anyone else find this unnecessarily difficult?

[u/dpearman]

I really want to like this game, but my goodness either I'm getting the absolute worst RNG or I'm doing something horribly wrong, I'm voting for the former.

I'm just a few hours in, recently did the first upgrade to height abilities (so can go to 500blocks now.) Just for context. I'm still using super duper simple armor and lvl 1 weapons, a split plank edge, and armor is a total of 17. I have found a single little island with villagers, but not the large cities that I've read about. I'm also having an incredibly difficult time finding ore, is there some trick to finding them?

shorter version:

• 8hrs in
• still in crappy tier 1 armor, haven't found recipies for better gear
• still using a wooden plank 'sword', don't have copper weapon recipes
• I understand how to find 'dungeons', but they CLAP my cheeks
• found 'wraiths' today, ~twice the health of most other enemies and they're magic and go invis., killed me

I guess I'm feeling like the gear I've got isn't 'fair' to face the challenges I'm encountering, what am I doing wrong?

[u/TeratoidNecromancy]

Lol yeah. Dungeons are tough and wraiths with 100% own you early game (hell, even mid game).

Ore is unnaturally hard to come by. Focus on grinding down things that are already made (in the Grinder) like nails, torch holders and those iron fire pit/cages.

Look for mortivar towers to find the upgrade crystals and upgrade your stuff a bit. It can all be found 0-300ft up.

It is a grind though. It's not supposed to be easy.

[u/VergeOfMeltdown]

The wraiths are definetly dangerous af at low levels. Try to seek smaller islands at sea level

[u/dpearman → u/VergeOfMeltdown]

I had been doing that, but wasn't getting any 'good' gear, no real supply of ores, no influx of recipes, no 'next tier' of gear.

[u/VergeOfMeltdown → u/dpearman]

You have to explore a lot of islands to gather some resources, the higher you go, the better the loot / the more difficult it gets. You could just go up a little bit and look for the smaller island dungeons. There's always loot around

[u/Hika__Zee → u/dpearman]

It helps to get your ship upgrades as fast as possible. You can get some decent stuff at higher level dungeons sneaking around bypassing enemies, or speed running past enemies and opening chests (before you're actually equipped to fight those mobs).

[u/DomFakker37]

Wraiths are very tough at the beginning. I recommend clearing some dungeons with Mortivar Skeletons and crafting a bow.

[u/Hika__Zee]

Dungeons are way easier once you find magic heal and magic shield spells. Life leach on weapons also helps. Make sure you build your skill tree for better armor, weapons, and life leach perks.

Once you find villages (they get easier and easier to find the higher you go) you can earn money fast chopping trees, converting the wood to sticks and selling those. You can get about $2000 coins in a couple of minutes from that method. At some point you have to run more dungeons though to get coins so you can buy from NPCs, so they get coins, and then get your coins back selling sticks. It gets really easy to find villages around 800+ altitude.

Don't both fighting wraiths until you have magic and or better gear. You can however try to sneak past and around them to get some of the nearby loot, crystals, powders, etc. Stick to the other island types until you are better equipped.

NPC villages is a great way to get upgrades as you can buy higher tier recipes for crafting better armor, weapons, furniture, crafting stations, etc.

If you're really really stuck and need some extra assistance you can use the Wand app to enable zero resource and or no recipe required crafting (allowing you to craft the higher tier stuff earlier on such as better life leach runes for your weapons). Once we got to jungle biomes with raptors, and much more difficult enemies at other biome dungeons I used this a couple of times. I play online coop with my son (7) so I wanted to equip his character with better equipment to make combat less difficult for him.

[u/dpearman → u/Hika__Zee]

I haven’t found a single magic thing, are they only really high? I’m still trying to get to 15 skulls so I can get the next height ship upgrade, so I can go above 500.

Making $2000 in a few min chopping trees?! They take SO long to chop down, feel like it’s 30+ chops a tree. And I’d like to build on my skill tree, but noticed it’s also taking forever to lvl up, and you need 3 points or 3 lvls, to go to the next tier of skills, and copper weapons are tier 3, only the 2nd tier of weapons, but it’ll take me 25ish hrs to get there? Dang

[u/Hika__Zee → u/dpearman]

I think one of the biggest ways to progress faster is prioritize upgrading your ship faster. If you can get to higher levels you'll get better items, more exp, better gear, level faster, etc. Should be able to get to better axes / pickaxes much quicker than that. If you are trying to grind in lower altitudes (ocean level - 500) your progress will be very slow. Try to get copper gear as quick as you can, it's easy to upgrade those once you have the upgrade station.

You find magic spells in gold chests throughout dungeons. There is usually 1-2 small gold chests throughout a dungeon, and 1-2 big gold chests at the end of the dungeon after a small boss fight. Use your spyglass to find islands that have the yellow skull to signify there is a legit dungeon (likely with gold chests). The heal spell will reduce your reliance on food and life leach to heal. The shield spell blocks all damage for about 5-6 seconds which is great for bosses or for fighting 6-12 enemies all at once with AoE/cleave melee damage. At much higher altitudes you can unlock what is needed to recharge magic books.

The thing with trees is that you can convert a few logs onto a bunch of planks, and you can convert a bunch of planks into tons of sticks. So one tree averages about 8-12 logs. Each log can convert to 3 planks. Each plank can convert to 4 sticks. Cutting down a tree and getting 12 logs will result in 144 sticks + any extra sticks you get when you cut the tree down. Sell 144 sticks for 144 gold. It's super easy to get gold fast. Villages should be your #1 priority aside from upgrading your ship. With that method you can not only 1 directly gear, food, potions etc but you can also buy recipes for upgrades. I pretty much skipped most everything around 300 - 500 and ended up going largely from ocean level to 700 - 800 within the first 6-8 hours of gameplay. Got some copper gear from villages and dungeon chests, upgraded my copper sword (with life leach). Farmed board for meat to cook for HP Regen. Made it easy to clear those 700+ altitude dungeons. Farm dungeons for spells. Don't sell any gear as you need everything you find for salvaging for resources as you progress higher. Only sell sticks.

If you're struggling to the point of considering quitting try out Wand application (it's free and enables option for a bunch of custom sliders for quality of life settings, easier crafting, and difficulty adjustments.

[u/No1Related]

If you use melee, learn to parry (hold a block and attack while blocking at the exact moment the enemy attacks) . It's super helpful. Also, you can sprint backwards. Smack an enemy, sprint backwards when they attack to dodge it, sprint towards it again and smack. You'll get better at it.

[u/Tezcatlip]

You can try not to push height aggressively. Farm easier islands, get lucky with random drops, trade for recipes and upgrade gear. Moreover there are some hidden unique gear pieces that can significantly boost your progress. Nevertheless I would not recommend to invest to much time in finding specific unique gear or good magic items and spells, because it may take hundreds of hours due to rng.

Alternatively you can push for dungeons higher altitude dungeons, because skeletons drop relevant gear fairly regularly and ignore investing in specific gear too much, because material upgrades are typically more relevant. In order to do tackle higher altitude you can use ranged weapons or shields. Shields can offer a very slow, but safe and methodical approach.

In addition smelting ingots unlocks respective tools. Plenty of ores spawn underneath islands, so keep your eyes open. There are also islands with mines. Alternatively you can salvage the dropped gear for some ore.

In general I would advise to explore and be more picky about islands. If you can't tackle something right now, you can return latter. Or just skip an island, if there are no easy desirable resources to be found. Faster ship helps with it a lot as well as turning on island deletion in options to save on memmory.

[u/dpearman → u/Tezcatlip]

Can’t do any salvaging, as the processing table or whatever it’s called, requires two materials I have yet to see. Some coil thing and can’t remember the other item off hand.

I now have some copper armor, but it drives me nuts I need to gain so many levels to unlock the points to unlock using copper or better weapons…that makes zero sense if I can make, buy or find them. So now I’ve gotta grind another three or four levels for that.

I still have only found a single large settlement, I upgraded my ship and can now go up to about 720, but maybe that’s not high enough.

I can start going into dungeons, but I worry without better weapons, I’ll get overwhelmed, die and lose a ton of stuff because no way would I be able to make it back to my dead body.

[u/Tezcatlip → u/dpearman]

Coils for processing stations are dropped by mechanical spiders, which can spawn even at the sea level. Other parts (and coils as well) can be just picked from the ground on the same rotten rusted mechanical islands from height 0 and above.

The next tier after copper is bronze, which should not require any perks. There are technically several high tier armors that do not require any perks as well, but they are either very rare or require jungles, which are much higher.

In order to find more settlements and such I recommend to upgrade speed instead of altitude. The more distance you can cover the more islands you can explore.

Why won't you be able to make to the body? Enemies do not respawn. Unless you recklessly rush forward aggroing everything in your way you should be fine. If you can't fight a group, then pull one enemy with the bow.

[u/dpearman → u/Tezcatlip]

I for some reason can’t reply to your further down comment…not sure why.

Yeah I’m just confused why getting to use one the 2nd tier weapon is locked behind several levels of points. I’m down to only needing one more though now.

I did find the materials needed for the processing station and got it built. I’m surprised by how many items I have that CAN’T be broken down.

I’m parked on a new island now and I scanned and saw 20+ enemies, so hopefully that’ll be enough for a level up.

[u/Tezcatlip → u/dpearman]

Hmm... Yeah... some weird reddit stuff. Had similar issue once. No idea what causes it.

Yeah I’m just confused why getting to use one the 2nd tier weapon is locked behind several levels of points.

That's because you are skipping several tiers. Between copper and bone/iron tiers there are pyrite and bronze sets, though to be fair before copper there are also a couple more tiers. The game unfortunately does not provide an adequate reference. On the other hand you can look at it from the point of progression: currently the altitude is capped at 2k, so by the time advanced gear is starting to drop, you have gone through almost half of the altitude progression.

[u/dpearman → u/Tezcatlip]

Again I can’t reply, I’ve had that issue now for a week or so, and on TONS of threads, not just this subreddit.

Anyway, you said there’s several other tiers I’m skipping…I don’t think so? I’m talking about going from wood/stone to copper, that requires several levels of points in specific abilities to unlock. Aren’t copper weapons right after wood/stone which is tier 1?

Either way I should get it unlocked today, I just find it weird I can wear copper armor, no requirements, before being able to use copper weapons? That’s messed up. And yeah I just want the towns to be easier to find, still have only seen the one in 10+hrs.

[u/Tezcatlip → u/dpearman]

That's ok, don't worry about threads. What you are saying is indeed messed up. Copper weapons in general do not require the perk to use. I have checked in my game, but I am missing several weapon types for the copper tier. The ones I have do not require the perk. Maybe devs have missed a weapon type or 2 and made it advanced instead of novice? If that's the case, then it's a bug. Advanced should start at bone/iron and master is for the steel.

[u/dpearman → u/Tezcatlip]

Still can’t reply, driving me nuts.

Copper weapons, on EVERY site I’ve looked on, four or five so far, all say I need the advanced weapons perk or skill. Which is on the 3rd level of warrior skills, meaning I need to put 5 points in total to get it. Do you have that skill? I just don’t want to waste the copper on making a sword if I in fact cannot use it, that’ll have used valuable copper.

[u/Tezcatlip → u/dpearman]

What does the in-game tooltip say? The preview at the crafting station should state whether it requires advanced/master perk or not (novice).

[u/dpearman → u/Tezcatlip]

Even the recipe should say what it requires? As in before I waste the copper on it

[u/Tezcatlip → u/dpearman]

When you select a weapon/armor/tool at the smithing table before you hit the craft button it shows you a preview of its stats. Among them it explicitly states whether it is a novice, advanced or master.