10 Bellwright Tips and Tricks for Beginners
| Tags: Features
| Author Paul G
Liberate the land with the best tools, tips and tricks for surviving your first year in Bellwright's historical survival crafter.
Searching for the best beginner tips and tricks for Bellwright? Given the game's scope — and the publisher's experience with big survival games— Bellwright maximizes its stay to let players build authentic 16th century real-estate while also offering familiar RPG mechanics and an enticing story.
But as with any entry to the genre, you'll need some help discovering the right resources to horde, and which areas to focus on. It gets easier the longer you play. So we put together our list of the most important tips Bellwright players should keep in mind in the early-game. From road placement to material farming, here's our 10 Bellwright Tips and Tricks for Beginners.
10 Bellwright Tips and Tricks for Beginners
1. Pick the Best Starting Area
Shacking up near important resources is key to getting the best start in Bellwright.
To get the best starting base in Bellwright, head straight south of Haerndean (this is where you talk to the Elder for the first time) and place your camp under the fork in the road. This place not only gives you easy access to starter quests and Flax, but also puts you close to the Herbalist.
Selling your foraged goods and pieces of cooked meat to the Herbalist gives you a ton of gold in the early game. On top of that, you can also harvest plants like Sage from his garden.
2. Always Harvest Flax
Besides Wood and Stone, it's super important to horde Flax in Bellwright.
These purple-blue plants are spread across the starting areas (large field south of Haerndean), and are extremely important for constructing huts and other structures in Bellwright.
Flax refreshes every morning, so it's worth training your NPC companions to gather as much Flax as they can everyday instead of standing around. You will need a lot of Flax later in the game, so it's a worthwhile chore in the first few days of your Bellwright playthrough.
3. Research ‘Stockpile’ ASAP
Once you've gotten your bearings in Bellwright, it can be very easy to lose track of the resources you've gathered.
Loot piles up fast in the early game. So to keep things organized, speedrun the ‘Stockpile' upgrade in your Research Desk to give yourself more storage in the long run.
4. Don’t Waste the First Day
Make the most out of your time by taking advantage of your first day on the job.
The very first mission you get from the Elder lets you create a basic Personal Shack to sleep the day away. Instead, save yourself the hassle later on and build everything in your menu (Housing Tent, Outhouse, Campfire etc.) to make the most out of the first day.
5. Place Camps Near Resources
A basic piece of advice that bears repeating: if you place a mining camp too far from a source of ore, you're not going to harvest any resources.
Treat your Bellwright camps like separate outposts. Establish each one with a specific purpose (or resource) in mind, and you'll eventyally create a network of supply that will strengthen your hold on the realm.
6. Learn Important Keyboard Commands
You won't get to use fast-travel in the early game, which means you'll be travelling Bellwright's humongous map the old-fashioned way: walking.
Luckily, the devs put in some useful commands to prevent any hand cramps. Pressing H makes your character auto-run to your chosen direction. You can easily access important menus during your trip as well, so you can always manage your resources on the go.
Speaking of which, pressing N also pulls up your “Call to Arms” menu, which lets you assign certain tasks to your camp NPCs while you travel. The more you know!
7. Use the Proper Books on Specialized Recruits
Throughout your playthrough, you'll enlist various NPCs in your camps as you go. Some of these characters perform certain tasks well, making other upgrades unnecessary.
The friends you make along the way come with their own set of stats (One Handed, Shields, Crafting etc.). Some of these recruits will be noticably proficient in some of them. That being the case, making the warrior-type guard NPC read a book about Cooking would be a total waste of time. So instead of creating a Jack-of-all-trades, get your recruits especially good at their assigned jobs.
8. Turn in Perishable Goods First
Bellwright has a ton of fetch quests in the game's current stage. And a lot of these involve delivering cooked meats and other perishables, which go bad pretty fast.
Fortunately, the game lets you turn in each of the components separately. So focus on turning in perishable items first to avoid losing them mid-quest. That rugged shirt can wait.
9. Place Small Traps Next to Berry Bushes
Put your small traps next to sources of bait to make set-up and gathering easier in the long run.
Small cages that you can leave around your base won't function unless you've placed specific bait in them. Natural bait sources, like barry bushes, grow out in the wild. So placing them next to each other not only makes setting up traps more convenient, but also easy to keep track of.
10. Just Have Fun With It
There's plenty of things to do in Bellwright's massive open-world. You could treat it as a simple farm simulator, a city-builder or a war game. But what's most important is that you have fun while playing.
Sure you could minmax your gathering output early in the game. Gearing up for conflict in the later stages sounds fun as heck too. But keep in mind that the game's still in its early stages, and flaws are bound to pop up.
As long as you're enjoying the experience/finding new ways the game can improve, Bellwright will continue to evolve into the historical survival crafter we all need it to be.
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