in malnutrition if you are not eating enough to compensate for it .* *To recover from malnutrition try to eat heavier foods like boar meat or prepared meals and try to avoid heavy exercise like chopping wood, walking too much, climbing or swimming.*

### Mental structure / Morale

**Third basic need.** Keep a strong mental structure is quite challenging as it is multi-factorial. Especially around day 100, as your isolation reach its maximum, it is hard to keep your character under control. The main actions to keep a high spirit are :

* building a confortable place (hut with furnitures),
* get a macaque friend and/or Weston (reducing loneliness)
* keep your stress as low as possible

Morale goes down when you have debuff status like pain or when you are severely hungry or thirsty. You can at least nullify the decrease by eating and drinking, or also reduce the physical activity. Crafting might raise your morale a bit as well.

Stress is one of the main factor in this equation. Lower your stress can be easily done by spending good time as building sand castle, diving or playing drum for instance. Moving around or diversify your days activities are a good way to nullify the deacrease.

**But if I can't get happy by doing that, how do I increase my mood?**

The only way (and the best one) to get your mood better is by drinking Kava or jasmine tea, light jasmine or citronella candles, wear chinea roses, etc...

### Hunting and Trapping

**Do traps work? How do i use them?**

*...the traps do work but there are a few things to keep in mind:*

*1- Make sure your bait is not about to experire. If you place fish scraps at 19% spoilage, they will most likely expire before they get to catch anything. So make sure any bait you use still has a couple days of life before you place it.*

*2- Traps have a chance to misfire and not trap anything, so it's usually better to have many traps working at the same time if you want to use them as a reliable source of seagulls.*

*3- Better baits increase your chances of catching prey, and of catching better prey. A full fish is better than fish scraps for example.*

*That said, I think I'll probably be making some improvements to this system in the near future. These traps do feel a bit dissappointing sometimes! :p*

*In the meantime, If the deadfall traps are not being useful to you, there are also other ways to catch seagulls. Such as hunting them with spears, bows, slings or even rocks. If you train a bit on any of these skills eventually it should get hard to catch them.*

**Also:**

*At the moment the chances of catching seagulls are not so high if you are using a single trap, but you can still get them if you are veeeery patient.*

*When a trap says it has finished cooking, it means it has been triggered, so if theres nothing there, it means that it didn't manage to catch anything with the bait it had. We will change the text as soon as we can so that it makes a bit more sense than "finished cooking". It's just one of things that got lost in our never-ending priority queue. :p*

*In the meantime here's a detailed answer that I gave to another player that you might be interested in reading:*

*A deadfall trap has a 16% chance to catch a seagull every 1 or 2 days if you are using scraps and a 33% if using fish or bigger things. I recommend using many traps at once to increase your chances, and making sure your bait has high durability, so it won't expire before you have the chance to catch seagulls.*

*If traps don't work for you there are a few alternate methods to get bird bones:*

*- Hunting: You can hunt live Seagulls with rocks, slings, spears or bows. Just make sure you have weapons in your hand row and go exploring the rocks, while you might fail your first encounters eventually you'll get them reliably, specially if you train too.*

*- Highland Partridges: If you climb to the highlands you should be able to find Partridges which also drop bird bones when you hunt them.*

*- Nests: Nests also sometimes have bones in them.*

*- Carcasses: These can also be found in the rocks, although they become progressively more rare the more you find them.*

*Currently the best and more reliable method is hunting, although it requires an initial investment. Traps work too but they require maintenance and numbers to work reliably.*

## Farming and Breeding

### Regarding Partridges

**Can you breed partridges?**

*They can, although at the moment they are parthenogenetic. :p*

*If you build a coop and release a live partridge inside, they will spawn an egg in their inventory, leave it there for a bit and it will hatch into a new partridge. So you can get as many partridges as you want from a single bird if you are willing to wait for long enough. :)*

## Crafting

### Clay Crafting

**How to unlock the Kiln:**

*The in-game survival guide has some clues on how to built it. :)*

*To build a kiln you should combine sand with mud (not clay), that should create a mud brick which should unlock the Kiln blueprint. The kiln needs to 20 mud bricks to be built and 2 sticks. Once you build the kiln you'll unlock the recipes for cooking pots and clay vases.*

### Raft and Chest

**How to unlock the Chest blueprint:**

*Enter the raft and the chest blueprint will unlock automatically. :)*

**Can you build the chest outside the raft?**

*No, you can only build the chest in the raft. :)*

## Running Out of Resources

Players should be wary of exhausting the resources of their island. Several resources in the game are finite, save for some that can be repopulated through farming or breeding.

## Bugs and Performance Issues

### Known Bugs

#### Can't Do Two Things At Once

Various bugs have appeared relating to players receiving the message "I can't do two things at once." Current solutions include submitting your log files and saves for review.

*... If it happens again and you have the time, could you send me your log files and saves?*

*You can find them here:*

*C:\Users\YOUR WINDOWS USERNAME\AppData\LocalLow\WinterSpring Games\Card Survival - Tropical Island*

*If you could send me the two files Player.log and Player-prev.log, as well as the save files and send them to us at winterspringgames@gmail.com that could really help us find what's going on.*

*I would need you to do this only at the moment that the bug actually happens, sending us the Player.log files long after you've encountered the bug would not be as useful as they get overwritten everytime you launch the game...*

### Performance Issues (Slowing/Lag) With Large Number of Cards

*We are aware of this issue and have some ideas to solve it. We just haven't had time to work on it yet. There's much to do!*

### Various Bugs and Exploits With Water Containers and the Water Reservoir

*Once we release the character creation update this Sunday* [OCT 17, 2021] *our next priority is going to be on implementing a new water system that should fix this issue as well as many other water container related ones. :)*

[Regarding Reservoir] *You can still store water from coconut shells or any other 1-use water container. Not just rain water. :)*

## Future Content

### Regarding Object Size and Stacking

*... Yeah, I'm not currently that happy with our current system. My current plan is adding an extra layer to it: a weight value to cards, and then making it so that cards can also stack on your hand and inventories. This way you'd be able to keep adding cards to your hand and containers as long as the total weight of these inventories didn't exceed the carrying capacity. :)*

### Regarding Checking / Reviewing Skills

**Is there a way to check current skill levels?**

*One of the future updates we have planned will contain improvements on that front and will let you check the state of your skills. :)*

*At the moment however there is no way to check your skills besides increasing them (i.e.: going spearfishing them to check spearfishing).*

### Regarding Modding

*... The game at its current early access stage is not very mod friendly, as we are making changes at a very fast pace and are constantly moving things around. For this reason and others we are not sure we want to get the ball rolling in the modding direction. Let's say we're just not ready for it yet.*

*Even though I know that just changing card art is not much, we'd not be that comfortable knowing that that could open the path to further modifications along the way. In our current state we would not able to provide any support for modding, and we could get hurt by the ensuing loss of agency we would have over the game. Remember we are just two people doing everything, design, code, art, publishing and community management, so we need to be very cautious with our decisions.*

*If there are any particular things you'd like to see in Card Survival, for now I think the best way is just to ask us to implement it, you know we're fast and answer to everything. ;)*

### Other New Features

**Post-Death Unlocks and Returning Mechanics**

*Yes there will be returning mechanics, although not as regular as Card Quest's. In this game they will mostly come in the shape of new characters that can be unlocked after achieving certain things. Each new character comes with their own set of skills and special recipes that allow them to craft new items. Characters are not available in the current version but will be added in one of the first Early Access updates.*

**Musical Update**

*...we have a musical update planned for the future (with flutes, ocarinas and a drum) so I'll try to add, if not a thumb piano., a similar enough instrument. ;)*