Tips for Gameplay
- If you want to maximize your experience with Nightingale during gameplay, refer to these tips and tricks.
- You’ll have many crafting recipes and resources unlocked, allowing you to experiment with higher-tier items and building components. Resources will be in a chest near where you spawn.
- Press M to use the map to find points of interest, NPCs, and Abeyance bosses.
- Follow Puck’s quests to progress in the game and unlock Realm travel.
- Make sure you eat food to keep your health and stamina stats maxed.
- Some areas will be blocked by a Hope Gate, you will need to gather enough Hope to enter these areas. Hope is a combination of estate and gear. Estate score is collected by building near an Estate Cairn.
- You have additional weapons in your inventory, press TAB to access them.
- You can repair weapons with essence dust. To make more essence dust, you can dismantle inventory items.
- Right-click while holding weapons or tools to use your secondary actions; two-handed weapons will block and one-handed weapons will let you dodge.
- Hail can kill you. Make sure you have shelter with a roof to protect you from the elements. Or you can use your umbrella to walk around while it’s hailing to avoid damage.
You can find and use the Realmic Transmuter in your Realm. Realmic Transmuters can change various attributes in your Realm such as weather and physics. To use the Realmic Transmuter, you will need to activate it with a Minor Realm Card. For the stress test, we’ve provided players with several Minor Cards to use on the Realmic Transmuter so they can try it out.
- Realm Cards are in your inventory, press TAB to open your inventory and click the Realm Cards submenu.
- Use your sickle to collect more fiber and sticks than you would with your bare hands.
- Open building mode (press X) to destroy or move built objects.
- You can control how many items you move from your inventory to a chest or vice versa by selecting the item and clicking the move to inventory button in the inventory menu.
Basic Tips
- Holding ‘E’ (interact) will collect all items near you.
- Right-click an item to transfer it instantly between storage.
- Use the umbrella to slow fall (hold space).
- Plant fiber and water spinach are great starting sources of Essence Dust.
- I recommend starting in a Swamp.
- Healing salve instantly cures sprained ankles and broken legs.
- The Respite realm (starter realm) is for unlocking new major cards (it is the main way to progress). So you’ll always be coming back to this realm.
- Explore the whole realm to reveal the names of each location here, most you can’t get in anyway. As you progress the main questline it will tell you the next card to unlock and the name of the location where. All of those locations are here, in the starting realm.
- In the System menu there is an Im Stuck option, which will get you unstuck.
Recommended Way to Progress
Unlock a major card, then open a portal to each biome in that major (e.g.: Antiquator is a major). In each biome go straight to the Fae Tower (it reveals all locations), and look for Fae Portals. They will give the most essence for your time – by far. Also, be sure to visit every trader in each major and each biome. The most important trader is the one with the caravan.
Advanced Tips
- Use the umbrella right before you hit the ground to prevent all fall damage (even if you’re still moving fast).
- Jumping constantly through swamp water prevents the slow, wet, and disease effects.
- Using the Thin Veil card in combination with jumping and any weapon with a dash (knife, climbing picks, sickle, hammer) is the quickest form of travel.
- Jump and at the height of your jump, dash. Do not hold sprint, you will maintain momentum and regenerate stamina on most jumps.
You get easily many times more essence dust by collecting rocks, building a collection of work benches on site and processing them into marbles.
Rocks and crude fiber both give 1 dust each. But 6 rocks will turn into 20 marbles at 2 dust each. Each wb is only a few logs and fibers so you can build half a dozen benches pretty quickly on the fly
Essence dust isn’t quite as hard to come by nor as valuable as it was during some of the playtesting. I recall 1 build where dust was the currency used to unlock recipes at the trader. Now dust is only used to purchase basic resources.
I think adding that the Major Cards are in practice difficulty levels, might be helpful. They are the progression system. It took me a long while to realize that. I think I got confused by the cool names. Really, you could translate the names to T0, T1, T1.5, T2, etc. The first few will give you T1 essence, then the next few gives you T2, and so on.
Also, something I just learnt on reddit. When you make a portal to a place, even if you reset the portal to open another one, if you later put in the same cards it will open to the same place. E.g., Forest Herbarium. I visit the first time, do a bunch of stuff, then leave and reset the portal to go somewhere else. If I late put in the Forest Herbarium cards, it’s the same realm I visited the first time I did it. The realms don’t disappear just because you reset the portal. If you want a new Forest Herbarium realm, you have to reset the portal, then look at the bottom of the screen and there are options to realm share, reset realm, and difficulty. Ticking the ‘reset realm’ means you get a new Forest Herbarium. But as I understand it, important NPCs don’t go away. They stay in the realm type even if the realm changes (I think – please confirm).
For Essence Dust you can convert Rocks to Marble Pebbles at a workbench and then convert those to way more essence than you’d have gotten for the rocks. The Rocks are only worth 1 Essence each, but 6 rocks can be converted to 20 marbles worth 40 Essence Dust.
If you really want to be cheesy set up near an Essence Trader and buy rocks in stacks of 10 for 10 Essence Dust. Drop some workbenches beside him and you’ve got an infinite supply of Essence Dust.
It’s hella cheesy but it makes the early game material grind much easier since that same Essence Trader will sell you pretty much all of the basic materials.
Unless they patch this or if there’s a better way to do this:
When you get a companion apparently their tree chopping skills are over 9000, and can take down a giant tree or even a small tree way way faster than you can even with the crappy first axe.
Let them and yourself smack some trees down, grab those logs, when you unlock the saw, make stacks of paper. You get a lot of paper per log, a stack of 100 paper is 200 T0 essence. I figured this out only last night after just constantly losing essence supply to repair and exploring/building in my respite realm.
So while I wait for cards/leather/twine etc I’m chopping trees / making paper / getting profit to at least cover my repair gear costs. In just a few minutes I had 2k in T0 essence.
Or maybe I’m dumb. I’m not exactly great at survival games, but I do enjoy progression unlocks. But if you’re first starting out that’ll get you what you need from that first merchant early.
As far as farming T1 and up I have no idea. Would love input, I work a lot so I only have had short bursts to play.