How To Survive, And Find Your Way Around, In Winter Burrow

Winter Burrow is a cosy survival game that’s been getting a lot of love lately. Although the survival and crafting elements are light, the first couple of days can pose some problems for first-time players. And navigation can be a real nuisance for longer than that.

Sleep At Night

When you start out, it can be tempting to just keep running around picking up resources. But, while the cold is a bit of an inconvenience during the day, it’s far worse at night. First things first, follow the early missions to fix  the fireplace, craft an axe, and then make a bed. Now, you can sleep through the night, which not only enables you to avoid the cold but also replenishes any health you might have lost.

Follow Red Leaves

Once you’ve slept, you’ll need to gather some more resources to fix up the armchair and knit a coat, before setting off to find Aunty Betulina. Which brings up one of the game’s main problems – the lack of a map.

Pine Creek Games has announced a basic map is incoming, although they also noted the omission was an intentional move to make survival more difficult and the game more challenging.

In the meantime, you’re going to have to use your best survival skills to find your way around. Throughout the game, you will see red leaves on the ground. These leaves are as close as you’re going to get to a pathway and they typically lead to important areas of the map. Of course, they also lead away from important parts of the map, but they do provide some assistance.

Watch Your Footprints

Another navigational aid that you may not have noticed straight away is that your paw prints are persistent. As such, you can find your way back quite easily, as long as you haven’t spent the past ten minutes running around and getting hopelessly lost. In which case, following your footprints will only lead you back into trouble.

With that in mind, try to employ tactical foot stepping and use your footprints to determine where you’ve come from and where you’ve yet to explore.

Head For NPCs

There are a handful of NPCs in the game and, apparently, wild animals give off a decent amount of warmth. Being in fairly close proximity (pretty much just on the same screen) as an NPC will afford you warmth, allowing your warmth meter to fill back up and staving off even the nighttime cold.

Not only does heading for NPCs help progress the story, but it can help to prevent passing out from the cold.

Keep Talking

There were a couple of occasions where I thought I’d finished an NPC story arc, only to find I had more to do, and had to make yet another run back to the characters. When you finish quests for characters, talk to them again. Twice, even, to make sure you don’t have to make another unnecessary trip.

Make Elder Tea

If you’re sleeping at night and hanging around near NPCs, the cold won’t really be much of a problem. But there’s always a slight risk of getting caught out. Fortunately, there are some easy recipes you can cook at the repaired stove that will help.

Elder tea takes two elderberries, which can be farmed from around your burrow. They’re close enough that you can even run out and gather some during the night. Brew up a stack of 10 and keep them on you, in case of emergencies.

Honestly, you can comfortably play the whole game without ever having to cook anything else, other than quest items, and simply wat what you find on the ground or in abandoned backpacks.

Explore

There are some areas of the game that can only be explored once you have improved tools or other accessories. In some cases, unlocking these areas is vital to progressing the storyline. In other cases, they can offer some materials needed for crafting.

While remembering to keep your bearings, don’t be afraid to wander off a little bit to look for backpacks and even scrolls.

Go At Your Own Pace

Personally, I didn’t get a lot of value out of the crafting or farming elements of the game. There are only so many different beds you can craft in a single game, and I didn’t really see the point in farming. But, if you like the cosy aspects of the game, you’ll likely get a lot more value out of Winter Burrow.

Fortunately, the quests are not timed, which means you can spend some time unlocking the upper floor of the burrow and crafting as many items of furniture as you want. If you want.