How to play guide for CryoFall

This page will serve as a basic **how to play guide for *CryoFall***. Feel free to edit this guide with any tips, tricks, and suggestions.

## Basic gameplay

CryoFall is a survival / crafting game with technological development. So most of the time you are **gathering** resources or Food, **crafting** equipment or Tools and growing your base. You can go out **hunting** animals - or be hunted by the local fauna or other players ;)
Later on, you could venture out to raid old Ruins in order to get high grade materials and items needed to craft the most advanced pieces of Technology.
The following sections describe these gameplay elements in more detail.

**Quickstart:** You want to know, what to do/build/craft first after your arrival at the unknown planet?

Luckily the game has a great tutorial. Simply follow the Quests given in the upper right corner of the screen. (There are no quest NPCs).
These quests guide you through the early game and let you build all essential Tools and Buildings (actually the quests guide you until the mid-game). Quests are also great way to obtain easy LP to advance your technology.

If you are in a hurry: At the bottom of this article, you find a list of short tips & tricks.

### Survival

The character needs to eat and drink to survive. Hunger and thirst are shown as colored bars in the right bottom corner of the screen. If the green bar gets empty, you will die of hunger. The blue bar is for thirst. So always keep an eye on these and stockpile Food while also having access to a water source.

At the beginning your character could get water from Waterbulb Fruit and other berries. One of your first goals (after crafting tools of course) is to establish a secure source of pure water: Build one or two Water Collectors.
Don't drink salty or stale water. Read the tooltip of possible food to know if it's safe to eat/drink. It will tell you whether or not it is edible - most of the berries and fruits are.

Obviously, you can fry fresh meet at a Campfire, by hunting animals, but it is safer to roast mushrooms at the beginning.

Keep in mind: nearly every food spoils. The spoil meter is shown as a circle on the top left corner of the item and in the tooltip. It starts full and green and gets yellow and finally red.
Don't eat or drink something with a red spoil meter. You could get nausea.

### Crafting/Farming

You craft very basic Tools from the crafting window (key 'C'). These are e.g. Torch, Stone Pickaxe and Stone Axe. For making other stuff, you need to build special workbenches like Workbench, Armorer Workbench or Cooking Table. By interacting with these buildings you get a similar crafting window - where you find other recipes.

An important step in the early game is to build a Furnace (or better 2-3). You use it to smelt ore into for instance Iron Ingots or Copper Ingots.
These materials are required in lots of recipes and enable you to craft metal Tools and weapons.

Once you manage to find seeds, you can start Farming (mechanic). (Seeds can also be found in Ruins later, when you are advanced enough to venture there).

You start by placing some Farm Plot. Interact with it while a type of seed is selected and the character will plant that seed. You can than water and fertilize the plants. They will grow slowly - so do something different in the meantime. At the Farming Workbench, you turn the fruits into (more) seeds. This way you should stock up seeds.

### Base Building

To build any Buildings or structures you need a Simple Toolbox. You can craft it from the start of the game.

Important: Your buildings will disappear (decay) when built outside one of your **Land Claims**.

So be sure to build Land Claim Tier 1 early and consider upgrading it as you develop your base and learn new technologies.
When you place a landclaim a green area becomes visible, showing your claim borders. This is the safe range to build things on.

And even with a land claim built, your base will slowly degrade! To prevent decay you only need to visit your base. For more detailed decay mechanics read information inside of your land claim. It will show you the decay timers and explain the mechanic in more details.

You will be limited in how many land claims you can place (some servers could override this limit with a custom setting). So choose your location wisely.

Your first base could be:

* be in the Tropical Forest, if you want access to more food and less dangerous animals. But temperate forest is also a great choice. See World.
* be not too far away from mineral deposits (located on the mountains)

Nice to have:

* a lake or the sea nearby (Sand, easy prey animals)
* near a patch of Meadows for herbs and mushrooms

### Skills/Technology

CryoFall has no character classes. But there are skills which provide bonuses for particular actions (gathering, harvesting wood or minerals,...).
These skills will automatically level up while carrying out the matching action. Example: If you chop down trees a lot, you get better in that.

Besides that, you get experience in the form of 'Learning Points' (LP) for almost everything you can do in CryoFall. So you don't have to grind a particular activity such as killing mobs to earn LPs.

The LPs are used to unlock new tech groups or particular technologies. You have to research a tech group first to enable the root tech of that tree.

## Controls

These are the most important key bindings:

* Movement: W,A,S,D. Hold Shift to sprint
* Aiming: mouse
* Use item in toolbar (e.g. weapon or tool): left mouse button
* Gather/interact: right mouse button

* open inventory: 'E'
* open crafting: 'C'
* open building: 'TAB'
* open technologies: 'G'
* open completions: 'N'
* open quests 'J'

Holding 'ALT' while within a land claim area will show you the range of the land claim. This is helpful when determining where to place the claim to get the most benefit.

## Tips and tricks for beginners

### Eat & Drink

* Follow the tutorial to build essential tools and equipment.
* Gather Waterbulb Fruit (the blue, glowing berries) as your first water supply.
* Don't drink salty/stale water or eat food with a red spoil meter.
* Build a Campfire to fry mushrooms or meat.
* Build a Water Collector to drink from.
* Soon you will be able to craft Empty Bottle in which you can carry your water supply around.
* Food that is nearly spoiled can still be cooked/fried if you have an applicable recipe. The result will be fresh again.

### Crafting & Materials

* Always pickup Twigs, Fibers and (at least at the beginning) Stone from the ground while walking. The easy way to find seeds is by picking up fibers. That event is rare so collect fibers often. (The other way is raiding Ruins.)
* You will soon have more Twigs than you need for crafting. Use it as Fuel in a Campfire or Furnace. This is the fastest way to get Ash which you need for e.g. Raw Glass. You can produce for instance Charcoal which itself is a fuel.
* Have at least two furnaces, ideally three. You will constantly need Iron Ingot, Copper Ingot and Raw Glass. Smelting these in parallel is a must.
* Start chopping rubber trees early. You will need the natural rubber to craft vulcanized rubber later on.
* Searching for Sand? Take your pick axe to a lake/sea beach.
* Need salt? Simply fill your bottles with salty water at the sea beach and cook it. See tech Cooking 1 or visit salt flats in the desert later for even more salt.

### Hunting & other dangers

* Some animals are easy prey and drop useful materials while giving you LP. See peaceful creatures.
* Stay away from Wolf, Boar, Snake, Crabs and other hostile mobs until you've equipped a ranged weapon. The Crossbow is cheap to produce and the bolts are, too.
* As soon as you can afford, build yourself a Musket. With this first firearm your meat-supply is secured.
* Hostile creatures will pursue you if you enter their aggro range. In that case sprint away using **Shift** key.
* You can get rid of creatures following you by walking up or down a ramp. In most cases the animals will quickly give up.
* Don't visit Ruins until you are well equipped. Because of the radiation you need at least a Respirator.
* Plan forward. If you want to venture out, choose the right tools/equipment and don't forget supplies (food/water/healing)
* In case of Death you loose all items in your inventory and quick bar if you are playing on a PvP server (but not on PvE server). So take only necessary items with you. In that case, you have one hour to retrieve your stuff from your corpse. Other players might take your loot on PvP server.

And at last...

Have fun playing CryoFall!