Flotsam: Beginner Guide
Flotsam is a new post-apocalyptic survival game that looks a little different from your typical post-apocalyptic simulator. In Flotsam, players must collect wood and plastic that has washed out to sea and use it to rebuild a new floating world. Rescue survivors and scavenge from wrecks, with this fresh and realistic statement on the potential effects of climate change and plastic consumption. In this guide, I’ll walk you through the first area of the game and give you tips on how to survive.
In the first area, there will be a lot of plastic and wet wood all around your townheart. This will save a lot of time at first, but don’t take it for granted. Because you already start off with a decent reserve of food and water, your first task should be to collect some wood and plastic from around your base. To do this, simply click the swimming icon in the buoy section of the HUD. Most salvage will be located in such a way that 1 or 2 well place buoys can collect it all. At the beginning, you’ll want to increase the number of swimmers that can use each buoy so that all 3 of your drifters have work. If you place more than one buoy, be aware that your team will scavenge from the buoys in the order that they were placed, so if you allow all 3 of your drifters to collect plastic from the first buoy, then they won’t move on to collect wet wood from the second buoy until the first zone is done. You can also increase the area of your buoys, which doesn’t cost any resources to increase. I typically enlarge the buoy area until I get as much as possible, without leaving any stragglers off to the side.
Once you start collecting materials, you’ll notice that you only have so much inventory on your townheart. You can see your inventory by clicking on the icon on the far right side of the HUD menu which shows two baskets holding wood and fish. The first step to creating more storage is to build a walkway out from your townheart. Before you start building, it’s important to note that your town isn’t just a one off. Actually, this town will remain how you build it as you move from place to place. This is important because you’ll need to make sure that you don’t build in a way that won’t scale when you get better buildings. It’s a good idea to use one single walkway from the beginning and keep everything in that area. This isn’t the only way to do this, but I’ve found that it simplifies things for later. To build a walkway, select the build icon, which is a hammer and saw icon at the bottom of the screen on the HUD. Walkways will be the first icon in the first menu.
Another reason not to crazy on the building from the beginning is that you only have a limited amount of salvage that can be collected by your swimmers. For this reason, you’ll need to make sure that you can build a scavenger boat before using up all the nearby materials in swimming distance. Swimming distance can be visualized by trying to place a buoy. There will be a white circle where you’ll be allowed to place a buoy, outside of that, you’ll need a scavenger boat. For now, create a small walkway. To optimize your walkway length, extend your walkway until the number of plastic needed increases and then shorten it just enough to reduce the amount. This will give you the best bang for your plastic buck.
Once the walkway is built, your drifters will go back to collecting salvage. Let them do this for a bit while you place a few buildings. Buildings can be placed off of the townheart or off of walkways. I’d recommend not building directly off of your townheart, as this will probably limit you later on. Instead, build off of the walkway that you’ve created. The next thing you’ll need to do is make a drying rack. This is a building that can dry both fish and wet wood. Dry wood is needed to make many of the other buildings, so that will be the next task. Build a drying rack by opening the build menu from the bottom and selecting the tab with the saw. The drying rack is the first available building. I typically make 2 of these to start.
Around this time, you might run out of storage space on your townheart. If this happens, your drifters won’t be able to salvage any more. To combat this, go into the build menu and click the storage yard icon, which is to the right of the walkway. I typically build 2 of these, but you could probably get on well with only one for the time being.
Once you’ve placed your buildings, it’s a good time to look at your drifters and see what unique abilities they have. Abilities can be found by clicking the drifters menu, shown as a person’s torso on the far right side of the screen, and then by clicking on the name of each drifter. Abilities are shown underneath the drifters portrait and need to be hovered over to see what they are. Usually you’ll have someone fast, but other abilities can affect speed, thirst, hunger, etc.. Abilities that reduce the amount of food or water needed, or increase speed are the best, especially in the beginning. Now that you know their unique abilities, you can designate priorities for each drifter. I like to have fast drifters swimming or hauling and leave the other things for drifters with a slower speed. To start, I try to make sure I only have 1 person building at a time to prioritize collecting more salvage. You can also make everyone prioritize building so that you can go back to salvaging faster, it will depend on how you like to play and on the unique abilities of your drifters. Increase priorities by left clicking on the task you want to increase where it lines up with the drifter you want to affect. Reduce priorities by right clicking instead.
When your drying rack is finished, you’ll have to tell it what item to dry. Click on the rack and select the wood option. You should still have a hearty inventory of food for now, so don’t bother with that until later. Also, make sure that you’re continually adding new buoys to salvage from as you finish with the old ones, this is important for making sure you collect as much as possible before moving to the next zone.
By now, you should still have a good reserve of plastic and you should be well on your way to drying out some wood for use. The next thing to make is a workshop, this can be found in the same menu as the drying rack. I’ve found it helpful to build this near to your storage yards, as this will speed things up considerably in the future.
The workshop will let you build rope or firewood from dry wood. This will be needed soon, so once you’ll built the workshop, set it to make a few pieces of firewood. You’ll have the option to create a continuous supply of firewood, but avoid doing this until you’ve built everything you need, since you’ll need the dry wood for these other builds. Once you’ve built the workshop, you’ll notice that your water reserve is probably getting a little low. This can be seen at the top of the screen, represented by a plastic water bottle. I like to keep my water above 20 at all times. To create more water, you’ll need a distiller, which can be found in the build menu in the third tab, represented by a water droplet. Once you have 8 pieces of dry wood, place the distiller nearby a storage yard and by the workshop if you can, again keeping it on the walkway. If you’ve managed your resources well enough, you should also have materials and space to build bedrooms for your drifters. You’ll only need to build three. These can be found in the first tab of the build menu. I tend to build these away from everything else to save space for more storage yards and drying racks, but that’s completely up to you.
Now that your distiller is built, set it to automatically create a continuous supply of water. Water will be one of the most difficult resources to manage, so it should probably be a priority for one of your drifters from now on. To make water, you’ll need that firewood we made before, but you can also set the workshop to make more firewood as you go. You should also be getting close to clearing all the nearby salvage, which means you’ll have to build a mooring point and salvage boat. In the workshop, make sure you set it to create one piece of rope. You’ll need this to make the mooring point. Typically, I extend my walkway a little bit to make room for the mooring point. It will need enough room to put a boat in there as well. It may be tempting to place this off the end of the walkway, but try to avoid this because that will make you unable to extend your walkway in the future unless you deconstruct your mooring point.
When your mooring point is finished, build your salvage boat. If you’ve been able to make it this far, with a somewhat decent supply of water; congrats! You’re doing really well! Now that you have a boat, you can travel much, much further to grab resources from islands and salvage from areas where your drifters can’t swim to. You can send out your boat by clicking the boat icon in the buoy menu of the HUD at the bottom. This works the same way as the swimming buoy except you can place it much further. For the time being, you should make sure that you always have someone in the boat gathering resources.
Now that you’ve made a boat, you can also travel to the island and collect the resources there. This will give you the sail mast, which can be used to move to the next zone. You might be tempted to move on as soon as possible, but I’d recommend staying for as long as possible to collect as many resources as you can, including all the fish that we haven’t gathered yet. If you’re close to hitting the 20 mark on food as well, it’s time to start gathering food. This can be done for starters by building another mooring point and then a fishing boat. You’ll also need to make 1 or 2 more drying racks and set these to dry fish instead of wood. For the rope to make the mooring point, you can make one at the workshop.
If you’ve finished making the mooring point, fishing boat and extra drying racks, you can start collecting fish. Fish appear as a school clump in the water and can be collected the same way as salvage, except by using the fishing buoy instead of the swimming or boat buoys. I tend to drop fishing buoys on all the fish in the water so that I constantly have someone collecting. I usually prioritize my drifters so that one of them is always fishing, once is always collecting salvage and the other is on the docks, making sure water is always being produced. There tends to be a great supply of fish in the first zone, so try to collect as much of it as possible before moving on. Once you’ve dried all the wood in the area, feel free to switch your drying racks to dry food until the next zone. You can also create another walkway and make another distiller, mooring point and fishing boat if needed.
When you are ready to move on or have run out of firewood to make fresh water, you’ll need to have enough resources to make sails. Make sure you don’t deplete your resources until you’ve made the sails in case you need to extend your walkway, as this is necessary for moving to the next zone. Build your sails on the side of your walkway and when your ready, click the map on the bottom of the screen to travel!
Thank you for reading this beginners guide to Flotsam! Let me know in the comments if there is anything I’ve missed or even just if you found this helpful so that I know if I should make more of these types of articles. Also make sure to clap if you found this article useful so that others can find it. Have an awesome day and happy gaming!
