Oldowan: Guide for New Players (Basic Survival and Crafting Tasks)

Upon generating a new world you’ll find yourself dropped in the low lands near the sea. Looking around you should see rocks, grass, trees, sticks, mushrooms, wild crops, and maybe some animals. Everything you see can be interacted with. The trees can be cut, the small stones and sticks can be gathered. The big rocks can be harvested with tools. The animals can be hunted. Everything can benefit you in some way. Likewise, there are many things that can hurt you. Not all animals are friendly and they like to be left alone, but that doesn’t mean you have to. The mountains offer important resources, but are home to more dangerous animals and cold weather. Venture there at your own risk.

All items have descriptions that can help you know what they’re useful for.

Crafting
There are many things to craft in Oldowan. Upon opening your inventory, you’ll see a big list of items on the right side. These are all things you can craft at any time as long as you have the materials. The small area under this crafting list is the crafting queue. This is where you can see items you’ve set to craft in the future. You can stop items from being crafted using the little ‘X’ button on the right side.

These aren’t the only items craftable in Oldowan. There are workbenches that offer more advanced items specific to that workbench. For example, there’s a pottery workbench where you can sculpt pottery and other clay-based items. You’ll make all your furnaces in a pottery workbench.

Cooking
There are six cooking stations that offer different recipes.

• Campfire – General cooking and roasting
• Mortar & Pestle – Grinding things into powder
• Pottery Kiln – Turns greenware (uncooked) pottery into fired (cooked) pottery.
• Charcoal Kiln – Turns wood into charcoal more efficiently than a campfire.
• Natural Draft Furnace – This is your first real furnace. It smelts copper, tin, and bronze.
• Forced Draft Furnace – Smelts iron, which is the most durable metal in Oldowan.

Food
There are a few different ways to get food in Oldowan.

Foraging
You can run around collecting things like mushrooms, grapes, coconuts, and mussels.

Hunting
All animals can be eaten. You can hunt the chickens, moa, mammoths, and wolves. Or you can go fishing.

Farming
Wild crops can be found around the land, but they’ll need to be mature before you can harvest them and start a farm. Once you have crops, you can plant them using a hoe, or build gardening plots and plant them there. You can start orchards using grape trees or coconut trees to have a reliable source of food.

Water
Water appears scarce at first, but if you know where to look, it’s quite abundant. Food items like grapes, coconuts and fish offer a decent amount of water. Using buckets, pots, or cups you can leave them out in the rain and they’ll collect water. Or if you take them to ice caves or a water well, you can gather water and bring it back home. The water well can be built from a Basic Mason Bench.

Shelter is important in Oldowan. It gives you a clean space to work with, protects you from animals, and insulates you from the weather. The most basic shelter is the Teepee, which can be crafted without the need for any workbench.

Other building pieces can be made from the various different workbenches. Start with a foundation and build off from it. Equip the building pieces to your hotbar and look for a valid placement opportunity on the ground. Things like grass, trees and stones will get in the way of building. Be sure to clear these out of any desired building location. Pieces can be snapped together by looking at the orange snap points that appear while holding a building piece. Use the ‘R’ key to rotate items as you wish.