You can check out our guide to learn how to achieve achievements and where to find encyclopedias in Gibbon: Beyond the Trees.
Achievements & Encyclopedia Locations
This guide will show you detailed about achievements and encyclopedia locations in the game.
Tutorial
- Learn the Ropes: Finish all three lessons with Yellow.
- Lilac’s Calling: Finish Pink’s adventure and follow Lilac on their quest to free all animals.
The first run when you hit Play will have you playing a pink gibbon in a tutorial-and-plot sequence that lasts about an hour. You can die as much as you like, checkpointing is pretty generous. You cannot make progress on any other achievements during this section, and you cannot miss either of these.
Finishing the tutorial will unlock Liberation and Daily Run.
Liberation
Liberation is the meat of the game. In Liberation, you run through the biomes of the tutorial, plus a few extra, stitched together randomly. Dying resets you to the starting point, but everything after the first few seconds of gameplay is picked on the fly from chunks.
Your goal in Liberation is to fill out the Encyclopedia, consisting of freeing animals and collecting information about gibbons. Collectibles appear in circles at the edge of the screen when you’re close (in the same biome, roughly), red for animals and blue for info. Loosely, but not exclusively, animals are low to the ground and associated with the more “human” biomes, while info is typically higher and associated with notable showpieces like crevasses and dams. It’s not perfect, but worth keeping in mind while hunting to help you know when to just buzz through a biome fast.
ATTENTION: Some folks speculate that the info collectibles stop spawning at all after one liberates all animals. Anecdotally, I spent an hour looking for the last info collectible after finishing the animals and never saw it, but that’s absolutely not proof. To be safe, get all of the info before you polish off the animals.
If you don’t, and can’t find the last info collectible, you can start a new save from the options menu without wiping your progress. You’ll have to rerun the tutorial if you do this, then you can restart Liberation with nothing gathered. Note that all progress-based achievements are dependent on the save you use! If you have 4/8 Daily Runs, make a backup save to get info collectibles, and do the Daily Run on that save, it will not increment to 5/8 unless you do it on the main save.
Liberate All _: Free all _ from their cages.
- There are ten achievements for liberating all of a given type of animal. They’re progression-locked to some degree – liberating all of a type of animal seeds one or two more into the spawning pool, such that you’re always only progressing one to three species at a time. I never noticed a pattern to some animals being kept in certain places rather than others, just stay low wherever humans are and you’ll find animals with some regularity.
Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free: Free all animals from their cages.
- Getting your tenth animal liberation achievement (100 total rescues) will give you an extra achievement and the “thanks for beating Gibbon: Beyond the Trees” screen. You can still go into Liberation after that, and there’ll be a lot more ambient animals around to reward you, but there won’t be terribly much left to hunt for.
Bookworm: Find all entries of the encyclopedia.
- The info collectibles are all contained in the last Liberation-specific achievement. They’re all associated with specific buildings or special screens, and I swear some don’t show up until you have others, but I don’t have any confirmation of that. The biggest advice I have for these is to be patient – you’ll just spend an hour or so swinging around waiting for the last screen to show up, and it’s not bugged, you’re just getting hosed by the RNG. The Encyclopedia itself gives you hints to where each one is, and I’ve put a section at the end of this guide with screenshots of the locations in case you want an extra bit of help finding the last one or two.
Daily Run
Daily Run is like any other leaderboard-based thing you’ve seen, giving everyone the same world and grading you at the end of the day on how far you make it. Liberation collectibles will not spawn in Daily Run, but it has its own suite of achievements.
Eight Days a Week: complete 8 different Daily Runs.
- “Complete” just means “submit a score” – you do not need to run the full duration for the score to count. Dying through any various means will still increment this. You do need to run on eight different, not necessarily consecutive, days.
Slide On: Slide for 1000 m in Daily Runs.
- This is cumulative, and repeated runs of the same course will all count. I don’t slide very much, but it’s pretty trivial to get a hundred or so meters of slide distance and then hurl yourself into the first chasm and repeat on some courses. Or, more likely, you’re better than I am at this game and just gather it naturally.
Get Back: Do 200 backflips in Daily Runs.
- Same as above. Backflips should just be part of your routine as much as possible, so this should come naturally over the eight runs you need to do.
Big Air: Traverse 60 m in a single flight in a Daily Run.
- This is in one single ballistic trajectory. Get a lot of speed, get a lot of height, and let yourself fly. If you can get Pink to accompany you, you can use the extra height/speed from his pair throw to count for this achievement. This takes some trial and error, but isn’t that bad.
- ATTENTION: Some folks have said that backflipping during a 60m+ leap will make it not count for the achievement. I cannot confirm or deny this; for my flight I let Pink toss me and took all hands off the controls just to be safe.
Things One Can Do In Either Mode
There’s plenty of time to increment these in your Liberation grind, but as far as I’m aware you can work on them during your Daily Runs as well. If you want to be safe, I haven’t verified personally that Daily Runs will count, so just focus Liberation. Many of these are actions doable during the tutorial, but they specifically require playing Lilac for the achievement.
Throw Deluxe: Do a backflip after being thrown by Pink.
- Trivial. You should be backflipping after a pair throw pretty much every time you can anyway.
Team Player: Get thrown by Pink 25 times.
- Getting thrown by Pink is generally useful, so you should be aiming for this anyway.
In Sync: Simultaneously swing from the same vine as Pink.
- This is absolutely one of those things that you’ll rip your hair out trying to get, and then accidentally get several times after you finally do. First you need Pink attending you, then you need to be in an area with vines, then he has to go for one of the vines, and finally you have to be in a position to also get to the same vine, and double finally Pink has to not decide to pair throw you when you do. Vines are, specifically, only the geometry that you get to do the big swing off of and choose when to let go, no matter if it’s a chain or a loose electrical wire.
My best advice is to, whenever you have Pink in attendance, try to match his speed and stay very slightly ahead of and above him if possible. Since the lower parts of the vine move faster than the upper parts of them (I got an engineering degree to be able to say this), you’ll have a small extra window to grab the vine even after Pink starts to swing on it. I had to do this twice for it to pop, and my guess is that if Pink is off-camera but on the same vine it won’t count.
Drop Down: Drop down from swinging as Lilac.
- Literally just a button press. The achievement only exists to inform you that you can do this, I think.
Smooth Move: Land in slide after a backflip as Lilac.
- As some others in this category, this is probably something you want to do when able anyway. You don’t need to time it perfectly, you can do the backflip and fall as long as you like into the slide.
Double Flips: Land 10 double back-flips as Lilac.
- This is one you probably won’t do too much. Remember that thanks to kinematics you need more than twice the height to pull off a double backflip, and I swear up and down that the second backflip is slower than the first. If you’re having issues hitting these, try doing a double backflip as soon as you’re able to jump off the end of the branch you start on in Liberation. With a bit of practice, I could land this 90+% of the time, and the start is fixed so you can repeat it as much as you need.
Happy Bouncing: Let Lilac bounce 5 times without swinging in-between bounces.
- Despite the icon, I’m not sure you need to bounce off of awnings and umbrellas to do this. I bounced off a few umbrellas and then just jumped a few times on the flat ground without swinging or sliding and it popped. I’ll update this if anyone has more concrete information, but if it’s not working, one of the market biomes has various bouncy surfaces you can jump onto from the ground without any swinging. The bounces definitely don’t need to be consecutive, at least.
Canabalt: Reach the highest crane in town and run across it.
- I only ran the final third of it and the achievement popped after Lilac jumped off. This one is a little annoying as the crane is fairly rare, there’s another crane you can fairly easily mistake for it, and getting up to the top of the crane isn’t always easy or possible depending on biome generation. Stay high in the town and keep at it and you’ll get there. There’s a hard to see vine towards the left of the underside of the top of the crane that you can use for extra height if you can get to it.
The right crane.
The wrong crane.
Encyclopedia Information Locations
This is a bonus section for the info spawns in the Encyclopedia. The lighting and weather may vary for you. I don’t have the hint texts and don’t want to go through the tutorial again to get them; if someone wants to furnish me with them I’m happy to edit them in, or I might do the tutorial again another night and put them in myself for completion.
I’ve taken special care to take screenshots only before I actually gathered the collectible so that you can compare position. If I only saw the collectible and didn’t collect it I threw the screenshot out and got a different one.
Numbers 1-5 unlock automatically during the tutorial, and are not included here.
Entry #6: Gibbon Song
- Fairly easy to get if you find it. It takes a bit of zen to figure out how to fall onto it, but no matter which branch you approach this screen from you should be able to get to it.
Entry #7: Family Tree
- Fixed every time you start Liberation until you grab it. Hold run before you gain control to get to the end of the branch before you let go to jump and you’ll get it, and also you’ll teach yourself how to line up the double backflip for later if you need.
Entry #8: Pollinators
- Not a terrible one, but you need to be high for it. If you don’t land on that top branch, you cannot get the height; if you do, you just go straight into it.
Entry #9: Acrobatic Champions
- Generic. As long as you can get to that high horizontal branch, the natural arc of swinging should toss you through it.
Entry #10: Apes or Monkeys?
- Completely unremarkable screen and almost never showed for me across two clears of the game, but you can get to it from anywhere from the warning. You have to start climbing immediately when the warning pops, though.
Entry #11: Penan
- A common one to see people bemoan as their last. It’s a rare screen and you have to hit a weird middle-height to get the collectible. The good news is that you can get to it from anywhere after the warning pops up, the bad news is that if you haven’t seen it before you have absolutely no idea where you need to be.
Entry #12: Gibbons in Danger
- This is a bit of an annoying one. The screen is very common, but it isn’t always easy or even possible to get up to that upper level to get it, and since the upper level is solid ground you cannot swing off it, you have to get above it to walk along it. You’ll probably miss this one several times and curse yourself for it, but you’ll keep getting opportunities.
Entry #13: Dams
- Rough one. Fairly easy to see coming, but an uncommon screen and actually landing the jump isn’t too easy.
Entry #14: Palm Oil Plantations
- A bit of a rough one. Anecdotally, the plantation crevasse is fairly rare, and you have to get low on the chain to swing through it.
Entry #15: Illegal Pet Trade
- Uncommon screen, but easy to get. You’re very likely to naturally slide onto this, and if you don’t, you can get back up to it from the ground before getting to the collectible. Just pay attention for this sequence of downward roofs and you’ll be fine.
Entry #16: No Selfies with Animals! #1
- The billboard screen seems to be fairly common, but Pink can actually steal this vine from you. Not a bad one despite that.
Entry #17: No Selfies with Animals! #2
- Trivial to get to if you’re high enough, but has a bad tendency to pop up too late for you to gain that height. On top of that, it’s a very unremarkable screen that’s hard to see coming. A frustrating one.
Entry #18: Rehabilitation
- Fairly easy one. Not a terribly uncommon screen, and you just have to slide down the huge log and jump towards the end to get it.
