This guide gives targeted, practical advice and guidelines for the introductory areas through the midgame, and stops when you become a master of your environment and are empowered to freely explore and shape the world for the rest of the game afterward.

This guide WILL NOT regurgitate tutorials or detail every aspect of the main quests. You need to pay attention to game mechanics as they are presented to you, and it is up to you to figure out how to problem solve and fight (and the combat isn't too difficult).

Instead, this guide is for the kind of player who would like to know how to optimize their time and focus on the most impactful things that will affect their playthrough.

Normal or Random Seed? Either is fine.

Doing some early prep work before the tutorial ends allows you to get a leg up before you start. Time is frozen, so anything you do during the tutorial will not drain your meters or progress the game.

• Don't dig trenches. Digging trenches with a wooden spade is a huge time sink that could be used gathering resources. Don't bother with organized trench-digging until you get better tools in the midgame. Instead, you'll use wellstones (see the Garden Layout section).
  
  
• Loot / dig up everything. Get into this practice any time you investigate a new area, but for now, you should especially dig up around the distinctive pyramid-ish shaped boulders that have lots of sandstone (1-2 are in your starting area). You will need a lot of sandstone later, collect it any time you see it for most of the game.
  
  
• Plant all that dunegrass and thorntail, and four sunburst shrubs. Having some grown dunegrass to move around will help once your wellstones start producing, and sunburst shrubs take a while to grow. You'll relocate them later.
  
  
• Clear the dead plants from your starting area. It doesn't take too long and gives you lots of wood and plant fibers for early building materials.

As you begin to explore, follow tutorials as they appear, but also follow these guidelines as you explore and progress along the main quest.

NOTE: if you progress far enough to be sent to the big temple with the lion icon on the map, STOP and complete your ghosts/graves first (see section below).

• Loot / dig up everything. Especially when you're around new setpieces (buildings, carts, forests, etc.) dig up every spot you can see and keep an idea of what you tend to find where. Continue to always stop to dig up sandstone, but also important in this early game is digging around dead oak trees for acorns (especially common on the forest floor that shows up white at night). You will need a lot of acorns very soon, and they take a long time to grow. If you are diligent in digging up around oaks throughout the early game, you can plant a dozen and still have plenty for all the gates.
  
  
• Pack your spring with plants. Every square inch of wet area around your spring should be covered in any plants you find--mostly thorntail, ancestral lily (white and red), amaranth, rootbeard, and rainbloom cactus. Don't worry about organizing them for now, you just want the essence, which you will be starving for in the early game. You should also build sigils around your plants when you unlock them, which will store extra essence. For large plants, only plant 3-5 sunburst and plant about half the acorns you collect to start your acorn farm and keep the rest for gates.
  
  
• Plant undiscovered cultivars. If you pick up a new variety of an existing seed (giant, wild, ancient, tainted) and you haven't planted it yet, plant it. You will get into hybrid seeds later but for now you do get passive stat bonuses as you discover new cultivars.
  
  
• Build baskets. You will quickly encounter inventory issues, which you should solve by building baskets early and often. See the "Storage Strategy" section at the end for how I'd recommend sorting them. Regularly dump out your stuff into the baskets you make. You can stash almost everything before exploring, but it's helpful to keep acorns, frozen essence, festival cakes (and other food like amaranth), and runic keys in your inventory.
  
  
• Poison won't kill you -- eat those frozen essences. You'll get red crystal shards called frozen essence as you kill wraiths and destroy corruption structures. They are a consumable and aren't used for any crafting, so put them to use in the early game when you're building stuff around your base and need essence, or need to activate a gate. Once you drop to 1 HP, you'll slowly regen and can use a poultice.
  
  
• Establish gates. This is limited by your acorn supply, but in the early game, unlocking sigil gates is critical to not spending forever walking around to get places. Be strategic, and try to establish portals at key points across the dunes.

You can get about 8-12 of each memory in the early phase of the game from ghosts and graves in the Dunes. After 3/4 completion on your first major quest, you will unlock the ancestral altar, which you should upgrade immediately. Unlocking these memories is critical, in this order.

• [Spiritual] Water Seeker / Wellstones. You need arable land, and fast. Make a beeline for wellstones.
  
  
• [Arcane] Crystal Clarity. Improve your water bottle, you use it a lot. You'll need an amber for this, which are most often found in chests. (The mirror upgrade is also nice and good for dealing with crowds of wraiths.)
  
  
• [Arcane] Seed's Power. You'll want to be able to craft poultices and infusions ASAP, especially to counter all the frozen essences you'll be quaffing. You'll need a lot of thorntail to make these, plus rootbeard for infusions.
  
  
• [Survival] Flint Tools. Improve your basic toolkit.
  
  
• [Survival] Adornments. Immediately craft yourself a wooden ring and equip it for a much-needed 10 inventory slots.
  
  
• [Survival] Carpentry. Among other things, enables basket upgrades, which will be useful as you start dumping inventory.
  

A few additional notes:

• You can click on a grave on the map to see what you'll need to draw out the ghost, which will save you a trip back to get materials.
  
  
• Chests, wraiths, and corrupt structures sometimes drop survival scroll, arcane scroll, or spiritual scroll, which you can use right away. If a dropped scroll is not one of these three and has a different name (and chews up your resources or poisons you), then it doesn't grant a point to any of the trees, but instead unlocks and advances a special perk.
  
  
• Ancient steles are worth doing after you've taken care of your priority unlocks. They all provide solid passive bonuses that will strengthen you throughout the game.
  
  
• DO NOT visit Naia's temple until you have found all of the ghosts and graves in the Dunes. Once you complete the activity there, it opens up the adjacent zones to the altar and it's harder to know which ones left are Dunes ghosts/graves and which ones will send you afield. I recommend completing steles also, but stele reveals will start sending you into adjacent zones even without completing the quest.

In this phase of the game, organizing your garden is not terribly important, but you need arable land, fast. Do not spend ages digging trenches. They are a huge time sink with basic tools. Instead, use wellstones. Once you unlock them, immediately place them, and upgrade them. Keep them at max upgrades as you advance.

The ideal spot for a wellstone is a position of elevation, because it will wet the ground as it travels downward, making a large area arable. Additionally, it is good if the cascade will end in a basin or pool that overflows to a lower basin, because if a pool has an overflow then its water level is predictable and won't change.

If you need to do some light trenching to get the flow directed the right way, go ahead, but the goal here is to minimize the amount of sand you have to move around until your tools improve. Let the improved wells run for a full game day before you start planting around them.

Note: wellstones can daisy chain. If an ideal spot is further away than the max range to link, you can place the second wellstone in range of the first wellstone instead of the original spring.

After the events at Naia's temple, the game guides you into exploring the adjacent zones. Before you do, take some time to clean up and prepare.

• Create the special tree you were rewarded and immediately plant or transplant some dunegrass, amaranth, thorntail, sunburst shrub, and oak tree in the grassy area to get some new cultivars. (It will convert any existing common plants in range, too.)
  
  
• You're about to greatly expand the number of plants and random items you'll pick up, so now is the perfect time to finish up any upgrades, organize your plants to make room for newcomers, and get your baskets settled.
  
  
• You may have enough cultivar varieties to create a few hybrids, if you got lucky and planted them judiciously. Create a hybrid by putting two specific cultivars next to each other, and the offspring may be a seed of a hybrid type. As you plant new hybrids, you'll get levels in stat perks. The hybrids you may have access to include:
  
  • Cutting Dunegrass (wild + giant)
    
  • Pink Ancestral Lily (red + white)
    
  • Bountiful Amaranth (meadow + giant) - note that this is one of your best crops for food
    
  • Soldier Thorntail (giant + wild)
    
  • Enduring Oak Tree (giant + ancient)
  
  
• I strongly recommend burning all of your remaining frozen essence at Naia's altar making her special consumable. Remember, poison can't kill you, so you can keep refilling water and getting essence over and over until you have stacks of the stuff. Its properties will dramatically help you in dealing with the special abilities of the next two zones.

As you begin the salt flats, you'll find water becomes a huge issue.

You'll need the following memories:

• Waking Spring (critical) - you will need to establish springs to keep your water up.
  
  
• Animal Empathy (optional) - if you find a frog while exploring, give it water, pick it up, and turn it loose in your garden. It's worth the detour.

A few notes:

• Dig up a ton of mistberries--you need 9 for the quest but the rest you should plant back home, they're a solid crop and will outperform almost anything else you can find. Also, if you find any wild mistberries, count yourself lucky--after you finish your quest you'll be able to breed the best staple crop in the game, sweet mistberries (see Appendix B: Best Bulk Crops).
  
  
• After you complete your first salt flats main quest objective (1/3), immediately return to base and craft and wear a water ring. Put your wooden ring away for now.
  
  
• Carry around some acorns and blessed drops to open gates and springs at strategic points in the salt flats; try to get a pair in the center of the zone to base yourself from.
  
  
• Rock salt drops from rock nodes in the crevices. It's useful to upgrade your baskets to preserve your plants.

The salt flats main quest reward, fully upgraded, is so insanely game-changing that as soon as you complete the Dunes quests, you should focus all of your attention on completing it as quickly as possible, ignoring all other objectives. (As with the dunes, the main quest objectives are the pink comets.)

For the quest, you will need 9 mistberries, but they are quite abundant, in bushes everywhere on the salt flats.

After completing the quest, you will need the following to upgrade your reward (and you should start looking for these as you do the quest):

• 3 dry feathers, which are littered around the salt flats, can't miss them.
  
• 4 ancient pearls by digging near skeletons and shipwrecks in the crevices.
  
• 2 moon glory flowers. These are from the canyon, so you will need to pop over and dig near some dead moon glory vines. You can also find them occasionally in the mountains.
  
• 2 skytorch seeds. This will require ascending up into the mountains, the final zone--it's dangerous but worthwhile to complete the upgrade. Skytorch trees are the tall aspen varieties, not the pine trees.

Post-quest-completion, be aware: pretty soon dust storms will start becoming a problem. You can begin preparing for them now, but if you notice a large dust storm covering the horizon you have about 5-10 minutes to get back to base and set up for it with walls. Walls seem to have a protective radius, so just placing one near a patch of fragile plants is generally enough to protect them from the worst of a storm. The most critical thing to protect is your baskets and structures; destroyed storage will not dump your stuff on the ground, everything inside will just vanish.

After you gain your mobility item, for the first time in the game you'll need to keep an eye on your mana. The more maximum mana and mana regen you have, the more uptime you'll have. Here's a list of things that affect maximum mana and mana regen:

• Your current Essence level directly and substantially impacts the amount of mana you regenerate. Keep your essence high--in your garden, stay topped up, and in the field, use frozen essence with a blessed orb to chase the poison down.
  
  
• Getting spiritual memories from ghosts and graves directly increases the maximum essence you can carry, which impacts your mana regen.
  
  
• Getting arcane memories from ghosts and graves directly increases your maximum mana pool.
  
  
• Finding and planting new mistberry and moon glory cultivars, or creating hybrids, gives you a +10% mana regen bonus to each through the Inner Strength secret.
  
  
• Building a feather bracelet directly impacts your flying speed and reduces its mana cost (A+, I always wear one) and a flower bracelet more than doubles your mana regen. Both are excellent, and will require Fine Carving (Survival). You also may want to progress into Aura Tuning and Aura Alignment (Arcane) to be able to wear them.

Do some organizing and a bit of planting at your base before heading out, but nothing too crazy, the canyons have some extremely useful tools for you. Just like the salt flats, you should focus the quest objectives (pink comets and the followup quests) before anything else, to get the zone quest reward. Before you go, you need to equip yourself with some supplies that you'll consume liberally:

• The best food you have (festival cakes, amaranth, mistberries, rainbloom cactus)
  
• Some acorns for gates
  
• Blessed drops (multiple stacks, put in your quick item slot and use them liberally, go back to Naia's Temple for more if you run out)
  
• Poultices and Infusions are optional, but you can get by with just blessed drops if you're judicious and quick.

A few notes:

• Between the supplies and your extra mobility, you shouldn't have too much difficulty with the suffocating poison damage. I'd also recommend putting your wooden bracelet back on, you don't need the water ring outside of the salt flats. After completing 1/3 of your quest objectives, you can craft a jade ring to help you deal with the poison.
  
  
• It's good to spend some time scouting atop the canyon peaks as you look for your quest objectives. Drop down into the canyons proper only when necessary.
  
  
• If you find a cluster of carts, especially near the temple, there is a ton of really good loot in the ground, including luminous tonic, which are amazing for this zone. If you're doing good on supplies and have the bag space, it's a good idea to take some time to scour these areas.

The temple event at the end of the Canyons questline is legitimately difficult if you are not prepared, because it's easy to get overwhelmed. While it is *possible* to do it with nothing more than some spare sandstone and a mirror, it is much smoother if you are willing to spend some resources.

• Take any tarnished amulets you have to Naia's temple for her craft and upgrade it as much as possible. You will use the resulting weapon primarily during the temple event.
  
  
• Unlock the memory Ornate Sigils (Arcane).
  
  
• Bring the following with you to the temple: sandstone (a full stack), wood (as much as you have), some each of flint, copper, amber, rock crystal, and moon glory (if you don't have any, farm two near the temple).
  
  
• When you begin setting up, upgrade the existing sigil to a Flame Sigil and make a Sorceress Sigil next to it. Then, build two bees of each type, in the areas between your sigils and the dais. You can build some walls if you want to, but it's optional.

When you're done, the front side should have a Flame Sigil, Sorceress Sigil, two green bees, and two yellow bees. After the first wave you'll be prompted to set up on the back side of the dais (between the two broken pillars). You should use the same setup, mirroring the front side, building between the two broken pillars so the green bees can cover both pillars. That setup should easily be enough for you to clean up wraiths and help rebuild the pillars manually.

After the event, deconstruct everything and get some resources back. The new bee structure you just learned is also quite handy for repairing damage from storms!

Following the completion of the first three zone main quests, you are solidly in the midgame and the world is your oyster. If you followed this guide from the start, it should now be around day 10-14.

Your new tools are powerful and give you complete command of your environment. (And holding down the button on the Earthquake ability is very handy for farming wood, plant fibers, and sandstone! Just don't do it anywhere near your garden.)

The quest reward for the fourth zone is not nearly as impressive, so I would recommend pausing progress on the main quest and focus on your garden. Gather memories, expand your springs, invite animals, produce hybrids...use your new tools to beef up your home area and make it thrive.

Venture into the mountains when you feel comfortable you've run out of things to do around your garden and you really need materials from the mountains.

Have fun!

In the Dunes phase, you can stuff all of your unwanted items into a few big baskets, though I would separate out plant matter from other items. However, in later zones, your quantity and variety of plants and items grows significantly. You'll need to adopt a strategy for storage that minimizes hassle.

My recommended method of choosing where to store things is to follow the automated "sort" button, which sorts items within their type alphabetically. This way, you can sort your pickups, then run down the line of baskets, dumping stock in inventory order.


For plants, giving enough room for each cultivar, you will need a total of 8 baskets. There's a little wiggle room in each basket for overflow and dry seeds, but otherwise most baskets will fill up as you complete all the cultivars.

Basket 1:

• Acorns (9 cultivars)
  
• Amaranth (9 cultivars)

Basket 2:

• Ancestral Lily (10 cultivars)
  
• Dunegrass (9 cultivars)

Basket 3:

• Fallenstar Flower (7 cultivars)
  
• Glowstick (7 cultivars)
  
• Lantern (8 cultivars)

Basket 4:

• Mistberry (9 cultivars)
  
• Monument Shelf (5 cultivars)
  
• Moon Glory (9 cultivars)

Basket 5:

• Oracle Fig (8 cultivars)
  
• Pinecone (6 cultivars)
  
• Rainbloom Cactus (4 cultivars)

Basket 6:

• Rootbeard (7 cultivars)
  
• Skytorch (6 cultivars)
  
• Sunburst (7 cultivars)

Basket 7:

• Thorntail (6 cultivars)
  
• Umbrella Fan (4 cultivars)
  
• Witchwood Seed (8 cultivars)

Basket 8:

• Any bulk crops you keep for food, such as bountiful amaranth or sweet mistberries
  
• Poultices, Infusions
  
• Overflow items you don't want to compost
  
• Misc unsorted

Generally speaking, once you max out a 'slot' of a given cultivar, there's no reason to keep more, you can just compost the extras. You can do the same for dry seeds, which have no real utility outside of satisfying quest objectives since they can't be planted.


Items, on the other hand, should generally be organized by rarity. And, generally speaking, you should only need three baskets the whole game.

Basket 1:

• Wood
  
• Plant Fibers
  
• Sandstone
  
• Flint
  
• Bone (you'll get a ton of these searching for pearls)

Basket 2:

• All other world drops

Basket 3:

• Special / Misc

By cross-referencing plant harvest time/quantity data with nutrition data, I've analyzed all available cultivars for optimal crops to grow in bulk. (Short version: as soon as you find Wild Mistberries and finish the Salt Flats quest, grow yourself Sweet Mistberries in bulk and use them the rest of the game.)

The metrics I will use are Food/Day, or the amount of food provided by the crop per day assuming harvesting regularly, and Value/Day, or the amount of food, water, essence, health, and inverse poison (so poison reduction is valued) summed up together, per day of plant growth, assuming harvesting regularly. In both cases, crops which poison are not considered, and only the "normal" (non-spoiled, non-fresh) version of each cultivar is considered.

(Note: In addition to bulk food crops, in the mid-game you will also need a ton of acorns for a quest. Like, a ton of acorns. Enduring Oak Trees drop 5, while all the others drop 3, but however you choose to go about it make sure to dedicate some land to growing lots and lots of oak trees.)

• From: Dunes
  
• 6 Food, -3 Water, 4 Health
  
• Food/Day: 2.00
  
• Value/Day: 2.33

This is the first early game staple food crop you can get your hands on, and the game tells you that. It's not great, you'll want to replace it with Mistberries or some hybrids as soon as you get the chance, but when you're first starting out it will get the job done. Plant a dozen and keep a stack in your inventory. Just watch your water.

• From: Dunes
  
• 8 Food, 4 Water, 5 Health
  
• Food/Day: 1.33
  
• Value/Day: 2.83

Worth mentioning because you normally wouldn't think to plant them since they're just out in the dunes...but you can plant the fruits you find and create a pretty nice crop. The downside is that they take 6 days between harvests, compared to Amaranth's 3 days. That said, they provide water instead of draining it and have a higher food density with a smaller footprint, so they're a worthwhile callout.

• From: Dunes
  
• 5 Food, -6 Water
  
• Food/Day: 1.43
  
• Value/Day: -0.29

Sunburst Shrub are not great at all, but I mention them because if you dig around a lot you'll end up with a lot of these in your inventory. If you don't have rainblooms, and you don't have amaranth, and you need some food, munching on Sunburst Seeds can get you by. But if you find yourself eating Sunburst Seeds regularly, you need to start a dedicated Amaranth crop.


Here I call out two amazing hybrid crops, both of which require finding a rare cultivar: Giant Amaranth to make Bountiful Amaranth, or Wild Mistberries to make Sweet Mistberries (as well as completing the zone quest in each case). Really, whichever you can get your hands on first and successfully breed it is going to be your staple crop for most of the game.

• From: Crossbreeding Wild Mistberry + Marsh Mistberry
  
• 10 Food, 10 Water, 10 Health
  
• Food/Day: 5.00
  
• Value/Day: 15.00

This is an all-around amazing crop to explore with for most of the game. In addition to having decent food output compared to Bountiful Amaranth, the fact that it also refills a good bit of water and health is an immensely helpful bonus.

• From: Crossbreeding Giant Amaranth + Meadow Amaranth
  
• 14 Food, -1 Water, 4 Health
  
• Food/Day: 9.33
  
• Value/Day: 11.33

At 9.33 food/day, this crop is easily the top performer for raw food production outside of some Oracle Tree cultivars. It's more than triple the food/day of any other crop with a similar small footprint. It is quite worth the trouble, if you can get a Giant Amaranth cultivar, to breed some of these for food.

• From: Salt Flats
  
• 6 Food, 5 Water, 10 Health
  
• Food/Day: 3.00
  
• Value/Day: 10.50

An honorable mention if you're struggling to find either of the other two cultivars. Readily available and abundant in the starting area of the salt flats, Mistberries are a solid, compact crop that outperforms almost everything you can find in the Dunes. After you complete the Salt Flats, turn your Mistberry Bushes into Marsh Mistberry Bushes, which are a direct upgrade to Common Mistberries and have the added bonus of purging some poison.


The compact crops are only outperformed in raw numbers by certain cultivars of Oracle Tree and Lantern Tree. So, while powerful, these require a lot of surface area and a long time to prepare. You'll also most certainly need frogs running around collecting them regularly considering the distances between trees. In short, these are premium crops that take a lot of effort to cultivate in bulk, and you do not need them for game purposes.

• From: Crossbreeding Giant Lantern Tree + Ancient Lantern Tree
  
• 3 Food, 3 Water, 6 Essence, 26 Health, -21 Poison
  
• Food/Day: 4.00
  
• Value/Day: 71.67

Worth growing but not for the food value, the fact that this gives tons of health and reduces poison means that this can completely replace having to carry poultices and infusions.

• From: Crossbreeding Ancient Oracle Tree + Grove Oracle Tree
  
• 9 Food, 9 Water, 15 Essence, 40 Health
  
• Food/Day: 8.00
  
• Value/Day: 64.89

A very interesting crop for the essence and health value, but it gives so much food (and remember you stop eating when your food fills up) that you can't rely on it for essence and health if you have to stop eating. And by the late game, essence stops mattering as much when you can refill any time at your spring.

• From: Crossbreeding Wild Oracle Tree + Giant Oracle Tree
  
• 13 Food, 7 Water, 12 Health
  
• Food/Day: 17.33
  
• Value/Day: 42.67

An honorable mention because it's the highest food per day crop in the game, just slightly beats Giant Oracle Fig (which has the same stats) because it produces 6 fruits every harvest instead of 5. However, there is simply no reason to grow these in bulk instead of Bountiful Amaranth or Sweet Mistberries.

There are 5 possible biomes in the game: Arable, Meadow, Swamp, Grove, and Alpine. By default, everything in the game is Arable until you begin to plant "mother" trees, which you get from the main questline.

Planting a mother tree will create an area of a biome around that tree that seems to grow as the tree ages. Planting a competing mother tree of a different biome will create an area of the new biome that will "push back" against the other mother tree, eventually creating an equilibrium.

Every plant has a core "native" biome, and this affects the base growth rate the plant will exhibit (alongside shade/sun, crowdedness, and dampness). This section is a catalogue of all of the native biomes and light preferences of each plant for optimal growth.

Notes on the data below:

• Most cultivars of each plant default to one biome and light preference, and exceptions are called out in bold. And to avoid confusion, note that while, for example, a Grove Oak Tree is still Meadow-native, it can only be grown in the Grove biome, so it will never have an optimal biome multiplier.
  
• All biome-native plants have a special cultivar if planted in range of a mother tree--but there are also some non-biome-native plants have special cultivars in alternate biomes. Herein are listed plants OTHER THAN the biome-native plants that have a special cultivar if the common variety is planted in range of the mother tree. (You can also plant another one of the biome variants, they will revert to common then to the new biome.)
  
• The light preferences of the Grove cultivars don't make much sense, but the listings are correct.