Here are some T1 beginning tips on playing Nightingale (post-Realms Rebuilt) that I wish I knew before.

Go Ahead and Build Your House Wherever

Nightingale is a game about portals and traveling to new places all the time. So… where is the best place to build your base? Near the Crossroads? Near a Portal? The actual answer is: wherever you want.

Fast travelling is easier than you think. Press M to bring up your map, and you’ll have two options: Travel to Respite, and Travel to Crossways. Clicking on Respite will take you to wherever you placed your Estate Carine, no matter the realm. That’s fairly straight-forward: porting home, dumping your inventory, and crafting some stuff. But how do you get back to where you were going? That’s where the Crossways comes in. There are portals in the Crossways. Specifically, these portals can only take you to the “Storied Realms” aka plot realms, but chances are that is where you are coming from anyways.

In any case, after you complete the 1st story realm you unlock the ability to craft your own portals wherever you want. So, again, don’t lose sleep over where you should build your base. Just do it.

Hold E to Collect All the Things

Did you just kill and skin a fae creature (you monster!) and see a bunch of Hide, Meat, Essence, and Bones pop out? Hold E to collect everything in one go. Chop down a tree on a slope and see the Wood Bundles start to roll away? Hold E. Mining Tin next to the water? Hold E occasionally. This method will not pick up sticks, rocks, and other interactable “nodes,” but it does work on basically anything that spawns in with the wispy glow around it.

Survivor Inventory is NOT Weight-Based

Early on, you can recruit an NPC to follow you around and fight and collect things for you. Unfortunately, they only have 15 slots of inventory, which means it’s easy to get clogged with all kinds of leaves, pieces of twine, and so on. The good news is that you can relieve them of those burdens, and instead load them down with 50kg stacks of Lumber and Ore, no problem. Extremely useful for when you strip-mining the fae realms for resources.

Don’t Let Survivors Bring a Knife to a Maul Fight

Speaking of survivors, ever wonder why your first survivor is dealing just 3 damage to those zombies trying to eat your face off? Because they’re equipped with 3-damage stone knife. Give them the Maul you aren’t using anyway, and suddenly they’ll be slaying mystical beasts while you sip tea and crumpets. Well, that’s a Tier 3 food, but you get the idea. Open the survivor’s inventory, put the new weapon inside, and then right-click it and choose equip. Don’t forget to give them your hand-me-down clothing after you upgrade as well.

Incidentally, you can also give the survivor a ranged weapon if that’s what you’re into. I recommend sticking to melee weapons though, to encourage them to take beatings on your behalf. If you do give them bows or guns, the good news is that they don’t need nor use up any ammunition.

Essence is of the Essence

When you are starting out, every spent Essence is a progression trade-off. Which crafting station do you unlock first? Is it worth unlocking (and crafting!) the Recovery spell? Once you get further into the game, the decisions become much easier, of course, but it’s also true that T1 Essence remains relevant forever as it is used to Repair even higher-tier gear.

So… pssst… interested in learning how to get some quick T1 Essence on the cheap? Check these out:

• Simple Saw Table – Paper x6 from Wood Bundle x2 [6 Essence]
• Simple Tanning Station – Straps x3 from Hide [3 Essence]
• Simple Workbench – Simple Wood Axe from Stone Block and Wood Bundle [10 Essence]

Once any of the products are created, right-click on them and choose Extract. Bam, enjoy the Essence. The Simple Wood Axe seems a clear winner, especially in the early-early game, but just note that these numbers are without any Augmentations from nearby decorations. And sometimes you just want to chop down a bunch of trees and/or clear all the Hides from your inventory, ya know?

Living the Charmed Life

There are a lot of little ways to enhance your gear in Nightingale, but one you don’t want to sleep on are Charms. These are unlocked under the Magick tab and represent conditional boons (and sometimes banes) that can be applied to tools and clothing. Key word there is apply, by the way – it does nothing in your inventory until you right-click and apply it to something. Ask me how I know.

One of the most useful ones in the early game is Charm of the Mule, which doubles your Carry Weight while reducing your Stealth by half. Seems like quite the tradeoff, but right now Stealth is pretty useless considering Bound always know where you are and using guns at all negates Stealth for several seconds afterwards. Once you get better backpacks you can drop it, if you want. Charm of the Wanderer is also great as it significantly decreases Stamina drain while gliding with the umbrella. Just note that Charms are only active when you have the item equipped. This means you are better off putting as many as possible on your clothing rather than on the items themselves.

Building from a Box

I was pleased to see that Nightingale allows you to use resources stored in chests to craft things at workstations. What struct me as odd at the time though, was how this did not extend to crafting walls, floors, or building the workstations themselves. Turns out, you can build using stored resources, but there’s a reason why you may not want to.

When you open any storage container, there is a gear-looking icon on the right called Container Permissions. It is here where you can toggle whether to allow for the resources inside that specific container to be used for building or not. The default is Not Allowed.

But… why? Well, resources are extremely important in Nightingale because they can imbue crafted items with their attributes. Buildings and Workstations, however, get zero benefit. So, ideally, you want your walls built with regular Wood Bundles from trees you chopped down on the tutorial island rather than the T3 Wood Bundle (Yew) that you could be using to grant tools +6% melee/ranged damage. The game otherwise doesn’t care which resource gets consumed, and it will consume your best resources on a whim if you’re not careful.

The good news is that you can decide on a system that works for you and just keep doing it. For example, I have several “Building: Allowed” containers where I put all the resources I don’t care about, and then everything else stays protected. Or you could do it the other way around.

Three Hots and a Cot

Food buffs are incredibly important for survival in Nightingale, as is the Comfort buff from sleeping. You can have up to three different food buffs at a time and there is never really a reason not to have them rolling. As a note, “different food buffs” is very generously defined in the game – you can get three Roasted Meat buffs as long as each was created with a different base Meat, e.g. Prey, Predator, Bug.

In the early game, I recommend finding and loading up on as many Blueberries as possible, as the Max Stamina bonus from them is significant when your gear isn’t providing a higher baseline. Also, do yourself a favor and unlock Mixed Plants immediately. The initial Roasted Berries recipe requires two berries, but Mixed Plants allows for two separate vegetables, both of which can be the same berry, doubling the attribute gain.

Semi-advanced tip: prioritize unlocking the Feast Minor Realm card if your base is in the Abeyance realm, aka tutorial island. The Feast card massively increases the duration of food buffs when eaten in that realm, and the increased duration persists when you leave. All of a sudden, your food buffs are lasting 40 minutes even while you progress the story in other realms. This is helpful no matter where your base is, but Storied Realms require you to finish them before you can apply Minor Realm cards.