Survival Guide for Primitive Areas

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First of all you need to figure out if the area is primitive or not. If at least the older characters have iron shields and/or there are vehicles better than small wooden carts, the place is most likely developed. In that case, read the Survival Guide for Developed Areas. If the area is primitive, continue reading. It's also possible that the surrounding areas might still be primitive.

There's Strength in Numbers

If you were spawned in a location that has other characters, don't go wandering off alone because that would usually be a suicide. Introduce yourself and make it clear that you're ready to help them if they help you in turn. It's important that you get food and either a shield or access to indoors. If you're outdoors for extended periods without a shield, animals will tear you into shreds.

If the location has food, start farming for it. If it doesn't, gather some other useful resource (usually wood or stone) while waiting for others to reply. If no reply has been given within a day, there's a chance the others are sleepers. Then you might have to survive on your own.

If you get lucky, within a day you'll get a bit of food and protection. Then you can help other locals with their projects and find out what your character's strengths are. If he's good at farming, he might become a farmer and so on. Learn by asking and by reading maps, what is found in the surrounding locations. You might volunteer to get resources from other locations if you wish to travel, but it's only worth going if you have a shield. Most likely you will have to travel on foot, because few people would trust a new character enough to lend them a vehicle.

Alone in Primitive Areas

If the other characters are sleepers or if you were spawned completely alone (this is rare), your priorities are as follows:

• a shield
• nourishing food
• healing food (if animals are getting past your shield)
• finding awake people

Seek for wood, bones, hide, chitin or stone on the ground or inside buildings, if there are any. If there are other characters present, apologize for taking resources and entering buildings just in case they wake up. Of course if you happen to find a shield, a knife, a hammer or something else, that's even better. Your goal in any case, is to get yourself a shield as fast as possible. Bone shield is the worst possible alternative and requires a (bone) knife to manufacture. A wooden shield is the next best alternative and requires a (stone) hammer. A chitin shield is most likely the best alternative you can get alone and that also requires a hammer.

If the location has animals and you need animal-based resources, hunt them every day. Bone bagh-nakh is the best weapon you can manufacture without wood. A stone cleaver is most likely the best you can manufacture without bones. A bone spear is the best primitive weapon, but for that you need a knife and a hammer. That usually requires traveling into several locations, because usually wood and stone are never found in the same place.

If the location has nourishing food, gather it until some animal hurts you or until you have 2000 to 3000 grams. then gather healing food if there is any, or go traveling. Animals can't attack you while you're on the road. The purpose of traveling is to gain better equipment, healing food and find other people.

If your character is strong and a good fighter, he may be completely safe from the animals once he gets a chitin shield. Then gathering healing food might become unnecessary. In the other hand, if the character is weak and a poor hunter, it might be that many animals will continue to surpass his shield. In that case it's important to build a reserve of healing food and to stay on the move or indoors. It's also good to hunt as often as you can because it increases your strength and hunting skill, albeit slowly.

See category:Primitive Items for tools, machines, shelters, and other ideas and the resources useful for living a primitive lifestyle.

Settling down

Usually it's not worth the trouble to settle anywhere alone, unless you've completely lost hope of finding awake people or you happen to be a hermit. If you still decide to build a hut or a cottage, try to settle a location that has good resources. Usually this means either a grassland with food, located one road away from a forest, or a forest with a healing food and game to hunt.

If you build a dwelling, you can put a smoker inside and smoke meat while protected from animal attacks. Ovens and fireplaces cannot be built without a trowel, which requires iron. It might be possible to find all the ingredients for iron and build a primitive smelting furnace, but that generally requires years of traveling.

Without iron, you are also unable to build locks, so if another person appears, there's a chance they will steal everything you have in your dwelling. People cannot spawn in a location that only has one person (unless someone traveled through there just recently), so the chances of another person appearing are quite slim, but depending on the region, there may be travelers and explorers.

A cheap primitive storage option is the small wooden cart, since it comes with a lock without requiring any metals. If you wish to protect your belongings, you can build one, but you shouldn't travel with it because it makes you go slower than walking speed. Another option is to never own more than you can carry on your person, excluding animal parts you don't need for immediate projects.

Traveling

While traveling, it's important to know where you are and where you have been. So name all the locations you visit, and possibly also all the surrounding locations. This is done by clicking on the orange name and writing a new name in the box. If you don't know the real name based on a map or a note on the ground, you can name it after the resources and/or give it a number.

If you have a map that shows the location of resources, it's worth visiting places that have hematite/magnetite/taconite, limestone or coal, even better if more than one of these are found in the same location. These are needed for making iron, and iron means development. Locations like that are more likely to have active people.

Clothing

Clothes are optional and it's possible to have a full life without any, but if you want to make something then a loincloth or a fur loin cloth are the most simple options. The next most simple ones are other options made out of hide and fur, often stitched together with sinew. More complicated clothes are usually a result of several years of work when you're alone, so usually it's not worth the trouble, at least if you haven't settled somewhere. One option is to rob corpses if you happen to run into one.