Valley 1:What Is The General Game Flow?

Continent Progression

On each continent in the game, you'll go through the following general progression.

Make Sure You Have Basic Supplies From Stash Rooms

This is an ongoing need you'll have to satisfy, but on your first continent the need is going to be particularly strong right at first. There are a few things that you absolutely need to keep well-stocked with. These are usually found through side exploration of abandoned buildings.

Look for the yellow "stash rooms" on your dungeon map in each building, and basically get yourself to that room and then get out of the building. All the other rooms have minor trinkets and rewards in them, but nothing worth expending the time to go find if they're at all out of your way. Better to quickly exit the building, then move onto the next, loot the stash room there, and repeat as needed. So much better use of your time than trying to be "completionist" in a game that is infinite in size! You could go crazy that way...

Some key supplies to keep an eye out for:

Wooden Platforms

See a ledge you can reach, underground or inside? Well, place a wooden platform and get up there. Don't have a wooden platform? Well, then, you might be unable to proceed. If you just fell off a big cliff in an underground hole, then you're really in trouble -- in fact, you might be dead.

Depending on the hole, you might be able to journey further underground and find a warp gate that will let you gate yourself back to the surface. Sometimes this is possible, sometimes you're essentially just trapped forever. When that happens, you'll have to use the dreaded "Abandon Character" button in the Escape Menu (this suicides your character). No-one who goes out properly prepared should ever have to abandon their character, so if you have to click that button you can take solace in the knowledge that it's your own fault. ;)

Wooden Crates

These aren't quite as vital as wooden platforms, but they are close. See, wooden platforms have to have a wall to hang on -- hence their working great in caves and interiors. But when you're outside and there's a sheer cliff you want to climb... well, the wood platforms just fall to the ground. Sure, you can stack them up, but they are pretty short and so that's like stacking individual bricks to climb a skyscraper. Crazy!

Wooden crates don't hang on walls, they just fall to the ground. But they can be stacked up, and are substantially larger than wooden platforms, so you can make all sorts of impossible-in-reality structures with the crates. Staircases right up those sheer cliffs, for instance. The physics of Environ are such that no tower you make will ever topple over -- things fall straight down, but that's it, so you can build all sorts of crazy things with ease. Just be sure monsters aren't chopping away at the bottom of your structure!

Upgrade Stones

As monsters gain tiers (more on that below), they get more health and generally better stats. You, on the other hand, have no such progression system. The only way to upgrade your character's stats directly and permanently is via upgrade stones, which you'll therefore want to collect in abundance. For 16 stones you can double your health; for 32 you can triple it; and so on. You can also upgrade your mana and your attack strength. But each upgrade gets progressively more expensive, and each character is limited to only 10 total upgrades (which can never be un-done), so spend with care!