Icarus – Beginners Tips

Here’s some practical tips for a new player.

Tips for Newcomers

Crouch. Immediately. Stay in crouch as long as you can. You won’t have any stealth gear or talents at start, but it’s better then just standing upright. Might as well have a neon sign over your head if you’re just standing there. Avoid most animals. You’ve learned the hard way that the “horses” are bloodthirsty vicious things. Later on if you kill one and get a really good look, you will realize… it’s NOT just a horse. It’s a horse and boar hybrid. Set of double tusks on either side of the lower jar. Seen a lot of horses, none have tusks.

• Gather loose stones on the ground, harvest the tiny tiny trees (you just press a button to harvest them, no tool needed).
• Make a stone pickaxe first.
• Mine the nearest stone boulder, try to get to about 100+ stone. 150+ is even better.
• Stop and make a stone axe, a stone knife.
• Chop a tree down, harvest and pick up all the wood.
• Make some spears.
• Arrange all your tools on your hotbar the way you like it. Put weapons on keys easy to reach in an emergency (I like 1-4, easier for the fingers of my left hand to reach without really moving hand)
• If you can kill a harmless animal, harvest the meat and try to cook it as soon as possible.
• Put the stack of cooked meat on your hotbar.

Selecting that key and then pressing it repeatedly will less you choke down meat as fast as possible. Almost all cooked meats gives you an instant bonus to health. Bandages only fix a debuff, like bleeding, etc. They do not provide health. Cooked meat does. You can spam that key in an emergency and sometimes outheal being damaged. Better cuts of meat give more health. But as a new player, you aren’t going to be killing bears and mastadons and other big animals soon. Stacks of cooked meat will do for the beginning.

Head towards a nearby cave. Don’t know where caves are? search for “icarus intel” on the web, and that’s an online map. Shows important locations. If it makes you choose a mission, look for any mission with “exploration” in it’s name. That’s a fully opened map, like open world.

if that sounds “cheaty” to you, it’s not. We ARE astronauts. We DO come from an orbital station. Having detailed maps of the terrain sound like a pretty easy thing to get.

If the worms are too much threat for you, build a base near the mouth of the cave. You’re going to want the metals out of the cave eventually.

And the last bit of advice… if you’re still reading this wall of text is… try to see if you can get someone to help you. Join your open world and run interference for you. Roam around the map gathering resources for you and then dumping it all into stockpiles so you have it to build with. Might be an uphill battle to find someone willing to do that AND who’s playtime schedule fits with yours. But consider it like an old fashion barn raising.

There were things you couldn’t even remotely do yourself in the past. You had your neighbors come over and help. Usually got turned into a sort of block party ending with a big shared meal. Then when the next guy needed help you’d go to their place to return the favor. So see if a more established player is willing to help out.