Washed up on a deserted island after a pirate attack, you might be wondering what to do first. Don’t worry! This guide will walk you through the essential first steps to establish yourself in the world of Archipelago.
Character Customisation
Before you begin your adventure, you’ll create your character. The customization options are extensive, allowing you to choose everything from hairstyles and beards to your character’s build and tattoos. Go ahead and design your perfect pirate!
A great feature in Crosswind is that you can change your appearance at any time. Simply press the “O” key to open the customization menu and make any changes you desire.
Gathering the Essentials
To survive and thrive, you’ll need to gather a few key resources. Here are the basics you should look for right away:
Plant Fiber
Harvested from bushes with any tool or weapon, Plant Fiber is crucial for crafting Rope and Cloth, which are used for essentials like Bandages.
Wood
At the very start, you won’t have an axe. Scour the shoreline for washed-up sticks. Once you craft an axe, you can chop down trees for a much larger supply of Lumber.
Stone
Similar to wood, you’ll initially find stones scattered along the beach. After crafting a pickaxe, you can break down larger rock formations to gather stone more efficiently.
Food And Water
While not strictly necessary for survival, eating and drinking provide significant advantages. Consuming different foods can boost your maximum health, increase stamina, or grant temporary stat buffs like extra strength.
Make sure to look at the Palm trees when you first load in to the island. Shake the tree, then gather and drink the coconuts that drop down.
As you can see, it will increase your Maximum HP for 7 minutes. You can benefit from up to three different food/drink buffs at once, so experiment with combinations.
Later on, you will be able to craft a campfire, which leads to discovering new foods. This will allow you to craft recipes that can give you better food buffs.
Basics in Building
Once you have gathered some of the basics, it’s time to start building! Open the Build menu by pressing the “B” key and then right-clicking to bring up the Building Panel. Here is a whole selection of items you can place down to help you progress but also make your home look good!
As you discover more items during your progression, more crafting recipes will unlock.
Once the Building Panel is open, go ahead and select the bonfire. This is the core of your settlement, so find a nice location and place it down.
We recommend placing down the Bonfire on a beach or near the water, so it can be easier for you to get to your ships, as you will be exploring a lot.
Once the bonfire has been placed, look at crafting a shelter. This can be used as a temporary home as it has a bed which can be set as a spawn location if you die.
Crafting The Basics
Once you have had a little look around the building menu, this will lead to the next part of this guide: Crafting. Look for the Workbench and place one of these down.
Once placed, interact with the workbench, scroll down, and craft these essentials:
- Bandages
- Stone Pickaxe
- Stone Axe
- Torn Sailcloth Bag
The Sailcloth Bag will allow you to carry more resources, and the tools will allow you to obtain resources such as stone and wood at a higher and faster rate.
Upgrading Your Gear
Upgrading is extremely important in Crosswind as this can increase the damage your weapons do, increase your power level and the damage you can withstand. Most importantly, you can upgrade your bag size, which allows you to carry way more items.
To upgrade, go ahead and open the build menu again and place down an Upgrading station. You will be able to see all the items that can be upgraded and the materials it costs to upgrade.
It is very important to know that you can also obtain a disassembly bench later on which will allow you to recycle your unwanted gear. This can give you 100% of the materials back, so if you do not like a certain weapon or armor piece, you can easily change it for something else.
Upgrading Your Crafting Stations
As we have told you about upgrading your pirate, you can also upgrade your crafting stations. As you advance throughout the game, you may have noticed at the top next to the station’s name, it’s got a number (1 in this case).
However, you may have all the materials to craft an item but be confused as to why it won’t craft. This is because the crafting station needs to be upgraded itself.
As seen in the image below, the Workbenches section has 3 items: the workbench, Sawhorse, and a Toolbox. On the right side of the image, you can see it shows “Workbench Upgrade”.
This is essentially an attachment to your workbench which can be placed anywhere within your bonfire radius. Placing one of these will upgrade your workbench.
Understanding The Comfort Level
Once you have had a roam around, died to some wild dodos, and farmed some basic resources, you will want to start building your new home. This is because some crafting stations will require a roof over them to be usable.
But this is perfect as it ties into the Comfort level. As you slowly start building your home and placing more decorations down, you may have noticed the “Comfort +1” on items.
The more decorations you place down, the more you will notice in the bottom left of your screen that the comfort level will go up. The higher the comfort level, the higher your stamina bar and stamina recovery rate will be, which is important when it comes to boss fights and long farming runs.
How to Acquire a Torch / Lantern
As it starts to become nighttime, you may be struggling to see, so make sure you craft yourself a torch from the workbench. This has unlimited durability so you will only need to craft one.
The downside to this is that you must put your weapon away to hold this. However, later on when you gather copper, you will unlock and be able to create the Lantern which goes on your waist.
Gathering Copper Ore
Copper will be the next resource that you will need to discover that will open up a whole new world of recipes to craft. You will have to roam around the island that you are on until you locate the cave icon.
Enter inside to discover the Copper ore. Beware that some enemies are inside these caves, but once you’ve located the copper ore, this can be harvested with your pickaxe and brought back to be smelted at the furnace.
How to Acquire Your First Ship
Once you have returned to your home after getting copper ore, you will notice an NPC walking around called “Doctor Galen”.
He will explain that he escaped from being captured and now wants to stay with you to survive. After his speech, he will also give you your first ship. So swim to the boat and board it; it’s time to explore!
Pressing the “K” key will allow you to easily call your ship wherever you are. This is extremely helpful when you are stuck on the other side of the island and can’t run back to the original location you docked.
How to Fast Travel
Once you have started to smelt your Copper Ore, you will unlock the recipe “Fast Travel Bell”. This is super useful and we recommend crafting and placing one down as soon as possible outside your home.
This allows you to travel from this to a location OR most importantly, when you travel to an island on your boat and do not wish to sail all the way home, you can open the map while on your boat and fast travel instantly home. This can save a lot of time when you need to farm certain resources.
What to do Next?
As we have covered the very basics, it’s now time to get your base down and start using your boat to sail to new islands and start exploring for new resources and completing quests that have been given to you in your journal!
Ive included our first one hour gameplay video too, to show exactly what we did.
