It’s certainly not every day that one of your favorite MMOs of all time comes back from the dead. When that happens, friends, it’s time to pop the champagne, crack one’s knuckles, and enjoy the heck out of the revival.
Fallen Earth Classic brought back the apocalypse in all of its awkward jankiness, weird humor, and irresistibly addictive gameplay loop. For those who are dusting off their memories of how to play after two years away and those who are trying Fallen Earth for the first time, here are 20 helpful tips to get you off to a good start in the wasteland.
Loot everything in the tutorial
You do get an option to skip the tutorial, but I say play it no matter what — and loot everything you can get your hands on. Since your character clone still retains items looted four years and a different body ago, it’s nice to start the proper game with a full arsenal of ranged and hand-to-hand weapons.
Go to Midway for a starter town
At the beginning, you’ll get your choice of three starter towns. This isn’t an irreversible choice by any means, but I highly recommend you head to Midway. This is because Midway is a “crafter” town where most of the quests pay out in much-needed crafting recipes. It’ll fill out your crafting screen with options and save you a pretty chip.
Save up your AP
Almost right away, you’ll be earning advancement points — AP — as you play. These allow you to increase various stats and skills, but there’s no call for them to be spent as you get them. In fact, many players recommend saving up your AP for when you do have a better feel for your build or need to increase a stat to equip a piece of gear. You really can do most all of the starter content without having to spend any AP.
Find early spots to farm tradeskill points
While questing is recommended, I always like to spend the first few hours building up my tradeskill points. There’s nothing more frustrating than finding a good node that you can’t loot because your tradeskill is too low! Fortunately, the starter towns all have nice farming spots for each tradeskill in and around them. Find these and take advantage of them.
Raise your tradeskill cap as needed
The only AP expenditure I’d recommend in the early hours is to pump points into maxing out intelligence and perception. Why? Because these two stats inform the cap on your tradeskills (all of your tradeskills). And since you’ll need a higher cap to loot better nodes, it’s a wise investment of AP.
Equip (and swap) an armory
Your character has the ability to carry a virtual armory around, and due to situations and ammo shortages, it’s always good to have a variety of weapons on hand. Your armory screen shows you were each weapon is stapled to your character’s body, and you can swap between these on the fly with CTRL+number options. Always make sure you have a melee weapon as a backup in case you run out of ammo!
Go exploring!
As many Fallen Earth players will tell you, a big part of the fun of the game is striking off in a random direction to see what may lie there. You can stumble upon interesting locales not mentioned on the map, great fields of valuable resource nodes, or just a great screenshot vista.
Make sure to stash your stuff in a vault
Every sector has bank vaults that work as extra shared storage. Since your inventory is limited by slots AND weight, you’ll want to make sure you’re heading back to town regularly to dump off stuff you don’t need at the time.
Try out but don’t rely on alpha mutations
For the first 15 levels, the game gives you an array of “alpha mutations” (somewhat akin to magical abilities in fantasy MMOs) that you can try. And I’d recommend you try them to see what you might like to permanently buy later on — just don’t get too hooked on them right now and find yourself floundering when level 15 rolls around and they’re taken away.
Use your maps wisely (and remember where you parked your horse)
Fallen Earth has a typical mini-map radar that’s useful, particularly to see the direction of quest objectives (red Xs) and your mount (a blue circle). But you can also click one of the buttons on that radar to pop out a bigger secondary map that’s much more helpful to get a lay of the immediate land, including resource nodes and NPCs.
Disrupt 1 (and melee combat) is your friend
While cheap ammo is easy to make at the start, don’t discount melee combat. You’ll start out with a great ability called Disrupt 1, which is essentially a several-second stun that lets you get in a few hits before the mob can strike back.
Headshots rule
But ranged combat’s a lot of fun too! If you do it right, you can even burn down mobs before they get to you. Pro-tip: Use your scope (if you have one) to target a mob’s head and try to get at least two quick shots off as headshots count for more damage.
Feel free to do all three starter towns
There’s really no rush to blaze through all of Sector 1 in a rush. I’m always of the opinion that it’s more beneficial to round out your character fully, and so I like to do all of the quests in the three starter towns, one after the other.
Queue up crafting jobs at the start and end of play sessions
Since Fallen Earth’s crafting system works in real time — whether you’re logged in or not — it’s always good form to kick off a play session by queuing up jobs and then ending a session with the same. Don’t overlook the fact that you get tradeskill points and XP from crafting!
Salvage, salvage, salvage
Because crafting is so integral to this game, you really need as many mats as you can get. Scavenging is a vital tradeskill to level up for this. But another tip is that you can deconstruct a lot of items — including stuff you just crafted — to reclaim some mats. Salvaging items can be done while you’re doing other activities as well.
Use your mount’s inventory space
Did you know that your faithful mount or vehicle has some additional storage slots? It’s not a lot, but hey, every last bit counts. Throwing some heavy ammo into those slots for future use is never a bad idea.
Can’t find your horse? Call for a tow.
It happens sooner or later — you’ll lose track of where your horse is, or you’ll die and find that your mount is miles and miles away from your respawn. In that case, you have the option to hoof it over to the garage and call in a tow. It’s convenient, but it’ll cost you.
Don’t wander into ant nesting areas!
Speaking of death, one of the ways that I often die in this game is unknowingly wandering into the middle of a large field of mutant ants. They’re not easy to spot at first, but you can find yourself in trouble as you get swarmed and are flailing about looking for an escape.
Touch base with Fallen Earth Wiki and Discord
The game’s wiki may be old, but it still has so many useful answers to the questions you’ll undoubtedly have. Also, touch base with the community on the Discord, where people connect for help, guilds, and cat pictures.
Take advantage of the character builder
Since there’s a hard cap on the amount of AP you’ll get, planning out your build is essential after a while. There’s a great tool online to help you do just that.
