Eternal Strands beginner's guide: 9 things you need to know before breaking everything
Eternal Strands may look like a standard third-person action game, its colorful setting and zippy movement suggestive of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning or Immortals Fenyx Rising. But do not be fooled! This debut game from Yellow Brick Games, helmed by Dragon Age: Origins writer Mike Laidlaw, has many secrets beneath its cheerful veneer—not least that it wants to see if you can break it.
It's a fascinating approach to the genre, and while we happily recommend jumping right in, there's a fair bit we wish we knew beforehand. Our beginner's guide to Eternal Strands will cover everything you need to know before you enter the Enclave and start breaking everything.
What exactly am I doing here?
There’s a lot of chatter from your excellent camp companions in Eternal Strands, but it's possible early on to lose track of what you’re actually meant to do next. So let's clear that up: You’re here to explore! The first goal is simply to run around all parts of the (temporarily) limited map, gathering items from defeated enemies, smashed crates, and any large chunks of scenery that you smash to bits just to see what happens.
You actually need to fail in the first fight to continue, but feel comfort in knowing, no, it wasn’t your fault. And then once you’re let loose, just make sure to reach the locations hinted at in your Quest log. You’re going to jump back and forth a couple of times between the location and base camp before things really get going and you’re battling your first five-story behemoth.
(And yes, your inventory is far too small at the start. Fear not, it will get bigger!)
You really can climb everything
A lot of games make big promises, like “The game reacts to real-world barometric pressure!” or “Every enemy has a unique personality and phone number!”, but few deliver. Eternal Strands boasted before launch that you can climb absolutely everything—and it’s true!
Every surface is yours to climb, to an almost farcical degree. You can even climb the curved sides of the wheels of a broken wagon. It's as if Eternal Strands is daring you to try and find a route to the skybox—except instead of awkward holes in the universe, you'll usually stumble on hidden secrets and merrily glowing chests full of treats.
You are limited by stamina, a meter that recharges when you stand still on a solid surface. Luckily, you also have a fix for that. From the start, you can wield a magic ability that lets you create jagged paths of ice in the world. Halfway up an enormous climb and low on juice? Blob a bit of ice on the wall, rest up, and then continue your ascent.
The game does have one limit. There’s a narrative device that says you can only reach so far in any area because of the boundaries of your scrying friends and their ability to return you to safety in an emergency. This stops you from just climbing right out the top of the map, though these restrictions may ease a bit as you progress through Eternal Strands.
There are secrets everywhere.
As mentioned, Eternal Strands rewards exploration in the form of goodies. There are chests hidden all over, and while most of a level refreshes on return visits, these chests are one-time only. You'll find a whole bunch along the main paths, but many more are tucked away—inside enormous hollow tree trunks, hidden in crevices in cliffs, and so forth. Pretty much any time we’ve noticed an interesting spot in the distance, our creativity and derring-do's been rewarded with a chest full of rare loot.
If you don’t want to fight someone, throw them away
One of the two magic abilities you begin with is Weaver’s Grasp, the ability to use your brain rays to pick up an object and then propel it away from you.
This is marvellous, because it allows you to grab any rock, box, lump of wood, skeletal remains, or most anything else, and throw it right into an oncoming enemy’s face. It’s extremely satisfying.
But you can also use it to pick up the enemy itself. Once they’re in your grasp, you can do something heroic like throw them into a wall—or even better, each other—and then as they find their feet, wallop them with a sword until they stop complaining. You can also do something somewhat less heroic, like pop them into a ravine, off a ledge, or into the middle of a raging fire.
Being busy when a baddie rocks up and nonchalantly flinging them into a very deep hole feels like the best sort of cheating.
Pick up everything
Another detail Eternal Strands doesn’t make obvious until a little too late is that there's a reason for all the random bits and bobs you're gathering. Everything you smash—and you should smash everything—has the potential to drop items. Sure, some of them are used for upgrading items, but what about the 70 billion others?
Turns out, they’re a resource for upgrading the upgrade stations at your camp. Anything you don’t have a use for when crafting, reforging, or upgrading your weapons and armor can be converted into materials for camp improvements. From the start, some of these require mulching 50 items for parts, so you’re going to be a bunch of steps ahead if you’re gathering as much seemingly useless Soft Wood as you can from the very beginning.
As you progress, you may choose to do straight loot-gathering runs where you don’t attempt to complete any missions or take part in any risky battles, but simply harvest swathes of stuff to bring back. That way, the next time you’re out and your inventory’s full, but an enemy dropped some new and exceedingly rare loot, you won’t feel perturbed ditching a huge pile of more generic items.
Keep some spare armor around
As you play, you’ll find new crafting recipes for new armor variants, and be able to put together a far better helm or what-have-you than the one you had before. And given that dismantling your equipment returns the original components back to your pockets, it can be tempting to say, “Well, this hat is much better at protecting me from bonks, so I shall melt the old one down for that rare part.” Alas, it isn’t useless, and Eternal Strands doesn’t tell you that until a bit later.
Not too far into Eternal Strands, you’re going to reach areas that are elementally overwhelming. There’s a large village that’s frozen in magical ice, as well as vast stretches of burning lands. Surviving in these harsh environs requires a combination of special potions, smart magic—and also the perfect armor setup. You’re going to want at least two sets of everything, each set built to better protect you from the hot or cold (and everything else). Instead of dismantling that old helm, reforge it to withstand a chill, and focus the newer one on keeping you cool. You’ll be glad you did.
You can turn off auto-climb
It’s a bit of a tricky choice, this, but by default Eternal Strands makes you climb absolutely everything you walk toward. That’s super-useful, especially when trying to make a quick getaway. However, it can also be incredibly annoying. Eternal Strands, quite reasonably, assumes that you’re trying to climb the rock in front of you because you ran at it—but instead you’re swearing because you were trying to run away from the pesky creature spitting poison at you, and now you’re climbing something instead.
In Options and then Controls, you can switch this feature off and instead press Y (or your local keyboard equivalent) to choose to start climbing at any given point.
Really, really don’t fall into the purple mist
For a game about exploring everything, Eternal Strands makes it a little bit too easy in some areas to accidentally step into an abyss.
Death isn’t an issue here, since your strand-based existence means you'll return to home base as soon as your health is gone. The downside is you can only bring back a select few of the many inventory items you gathered that run—as opposed to all of them if you return via the proper exits. And that can be aggravating if you died only because you didn’t notice that there was a gap between this grassy hill and the next, and fell.
Purple mist gives these gaps away—and to be clear, they’re few and far between—so always be wary when you see this leaking magical danger. It’s very disappointing to discover you just lost those epic drake scales you fought so hard for because you walked Mr. Magoo-like into a hole. It’d be nice if Eternal Strands just reset you a few moments earlier (maybe with a slight health penalty) instead of killing you off, but for now this isn’t the case.
No really, climb everything
Yes, we already covered this ground (vertically), but you might have thought by “everything” we meant “everything” that’s inanimate. We did not.
Eternal Strands has nine enormous titans wandering around its vast, open levels, and you’re going to want to battle them. And yes, the game’s extraordinary freedom means you could do this entirely by throwing rocks and arrows and magic at them if you wanted, but you’ll likely have an easier time if you see them as a giant obstacle course, too. Each has ways of having its armor removed, and that’s a lot easier if you’re clinging to the side of it like a mad window cleaner on a giant, stomping building.
Also, it’s funny to stand on a vast creature’s head and hit it until it falls over.
Eternal Strands is available January 28 on the Epic Games Store.