Beginner's Guide

## Newbie Check List

* Fishing Rod
* Research Tent
* Workbench
* Chainsaw or Hatchet

## Part 1: Fishing and making money

The first thing you want to do is to **acquire a fishing rod**. Go up to a vending machine and buy a fishing rod. You will always start the game with 100 mk which should be sufficient as a fishing rod costs 60-70 mk. If you don’t have enough money, you can make some money by looting resources and selling the items back to vending machines.

Once you have a fishing rod, your only goal should be fishing and making enough money to buy a tent as soon as possible.

You can start by looking for circling fish animations by the shoreline. Equip your fishing rod by pressing “Tab” and clicking on the fishing rod in your backpack. Then click on the spot you want to fish, spam press “E” once prompted to reel the fish in.

The best starting fishing spot is the lake north of Sgt. Lake’s Outpost. The whitefish caught there can be sold back at the fish vending machine for around 100-150 mk. A backpack full of whitefish should result in sufficient funds to purchase a tent.

Remember! Item prices will vary depending on the demand and location just like the real world.

## Part 2: Purchase a tent and claim your land

Ok, so now you got the money. Head over to a vending machine and get yourself a tent. Depending on when you started your journey, there may already be a lot of other players who had claimed their land.

In this case, it can be a bit stressful finding an available plot within the neighbourhood. Don’t worry too much at this stage, just find a place that’s not in the snow area and you’ll be alright. The main purpose of placing down your tent is to claim land as soon as possible. If you wait too long, you might get robbed by another player and lose your tent or you might end up having to live far far away from civilization which will not be fun for your first playthrough.

I do recommend beginners place their tent at the starting island rather than the middle island. Because, there’s a large forest that will help with the next part and something bad always happens at the main island.

## Part 3: Upgrading to a house

Great! You finally settled down in your little yellow tent. Now, you have 24 hours to get a **workbench** and a **hatchet/ chainsaw** to cut down 100 pieces of wood before your tent disappears into the abyss.

Now it’s time for a small adventure. Take a walk around the neighbourhood. Did you notice any buildings or warehouses? There are loot boxes in them. You will come across a ton of different items ranging from useless paintings to ammo. If you can’t see any lootable boxes at these buildings, it means someone already looted them within the last 10 minutes. Come back later or stick around for loot boxes to respawn.

Items you can try to get in those lootboxes:

* A workbench. Place it down in your tent so you can start depositing wood to upgrade the tent into a house.
* A hatchet or axe in one of those boxes. If you do come across a chainsaw thats fine too, but the axe will have a higher wood drop rate which is essentially what we want the most right now.

Optionally, you can opt to continue fishing and gathering enough money to purchase these items. But where’s the fun in that without some occasional looting for free stuff?

## Part 4: Explore!

Finally! The grinding phase is over! Well, yes. But not quite yet. There’s so much more stuff to do and complete. It’s time for you to explore and build more wealth so you don’t have to swim around like a peasant. Check out other sections of the wiki for more information.