Fade to Silence – Beginners Guide

Beginners Guide

Pace of Play

In Fade to Silence you have to move fast. Nearly everything that is thrown at you is an obstacle meant to run out your clock. Blizzards drain your temperature and health fast, monsters delay your travels, crafting causes a dwindle in your supplies. In order to keep up, you need to lock down resource locations, and capture Outposts as quick as you can.

Outposts have hoards of supplies for you to transfer to your refuge. Every follower you acquire has a set amount of food and wood they consume per day, so maintaining a positive ratio is a must. Doing this keeps your followers morale high, which in turn increases their efficiency and levels up their trust in you. The more they trust you, the higher their skill levels get.

Prioritize your followers’ tasks. Food is the hardest resource to manage. You receive little meat from hunting, and the gathering spots become depleted fast. Fortunately there are ways around you. Build the Butcher’s hut as soon as you can. This will allow a follower with the proper skills to take tainted meat and turn it into viable food. You can also do this with the Woodcutter station. Building these two first is a must, but in order to do so you need followers.

Followers

Followers appear in the same places every time, but not always in the same order. Some will even appear randomly in your camp. While you may be tempted to acquire every follower you can as quickly as you can, don’t. Get two followers as fast as you can, from the first area. Use these to build the huts that you need and start to build up your supplies.

Once your supplies are at a reasonable level, being to recruit the others. The game gives you the option to turn away followers, but there’s really no reason to do so. Recruiting them gets you achievements, and this game is incredibly easy to get every achievement for.

Your followers also have certain skill sets. Every follower has three skills which allows them to craft objects at the various huts available. When you take followers out in to the wild with you, consider the possible skills you may be losing if they die. The game offers you the ability to revive them, but sometimes they just disappear never to be seen from again. Until your next permanent death at least.

Surviving in the Wild

With monsters everywhere and deadly blizzards that can strike at any moment, Fade to Silence often feels like an uphill battle. Make sure to keep a stock of arrows with you at all times, or Pristine Wood with you; that way you can craft them at a campfire. This will allow you to hunt while you travel, and take out Spitters from afar. When in melee combat with creatures such as Rippers, learn to time your strikes. You have a light, and heavy attack. As well as a dodge and a parry. These moves drain your stamina, so timing is key. The dodge function is pretty broken, so learn to parry. Parrying is an easy strategy to survive when the tide of battle begins to go against you.

Always keep at least twelve pieces of firewood with you. This is enough to fully light a campfire. This will help you recover from hypothermia (when your health bar is frozen over), but to fully make use of your recovery time, take one of each of the two types of health potions. This method will give you the biggest bang for your buck.

Doing all that will help protect you from Blizzards, but always try and keep a image in your head of where the nearest shelter is. Without shelter, blizzards will most likely kill you. Torches can prolong your death, but shelter is what will save it.

Foraging is also important. There’s a few different types of plants, most of them are in high supply. Except for grubroot. Pick every single Grubroot that you can find. They’re used for food, for potions, for making fiber which can be made into armor and fur. It is the most versatile plant in the game, and unfortunately there is never enough of it.

Boons and Blessings

While permanent death is always around the corner, there are certain ways to gain upgrades that will never abandon you. These are called Boons and Blessings. Boons are earned from taking outposts. They can only be used after you lose your final life. They allow you to gain more lives next time around, or keep various things that you’ve created or gathered. Go for extra lives first, then resources, then crafts. This will help make the repetitive atmosphere that the permanent death feature creates not feel nearly as overplayed.

Blessings increase your stats. From your ability to retain temperature, the speed at which you starve, or even your ability to recover health and stamina. These are most commonly found from Cleansing Eldrtich monster spots, but can be found strewn throughout the world.

Completing the Game

You can complete Fade to Silence in just one extra life cycle fairly easily. By mastering everything listed above you can push through every Outpost in just a few hours, with extra lives to spare. But should you? Doing this means you only created the huts and tools necessary to get to the end. You miss out on a lot of different aspects that the game has to offer. Fortunately, despite the repetition that the game has, it does have two different endings, and they require different methods to get. I won’t spoil how to get them, but they offer different lengths of game time.

If you ever need a refresher make sure to use the in game Survival Book. It isn’t always the most helpful, but it’ll get you where you need to go.