Radiation Island - Tips, Tricks, and Strategies to Get You Started and Keep You Alive

Attention all survivors:
Curious to know how much fun we had trying to hunt habits and avoid zombies? Check out our Radiation Island review!

Radiation Island is a survival game, and as such will have two main categories that its players will naturally fall into: those who think it’s too difficult, and those who think it’s too easy. If you belong to the former, we’ve got some handy tips that should make your first few nights a fair bit easier to handle.

The Basics

• Grab whatever you can - You’re going to need supplies in order to craft tools and weapons, so make sure you grab everything you see laying on the ground when you’re starting out. This will come in handy very quickly.

• Punch trees - It’s a silly tradition, really, but it’s just as useful here. If you find yourself low on resources and in need of twigs, you can gather them easily by just attacking a tree with nothing equipped.

• Gather from bushes when you can - Large bushes can also be harvested for useful materials. Later on you’ll probably want to use a machete to make things easier but when you’re just starting out bare hands will work just fine. The materials you gather from these bushes will be necessary to craft medicine, bandages, and so on, so don’t ignore them!

• Keep a stack of food on you at all times - You’ll start to get hungry pretty fast, and if you don’t have any food handy you’ll begin to starve in short order. You can find coconuts and pineapples scattered around the beach most of the time, so definitely keep as many on hand as you can.

• Respect the item stacks - Items like food and resources can stack pretty high, so don’t worry about collecting a lot of them. Tools and weapons, on the other hand, do not stack. Keep this in mind when you go out scavenging because inventory space is extremely limited.

• Craft tools as soon as you can - You’ll want at least one axe and one pick so that you can harvest more wood and stone more reliably than hoping you find some laying around. As a bonus, the axe can help you fend off wolves and other hostiles - it’s better than using your bare hands, at least.

• Also make sure to craft a boomerang - It’s a silly little weapon, but it’s simple to craft and is also an important item for the beginning of your game. One hit from the boomerang should kill a rabbit (meat!), and it can be used to weaken a wolf at a distance before it closes in and you’ll have to fight it up close.

• Explore, explore, explore - Keep venturing out to try and find structures to ransack. More often then not you’ll stumble upon items that will aid in crafting more advanced items, or even find better equipment.

• Establish a home base - Find someplace, preferably a building of some kind as it’s less exposed, and use it as your base of operations. It might take some time to craft things like storage boxes and a bed (assuming one or both aren’t already present), but having a place to come back to when it gets dark and being able to dump all your stuff in a central location is incredibly handy.

Crafting

• A backpack should be your first priority - You don’t get a lot of inventory space to start out with, but crafting a backpack will help immensely. You’ll find it in the same tab in the Crafting menu as the rest of the clothing items, and it will require a fair bit of leather - which is most easily found by killing wolves.

• A furnace should be next on your list - It takes a fair bit of stone, but you’ll definitely want a furnace as you can use it to process raw ore for use in more advanced tools. But more importantly, you can use it to cook meat.

• Load up on cooked meat - Once you have a furnace, go out and hunt rabbits and/or sheep so you can et your hands on some raw meat. Next, load it into the top section of the furnace, along with some fuel (wood, charcoal, etc). It will do its thing automatically so feel free to wander off if you’ve got a lot to cook. Why cooked meat? Because you can hold 20 to a stack and one piece of cooked meat will pretty much fill your hunger meter entirely.

• Carry medical supplies at all times - Pretty much all of what you’ll need for simple medical supplies can be found on bushes, and you’ll definitely want some of these healing items on hand as you start to venture further out. You’ll naturally heal from regular damage so long as you aren’t starving, but some status effects won’t go away without proper treatment. Bandages will be needed to deal with bleeding, radiations pills are necessary for when you wander into a dangerous area, and a splint will some in handy if you break something after an unfortunate tumble.

• Start melting down ore - The basic iron ore you’ll find while harvesting stone can be used in all sorts of more advanced items like machetes, shovels, a more durable axe, and several varieties of ammo.

• Use wood for furnace fuel at first - I mean obviously you’ll need to burn wood, but use the larger pieces of wood instead of twigs. Sure twigs are a bit easier to come by, and will work in a pinch, but burning wood will produce charcoal, which you can then use as fuel in the future. Besides, there are plenty of trees around the island and they’ll all grow back eventually.

General Survival Tips

• Always keep torches around when you go exploring - Night will fall very fast, and if you’re away from camp you won’t want to get caught out in the dark without a light source. You should be able to find torches in a few different areas, but you can also craft them using wood, stone, and fat (found on sheep and bears).

• Never go exploring empty handed - You’ll want to leave inventory space open for whatever you might find to bring back, but make sure you set out with at least a few essentials. Things like bandages, a weapon (or the supplies to build one if necessary), and most definitely food.

• Keep enough on hand to build a camp fire and keep it lit - The days never seem long enough, which means you’ll more than likely get stuck out at night as you move deeper into the island interior. Assuming you’re able to find some shelter to hole up in you’ll also want to get a fire going as it will ward off some animals and also keep you from freezing.

• Craft or try to find a ranged weapon (not a boomerang) as soon as possible - Ranged weapons like guns and bows will allow you to take out enemies and predators before they can reach you, thus avoiding damage and possible bleeding wounds. They're also really handy when dealing with crocodiles, since they tend to stay in the water.

• Use your maps - You can find the maps in your journal, with one providing a view of the entire island and the other a more local snapshot. These will help guide you to other locations and objectives, as well as help you find your way home if you get turned around. You can zoom in on the island map by tapping on it, and you can place a waypoint on either map by tapping wherever it is you’d like to explore.

• Make a shovel and dig - It sounds silly, but the sand you can collect by digging up a beach will be important for making glass in the furnace - which is needed for creating the bottles for medicine. As a bonus, you’ll sometimes dig up crystals that you can use to create a shock club (a powerful weapon), convert into several other types of resources using Converters, and so on.

• Tap the icons at the top of the screen to heal and eat - You can certainly go into your inventory to use items if you’d like, but it’s a lot faster to simply tap on the hunger or health icons and let the game use the items for you. It’s smart about it, too - it’ll automatically use the least potent stuff first, so for example if you’ve got a stack of cooked meat and a few bananas, tapping the hunger icon will use bananas first and save the precious meat for when you really need it.