Card Survival: Tropical Island

Hunter

At the start your biggest source of water is going to be coconut water (sharp rock on husked coconut) and rain that you collect by catching it in empty coconut shells. When you drink/eat coconut products your "stool liquidty" stat will go up (yes its that kind of game) which will eventually give you diarrhea, which then drives your hydration down. Therefore you want to limit your coconut product consumption to only once or twice a day. For collecting water in coconuts you have to wait until it's raining and then manually set the coconuts to collect rain, it isn't automatic.

Always be researching something. You can pause research in one thing to pick up another without penalty so if all else fails you can research meals or clothing until you unlock something that you really want. A good way to get your feet wet in progressing up the tech tree at the start is to make a woven palm frond (use frond on frond) which allows you to research baskets, which are storage against animals but also can be carried in your inventory for overall carry weight reduction.

Make sure you go in and look at all the bars on the status menu, and check the in-game help too. There's some critical info in some of the help entries that you wouldn't think of normally.

The fishing spear is cheap, good for fishing, and also good for self defense so make sure you make one. A harpoon is better but requires more time commitment. If you get an animal event then consider the damage they can do to you; birds are completely safe and macaques may give you a fairly easily treated bite but boars can break your leg (hard to fix, slows you down, incredibly painful) and monitor lizards are disease factories.

It can be worthwhile to pick cards up and go hold them over all the lit up cards, there's a lot of interactions you might not think of otherwise.

There is a critical path to follow early game:
Search for the jungle entrance from the beach, and then search for the Wetlands. go to the Wetlands and search til you find at least one, preferably both availible puddles. these refill in the rain to give you unsafe (needs to be boiled) water, but also you need to dig up mud and combine it with sand to make a mud brick, plus make clay once
. This unlocks a really key crafting chain and you should be returning there frequently whenever it rains and refreshes.

Don't wear yourself out, it drives up your water and calorie burning. If you start getting low stamina (especially if you get a notification pop up telling you that you are) then take a rest via the clock menu which takes 15 minute.

If you get wounded then you need to clean the wound and cover it. A certain plant in the jungle can be made into bandages, and once you make a loom it's really easy to make ash bandages and put them in your satchel just in case. You can use salt water to wash wounds (fill a container with ocean water, use on wound, can't just wash your whole body) but it gives a mood debuff.

If you eat a lot of one thing you'll see a notification pop up that shows a few icons of that food. That means your character is getting sick of eating it, and if you keep eating a lot it can make them really stressed.

To keep stress down and morale up you can do fun activities, and it's a good idea to dip into them if you have time. Diving in the sea is fun and gets you items, and building a sandcastle is the same. Don't try and fill the entertainment bar because you won't, just do it once or twice to push back depression.

The "hunger" system is really deceptive. You want to eat prepared meals with fat and oil in them to keep your weight up, and generally eat til you get "I may have eaten too much". This will increase your appetite and allow you to eat more without getting nauseous, and will help keep your weight up.Once you get a cooking pot the easiest good meal to make is island chicken/fish which requires bird meat or fish, coconut milk (not coconut water! Made by using the meat on an empty shell), and "greens" which the snakegrass that is all over the jungle can fill. When you make the coconut milk you'll have two half portions, use one bowl on the other to get one fully filled bowl for the recipie.