This makes ZERO SENSE TO ME. Maybe it's just me, but I can't wrap my puny brain around these "survival" games. :/ I can't even figure anything out. Is this too hardcore for some one like me? T_T It frustrates me to no end. The more I seek something "good" to play, I'm always let down by my lack of understanding. And this game just makes me feel retarded.

Its a learn by doing style of game... like old school Everquest. And its in the vein of Gothic mixed with Mage Knight where there are no tutorial sand nothing to teach you except survive by trial and error. Eventually it becomes an open world RPG with major factions you interact with but at the start is mind numbingly brutal. sort of like now Subnautica starts... your worried about air food and water but after a time they are meaningless... that said this game will take a thriving well planned community and decimate it, and thats part of the charm <3

I only started playing and I've amost rage quit twice! and I love the game for that... I only know a small fraction of the game and that's such an amazing thing to me. To be completely lost, confused and not knowing about a brand new world... ignorance is glorious and this is a perfect game for me right now :)

It's a tough game but assuming you start the game with the reccomended scenario as a wanderer you'll start the game at a settlement called The Hub. From here your first priorities will be to make some money and to get some food, probably the easiest way to aquire some funds is by mining for copper - there are a few copper nodes dotted around The Hub area and you can use the prospect button to locate them. You can sell the copper at the bar in The Hub and also buy food there, it's a little tedious to start with but you can speed up time to make things a little less boring.

If you are attacked by bandits simply run back to The Hub and let the guards deal with them.

Once you have made a decent amount of money you can purchase one of the derelict buildings and use this as a starting base , you'll need to repair your new home using building materials which can also be bought from the bar. Once you have a house you can construct a research bench and start researching new technologies which will allow you to build more stuff such as buildings,storage for various items, farming, defenses etc.

You can also hire allies from the local bar to help you, when you have good bit of tech researched and some allies you can think about setting out to start your own outpost. After that it's really up to you to decide what you want to do next, but you should have a good idea of how the game works by now making things a good deal easier moving forward.

If you need more help figuring things out there are lots of useful tutorials on youtube.

If you want to get into the fun stuff more quickly, you can seek out the ruined military outpust nearby. Southeast of the hub. There's a lot of weapons, including a good quality ninja sword. A couply trips, especially ifyou have a backpack can net you a bunch of cats. It's certainly more fun than mining copper. Though probably less profitable expendeture of time (though the cleaver and Ninja sword are nice).

You will need to avoid bandits. Which is the core "skill" of the game. Keep watching, keep your eyes peeled and choose your battles. One of the good things about this game is even if you fail, as long as you survive you get better at something. If the bandits have iron clubs than you're fairly likely to survive a beating. And your toughness stat goes up, which means you take less damage.

I'm about 50-60 hours into the game, so just learning myself. So far, I've been mining copper and then started adding iron after the price of copper dropped (possibly due to my over-production?). That provided funds to buy a ruined house in The Hub, and to repair it, which took a bit of time and effort. I built a Research Bench and a storage chest, then added a stove and a Small Wind Generator on the roof to power things.

I had been luring Starving Bandits into the Hub by letting them start a fight, then running back into the bar, and letting the seriously more competent ninja guards deal with the troublemakers. Afterwards, I would loot the bodies and sell the junk to the bartender. After gaining enough combat skills to at least hold my own, I started luring Dust Bandits into town instead; their equipment is worth a LOT more. On one such run, Slavers showed up and started enslaving all of the downed Dust Bandits, until a couple of Dust Bandits began fighting the slavers. Bad for me, since the Slavers managed to cart off the unconscious bandits before I could loot them. A few in-game days later, the Dust Bandit encampment outside of town was wiped out, probably by the Slavers.

You can recruit additional party members in some of the bars (the game doesn't replace them, so you have to hit bars in new places to find more). Don't over-recruit, because the food supply in the local bars won't support a large party; you'll need your own food source.

Greenfruit is probably the easiest food source to start with, since it requires no research and will grow in "mostly Arid" regions such as the Borderlands, as long as you have a well to provide water for it and a powered stove to cook it on. Putting the well next to the farm means less time hauling water back and forth. Note that a larger farm still uses the same amount of water, but grows a lot more food. Greenfruit needs to be cooked (along with water) before it's edible. Making Bread from Wheatstraw is a lot more complex, and takes a more labor-intensive production chain.

I built a house well away from town, and had multiple attacks by both Starving Bandits and Dust Bandits within 2 days, plus a visit from the Holy Nation for "Prayer Day". My party is heavily battered with 2 in recovery comas, out of food and starving, and surrounded by a pile of bodies, in no kind of shape for another encounter. The Dust Bandits will be back shortly.

It's not a "casual" game by any means, and requires a lot of learning on the part of the player as well as development of the character. It's not something that "everyone" is going to enjoy, but will generate a hard-core following.

You can just leave your base alone without having any disadvantages. Grab your food and maybe some building materials and buy a house at "The Hub" or in "Squin" (if you're not enemy of the Shek Kingdom). Then recover there until all your wounds are fully healed.
The Hub has a small hut with 2 beds you can use for free (also spawns food and junk to sell every 24-48h) and also a couple of camp beds in some of the destroyed buildings and at the fireplace right of the east gate.
For 10.000 cats you can also buy a membership of the "Shinobi Thiefes" (+100 Relationship points with them) where you can sleep and train basic attack, assassination, lockpicking and buy backpacks with no penalties.
You can also grab a couple of dust bandits and take them with you for figthing them in your house for easy combat training. Don't do that in Squin as the Shek Warriors will usually get into your house, grab the bandits and put them into a cage in the police station.
Better research your own prisoner cage and put the bandits inside until they're recovered from wounds.

Thanks for the advice about deserting my base for a while; I checked up on it and it appears that it should be safe in my absence, odd as that seems in that unforgiving world.

On the other hand, I'm quite well aware of the possibilities of buying a house in town, and even stated in my previous post that I did so before attempting to build my own base.

Unfortunately, I was not aware at the time that my deserted base would be safe in my absence. Retreating to town and recovering would have made a huge difference. Staying to defend it resulted in my party being pretty well wrecked by Swamp Ninjas (we won, but barely), followed immediately by a large group of Starving Bandits (while I was still bandaging from the fight, leaving only 2 members left standing at the end, both in really bad shape), and then a major assault by 18 Dust Bandits, all within the same in-game day. I could deal with any one of those attacks, but three back-to-back with practically no time to heal, and then left for dead with predators eating the bodies, resulted in me giving up and starting over with a better idea of what I need to do next time.

A smaller but significantly better trained party wouldn't have run out of food as quickly (the local towns couldn't reliably supply my 12 people, and I didn't get a break from fighting long enough to grow any food). A training dummy on the roof in town would have allowed for better Attack skills, rather than spending the first 30-40 days and dozens of fights just trying to bring the party up to a mere 10-15 skill (which i could have reached by training, and THEN fight). Also, I clearly need to stockpile a LOT more food before venturing out, so I don't send a couple of runners back to The Hub and Squin, and find barely enough food for sale to feed the runners, much less anything to bring back. It's easier to plan ahead when you have some idea in advance of what situations you're planning for.

I like the chosen location, however. The spot I picked was on the gradual slopes just north of The Swamp and east of the river, which is just east of the limits of Shek control, so it's within the jurisdiction of the Holy Nation. I built a short distance due East of a large copper deposit, with a large Iron deposit within the eastern edge of the area I'm claiming. I've got 100% Arid and 10% "normal" growing conditions for most of the base, and both Swamp and Arid overlapping at 100% within the southern end, so I can eventually grow both Wheatstraw/Cactus and Riceweed/Hemp inside the intended enclosure. Iron will be inside, copper only a short walk outside, a Well at 100% toward the southern end, and wind conditions ideal for Small Wind Generators at full efficiency in the northern sections.

Hopefully, Swamp Raptors won't venture up the slope into the dry half of the base until I've got it walled in and defended with turrets, at which time I'll plant my Riceweed and Hemp.

This has been quite a learning experience.

All i can tell is: a good (lost) beating without bleeding out to death will make you just stronger (toughness). You can train on those training dummies to increase your attack, but that won't help for defense, toughness or anything else.
The longer you're taking hits without going down, the more toughness and fighing skills you'll gain - samurai or crab armor recommended (but not for ranged attacks!).
I also recommend to get a backpack for training, that will give you a lot of penalties (- xx on attack/defense) as this will make your opponent stronger compared to your char, thus gaining more XP in the fight.

1* Samurai armor: UC cities/Shek kingdom armor vendor or "armor king" for high quality ones
2* Crab armor: hard to get, needs crab raider looting or being allied with them
3* skip booth of their boots, get some wodden sandals for attack speed bonus instead

You won't gain much XP if you have 10 people in a squad fighting a single, heavily wounded dust bandit. To train your chars, it's better to kidnap a dustbandit (or any other hostile villain), patch him up and put him into a bed if he's ko. If he's not k.o and getting up before fully recovered, knock him out and put him into a bed again.
Also give him some decent armor and a crappy weapon - give your char also a crappy weapon, preferably a katana class if you're lacking dexterity, else any weapon you want to train for later on.
The less damage both of you do, the more XP gain, because of more hits are dealt, before going ko.
Your DEX should be 50+ at the very least. The more, the better, it's affecting attack and blocking speed.

Make sure your other characters, not involved into that training, are on "passive" and "hold", then fight that villain 1on1.
He will as well get stronger, that's a plus. But you need to make sure he can't escape.
To do that have the villain and your training char in a building and build (no need to complete, the frame is enough) a bed right in front of the doorframe. This will break the pathing and the foe can't escape if he wakes up and want's to run away.
Put him in a cage before you quit the game, else he might be gone on a reload.

Your base is in a spot which is pretty popular because of arid AND green fertility and massive amounts of water. Copper isn't needed that much, so you're good with the iron for building and crafting.
To make your base entrance more save, you can make sure the foes have to go through the water to reach your gate. This will slow them down and you can get some ranged hits on them before they can wreck havoc on your gate.

Swamp raptors will show up at some time and try to eat your crops. It's just another opportunity to train your chars (excellent for turret training).

A couple of visits to the Holy Nation farms allowed for some combat training against River Raptors, plus it allowed for a couple of days of farming to build up that skill in 4 members of my party (of 8), so their learning failures came at HN expense, and the Raptor leather and harvested crops paid for their meals (loot the farms before and after harvesting - it's legal - and sell the produce to the farm leader). By the time I left, all 3 of the surviving occupants of the farm were unconscious, and 20-30 River Raptors were devouring the few remaining crops. It seems like it would be a full-time job just hauling Raptor corpses to the furnace to dispose of them, so I gave up on any ideas of setting up a base in that area.

The area just above The Swamp may get Swamp Raptor visits, but from what I've seen so far, they don't seem to venture up the slope into the Arid region. My intent is to build the base with the gates to the north, so anything coming out of the swamp (Blood Spiders, Swamp Ninjas, Swamp Raptors) will have to pass by a long stretch of wall and a number of defensive turrets before reaching the gate near the top of the slope, then enter via a small foyer area surrounded by turrets.

So far, my new party is trained up to Attack 15-25 through a combination of a training dummy in The Hub plus frequent encounters with Starving Bandits around the small outpost between there and Stack. Defensive skills are still weak, mostly in the 8-12 range, but improving. The gang can now battle a comparable number of Dust Bandits about even-up, so it's only a matter of grinding a bit more skill until I'm ready for another shot at base building, except that this time around, the Dust Bandits have set up a camp just a few hundred yards/meters further to the east of my chosen spot.

Last game, the Dust Bandits set up camp at the bottom of the long sloping road that leads up to the gate of The Hub, and I had repeated clashes against them until Slavers wiped out their camp. Without the Attack training that this current group has, my earlier party had to rely on larger numbers (party of 12) to beat them, and suffered a lot of damage in the process, as well as eating more food. Once I get a basic food system up and running, THEN I can start bringing in additional members. Meanwhile, I'm stockpiling enough food to tide the group over until the farms start producing.

UPDATE - My party returned to the chosen build site to farm Dust Bandits, hopefully luring a few strays at a time out of reaction range of the rest. When my group arrived, most of the multiple Dust Bandit parties were busily engaging a smaller group of Slavemongers. Scrolling around the battlefield area, I spotted a pair of Blood Spiders, attracted to the carnage and heading straight into the middle of the Dust Bandit camp. That distracted a number of Dust Bandits, leaving several of them with serious injuries.

After drawing off numerous Dust Bandits, one or two at a time, I went to the rescue of the last standing Slaver, only to see him fall seconds before my party got there. The remaining wounded Dust Bandits were quickly taken out, and the one Dust Boss had a 2000+ cat bounty on him. I patched up several of the Slavers (after one of them woke up) for the relations increase, then my moderately battered party, laden to the max with looted bandit gear, hauled the Dust Boss to a faction town for the bounty and relations boost.

Returning to the scene of the carnage, the Dust Bandit camp was gone, so now it's just a matter of gathering a few last items and a bit more food until I try building my own outpost (again).

SECOND UPDATE - Started a base camp, built a manual stone crusher and iron smelter, plus a well, and started on a small wind generator prior to upgrading all of the aforementioned systems. My party returned to The Hub for more materials, came back to the base camp with more stuff, and the Dust Bandits had built a new camp where the previous one was. I can see campfires and bedrolls to the east from within my base, which is probably not a good thing, but so far, the patrols have all turned back just short of spotting distance to my group (I'm keeping away from that side of the camp for the moment, just in case), so I can see them, but they don't see me. This could get ugly.

I'm getting some funny ideas about what happens if/when the inevitable Prayer Day entourage waltzes down the road straight through the middle of the Dust Bandit encampment. What happens if the Priest and his party get wrecked and never make it to the player's settlement? I may find out over the weekend.

Sorry for the late reply, but i didn't get a message about this thread being updated. Working on some foreign fields to raise the farming skill and get some cats by selling the farmed goods is a valid strategy. They don't care about using their crops ;)
This also works pretty well in the Swamps. There are some small towns with rice fields you can work on. And if you manage get into the hidden Forrest to Flotsam Village, you can farm their Hemp Field and an iron node from inside their walls - unfortunatley no house to buy there. Blood spiders are no joke with low tougness and low armor + they'll eat you alive, so be careful there.
Also, i wouldn't care about good relationships with the slavers - unless you want to ally with them. If they're spotting one of your chars on the ground, they'll enslave him. Which can be okay, if you want to train that character in their slave camps ;)
To reduce the dust bandit patrols, you'll need to kill or capture the Dust King. He's in (or in front of) a tower just east of the hub, across the river. Just hire a squad mercenaries from the hub and to be safe, another one from either Squin or the waystation (also east of the hub). Make sure you make them your bodyguard and don't send them to protect your base!
When you eliminate a bandit camp (it will have 0 citizens and 0 roamiong squads/people), it will usually respawn in a different location, but most of the times further away from your base. If in doubt, hire a squad of mercenaries (again), but this time order them to protect your base - this will buy you time and they usually can deal with a bandit raid - with some help.
If the Prayer Day squad will trigger the bandit camp, it's game over for the group of bandits in that camp. The paladins will make short work of them.
But if somehow another group (maybe bloodspiders or swamp ninjas/red sabres) is joining the fight and kill the priest: lucky for you - Prayer Day postponed :)
If you're not involved killing the priest, that is. Else they're sending some revenge squad with stronger paladins and when this squad is also killed, you'll meet some of the High Inquisitors (Seta and Valtena), sent by the holy lord phoenix. They have stats into the 80s!
But they're worth some cats if handed over to the Shek, United City or Flotsam Ninjas. 40k each i guess.

After a few serious fights against the Dust Bandits and Starving Bandits (5 attacks in less than 24 hours) and another trip back to The Hub for rest and recovery (as well as to dump off as much looted junk as the party could carry), I started work on a VERY ambitious perimeter wall (roughly double the area of The Hub), with a smaller inner fortress just inside the gate at the north end. (Once I get the perimeter wall done, I'll see if I can post a screenshot.) Any invader will need to come in through the gate under turret fire from the main walls AND the fortress, then around the inner fortress with its gate open to the south, before wandering into the southern half of the settlement where all of the crops will be grown (I currently have one farm in the north until the southern parts of the wall are done). One invasion by Swamp Raptors reminded me of just how quickly even a single Raptor can devastate a field. It also reminded me of how hard they hit if you're forced to engage them in melee, because one minor raid by 3 of them did more damage to my party than from 2 consecutive attacks by groups of Dust Bandits. The one that slipped by and reached a field stripped half of it bare in seconds.

In essence, there's room for about 3-4 fields in the narrow strip of Swamp inside the walls below the road, with another 4-6 fields on the small rise above the road in the 100% Arid / 10%Green zone. Iron and Stone systems are already up and running just north of that. Oddly, while my harvesting of Wheat in the upper area has been in the range of a 75-80% success rate with workers of various skills, my attempts at harvesting Greenfruit have met with less than 10% success with my two best farmers at around 25 skill level. I'm wondering if the "Green 10%" rating for the Borderlands affects success rate, since it seems to have little or no effect on growth rate. Getting an average of 1-2 Greenfruit per harvest for 16 plants isn't going to feed a settlement, so I'm going to be reliant on Riceweed and Wheatstraw fields. The Swamp Raptors aren't edible.

Swamp Raptors are usually stronger than River Raptors, but booth are annoying in terms of farming in an unprotected area.

The fertility of 10% green doesn't affect the harvesting success rate but the growth rate. You'll need more (or bigger) fields to compensate for this, or beeing more effective, better green fertility in case of greenfruits.
My goto food when operating a base is "Gohan" which needs 10x riceweed + 8x greenfruit. I mostly avoid food which needs bread (Foodcube, Meatwrap, Dustwich) becaue the bread needs extra work which isn't worth it in my opinion.

As you've lot of raptors around, you can give your hivers or animals the foul meat (they also eat raw meat).
The Swamp Turtles (passive & peaceful) will drop 14 raw meat on death, which you can give your scorchlanders and cook some of that meat for the other races.

For a table with growth and harvest time and yield rate, please check this wiki page about Farming

The wiki seems to confirm what I'm seeing, that Greenfruit at 10% productivity is basically keeping pace with the growth of Wheatstraw at 60% productivity, but the harvesting success rates are drastically different. Cactus (100% productivity in Arid) seems to be harvested with almost zero failures by my far-less-skilled farmer.

I finished the southern half of the wall, and put in 2 Riceweed crops in the Swamp part of the camp, plus a second Wheatstraw field in the Arid region just above them. That drew multiple parties of Swamp Raptors within an hour or two. By the end of the third attack, I had several members unconscious and healing in beds, with most of the rest of the party injured to varying degrees, and two more Raptor groups were converging on my gate, so I reverted to a save before putting in those fields in the south end of the camp.

EDIT - Confirmed in a couple more Raptor raids that my "inner citadel" idea was less than ideal. I removed the few bits and pieces already built, laid out a long entry corridor running to one side just inside the main wall, and chose locations for several turrets along that inner wall with wide fields of fire. This looks a lot less imposing, but should be far more effective.

The old arrangement didn't give the turret gunners enough time for more than one or two shots before the Raptors were around the corner and past them. Now the Raptors will have twice the distance to cross while under fire, then pass a second group of turrets, which should be manned by the time the Raptors turn the corner and exit line-of-sight from the first group of turrets. I'll put a gate in the inner wall, in line with the outer gate, so I can take a more direct path when convenient, but keep it closed most of the time to divert any invaders down the long "kill zone".

Getting the whole party to hold, rather than run into the kill zone to engage the Raptors in melee (with painful consequences), has been an issue, because with two groups, stray individuals from each tend to try to get involved before I can order the second group to hold, and then I've got to direct them individually to move them away from the approaching Raptors, without pulling my turret gunners off their tasks. Killing bandits is simple in comparison, and a lot less hazardous if/when a few get past the defenses.

Gohan is my preferred food to purchase (highest nutrition for the cost), but growing enough Greenfruit to make it is proving difficult, as I'm only able to harvest an average of about 2 per crop, so I've been saving those until I have enough to expand the field to the next size. Growing it in better soil means starting a new camp elsewhere, since the Borderlands are only at 10% Green fertility, and Greenfruit won't grow in a swamp. I've been making Meatwraps from the Bread being made from harvested Wheatstraw, combined with a bunch of raw meat I've saved up (mostly from Bonedogs encountered earlier), which isn't the most efficient food supply, but is tiding me over until I've completed enough defenses (and trained enough turret gunners) to guard several Riceweed fields.

If I do another campaign someday, I'll have to try placing the camp where Vain and Borderlands overlap. No Raptors there, and somewhat higher productivity for Greenfruit, although Riceweed productivity will be significantly poorer.

EDIT 2 - Finished the wall, did a recruitment run through HN territory with a lot of stops to buy food (now for 15 people), returned to the outpost and put the farms in place again, then waited for the inevitable Raptor tidal wave. Dust Bandits showed up first, intent on avenging the heavy-handed reception of their previous ill-considered assault. It didn't end well for them this time either, and the increased time under turret fire definitely had more effect than with the old layout. Then the Swamp Raptors appeared, 7 in the first group (much less than on the previous attempt), 3 in a second wave about 1-2 hours later, followed shortly after by 1 lone straggler. Rather than take them on in melee after the turrets softened them up a bit, I chose to draw them toward my crossbow group, while the melee fighters remained at a safe distance with Hold orders. After a long "shoot and scoot" chase around the compound, with 5 crossbows spamming "toothpicks", I managed to finish off the last of the Raptors, only suffering injuries to one crossbowman who decided to take a detour THROUGH the raptors instead of almost directly away from them. I have a workbench to replace the expended ammo, which is preferable to having down time while serious wounds heal.

I loaded up a very old save for informational purposes, back to my original 5 characters with very little skill at anything, and checked out a different location on the edge of Vain, near the Hive Village closest to The Hub. As my group headed into the village to trade, it was under attack by no less than 11 Beak Things (Gutters), and the Hivers were taking a lot of casualties. Slavers showed up and tried enslaving a few of the downed Hivers, which prompted the Hivers to turn on the Slavers, and then the Beak Things went after the Slavers as well. Serious bloodbath for all parties involved, and then a couple of wandering Gorillos joined the action. I'm now starting to wonder how advisable a Vain location would be for a relatively squishy party, with Beak Things and Gorillos showing up.

I reloaded the save with the Borderlands/Swamp fortification. A couple more crop cycles and it should finally be self-sufficient with food.