Things you can do or keep in mind to survive longer in Caldera.
How to Survive
Сrеdit gоеs to Waifu Sensei!
Scuff Player’s Guide to Survival
I lack fancy words, but you really don’t want to die in your journey in Caldera. Dying can reset your journey extremely far, losing a lot of progress. So this is how you can scuff your way to stay alive.
- Keeping your Poise Up
As long as your poise is at least 1, you won’t lose your health from one hit. However, there are still instances where monsters can damage you more than once in a single move. It is recommended that you have a way to get back from a fight and let your poise recovers. Your poise recovers after 4 moves, where it starts to slowly rise up, but only if there isn’t a monster adjacent to you and you are not being damaged. Gifts like summons and disablers like puppet can be a fodder for your enemies to hit, so you can run away.
- Stuffing your Pack with Healing Potions
In basic games, you won’t usually need other potions and herbs in your journey if you know what you are doing. Sell the things that you won’t use, including orbs, wands, and rosettas if you have a lot). Potion shops can sell Healing Potions and Greater Healing Potions which is crucial when dealing against damage you can’t avoid. Maybe you keep setting yourself on fire, or maybe you keep dropping health, but your lifesteal don’t work since all enemies have no blood. Just by making one mistake of losing health can lose you a run that you will have to retry.
- Committing Sins like Breakfast
You’d think that once you break a god’s taboo, it could permanently ruin your game. Fortunately, they will easily forgive you with just by burning their god icon, which is purchasable in any town’s Occultist Shop. These icons restock, and can range from 3900 gp to 4500 gp. So this solution is recommended for midgame to lategame specific.
Now, why am I suggesting you to sin? Well, everytime you dedicate yourself to a god, it resets your hp, poise, hunger, as well as removing status effects. This is an ultimate powermove when you’re at a brink of death. Additionally, when dedicated to a god, you can press the same icon in gods tab, to reset this same status, health, everything. Everytime you do this, it is a great sin, which increases your taboo against that god by 50% or more as seen in your god icon on top left of your main screen. So with the price of 4500, you technically are able to get 3 full restores with the price of one icon.
Personally, if you’re rich enough, you can use it just to solely restore hunger on your journey, specifically because god icon is not perishable. You don’t have to worry about immediately burning an icon, since the only penalty you get by being cursed by a god, is a double cost to use their gifts. But if you don’t use them in the first place, it’s a free heal, right? If anything, you can also donate to the god’s town to help remove curse.
- Puppet Gift is very valuable
Not only that it prevents your target from moving, they also can’t attack other than using tick effects. Normally, you can’t melee attack a creature this way, but I think you can disable friendly fire to get free hits. Your summon can also hit enemies that are inflicted with puppet, and so does ranged attacks. It’s technically the easiest way to kill a deer.
I have to say that for my own playthrough, I’ve found cheating to be a godsend — hit the tilde key to get the console, and type “help” to get a list of the commands. Three console commands in particular are very helpful, those being “map” (to reveal the entire map of the level you’re on), “gold 200000” to grant yourself enough gold to overcome the general lack of income available, and “god” to grant your character invincibility and all the deity skills. Even with these cheats, you’ll still be facing hours of difficult exploration and puzzle-solving, so I’m not sure if being invincible is even a “cheat” from a game enjoyment perspective. I love the backstory and lore of the setting.