document updated 12 years ago, on Aug 29, 2011
Strategies for the game, particularly for speedruns:
- There is NO penalty (no time penalty, no loss of ingredients, nothing) for dying. Dying is basically a free teleport back to your base. So death is actually desirable.
- Whenever there's nothing else nearby to harvest, always be harvesting dirt. ANYTHING can be built from just dirt, at the following rates:
- 1 sediment = 2 dirt
- 1 stone = 2 dirt
- 1 glow bulb = 4 dirt
- 1 weed = 5 dirt
- 1 wood = 19 dirt
- 1 mushroom = 25 dirt
- 1 energy = 27 dirt
- 1 gas = 100 dirt
- 1 coal = 114 dirt
- 1 iron = 158 dirt
You don't necessarily want to use this as your primary means of production. Rather, it helps to fill in for materials that you wind up short on.
- The clock stops while you're crafting (as well as viewing the recipes; it does NOT stop when viewing help). Taking a long time to craft something up from pure-dirt is much better (clock-wise) than leaving your base for a few seconds to pick up some ingredient you're low on.
- Turn the gamma up on your video card settings. This extends the range of your light by a fair bit, allowing you to defer light upgrades until later.
- FYI: Some things tend to appear in more shallow areas, while others tend to appear much deeper.
- mushroom, wood — very shallow
- gold, bolts, diamonds — very deep