NEO Scavenger – Ten Beginner Tips

NEO Scavenger is a mildly demanding Roguelike. A lot of things can go wrong, your initial selection of skills, traits and even what equipment you take or leave all influence how long you will survive for. The purpose of this guide is to offer your ten tips to ease you into the game, especially if you are playing NEO Scavenger for the first time. If you want to give NEO Scavenger a go you can find a free Demo at the Blue Bottle Games site. This Demo will allow you to sample a good portion of the game, especially its “randomness”.

Sitting in my camp, surrounded by deer and ruined buildings. That was the calmest moment during that playthrough.

NEO Scavenger – Survival Tips

1. Choose your skills wisely – All the skills you select have their benefits. Some of them appear to have greater benefits than others. Here are a few:

Botany – When scavenging in forests or plains Botany increases your chance of finding food and water. Furthermore it will tell you whether the food you just found is edible or poisonous. In essence, with Botany, you will NEVER go hungry. Move to any forest or plain and search for food. You will most likely find enough food, in a few short turns, that you will not die from starvation or dehydration any time soon.

Strong – You can increase the chance of finding loot, at the cost of safety and sneaking. You can carry more. In general it is a very useful skill, and you can use it to kill the dog during the first scene.

Melee/Ranged – These allow you to not only be better in combat, but they also allow you to make improvised weapons of your own. These skills are priceless if you intend to live off the land, especially if your other skill is Botany.

Lockpicking – It’s a useful bonus skill, if you do not know what else to pick. Make a lockpick, and together with this skill you will have an increased chance of finding loot in buildings.

Athlete- Move more on the map, sprint during combat. A useful skill during any part of the game, whether you want to move further, or to run away.

Other skills may not be as useful, or are highly situational. Mechanic, Electrician, Hacker, all of these skills have limited uses throughout the whole game. There are, of course, situations when they have a role, but you won’t normally use them on a day-by-day basis. This also includes Medic, which although allows you to identify the use of different drugs, and gives you insight on your overall medical state, is not usually worth the skill slot. The above skills are those you should consider your primary picks. Everything else is optional.

Your initial selection of skills is important. Make sure you pick the right ones.

2. Freeze or Live – Your very start of the game is about staying warm. There are a few ways to do that. Firstly, find enough clothes not to freeze. Find a pair of shoes, pants, shirt and jacket. With all of these you should be perfectly safe. Furs will provide more heat but they will be hard to obtain early into the game.

If you want to get a very warm piece of clothing early into the game do the following: 1) Take the Strong or Melee Skill, together with Trapping. 2) Use the Strong or Melee skill to kill the Dogman during the first stage of the game. 3) Open the Crafting Menu and combine the Dogman, with a glass shard and your trapping skill. This will give you Dogman Fur. Dogman Fur is wore like a cloak, so you can still wear something under it, but the Dogman Fur alone will keep you warm through the night (you really do not need anything else).

If you fail to find any clothes at all, but you found a sleeping bag, you can create a camp, and add the sleeping bag to it. The sleeping bag will slowly let you regain your heat. You will start to freeze once you leave your camp, but you could always bring your sleeping bag with you, to keep yourself warm at new camping spots.

Do not be angry if you die at the start of the game from freezing. That can happen, a lot. You either get lucky and find clothing, or you don’t, and you freeze.

This is not a well organized Vehicle inventory, but you can get a clear idea of your options!

3. Organization – When you are safe from freezing it is time to start looting. There is so much junk though! What should you take and leave behind? First of all, cardboard boxes and plastic bags are your simplest containers that you can carry on yourself. A plastic bag can be carried on your back, as a sort of backpack. If you find a proper backpack, good job! But if you do not remember there are many alternatives. Some clothing will allow you to store small items in their pockets as well. You can also store items in smaller containers, to then store them in other containers (so, you could put items into a First-Aid Kit and then put it inside a backpack).

You also have vehicles. For now these are mostly things you either drag or push. The shopping/box trolleys are some of the best vehicles you can find. However, a Sled is also a good alternative. The problem with the Sled is that it slows you down. You can fix that, by turning the Sled into a Sled with a chord, thus increasing your travel and combat speed.

Once you have a suitable vehicle you can carry a lot of large items on you throughout the wasteland! Just remember, you cannot carry too many things. Your character has limited strength so keep an eye on your bars. The more you have to carry the quicker you will tire and the slower you will move.

You can also ROTATE items in your inventory. When holding an item with your mouse press A or D.

4. Efficient Looting – How to increase your chance of finding something at a location? In Forests and Fields Botany will increase that chance significantly. In urban areas you have a few options. Among items you have the lighter and crowbar. The crowbar increases loot chance, but decreases safety and sneak, but the lighter will further improve your looting and safety, but decrease sneak.

The Strong skill works just like the crowbar. If you have a Lockpick you can use it with the Lockpicking skill to increase your loot chance. In some locations having the Trapping skill will decrease the chance of a trap wounding you.

All of the skills and items above can be combined on every single scavenge attempt. However, items will have their conditions drained a bit, so you will eventually need replacements.

5. Travel – A lot of things can effect travel. Your skills, footwear (or lack of), tiredness, terrain type, time of day, vehicle, weight. If you have shoes, a quality vehicle and are fully rested you should travel quickly, and with little obstructions, except the night. During the night you will move at a snail’s pace. However, there is a cure for that. If you found a torch you can light it using a lighter or other warmth source (like a camp fire). Then, when you hold it in your hand, you can travel during the night as far as you did during the day, your vision will still be limited however. This also means that with a torch you can craft or scavenge just as much as during the day. Otherwise you will be able to do one action per turn.

NEO Scavenger – Ten Beginner Tips

6. Crafting – You can make a lot of very useful items through crafting. Weapons, ammo, safe drinking water, etc. If you play your cards right you could find yourself carrying some of the deadliest weapons in the game without having to enter the city!

Combining items can be a bit confusing. When crafting some items can be combined into different things, or deconstructed. When you insert a few items into the crafting window, but you do not see the end result you wanted, look for an arrow above the “result” window. That will scroll through your crafting options, if you have any.

Remember, when crafting an item that has a “condition” (between 0 and 100%) what condition your final item will have depends on the average of all the conditions of the items used in crafting. For example, if you had a Sled with 50% condition and added a medium cord (it has no condition listed, so it’s always 100%) then you would end up with a Sled with a String with 75% condition.

For a long list of different Crafting recipes check the NEO Scavenger Wiki.

7. Camping – Not every location is good for camping. In fact, your choices might be very limited. Each camp site can be in some way improved, through the use of found or crafted items. You can select which camping spot you want to rest in by selecting a camping spot on the rand hand side of the screen. Usually the game will select the BEST camping spot.

Having a camp does not guarantee the safety of your items. Bandits can still enter and take your stuff, but if you plan on looting a local area you can use the camp as an area to gather all that you found, and then take only those things that you will need for your further journey.

In order to hide things in your camp you have to first place them on the ground. Then, through the camping menu you have to put them into the camp inventory. By doing this you can also improve campsites by adding sleeping bags, fires, tarp covers and other items. See the Camping page on the Wiki for details.

Bleeding does not mean the end of the world. If you wait long enough you will stop bleeding eventually… But you might as well use a bandage to stop bleeding sooner.

8. Lets talk about health – A lot of things can go awry with your character. Let us talk first about combat wounds.

During combat you can suffer bruises and cuts. Cuts will cause a bit of blood loss, while bruises will heal themselves over time. All wounds will also cause a bit of pain, which if accumulated sufficiently could make your character pass out during combat. Bruises can cause fractures inside of your body, which in turn means more pain, and possible internal bleeding. Depending on what you are attacked by your wounds will differ.

Fractures can be “fixed” with splints. That does not mean you will be fully operational but you will not be as penalized as before. For cuts and bruises you can apply bandages. You should use CLEAN RAGS over DIRTY RAGS. Dirty rags if used over wounds can cause infections. Clean rags, when used, will turn into dirty rags eventually. It is possible to clean dirty rags and turn them into clean rags. Alcohol can also be used to clean your wounds. It is possible to survive without using any bandages or alcohol, but if you have numerous bleeding cuts, and especially if you have lost a lot of blood, use those bandages and other medical supplies to recover, or the next fight could be your last.

Disease and poisoning can happen. Antibiotics help with most diseases. Food, water, untended wounds, can all cause diseases and poisoning. Usually the side-effects include vomiting, which reduces both your hunger and thirst by a margin. You can test the quality of water with a water tester, and you can also boil it to make it safe for consumption. Food can be safely identified with the Botany skill (in the case of berries and shrooms). Meat can be cooked over a fireplace, making it safe to eat (human meat is risky).

9. Know your enemy – The AI in NEO Scavenger is not “dumb”. Bandits will follow your trail, but they could flee as well. I had moments when an empty shotgun was capable of forcing a bandit to flee, since he did not know whether I had a shell or not. Even a group of bandits could flee, if you threaten them sufficiently.

Looters -> Bandits -> Raiders. Looters tend to be the weakest, while Bandits and Raiders could have working firearms. Be very careful when facing them. If you see a bandit with a gun charging at you? He has no ammo. If he has ammo, use cover, then close the distance through sneaking.

Melonheads are as much a pest as Looters. They are only dangerous in very big groups. Dogmen are far more dangerous, and Horrors just as much. If you see a Dogman or Horror and you lack a strong ranged weapon (bow or firearm) move in the opposite direction. You could try hiding, but the Dogman or Horror could still bump into you.

Ranged weapons, no matter the type, are a good way to start any engagement. Even a sling with pebbles, combined with the Ranged skill, could take out far superior opponents in just a few attacks. The Bow and Spear are two weapons you can make yourself and they are very dangerous, in the right hands. Firearms are rare, and the right ammo to them is almost non-existent. Keep the firearms for special occasions, and rely on weapons you can craft yourself for dealing with the vast majority of enemies

10. DO NOT LOSE YOUR AMULET! – The amulet around your neck, if taken off, will summon a Wraith. This is the toughest enemy you can face in the game, and according to those who succeeded in doing so said that it was thanks to the largest firearm they could get their hands on, and a lot of luck. The Wraith appears when you no longer carry your amulet.

You can lose your amulets when: 1) Bandits loot you, and 2) You use the amulet for crafting (that can happen). You can also willingly take the amulet off to fight the Wraith. Why would you want to fight the Wraith? You deal with the biggest challenge in the game, and since there will be only the one Wraith in the entire game you will be safe to use the amulet for crafting, or as something to sell at the Junk Market.

Conlcusion

There are things  I did not mention, such as random events, locations or the “City”, but this is a guide for beginners, so if you are looking for more precise information on a topic check the NEO Scavenger Wiki! All your answers will be there.