Ylands – Beginners Guide

For the faint of heart and those who hit their heads on rocks on the way on…or for those who needs answers hah!

First Steps

All credit goes to DrunkOctopus!

You’ve started into your first singleplayer game. Right now you should be seeing this:

The bar on the bottom is your hotbar. To the left you have your hands, used for punching/gathering/resting. 2-9 are your regular hotbar slots. 0 is your dynamic hotbar slot used for building, taming, and a few other things we’ll get into.

On the top left you have your hearts. You have five, and yes they go down quick when you face off against even a wolf. As with any survival game: air on the side of caution. Hunger and cold will decrease your health slowly (quicker if wet and cold) while damage from animals can do a heart and a half at a time.

First/Third Person: press the ‘C’

Crafting an Axe

By now you will need wood, so let’s craft an axe.

You need to gather three things:

• A stick
• A rock
• Three pieces of grass for rope

They look like the following…

Grass comes in multiple green types, like these:

Sticks look like this on the ground and can also be gathered from trees by right clicking them up close:

Rocks come in two types: big (right) and small (left). You need to put a hammer to the big one for a long time:

Press TAB to open your crafting menu.

You are looking to craft the grass rope in the red markup I drew with to eventually craft the axe in the yellow markup. Items that are highlighted red cannot yet be crafted, but items in blue are craftable. The amount of items you can craft are in the bottom right.

To craft you can RIGHT CLICK or click craft in the bottom left.

Items you lose or gain will be in the bottom right of your screen (sorry for the windows overlay):

Use your axe on a tree by left clicking it while selected in your hotbar.

WARNING: Trees can fall on things including you and kill you.

Trees must then be chopped apart and their items collected. They drop resin, seeds, bark, logs, sticks, and wood pieces. Destroying the stump will yield wood pieces.

Use these wood pieces to craft and unlit campfire. It will ask you to place it down opening a screen like this one…

Get used to this building screen, you will need it to survive. The info is on the righthand side of your screen and allows you to rotate it at any axis.

I hope you didn’t wait until nightfall because now you need to find flint (tiny little stones).

Use two of those to craft a flint lighter. Equip it in your hotbar and light the campfire. The campfire can be used to craft some roasted fruit. For this we need berries. They have larger and smaller bushes. Here’s an example of the larger bush.

Notice the black dots, those are the berries. On other bushes they may be purple or red.

Now that you have that out of the way you probably still need food. Keep gathering berries or if you are on a tropical island you might be able to find things like these:

Next I recommend clothing, in the form of grass of course. You will need a total of 21 grass. Make two ropes, and then craft the clothing and equip it using right click.

Finally I recommend crafting a knife (3 grass for a rope, 1 flint). Make a pole using a single stick and some of the durability on the knife. Transform that into a spear. Congrats! You have your first weapon.

Crafting Basics

Crafting recipes unlock based off you having found their requiremed items. Kinda annoying? Yeah I suppose, however it helps with progression and keeping first timers engaged.

Welcome to my humble hovel of crafting.

There are seven crating elements you’ll need to know about.

First off, the knife unlocks a lot of recipes. It requires one grass rope and one flint. Get it please!

The second, the tanning rack, allows you to make hides into leather. This is useful in numerous crafting recipes such as the bellows or leather armor.

The third, the spinning wheel, turns flax, cotten, or sisal algave leaves into yarn. I highly recommend you plant these crops first instead of gathering the entire island’s worth (by breaking down the ingredient [left click on item in inventory, break into seeds/grass]).

The fourth, the weaving loom, turns yarn into cloth.

SIDE NOTE: Be careful when crafting sewing kits using a yarn and needle, it has durability instead of being a one off item.

The fifth, the smelting furnace, is powered by coal and allows you to create ingots from ore.

The sixth, the blacksmith forge, requires you to have items made using these crafting elements (bellows & anvil).

Anvil: Get a smelting forge and grab a single iron ingot. You will need a hammer too.
Bellow: Get a tanning rack and skin goats until you have 3 leather. OR make 3 cloth. Obtain a sewing kit with 1x yarn & 1x needle.

The seventh, the kiln, unlocks the ability to turn sand and clay into hardened items such as bricks, pots, and windows.

Constructing a Hovel

This should be done by carving into the side of a cliff.

I grab a pick, and keep mining until I have a little hole. I recommend having clothing for this too, as it can get cold on the inside.

Your hovel will slowly expand as you mine it. I suggest grabbing some bamboo chests or wicker baskets to store things in the beginning. Later add in your crafting tables and light sources.

If you have trouble placing items, press V to bring up the build menu. This is useful for items like wall torches and grass pads that need you to toggle your build mode to be place them.

When you get to making doors & walls, I suggest moving into the Building Basics chapter of this guide.

‘Crafting in the Drunkcave’ A screenie

Ores

Flint Ore

Iron Ore

Clay Ore

Coal Ore

Copper Ore

Flora

Cotton

Useful for making yarn. Found mostly in tropical biomes.

Flax

Useful for making yarn. Found in temperate biomes.

Birds Nest

Useful for grabbing feathers and eggs. Don’t grab the nest!

Bamboo

Used for building primarily. Quite common on tropical islands. Found only in tropical biomes.

Bananas

Can be eaten raw, cooked, or fed to horses. Found only in tropical biomes.

Champignon

A mushroom I know nothing about, roastable?

Coconut Palmtree

Has gatherable seeds (green coconuts). Grab these before you cut the tree down! Found only in tropical biomes.

Corn

Edible and plantable. Yum!

Philodendron

A plant that gives you a large amount of grass.

Potato

An edible (roastable) and plantable crop.

Turmeric

A spice in real life I have no clue on in game.

Melon

Edible and plantable. Found only in tropical biomes.

Pineapple

Edible and plantable. Found only in tropical biomes.

Elderberries

Edible and plantable. Can be used to tame horses. Found in tropical, temperate, and frigid biomes.

Mageblossom

Plantable. Can be used in potion making Found in greater quantities in tropical biomes. Can be found in temperate biomes.

Oyster

Found underwater, mostly in the shallows. Break the item down (left click in inventory) to seperate the useless shells from the cookable meat (can be consumed raw like in real life).

Sea Urchin

DOES DAMAGE. Found underwater in shallows and in weird places you’ll end up stepping on. Break the item down (left click in inventory) to seperate the spines from the cookable meat.

Starfish

Roastable. Found underwater in shallows.

Blackberry Bush

Found in temperate biomes. Edible, plantable, and roastable. Can be fed to horses.

Raspberry Bush

Found in temperate biomes. Edible, plantable, and roastable. Can be fed to horses.

Sorrel

An amazing healing herb in real life that promotes good health. What does it do in game? I’m guessing it is used in positive-effect potion making. I’ve seen it in temperate biomes so far though.

Grain

Found in temperate biomes. No clue what to use it for besides getting tricked into thinking it is a source of hay.

Blooming Sumac

I have no idea what this is. I’ve found it in temperate and tropical biomes. I’m guessing it has to do with negative-effect potion making.

Boletus

Confirmed dank roasting. Found in temperate biomes.

Fauna

Goat

All hail the mighty lil’ bleater.

Good source of leather, only takes a few arrows to down, and they don’t fight back as far as I’ve seen.

Seagull

Source of feathers and meat alike.

Crab

Source of crab carapace for helmets and crab meat for your campfire.

Boar (Brown)

Oh! Look at me, I’ve been impaled!
Comes in brown or black skinned variants. Only one type of hide, drops a large hamhock.

Panther (Black)

Something you don’t want to wake up.
Found virtually anywhere – mainly in hills, mountains, and deep inside caves – and drops meat & pelt. A tan version can be found in the colder regions or underground.

Male Castaway

Often has an appaling sense of style. Designers tend to shoot them on sight. Their bones will feed your family for the months to come.

Female Castaway

Never curvy and usually sporting some kind of weapon to fend off the teenagers. Their bones will feed your family for the months to come.

Useful Items

So you’ve gotten somewhere, and unlike some people, made it past ten minutes of gameplay. Awesome work! Now to move on towards the next steps.

Sombrero

I kid, these don’t provide defenses, however they are kinda funny and teach you about withered plant gathering.

You need to find yellowed, withered plants to get hay for the recipe.

There’s the difference between healthy and withered plants. Grain looks yellow most of the time so it can get a little confusing.

Bark Armor

When you cut down trees you will find bark. This can be repurposed into armor for your first time running towards wolves. Let them bark up the wrong tree for once, heh, get it?

Maps

Maps are made with a piece of charcoal and a sheet of paper/leather. Regardless of your choice of materials, you will need an old fashioned press to refine the resources. This requires you to make the blacksmith forge (if you skipped ahead go back to Crafting). Once you have the press you’ll need to feed it paper pulp I believe or leather to create the sheets. The map is crafted through the TAB menu after that.

Doors

Wooden doors are made using the saw tool to make 5 beams and 6 planks out of logs. You’ll need 10 nails before completing the recipe. There are a total of six types of door styles to select from. Bushi figured out how to make the iron door by using the blacksmith forge with iron ingots. Thank you Bushi!

Bandages

5x rags or 1x cloth can be made into a bandage to heal your injuries. This is useful since food and passive healing are both really slow! Rags can be made from tearing apart cloth items while cloth can be made on the spinning wheel & weaving loom.

Building Basics

Doors

Enough people have asked me about doors and I’ve wondered for long enough myself that I decided to figure it out.

You’ll need: 6x Beam, 5x Plank, 10x Nail, and 1x Any Hammer

• 1) The hammer is simple. A stone one will do and the recipe is given to you at the start of the game. 
• 2) Let’s use the hammer to make the nails in the blacksmith’s forge. 

• 2) Every time you craft a batch of nails it gives you ten. So don’t queue up 10 nails because you’ll have 100. 
• 3) You’ll need the saw for these next items. The crafting recipe is made in the blacksmith’s forge. 

• 4) Use the saw to craft the beams and the planks in your TAB menu. Warning: Planks craft 5 items per craft while the beams only craft one.
  Here’s a picture of the beams showing the recipe. The planks are similar in nature. 

• 5) End results are numerous types of doors for you to craft: 

Taming

Horse Taming

To tame a horse you need to look in the plains/hillside areas of your island. Horses seem to be more common in hot biomes. The principle is: gather fruit and walk right up to it.

To feed the horse you have to put the fruit in your dynamic hot bar slot.

You will definitely need more than a couple handfuls. I recommend 20-40 pieces of fruit. It is quite easy to tame a horse, while it is fairly difficult to ride it.