What's the first thing you do when starting a new character?

[porcobuddha]

Hi guys,

I would like to know what are the "must-do" things you do when starting a new character.
I'm new and I really don't know how to properly settle and what to do in order to improve my stats.
I've already red the guides on the forums but they don't explain everything.
How am I supposed to earn silvers? Also levelling humorus takes a long time due to the "full and fed-up" debuff.
So, what do you guys do?

[JohnCarver]

One key thing to push for would be Settling. Settling allows your character to own land which in turn allows you the first steps in securing your place in the world. As for earning silver, check stumps for skins and gather Indian feathers and arrowheads to turn them into Savage Charms. Sell those to the vendor in town.

The Full & Fed up Debuff is known to be a bit too harsh and is being adjusted and addressed in an upcoming patch scheduled a few days from now.

Good luck! and have fun!

[ezgoezit]

I took some time to watch some youtube videos by this guy:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmJXK9 ... jUtQ4us6qA (Eegore)

[vienradzis]

http://www.salem-wiki.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

[Champie]

I'll help you by giving a few suggestions. I hope others contribute as well. Also, I will answer any questions that I can if you post them here in this thread or PM me. I'm sure there are others who would be happy to do the same.

Stray chestnut, smooth stone, flint(for Rock Maracas and Tastes of the New World), devil's wort are the most important items at the start. You will especially want to find flint right away so that you can make an axe. The axe will allow you to chop blocks from wood piles or logs. At the very start this is useful so that you can split the blocks and make wood chips to study. The goal at this point is to gain the HIKING skill so that you can build your own lean-to and/or repair a decaying lean-to.

It goes like this: Survival Skills -> Foraging -> Lore of The Lumberwoods -> Hiking

All of those skills and the required gain in Frontiers & Wilderness proficiency can be gained using the foragables mentioned above. Once you have Hiking you can build your own lean-to.

Foods like berries on a straw (or just blackberries), oakworth, wild garlic, lavender blewits, sugar caps and even unboiled waxing toadstools will be useful to restore Black Bile that is required to study. All those foods, except waxing toadstools will be useful in raising humors. I suggest that you gather several of these items and then examine their gluttony values before starting gluttony. You can examine their effect in your humor bars by mousing over the item after starting gluttony. As long as you don't actually click on a food to "glutton" you can cancel the gluttony session by right clicking anywhere on the screen. It may take you some time and error to get comfortable with gluttony. Until you are comfortable, be sure you have a least several foods in your inventory to ensure that you can at least get 1 or 2 points and a short fed and full up timer. After a while you'll get the hang of it and later you will have access to a lot more foods.



To start earning silver you will have to collect dried rattler skin from hollow stumps. Once you manage to increase your Blood and Yellow bile a bit (10-ish) and learn self-defense and small game hunting, you can make a slingshot and start hunting rabbits to make dried hides (you can sell for 4s in Boston/Providence), and crickets to make a Cricket Team (you can sell for 40s in Boston/Providence). You will want to use Hot Bar keys to hunt, in my opinion. I like to set up PUNCH on F1 and SHOOT on F4, for example. I also put GUARD on F5. Those are the basic combat moves you will get after you learn Self-Defense (Shoot requires Small Game Hunting).

Edit to add: John Carver mentioned Indian feathers and Arrowheads to make Savage Charms. To make these you need Indian Tracking skill. It is easy to learn, and it is likely you will learn that skill before you are a capable hunter. However, Indian feathers are not very common, so it will take a lot more exploration to find them.

[porcobuddha]

Thank you guys!
Could you tell me what should I look for to find the best place to settle?

[Suffragium]

Thank you guys!
Could you tell me what should I look for to find the best place to settle?

At least 3 different biomes within 5 minutes of wander, at least one lime pit in the same distance, at least 2 hours away from Providence.

[Champie]

Thank you guys!
Could you tell me what should I look for to find the best place to settle?

My personal Experience: I love wandering the map to see what's out there. I usually settle in a place that is convenient to whatever I am trying to accomplish at the time. If you just want to settle down for a short time and get the hang of the game, choose a spot that is located near a variety of biomes and possible close to other resources like lime, clay, water. If you are lucky you might find a small abandoned camp where you can put a claim over some infrastructure already built (mine, oven, smelter, etc.). Even if you can't use them right away, it will be nice to have access. Mines are especially nice because they serve as a great "storage basement" as well as a source of ore for when you are ready to start producing iron.

Here is another strategy that many people employ: You are encouraged to make several characters and port them out into the world with the wilderness guide. By doing this you get the chance to see more of the world and develop multiple characters simultaneously. By doing this you also mitigate the risk of "losing it all" if something bad happens to one of the characters. Also, the use of alts that never leave Boston is very common. The serve as vaults for items that you want to store without risk of being stolen or destroyed out in the world. While it may seem like a cheap strategy, it works and is essential at times when you become overwhelmed with items in your inventory or on your claim. It is common to loot abandoned claims. When doing so, it is often easiest to store those items on alts in Boston if you only have a small claim or are already overwhelmed with inventory.

[Dammit]

I wandered around for about 5 days honestly while I studied and learned and ate, and kept the wiki going hot.

After about 5 days I had sufficient skill to do most things I wanted to start a settlement.

1. I had about 25 humors
2. You can skip the sling shot to kill rabbit or cricket if you get the skill (stomp) and learn to use it correctly.
3. I had hiking, and settling and most mining, coaling and smelting skills as well by this time.
4. While wandering around I made a ton of silver from snake skins which let me build a few claims, these was important for alts for goodies.
5. So by the 5-7th day I had 3 total characters. 1 who knew all kinds of skill and had 25 humors or so, 1 for a nice water spot I found, and another for a nice grass spot I found to start feeding worms.
6. I kept a box with my grass and the few pythons I found and kept them fed.
7. By about the 3rd week in my Salem career I had 3-4% worms and had almost all major skills learned (I think I only have 3 skills left at this point to learn).
8. I started feeding my 2nd alt up so now he has around 30 humors while my main guy has about 75. All this is done since my join date to now. Pretty good for a newb I guess..
9. I also gathered the items to make clay pots for purity trees, currently I have 2% trees so they are slow but forestry was slow to gain and so was the items to make a 6% pot.

Everyone has their own way and I am sure the vets here are more precise than me, but I am just pointing you toward the way I was pointed by a few decent folks. Had it not been for someone extremely wise, I would only have 1 character which is apparently a bad idea here.

So in short I had a lot of things going on at once with finding purity spots, making purity items, growing trees, keeping worms fed, and building a place up as well. I also found it very pleasing to sell some purity things, people seem to like to buy 6-9% things which is rare but once you find it, you got good income. I made enough to drop a town bell after just 3-4 weeks of playing now.

Once you hit 40-50 humors you can also kill spiders which currently sell pretty darn well, made a boat load from them as well.

The game gets a ton easier once you figure out how to make silver and make it by the thousands quickly. My tree purity % should really pick up now that I have bought 5-10 cuttings from vets and also purity humus, so purity goes much faster if you can afford the thousands of silver to buy these items to make the grind go faster.