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A Nightingale beginner’s guide for getting started in the Fae Realms

Nightingale Guide

• A Nightingale beginner's guide for getting started in the Fae Realms
• Cooking and sleeping to manage hunger and stamina
• Multiplayer options for playing in private and public parties
• How to move or remove Estate Cairns and other structures
• Realm Cards explained - How to find and use them
• How to upgrade your carrying capacity
• Gear Score - What is it and how do you increase yours?

If you’re starting out with Inflexion Games’ new survival title, Into Indie Games is here to help. In this Nightingale beginner’s guide, I will provide a few helpful tips to make your adventures in the Fae Realms slightly easier.

Whether the Gaslamp fantasy world drew you in or you play anything on Steam with the survival tag, there are a few handy things to remember. Doing so will make the earlier stages less frustrating and set you up for success later on. 

Nightingale beginner’s guide – Companions

The first tip is particularly helpful for anyone planning to enjoy Nightingale, beginner or otherwise. After completing the tutorial, you can recruit a companion to assist you on your adventure. They usually want you to complete a quick quest before tagging along, but once that’s out of the way, they’re good to have around.

Companions can gather resources, lend a hand in combat and carry extra stuff. How well they do these things depends on the gear they have equipped, which you’re able to change. If you want them to chop down trees, give them an axe. If you’d prefer they were ready to attack a pack of wolves in a pinch, hand them a dagger – although to be fair, an axe also works. Likewise, giving them better gear will keep them safer.

If your companion goes down, you can revive them. Likewise, if you fall in battle, they can get you back up. That makes them worth having, even if you usually prefer to tackle the world’s dangers alone since it saves having to run all the way back across the map to gather your lost items.

Gather essence from the start

Essence is an incredibly important resource in Nightingale. It’s used as currency, for crafting, upgrading gear, and repairing your items. As you might imagine then, you need a lot of it. There are four tiers of Essence, but in this Nightingale beginner’s guide, we’ll only focus on Essence Dust since that’s what you will gather most of early on.

The best way to keep yourself stocked up on Essence Dust is to pick up absolutely everything you – and your companion – can carry. Not only will you pick up some useful stuff, but everything else you can use to get extra Essence Dust.

If you want the easiest option early on for farming Essence Dust, your best bet is to collect Plant Fibre. It’s easy to come by, weighs basically nothing and yields one Essence Dust for every one Plant Fibre. That’s a good trade for very little leg work. To make that process even quicker, use a scythe rather than gathering by hand as it results in more material.

Craft an umbrella

It’s not every day that you get to use an umbrella in a survival game, but in Nightingale, it’s a useful tool to have on hand at all times. 

As you might expect, rain is a weather type you will need to contend with occasionally, and it can hit you with the Wet debuff. When active, it reduces your stamina regeneration, making everything feel like more of a chore. 

But pop up your umbrella and you will keep yourself dry. It also works in hail. However, remember that this precipitation variant will damage your equipment, including the umbrella. So don’t get caught in a downpour for too long if you can’t repair it.

Keeping you dry isn’t the only reason to carry an umbrella. Not only does it shade you from intense heat in desert realms, but you can also use it to glide gracefully to the ground after jumping off hills and structures. Doing so uses stamina, so time your deployment carefully to avoid prematurely crashing into the ground. 

Place your crafting benches inside

Not only does it make more logical sense, but building your crafting benches inside has beneficial gameplay effects. By making one where everything is safe and dry, the bench will get the Sheltered trait, which decreases refinement time.

On the flip side, if you place yours outside it will get the Exposed trait, resulting in a decreased growth rate. Beyond that, it will slowly break and become dirty. That means you will need to clean it to keep everything running efficiently. And no one wants to dust. Ever.

Kill animals, for their hide, not sport

Leather is a vital resource for increasing gear score and to get it, you will need Hide. The best way to get it is to kill animals. If you get into the habit of attacking a pack on sight, you can hopefully avoid those annoying moments where you have to scamper about looking for them later on. Until you get a ranged weapon, it’s also better to go for animals that are happy to fight. The flighty types are usually pretty fast and much harder to take down.

Go for headshots

Now, this one probably sounds quite obvious to most of you. Hitting an enemy in the head with a ranged weapon normally does increased damage. But in Nightingale so do melee attacks. If you’re anything like me, you spam the attack button in first-person melee games and don’t think too deeply about what you’re hitting. Here, you should try and be more tactical since the extra damage is decent. Look out for the yellow numbers above the enemy’s head and the soundbite that resembles breaking glass to know you’ve scored a crit.

And that’s all for this Nightingale beginner’s guide. I hope you found it useful and that it bolsters your chances of survival in the early stages. Do stay tuned for more future guides that will help you with some of the game’s more intricate details.