A Valley Without Wind
- Remap the pause button to something easily reachable (Q on a typical WASD set-up is ideal). You can only get a close look at enemy stats while paused, and having to reach across your keyboard while fighting a boss is annoying and awkward.
- Play through the tutorial mission.
- Mess around with the difficulties a bit, find somewhere that's challenging, but not frustrating.
- There are only two ways to heal: Killing enemies, or going back to town.
- Don't be afraid of dying, you don't lose anything not immediately replaceable.
- Learn to loot efficiently. When you find a building, or a dungeon, your goal is not to empty every room, but to search for any stashes, empty them, and then move on. Otherwise, you're just going to end up burning out without much to show for it.
- On that note, make good use of your maps, especially the one in the bottom right. If you mouseover a room, it will give you details about what to expect there. You can see up to two rooms deep from where you are, so you'll never have to enter a dead-end room to see if it goes anywhere.
- Destroyed rooms are always empty, and can be safely ignored, or hidden in without worry.
- Crafted spells are almost always better than found ones, even before adding gems.
- Everything you need aside from spells can be bought from the floating crystals in town. It's expensive, but it gives you an out if the RNG just won't give you enough of something you need (Wind Shelters and Buoys are the usual culprits.)
- Always plant the Wind Shelter on the windy side of the threshold. You'll want the extra square of reach, and the mission is always windy, anyways.
- You have ten upgrade points to distribute between Health, Mana, and Attack, and you can buy the crystals for them in town for dirt cheap. Play around with the set-up that works best for you. Though, as a rule of thumb, mana capacity is the least important of the three. Whether you want more health or more attack power comes down to personal preference.
- A good mouse set-up is your main attack spell on left-click, wooden platforms on right-click, and an attack spell of a different element on middle-click, preferably one that can destroy background objects. Keep a few utility spells and items on the hotbar that you can fire off with the number keys, when you need them.
- Keep at least 500 wooden platforms on you at all times. They're dirt-cheap to buy, can be found everywhere, and running out in the middle of a cave dive is almost certainly a death sentence.
- If you die somewhere you expect to be again (like the Overlord's tower), kill the ghost first. They have a way of piling up.
- Nothing you can do can ever render the game unwinnable.