Overview
This is a basic Guide to surviving hard modes early game and establishing a good baseline for future survival.
Five basic rules to surviving.
Coconuts and potatoes are your worst enemy and best friend.
Never eat more than two pieces of coconut/potatoes, or drink more than two coconuts within 10 hours. Water is even more important in hard mode and having diarrhoea can kill you if your stills are empty.
Avoid getting poisoned. It will eventually happen. Fighting a shark and BAM run into a sea snake or like me run into a rattler in the middle of a storm because the wind was louder than the rattle noise.
You can never have enough fiberous leaves. In hard mode it takes 72 hours (3 days game time) for them to respawn. As far as stills go try and use up all the palm fronds on the island before using fiberous leaves to fuel them.
If a shark attacks you when you aren’t specifically hunting them run. If you’re fishing or looking for loot you wont have the necessary tools on hand to handle a shark.
When, not if, things go south don’t panic. Take a second and make an action plan to resolve whatever situation you’re in.
Day 1
collect one rock and make a sharpend stone.
collect all rocks, sticks, young palms, and yucca on the island and craft yourself a knife from them.
cut down one palm tree (size doesn’t matter I usually cut the biggest one on the island) and harvest the palm fronds.
craft a campfire and place it where you want your starter base to be as well as a fire starter.
Craft a shelter using the palm fronds you found.
Craft an axe, hammer, and coconut flask.
Next craft a fire ring.
If you aren’t high enough crafting for a still yet craft a fishing spear, or crude spear.
craft a still
Craft a smoker if high enough level.
If at any point you’re hungry or thirsty drink two coconuts and eat two halves of a coconut.
If there is still time in the day collect all the other random materials on the island beside the herbal plants. As well as fishing up 4-5 fish/crabs. (don’t butcher them right away only butcher them when you need to use the meat otherwise the meat can go bad.)
Make note of what other plants are on the island most notably if there is any Pipi.
Day one complete, you should have a still with full fuel, a shelter, a stock of a few fish, and a campfire with a smoker.
Day 2
When you wake up make sure to check your food and water levels. If they are low. eat and drink no more than two drinks of coconut, and two halves of a coconut.
Ration your food and water well. Only eat and drink when you’re below 25%. That is unless you’ve taken decent damage.
Try and keep your stills full of water, they don’t burn resources when they are full so don’t worry about using more fronds than you need.
Today you will be exploring some of the shallow wrecks around the island. make sure not to dive too deep or enter shark infested areas as you do not have the defenses for a shark attack yet.
once you have finished exploring the wrecks head back to base and take inventory, if you’re low on palm fronds for the stills go collect 2-3 tops from palms.
Really get to know your island make note of any clay deposits you see when checking wrecks near you, also make note of any rock nodes on the island.
If you have spare time get chopping on some palms and other trees and pile them up near base. This will start amassing materials to create a raft.
Day 3
Your main goal today is to make sure you are at least 90% full on water and food so that you can make the paddle to the closest island to collect any cloth and fibers on that island.
Try and bring 2 coconut flasks with you and at least one to two smoked food. It is possible to get stuck on the second island if a storm rolls around.
The reasoning behind getting more cloth is to make a second still so that you can start a Pipi farm on your island so you can start stock piling some antidote for when you do get poisoned. and also so that you can make a sail and rudder for your raft when you start constructing it since a sail is much much faster than paddling in your life raft.
And that’s it your first 3 days in game all done! you have the start to a successful play through all done in 3 days! After your raft is complete its smooth sailing (literally) from here! that is if you remember the 5 rules at the beginning of the guide!