CAMPING

A large part of your adventuring through the wastelands of Ashe is taking the time to rest and recuperate between stints of travel. There are a few key facets to that resting, which are pictured and detailed below:

**Choosing Your Resting Location**

Resting your party is not simply a case of deciding to set up camp wherever you may find yourselves. The effectiveness of the camping spot is dependant on the location you choose to stop at, and the different levels of shelter offered will impact that effectiveness greatly – marked on the camping screen as the **Environment Effect.**

Camping out in the open air is the least effective location, as your party is entirely at the mercy of the harsh weather conditions and constantly on guard for enemy attacks. While this does not manifest in immediate danger in game, it does severely hinder the stamina and HP, or Health Points, that can be recovered; this level is known as **Exposed.**

Finding shelter is important, then, and there are several layers to that as well. **Rough** is the first level, often referring to the marginal shelter provided by forests and other such terrain. You restore slightly more stamina, but no more health than when camping **Exposed** – better than nothing, but still not the ideal situation for really preparing your party for the journey ahead.

**Sheltered** is the next level up, netting your party a more significant stamina boost and an extra health point for every food you spend resting. This is the shelter that ruins and other old-world structures can offer, not entirely wind and water-tight but much easier to establish a camp within than the forest or the open air.

The final level is then **Civilisation**, netting even more of a stamina boost than **Sheltered** and the same level of health regeneration. This is, as you might expect, the shelter offered by an inn or other such building within an established settlement; while not even these are fully protected against all dangers, they are the most secure locations you can find in the wastelands of Ashe.

**Fatigue and HP**

As has been mentioned already, the main reason for regularly making camp and resting is to replenish both your Fatigue meter and any lost health points from combat or other sources of damage.

Fatigue is measured below the Morale bar, on the top strip of icons above the main Overworld map. It will be degraded slowly as your party loses stamina through travel and encounters, leading to negative effects being placed on the party should their Fatigue meter drop too far. Luckily for your party, any amount of resting in any location will always recover at least a small amount of stamina to refill that meter.

HP is lost in a variety of ways as your party travels and fights, but it is also always recovered to some small degree when taking time to make camp and rest. Unlike using food to heal individuals, resting heals the entire party for a smaller amount, again based on the level of shelter you have found to make your camp.

Selecting ‘Just Rest’ when camping will trigger regeneration of both of these stats without any further actions, but any of the other options (see below) will also recover the same amount of stamina and health, so don’t worry about choosing between recovery and downtime activities.

**Upgrading and Honing**

Two of the options available when resting at your camp involve the changing and upgrading of your equipment, affecting the decks of cards your Heroes have access to in combat. As always, you will recover stamina and HP based on the level of shelter you have made camp within, regardless of which option you choose.

**Upgrading** is the process of using crafting materials to increase the quality of your Heroes’ equipped items. The type and quality of crafting materials at your disposal will affect which pieces of equipment you can upgrade, but once you have upgraded that item all of the cards provided by the item will be upgraded. This means that they become the ‘+’ variants of their original effect, with extra damage, defence, willpower and/or quality of effect where relevant.

**Honing** instead involves using your crafting materials to remove unwanted cards from your Heroes’ equipment. As you move through your journeys, you might want to reduce the number of extraneous abilities that each Hero has in their deck, making it more likely that you will draw the cards that you need during combat. As you get further into the late game and equip powerful weapons and armour, this will become all the more important to avoid drawing dud cards in the heat of battle, so bear it in mind as you make camp and rest.

**Meditating and Healing Injuries**

The final two options available when making camp both involve the usage of Mystic Herbs, a rare resource found through scavenging or bartering with traders. Again, your stamina and HP will still be replenished alongside choosing either option.

**Meditating** uses a Mystic Herb to upgrade or remove one of your Heroes’ class cards – essentially, either **Upgrading** or **Honing** one particular card from their deck that they received either through levelling up or at the start of the journey. As you level up your Heroes and unlock their more powerful class cards, it may be that you choose to double down on their class strengths or streamline them with only the most useful cards for your chosen build; this is where **Meditating** becomes useful.
**Healing Injuries** is the final option, very simply using a Mystic Herb to remove one Injury card from a Hero’s deck. If any of your Heroes fall in combat (reduced to 0 health), they will sustain an Injury and have a corresponding Injury card added to their deck – useless cards that take up space in your draws each turn and sometimes have even more negative effects beyond that. Using a Mystic Herb while resting is how you remove these cards, healing the Injury and restoring your Hero back to fighting fitness, so be sure to keep a couple of Mystic Herbs handy for such occasions as you travel.