New to Hamlet, need a few tips

[Aalda11]

I've played Hamlet for a few hours now but I'm realizing it probably requires a different way of playing. I have about 200 hours in DS in general so I started playing the way I was used to but I'm having trouble doing that.

First food. My usual tactic is to build a base next to a beeffalo herd and plant a spider nest or two nearby. Then I run bring all the berry bushes I can find and plant a farm. With about 20 bushes and two spider nests my food and silk problems are solved for an eternity, I just keep making meatballs and I'm fine. Sometimes I kill a beeffalo and make a few jerkies to replenish health and sanity.

However in Hamlet things aren't as easy. First, obtaining monster meat seems to be more difficult. So far I've only seen two types of monsters frequent enough to farm - the weevols and the toothy plants. The former drop eat only rarely, the latter not at all. I've found a scorpion in a cave once and it dropped a piece but I can't find any farmable spot for them. I've also found a mant hill but the one mant that patrolled around didn't drop meat, only chitin. Plus the hill is on the other end of the map. There are also the spider monkeys but they're a bit too beefy to farm. 

As for normal meat, I was farming the guard pigs but fighting them is very annoying and the idea of this being my main source of food isn't appealing at all. Killing the hippos is quite easy and they drop 4 meats but I quickly found out they don't reproduce fast enough to farm. I basically ate all of them in my vicinity in the first few days. And there don't seem to be any koalefants in Hamlet.

So what's the deal with food in Hamlet? Am I doing it wrong building my base in the city? Are you just supposed to sell clippings and berries and buy food? The same goes for silk - it's way more difficult to get silk from the spider monkeys and trees, are you supposed to buy ready made products from shops?

Thanks!

[Computer-7]

you just buy food, if you don't feel like buying it some options like mants, pogs, bats and weavoles with some berry bushes should give you a lot of meat balls.

[Roosev]

Rush the Crock pot.

For food, steal the berry bushes from the guards and then replant them close to your base. These will be for emergencies and to make oincs.

You can get manure by shoveling the dung piles and/or picking up from the pigs. One berry (or you can trade in 3 Clippings for 3 oincs) will be enough for you to get 3 ice from the food vendor.

You can farm for monster meat by either killing vampire bats or killing the Dung beetles. Dung beetles will be an easier source of food at the beginning due to the lack of vampires waves right at the start. Always keep the monster meat, especially if you have a crock pot.

As long as you can consistently get a single monster meat and be able to buy 3 ice from the vendor, you will never go hungry again.

After the vampire bat waves escalate, you will never ever run out of monster meat.

If for some reason you can't buy any ice from the vendor because you don't have any oincs, you can always use the berries as a filler for the meat instead.

[Aalda11]

Ok thanks Mel Gibson. Seems the key is to wait till the bats get more numerous. Until then I'll just eat whatever I can find (a bit more difficult since I'm playing as Wigfrid).

[Roosev]

13 minutes ago, Aalda11 said:

Ok thanks Mel Gibson.

I did forget to say, if you still can't get any monster meat, you can just buy any meat item (drumstick or morsel) from the shop for about 2-3 oincs and then mix that with the ice. It's a bit more expensive, but it's still cheaper than the pre-made meals in the other shop.

[Majestix]

I have never found the need to buy food in Hamlet. Here are some tips:

• Sometimes the outskirts of the pig village have a set piece with farms. If you get that in your world gen, then it is very handy to live near there. Another handy set piece is the berry bushes one. Neither is essential, but they can be helpful. You can kill off the guard every few days and help yourself to the pigs' produce. Once the guard is gone, you can also kill the defenceless worker pigs. Be careful though, should there be another guard tower nearby. A bit later in the game, when you get the executive hammer, you can just destroy the guard towers guarding the farms and berry bushes, and then nobody will be able to stop you from stealing the food from the workers and killing the workers themselves on a regular basis. Hey, don't judge, it's the wilderness out there. To eat or be eaten.
• If you don't get the farms on the outskirts, you can pretty quickly build some yourself, thanks to the abundance of dung beetles. Knock them off their dung ball, kill them, unravel the ball. It is important to kill the beetles once they fall down, otherwise they will find a pile of dung and use it up. If instead you kill them, then the pile of dung will spawn a new beetle with a new ball without getting used up.
• Two weevole carapaces, one vegetable, one stick = hard shell tacos, 37.5 hunger and a whopping 20 health (although I think this one is unavailable to Wigfried).
• Try to wean yourself off meatballs, also in normal DS. I almost never make meatballs these days, there are much better recipes out there: pierogi last longer, and give lots of health, bacon and eggs restore more hunger. If you spawn gobblers while harvesting berries, 2 drumsticks, 1 berry, any one meat (morsel or monster meat will do) = Turkey dinner, 75 hunger, 20 health (but spoils within 6 days). Also, in the early game you will find bean bugs when flipping over stones. 3 Bean bugs + any meat = Feijoada, 75 hunger, 20 health, 15 sanity!
• Main sources of meat for me are dung beetles, pigs on the outskirts of town, bats. You can also kill pikos, although I am usually so flush with meat that I almost never need to bother with these buggers. When you go clearing jungles of snap teeth, you will end up with tons of leafy meat, which you can convert to eggs (I tend to make sure I have a bird cage and a bird by day 9, at the very latest). In the early game you can get eggs by chopping down palm trees.

In general, I have found that Hamlet forces you to find a new way to do lots of things that you thought you already knew how to do (e.g. finding gold). Don't be wedded to trying to find "the Hamlet parallel" of whatever you were used to in DS (e.g. the spider monkeys are nothing like the usual spiders, the pigs are nothing like the usual DS pigs, etc.), instead find new ways of surviving.

Good luck and have fun!

[Aalda11]

Thanks Majestix, believe me, I've tried to wean myself off meatballs since RoG but there just isn't a more efficient option. Pierogi need eggs which you can only get by feeding a bird - very inefficient. Plus you don't usually need health from food, you need to reduce hunger first and foremost. Turkey Dinner needs drumsticks, not exactly a reliable food item to get. Same for most other ingredients - they're way too annoying to obtain compared to 1 monster meat and 3 fillers for meatballs.

Actually I've been complaining about the food system for years now. They made meatballs simply too efficient and most other recipes too much pain in the butt to get. I had hoped so much they'd fix it in SW but it's even worse. The comparison between how much work it takes to fill up from mussels or lobsters or fish vs. meatballs is ridiculous. Basically the core problem is most reasonably easy recipes only give around 30 hunger - if Klei fixed that they would fix 80% of the meatball problem.

[Eightvo]

I found Hamlet to require a completely different strategy. 

In DS/RoG I always did pretty much the same thing... walk the edge looking for beefalo and spiders, build a base.. farm spiders with a bird cage for meatballs and the occasional Ham and Eggs. 

In Hamlet, I found the pretty much ALL the basic resources are harder to get  en masse. There aren't bees, so you can't farm flowers. There aren't spiders so getting infinite monster meat, the bird cage, and top hat are all much more difficult to get. Walking the edge doesn't help nearly as much since a lot of the important spots are Ruins or Cave Clefs which walking the edge doesn't help you find. 

 

For food, you can buy ice for 1 oinc and it always gets replaced by ice. You can get oincs easily by selling twigs to farmers or flowers to the florist. You can sell rope/planks to the workers... but I found it's better to wait until you have a Grass/Wood farm to do that regularly...(I mean, if you just need 2 or 4 coins then fine, but if you'r looking for 50 coins... that's A LOT of torches or treasure chests and it's better to wait until you have a ridiculous supply. Depending on the random town, you can earn up to 40-50 coins with shears trimming hedges and trading the trimmings to the general store. You can live near the pigs... they don't turn into werepigs on full moons and the guards stay out all night so they are reliable guards. There is a bit of an issue where they attack with torches during dusk/night so if you're not careful you might accidently burn some stuff down... but if pigs houses burn the builders rebuild them... not sure if the farms and flowers get replaced... but you can't really pick them very well anyway.

1 Machete=33 twigs = 11 rope = 22 coins. You shouldn't ever need to buy twigs... but flint is 2 oincs i think... each machete can earn you 16 coins and from the grocher you can buy 3 ice and a small meat for 5 oincs or 3 ice and a large meat for 8oincs. 

 

Wood in not very necessary... especially if you rush buying a house. Gears are tough... you can rush searching for the palace town, or you can search for the strange thing assembly point which is the only place I found naturally occurring gears in Hamlet so far. Cutting down jungle trees often gives eggs or monster meat (snakes, scorpions)... so if you collect a bunch of wood you should have a lot of ingredients for Ham and Eggs at 2 or 5 oincs each (for the piece of good meat from grocher). Asperigus is a pretty terrible crock pot ingredient but it grows in a bunch of the biomes... I eat exclusively Asperigus and bugs from under rocks and bird seed for quite a while before settling down with a crock pot. 

 

You can chop down tea trees as long as a guard isn't on screen and obtain tea tree seeds which you can plant any where and chop down freely. Usually, the first thing I start farming is Wood... it's pretty easy to get started. You can also buy berry bushes for 2 oincs and farm them (You can get oincs from one of the towns pigs for berries also) but this req. Fertilization... but you also earn oincs by picking up manure during the day in town.

 

TL;DR

   Eat asparigus/birdseed until you get the oincs rolling in to buy from the grocher.

[Majestix]

Try playing Warly for a while. That's Klei's optional fix for the "problem" of too tempting meat balls.

By the way, getting eggs is a non-issue. I have listed some Hamlet specific sources in my post above. I don't know what you mean by "very inefficient". It only takes a few seconds to turn a (leafy) meat item into an egg; and leafy meat is an item that you drown in in Hamlet and that there is no better use for. In fact, if you are Wigfried, then there is simply no other use for it.

[Aalda11]

17 minutes ago, Majestix said:

Try playing Warly for a while.

By the way, getting eggs is a non-issue. I have listed some Hamlet specific sources in my post above. I don't know what you mean by "very inefficient". It only takes a few seconds to turn a (leafy) meat item into an egg.

Yeah, or you can use directly as a filler for meatballs - that's my point about inefficiency.

I did play Warly and it was a blast. I just wish for a more fundamental change.

[Majestix]

47 minutes ago, Aalda11 said:

Yeah, or you can use directly as a filler for meatballs - that's my point about inefficiency.

You cannot use leafy meat, an abundant resource in Hamlet, as a filler.

Anyway, I have said my piece, it's up to you what you do with it. I am frankly not sure why you asked for advice if you were not intending to listen to it, and instead to just repeat the same things over and over.

[Aalda11]

3 minutes ago, Majestix said:

You cannot use leafy meat, an abundant resource in Hamlet, as a filler.

Anyway, I have said my piece, it's up to you what you do with it. I am frankly not sure why you asked for advice if you were not intending to listen to it, and instead to just repeat the same things over and over.

I'm sorry what? You got mad at me? Did I say anything offensive? Or you just habitually insult people for no reason?

[Rellimarual]

It depends a lot on which character you're playing, but I suggest building a base near the lake and leaving a few traps on the shore for frogs. They get caught on their own fairly easily and it's super easy to lead them into the traps. Frogs legs can be dried into small jerky. Drying racks are easier to get up early game than a bird because silk can be tricky until the spider monkeys start infesting more than one or two trees. Make drying racks (2 or 3) right away, then hunt snaptooths for their stalks, leafy meat and that nectar stuff, which restores health as well as hunger. Cooked leafy meat is an underrated early game food item. It gives a little less health and hunger than big meat, but it's easy to get if you can kite snaptooths, much easier than kiting those annoying pig guards! While you're in the jungle hunting them, bring some shears to snap vines so that you don't have to spend your grass on ropes for the drying racks.

[axxel]

Restoring hunger from radish and cooked aspargus should bring you through the first season. Usually, I get most monster meat from jungle tree cutting.

[Aalda11]

11 minutes ago, axxel said:

Restoring hunger from radish and cooked aspargus should bring you through the first season.

I think my problem is I started my first Hamlet playthrough with Wigfrid. I guess any other character would be easier with so much asparagus laying around.

32 minutes ago, Rellimarual said:

While you're in the jungle hunting them, bring some shears to snap vines so that you don't have to spend your grass on ropes for the drying racks.

I realized getting grass - and also berries and veggies - is very easy. You just steal them from the suburban farms. Sure the guard will get mad but he's very easy to dodge and he doesn't alert the other guards. Feels like cheating to be honest. 

[axxel]

Just now, Aalda11 said:

I think my problem is I started my first Hamlet playthrough with Wigfrid. I guess any other character would be easier with so much asparagus laying around.

Ok, then I revise my tip for beginner's meatballs. You may find a bunch of tea trees where pikos will spawn. They can be lured with everything. And protect these trees. Actually in Hamlet it'd be a good idea to make plenty farms for meatball/chilli fillers (but aspargus, they are a problematic filler). I left out other relyable meat sources/farms for you to find. 

[Hx380]

1. Smash unimportant pillars till moleworms fall, then pick them up and release them near your base. Wait till them make a burrow AMD you got infinite meat source. 

2. Chop spider gorilla trees, make a bug net and catch some butterflies to plant them where you want. Then just kill butterflies when you need them. 

3.Dung beetles are a easy monster meat source, poop for making farms and chitine for selling in oddities store. 

4. One of the stores sells berry bushes

5.You can surround tallbird nests with walls and build a lighting rod near them, so you can kill them easly everytime they respawn. 

6. Inside deep rainforest biom you can surround a piece of meat with walls to attract snaptooths to it. The ones chasing after meat won't react to being attacked. They also don't destroy walls. 

7.Killing and drying frogs can be a good idea since they spawn pretty much everyday. 

8. Tubers can be safely eaten during lush season. Wx78 can eat them all the time without getting damaged by poison.

 

[Osbalop]

For monster meat dung beatles are by far the best option, when BFB arrives try to make him poop near your base and you will have chitin and monster meat forever

[TheOnlyGuyEver]

1 hour ago, Hx380 said:

5.You can surround tallbird nests with walls and build a lighting rod near them, so you can kill them easly everytime they respawn. 

Thunderbird

[Mooagain]

2 hours ago, Hx380 said:

 4. One of the stores sells berry bushes

Or at least they are supposed to 

[Rellimarual]

5 hours ago, Aalda11 said:

I think my problem is I started my first Hamlet playthrough with Wigfrid. I guess any other character would be easier with so much asparagus laying around.

Then it goes double for leafy meat. You can just kill and live off of snaptooths for years, especially on Herald Island, which is where I based when playing as Wig. Definitely get a bird ASAP with her. Snaptooths, frog jerky and monster meat from bats and dung beetles will keep you in bacon and eggs indefinitely.

[Hx380]

1 hour ago, TheOnlyGuyEver said:

Thunderbird

Yes you are right, im sorry xD

[Aalda11]

6 hours ago, Rellimarual said:

especially on Herald Island, which is where I based when playing as Wig. Definitely get a bird ASAP with her.

Heh, I'm doing my first playthrough largely blind so I have no idea what you're talking about. Gonna find out soon I suppose.

[Aalda11]

Goddamn, my second try with Wigfrid and I died of hunger again. This time the giant bird ate me just when I was hungry and getting ready to hunt for food. And in his nest and in the dungeons there is no food.

I always took Wigfrid as an easy mode but not in Hamlet apparently. My next try will be with someone else, probably the little tree guy.

EDIT: Little tree guy is a lot of fun, I like how easy his sanity management is but hot damn, healing him is a nightmare. I ran with like 10 HP for half an hour, scavenging resources for his healing balm, then I got killed by bats.

Overall if Klei's goal was to subvert player's routine ways of playing they have succeeded. I have sunk over 200 hours in DS and I've never expected having so much trouble to survive.

[Rellimarual]

With Wormwood, setting up base near a pond is doubly helpful because the hippos and frogs will be constantly killing mosquitos and you can just hop in a boat for free heals. But you have to keep the area loaded for this to happen.