I've been seriously digging this new game that is described as a survival driving horror game. It is such a unique concept to outfit a beat up station wagon and continually upgrade things about such as putting on armor siding, various energy gathering doo-dads on the side of the car, and running around and salvaging anything you can find so that you can upgrade it even more.
Sure, it sounds a lot like a game where you are just constantly grinding for new gear, and in many ways that is exactly what it is, but for some reason it is addictive and fun as hell.
Now that I have a bit over 10 hours of gameplay completed, I feel as though I am really getting grips with how the game works and I have made some mistakes along the way and learned how to do things better.
This game doesn't hold your hand at all and often things can be really difficult to figure out and when you do something wrong, it can really make things take a lot longer. So here are some tips you should know right from the start.
Just make new panels and doors instead of repairing the ones you have
You are going to take damage and probably a lot of it on a regular basis. This is part of the game and attempting to avoid all damage simply wastes so much time and you are better off accepting the fact that you are supposed to run head first into trees every now and then.
The game does let you know that you can repair this with "Repair Putty" and walks you though that process. In fact, it doesnt' let you leave the garage the first time unless you do so. It's pretty straight forward.. you slap the putty on anything and it makes it stronger. It's simple.
The problem is that in order to craft repair putty you are going to need something called "chemicals" and this is one of the more difficult and rare things that are found in the game.
The only place I have ever found chemicals is in storage lockers in trailers that are sparsely located around the various maps. You never find a bunch of them at once.
At first I was just getting back to my garage and then running around and slapping repair putty on everything, sometimes going through 3 or even 4 containers of the stuff. The ingredients in repair putty is two scrap metal, two plastic, two glass shards, and two chemicals. All of these things are very common EXCEPT for the chemicals.
Since chemicals are so difficult to come by in game you really should use it sparingly and that is not what doing all these repairs accomplishes. Especially for steel panels (the 2nd upgraded panel and the most efficient that I have found thus far) the only thing required to craft them is scrap metal.
Unlike chemicals, scrap metal is the MOST common item that you are going to find in the game. you are going to have so much of it that you don't even feel excited about finding it after a couple of hours.
Steel doors require more than just scrap, but the other things that it requires are also very common items such as plastic, duck tape, and glass. These things are found all over the place in bins as well as when you salvage other doors on abandoned cars in the game.
Chemicals on the other hand are only found in Hazmat cabinets where as scrap metal is found in just about anything. While I am quite certain there are other far more rare items in crafting in this game, at the early stages you are going to find yourself constantly running out of chemicals and not really having any convenient avenue for getting any more. The only way you can really get more chemicals is by going on another run and if your car is already badly damaged this can be really dangerous.
So the thing to do here is to just skip repairing panels and doors and just make new ones. You can deconstruct your damaged doors in the "matter deconstructor" once you build one and the game will push you to make one of these pretty early on in any playthrough.
Even a seriously beat up door or panel is going to give you some of the materials back after you scrap it, so even though the materials that go into making a panel or door are very common, the scrapping of a nearly destroyed door will net you some of those materials anyway.
You still should make repair putty, but this should really only be used in the field when you are on a run and are pressed for time. You have as much time as you want back in your garage so there is no reason to use anything that has chemicals involved in it.
if you are just using putty willy-nilly like I was, you are going to find yourself starved for chemicals and they are used in a lot of important things.
A bit later on in the game you will get access to the blowtorch and you should try to use this instead of repair putty as well, even in the field because "chemicals" is just too unreliable to be found.
Basically, if anything you are making requires chemicals you should look at what it would take to simply re-make whatever it is that you are trying to do.
This is not something that the game is going to outright tell you but I think that for new players it would be a lot better to know that "chemicals" are quite rare and if you do what the game suggests and just start throwing repair putty on everything all the time, you are quickly going to run out!