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Walter gaming Tips and Q&A


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   With the beta going live, many people will be playing Walter, some for the first time. As a long-time Walter main, I know how hard he can be to play, specially since he has basekit stuff that may be hard to notice, or underestimated, that makes his playstyle way smoother, and some of these took me quite a while to learn, like the "tree sanity".

So, I want to make a thread with "basekit" tips to help people that may not know them:

 

1. Woby's inventory has "implicit" uses: Atleast in early game, you can ignore carrying a backpack and use armor all the time if you want to feel safer. Her extra inventory also makes body insulation less of a pain to wear. And, her inventory persists after death; If you die and need to revive far away, on a meat effigy, or at portal, she can always carry insulation, food, heals, armor, etc.

2. >Trees give as much sanity as Tam and lessens sanity lost< : I think this is one of the most underrated things he has for his sanity. MAKE YOUR BASE WITH TREE AREAS . Its 0 upkeep and a constant sanity buff around the area. You can do this across your base, farms, boss spawns, sanity stations, in ruins, anywhere. Trust me, this **** is insanely useful, try it.

3. Easy early game heals: Butterflies can be killed with slingshot and their wings are a decent quick heal (well, now even better with the Field Medic perk lol). Trail Mix is Walter's favorite food and cheap to make, so its both a decent HP and hunger filler. Walter's tent is a portable healing station out of twigs and grass, and he loses half the hunger using it, so its completely worth "rushing" and carrying.

4. Farming critters: Walter is specially good at farming bunnies, butterflies, birds, moles, etc. You can also do this alternating ctrl + f while doing other tasks. For example, while chopping trees or collecting berries, you can shoot each bird that falls near you. Its tiredsome to do this all the time, but for early game its pretty good.

5. PK is your bestie: morsels>Pig King>gold>gold rounds. Also, pigmen are befriended with morsel for half a day, which you can easily farm from critters.

6. Shadow bunnies: You can get your sanity intentionally lowered to farm these. Its essentially a safe way to gather some monster meat, nightmare fuel, and beard hair.

7. Farming krampus: Its pretty easy to farm these out of killing critters, since you can summon them basically once a day. They are kiteable with the slingshot and give monster meat, which is good for Woby. If you are lucky you could even get a krampus sack on the first autumn or year. You can make a "cheap" farm for this, using an area with rabbit holes, flowers, a feather hat, and even a scarecrow for canaries.

8. "Ignoring fashion": Not gaining sanity from clothes means you can just focus on insulation, armor, or utility. For Winter, you can completely ignore the bother of rushing a Tam o Shanter; For Spring, If you don't have an Eyebrella, Rain Hat or Rain Coat are easy to get if you want to keep your hands free (and tentacles are easy to kill at a distance using the slingshot, for their skin); For Summer, Walter's hat has a base (60) overheating resistance. You can easily go through Summer just with this and a thermal. Also, Walter does NOT lose any sanity from staying in caves, so its also good for Summer.

9. Walter can build a cheap "sanity station": by just telling stories on a campfire surrounded by trees. Ways to upgrade it are of course Lamb's Idol (something worth rushing the first summer), Glommer, Evil Flowers+BQ Crown, etc etc.

10. Enlightened Crown is THE BEST ITEM for Walter: Gestalts on a ranged weapon are free extra damage, and believe it or not, Walter has a pretty solid sanity control. He gains the entirety of sanity auras at all times (not affected by dusk, night, caves, and insane auras), and also gains sanity from magic stuff like Thul Armor, magi, etc. Enlightened Crown is a gamechanger for Walter.

11. Armor while riding Woby: Woby has an "hp bar", when it gets depleted it buck off Walter. This resets after 5 seconds of not taking damage. However, Walter is the one taking the hits, so, by wearing armor you can extend this threshold. Marble armor is by far the best due to its 95% protection (the "Woby bar" goes to 180, for example, you can take 3 consecutive hits from Eye of Terror without getting buck off), but any armor does this to a different degree.

 

Anyways, I really like playing Walter, imo he has a pretty unique playstyle. I know hes challenging, most people either never played him due to his previous "worse than Wes" reputation, or tried to but got the "2 terrorbeaks" treatment, so I think some of these tips will be useful for many, specially new Walters.

 Thanks for reading, please add more tips or tricks in the comments, im sure theres plenty more. I excluded Skill Tree tips because that adds A LOT more to his playstyle and I wanted to keep this as short as possible (also would have been too much yapping lol), but feel free to share any insights on that too!

And, if you have any questions about Walter's mechanics, skill tree, perks, etc feel free to ask those too!

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just watched some of my footage from my boss-run, i'd also like to contribute some tips

1. if you're visiting the ruins, try to craft the scrappy frame and a set of moggles. scrappy frame trivializes the bishop and moggles help you with shooting from afar. the hardest component of the frame is the frazzled wire, which you can get from grave digging, shuffling tumbleweeds, or breaking down clockworks with a hammer (i didn't even remember this). you can just break down the fences for scraps if you don't want to ruffle through junk.

2. the best slingshot grip before Bee Queen is the glommer grip, so get it asap. but you don't have to pick up the glommer flower for it to follow you and produce goop, you just need to visit the glommer statue after a full moon and it should leave behind some goops for you, if the pigs haven't eaten them. (i used to sweat myself rushing the ruins and leave before day 11, but now i can take my time with it)

3. all three of woby-task skills are useful. i didn't have a use for picker woby before, but having woby pick up butterfly wings-seed-poop is extremely convenient (idk what else would be good). if you're not using gathering woby (chop-mine), you can let her pick up the resources that you mine-chop yourself. foraging woby is always nice for some extra blue/green mush (hp and sanity), cacti, banana, etc.

4. spider gland (not even healing salve) is an amazing healing item with the field medic skill(12hp/per). you can easily amass glands and have it as your primary healing in the early game. you can plant a spider nest near your base or some pigs and gather meat for treats, silk, and glands.

5. advanced slingshot band is pretty terrible, saves you a point for better skills if you don't pick it.

6. portable campfire + faster cooking make for a really nice synergy, even better with foraging woby. you'd always have fresh cooked food on the go, not needing to worry about cooked dishes and their spoilage

7- fighting Ancient Guardian. it's actually better if you continuously shoot AG as your shot has a stagger effect. AG won't charge as much and cause earthquakes, which can knock you off woby if you get hit by 02 consecutive falling debris (i did), and potentially kill you by letting AG ram and slam. the fight is a bit faster than letting AG ram into pillars too.

8. glass round is a really good alternative to marble round, dealing the same 51 damage, and easier to gather too. this is a good everyday-ammo so you don't waste cursed round and have to craft with nightmare fuels. you just have to make a trip to the lunar island and assemble the crafting station.

9. big woby's insulation makes winter a breeze with a thermal stone and just a winter hat, or better, a beefalo hat. i prefer the winter hat because beefalo hat is ugly as hell.

the rest i forgot

I seriously like the idea of this thread

A few things I'd like to add to the already complete list of tips:

1. Keep your pioneer hat on before you get armor

Yeah, I've seen ppl joining pubs, straight up throwing the hat away, got hit by a tallbird and went into his infamous sanity death spiral all in a matter of minutes. Though the hat doesnt provide any armor, the reduced sanity penalty is invaluable in early game even if you dont have the pinetree panache skill.

2. Moslings are a breeze for Walter

This applies even for pre-skilltree walter, no baits or some other sophisticated setups needed, you can kill the moslings first before the moosegoose, making the fight much easier.

3. Watch his hunger

Walter has a tiny stomach, with a maximum hunger cap of 110. This means that filling dishes like tall scotch eggs and meaty stews can end up wasting hunger, and he might starve in the middle of a fight.

4. Keep Woby fed

Woby goes slower when she's hungry, and sprinting and dashing also take away a lot of hunger. Having her turn back to small form when you are chased by hounds/splumonkeys/nightmares could be REAL bad.

5. When fighting in caves, deal the killing blow AWAY from cliffs

Trust me, its definitely not the best feeling to have guardian's horn, shadow thurible or bone armor fall into the void because you have been fighting too close to cave walls.

 

Also a fun fact: Walter will still gain the tree sanity boost from being surrounded by treeguards. 

Will be updating this post as i remember more

4 hours ago, kroban said:

8. "Ignoring fashion": Not gaining sanity from clothes means you can just focus on insulation, armor, or utility. For Winter, you can completely ignore the bother of rushing a Tam o Shanter; For Spring, If you don't have an Eyebrella, Rain Hat or Rain Coat are easy to get if you want to keep your hands free

Note that Walter also does not lose sanity from wet items, so if freezing isn't a problem (e.g., in summer or after the 13th day in spring) you can actually tank the rain! This works especially well with his "sticky" slingshot grips, which allow you to attack without having it slip out of your hands.

Also, a lot of players seem to disregard his hat because "you can just not get hit" and "the head slot is best used for helmets", but it actually reduces the sanity loss from all causes of damage. It allows you to minimize the sanity penalty taken from eating taffy/cooked green caps, for example.

1 hour ago, Crimson Hollow said:

1. Keep your pioneer hat on before you get armor

Yeah, I've seen ppl joining pubs, straight up throwing the hat away, got hit by a tallbird and went into his infamous sanity death spiral all in a matter of minutes. Though the hat doesnt provide any armor, the reduced sanity penalty is invaluable in early game even if you dont have the pinetree panache skill.

I'm sure people have calculated this ages ago, but I'm curious if anyone has statistics on whether more sanity would be saved with a log suit and pioneer hat or a log suit and a football helmet. With the new skill I'm almost 100% certain it's the former but I'm not sure about without the skill

26 minutes ago, YouKnowWho142 said:

I'm sure people have calculated this ages ago, but I'm curious if anyone has statistics on whether more sanity would be saved with a log suit and pioneer hat or a log suit and a football helmet. With the new skill I'm almost 100% certain it's the former but I'm not sure about without the skill

log suit + football doesn't help with your %damage reduction, as they don't stack like back in the solo DS game. you'll still only have 80% dr, instead, the durability loss will be split between two armor. so yeah, log suit + pine hat is better for sanity loss

if you mean how much sanity saved in the long run,

ball helm: 80% dr 315 hp

log suit: 80% dr 315 hp

[1] it takes a total of 3150 damage to break both armor, meaning 6300 sanity loss

[2] it takes a total of 1575 damage to break one log suit, meaning 3150 sanity loss, or 1575 sanity with the pinetree hat, and 787.5 sanity with pinetree panache

[3] it takes a total of 3150 damage to break two log suits, so 1575 sanity loss with panache

so with pinetree panache, that's a difference of 4725 sanity loss. log suit + panache is 3x more efficient than log suit + ball helm.

Spoiler

this is assuming my math is correct.

i calculated [1] by adding up the hp of both armor, so 630 hp. according to the physical damage formula on the wiki, [mitigated] = [taken]*(1-[%dr]), so damage taken = 630:(1-80%) = 3150

for [2], i take the original sanity loss 3150 multiply with 0.25, which is the %reduction of panache (75%)

 

1 minute ago, _mylilsunshine_ said:

log suit + football doesn't help with your %damage reduction, as they don't stack like back in the solo DS game. you'll still only have 75% dr, instead, the durability loss will be split between two armor. so yeah, log suit + pine hat is better for sanity loss

80%*, as both helmet and log suit have.

Otherwise, yeah.

Would like to second YouKnowWho's suggestion to move this to the general discussion section, since that's where it will find the most eyes, and this isn't really feedback on the beta. Would also like to take a moment to glory in Walter's rise in popularity after a long time of seeing him described as the worst and hardest character in the game (let's get this out of the way: this was never true). "Perk soup"? More like perk STEW. Warm and nourishing.

1. You are a 1x damage character, including in melee. Act like it. The slingshot does not need to be your only weapon. Especially in the early days, before you get good grips (or if you don't have the grip skills at all) or a steady supply of marble going, you'll be better served by a spear in combat. You're not like Wendy, whose damage gets penalized if she doesn't fight in a specific way. The only thing you get punished for is getting hit. So don't tank, and you'll be alright. Generally: if you want to do things quickly, use a spear or a ham bat. If you want to do things safely, use the slingshot.

2. Gold rounds are not good combat ammo just because they're better than pebbles. The best use of gold rounds is for food, not for fighting.

3. This one is skill tree related: break free of the monarchy with stinger rounds. Like the gold round -> morsel -> PK -> gold round cycle described by Kroban, stingers can be very easily used to get more stingers. They do 9 less damage than gold, but enough to kill birds, which is most of what gold rounds were useful for in the first place. Plus beehives can be more easily found than Pig King.

4. Poop pellets are underrated. For a piece of manure and a science machine, they'll let you temporarily deaggro non-boss mobs. Don't get overconfident: they don't last long and a lot of enemies will just aggro right back onto you if you're still in aggro range. But with Woby, you have the tools to get out of range quickly. Finding new uses for poop pellets is always fun. Just be careful if you have a slower follower like Chester or Hutch who can still catch aggro.

5. Walter's dirt-cheap tent is your friend. Is looking at a black screen for a few minutes kind of boring? Yeah. Is it more boring than having to start from scratch because you died? Up to you. Generally what I do is sleep until my HP is full, then if sanity is still an issue, spam stories over the campfire till morning comes. It can also be used to sleep through periods of time you really don't want to deal with, like frog rains and the nightmare cycle, though you won't be able to use it to escape hound waves or other fights.

6. Woby will slow down as her hunger drains. Keep her full, not just above 0. Woby gets less hunger out of stale and spoiled monster meat, so cook it, turn it into jerky, or use the new skill to make her treats. In a pinch, cooked monster meat or monster jerky is not the worst emergency meal for Walter either, since the health loss is much smaller than plain monster meat.

7. Glommer goop is handy for going insane safely.

8. Because of the autotargeting, the slingshot might be the easiest way in the game to kill nightmare creatures. The problem only comes when you're fighting something on top of the nightmare creatures (which, because you pretty much only lose sanity from taking damage, is most of the time), or when you can't get any healing so you're stuck in a perpetual cycle of fighting nightmares.

9. Abuse wormholes like crazy, since you don't lose any sanity from traveling through them.

14 minutes ago, Chewabacca said:

4. Poop pellets are underrated. For a piece of manure and a science machine, they'll let you temporarily deaggro non-boss mobs. Don't get overconfident: they don't last long and a lot of enemies will just aggro right back onto you if you're still in aggro range. But with Woby, you have the tools to get out of range quickly. Finding new uses for poop pellets is always fun. Just be careful if you have a slower follower like Chester or Hutch who can still catch aggro.

To add on to this poop pellets here's some additional poop pellet facts

  • They deaggro nightmares spawned by nightmare lights if you can put enough distance between you when firing them this is especially helpful for disengaging planar empowered lurking horrors.
  • When used against clockworks they'll go back to their original positions before they begin to aggro on you again 
  • They'll make a tall bird forget you stole her egg
  • They can be used as fuel in campfires
  • They only drop aggro on the Walter that fired them meaning if your teammates, followers, or another creatures are fighting it will not break up the fight

On a separate note stickies and ickies have a special effect on birds in that when hit by it they can't fly away so instead they'll hop on the ground flapping their wings trying to shake it off while you can't directly pick them up like this after you shoot them you can walk up to them and drop the bird trap on top of them to capture them avoiding the waiting process. While this doesn't have a special effect on rabbits and will panic other nearby rabbits you can also shoot them with these rounds making it easier to drop a trap on them while they're fleeing.

12 hours ago, kroban said:

For Summer, Walter's hat has a base (60) overheating resistance. You can easily go through Summer just with this and a thermal.

Clothes don't stack with thermal stones. A hat will extend the time before you start taking damage from about 8 minutes to something like 8 & a half minutes. 

7 hours ago, Crestwave said:

Note that Walter also does not lose sanity from wet items, so if freezing isn't a problem (e.g., in summer or after the 13th day in spring) you can actually tank the rain!

Wetness causes spoilables to spoil faster, items to slip out of your hands, fuel to burn shorter, and your temperature to lower greatly. Losing sanity is one of the least detrimental parts of it. 

14 hours ago, _mylilsunshine_ said:

 

[2] it takes a total of 1575 damage to break one log suit

sorry if I'm misreading your post but at a glance your math seems way off, it doesn't take 1575 damage to break a log suit, it takes 393.75 (315 goes to the suit and breaks it and 78.75 goes to your health)

7 hours ago, Cheggf said:

Wetness causes spoilables to spoil faster, items to slip out of your hands, fuel to burn shorter, and your temperature to lower greatly. Losing sanity is one of the least detrimental parts of it. 

You can easily place spoilables/fuel in a backpack or Woby to safe-keep them. I already mentioned workarounds for the temperature and item slipping. If you have a Wickerbottom for summer rain, the temperature loss is a benefit and you can forego a thermal stone without overheating for a decent portion of the season. As for spring, you can tank rain without freezing after the 13th day.

Essentially, several parts of Walter's kit synergizes with operating under rain, unlike Wormwood who is only free from the sanity drain.

1 hour ago, Guille6785 said:

sorry if I'm misreading your post but at a glance your math seems way off, it doesn't take 1575 damage to break a log suit, it takes 393.75 (315 goes to the suit and breaks it and 78.75 goes to your health)

you are right, turns out i calculated how much damage would it take to kill a 315 hp player constantly wearing a log suit (or have permanent 80% DR).

after revisiting my 6th-grade math, :flustered::dejection:

[1] it takes 787.5 damage to break a (log suit + ball hat) combo, so 1575 sanity loss.

[2] it takes 393.75 damage to break 01 log suit, so 787.5 sanity loss, or 393.75 with a pinetree hat, or 196.875 sanity loss with panache

[3] it takes 787.5 damage to break 02 log suits, so 1575 sanity loss, or 787.5 with a pinetree hat, or 393.75 sanity loss with panache

it's a 04-times difference between [1] and [3], so a pinetree hat with panache skill is 04-times effective at mitigating sanity loss, without the skill is 02-times

10 minutes ago, Crestwave said:

You can easily place spoilables/fuel in a backpack or Woby to safe-keep them. I already mentioned workarounds for the temperature and item slipping. If you have a Wickerbottom for summer rain, the temperature loss is a benefit and you can forego a thermal stone without overheating for a decent portion of the season. As for spring, you can tank rain without freezing after the 13th day.

Essentially, several parts of Walter's kit synergizes with operating under rain, unlike Wormwood who is only free from the sanity drain.

And other characters can place items in a backpack, take longer to do work actions and fighting because their tools are slipping, take fewer attacks to prevent getting hit during the tool drop, use warming things like a thermal stone, and just fight the shadows that spawn from insanity. Rain always has a ton of cumbersome things you can do to work around its downsides, that isn't a Walter thing and Walter 10,000% does not synergize with operating under rain. Walter suffers from 90% of the drawbacks that rain offers.

18 minutes ago, Crestwave said:

You can easily place spoilables/fuel in a backpack or Woby to safe-keep them. I already mentioned workarounds for the temperature and item slipping. If you have a Wickerbottom for summer rain, the temperature loss is a benefit and you can forego a thermal stone without overheating for a decent portion of the season. As for spring, you can tank rain without freezing after the 13th day.

Essentially, several parts of Walter's kit synergizes with operating under rain, unlike Wormwood who is only free from the sanity drain.

I'll have to agree with Cheggf here. Rain has a lot of issues and Walter can only really deal with one of them, and that is the sanity loss. I still find myself fighting to get an Eyebrella every winter without fail and use it pretty constantly. Dripping and wetness in the cave also give me a lot of the mentioned problems. Not to mention with the Portable Drying Rack skill, now Walter has one more downside in the rain that is character-specific (two if you count the Portable Campfire being weakened and you use it more often).

8 minutes ago, Cheggf said:

And other characters can place items in a backpack, take longer to do work actions and fighting because their tools are slipping, take fewer attacks to prevent getting hit during the tool drop, use warming things like a thermal stone, and just fight the shadows that spawn from insanity. Rain always has a ton of cumbersome things you can do to work around its downsides, that isn't a Walter thing and Walter 10,000% does not synergize with operating under rain. Walter suffers from 90% of the drawbacks that rain offers.

17 minutes ago, Cheggf said:

And other characters can place items in a backpack, take longer to do work actions and fighting because their tools are slipping, take fewer attacks to prevent getting hit during the tool drop, use warming things like a thermal stone, and just fight the shadows that spawn from insanity. Rain always has a ton of cumbersome things you can do to work around its downsides, that isn't a Walter thing and Walter 10,000% does not synergize with operating under rain. Walter suffers from 90% of the drawbacks that rain offers.

I already mentioned the fact that the sticky/jelly grips prevent the slingshot from slipping out of your hand, which also happen to be extremely powerful upgrades that are basically must-haves until you unlock the void wrap in post-rift. Woby is also able to do work actions, which is not exactly the fastest but suffices for minor stuff like mining stone fruit.

Walter does not need to do cumbersome things to tank rain, most players immediately get the grips anyway and dropping your umbrella after day 13 is reducing cumbersome things to manage, not adding it like your thermal stone analogy. Take note that I have never mentioned tanking rain when freezing is possible. But it's fine if you don't believe me, I just thought to mention some cool tech. :)

Another thing is you can feed cheap ammo like poop rounds and pebbles to slurtles. Using this you can sort of domesticate an entire slurtle area for months at a time if you have a beefalo+retriever woby, giving you sort of a bottomless reserve of explosives so long as you pass through the caves sometimes.

8 minutes ago, Walrusst said:

Another thing is you can feed cheap ammo like poop rounds and pebbles to slurtles. Using this you can sort of domesticate an entire slurtle area for months at a time if you have a beefalo+retriever woby, giving you sort of a bottomless reserve of explosives so long as you pass through the caves sometimes.

It only works with rock ammos now. No poop or stinger pellets.

On 2/27/2025 at 2:47 AM, kroban said:

6. Shadow bunnies: You can get your sanity intentionally lowered to farm these. Easy monster meat, nightmare fuel, and beard hair.

What is nightmare fuel and beard hair good for? I was playing Walter for the first time ever yesterday and had loads of nightmare fuel due to fighting shadow creatures non stop. I didn’t know what to do with it.

39 minutes ago, This14Real said:

What is nightmare fuel and beard hair good for? I was playing Walter for the first time ever yesterday and had loads of nightmare fuel due to fighting shadow creatures non stop. I didn’t know what to do with it.

aside from the obvious crafting sink that is cursed round, walter can utilize nightmare fuel just as well as any other survivor.

with how easy sanity is to manage (no sanity aura, x2 sanity food like cacti and green mush, etc.), dark sword is a really nice all-purpose weapon for walter. the slingshot is cool but it's most likely going to be cheaper to wack things with a melee weapon. i like dark sword. night armor is also cool when combined with the pinetree panache hat for good damage reduction (DR) and minimal sanity loss while staying mobile on foot, i just don't like night armor and think marble armor + riding woby is better for sanity in the long run.

nightlight. waltuh is not affected by the magical sanity aura of the nightlight so you have a big ass light source that does not generate any kind of heat, really nice for boating, and there's a new skin for it too. the sound is really obnoxious though.

waltuh can do a lot with ruins gear. thulecite suit is especially great thanks to its 90% DR and 3.3 sanity/min which waltuh does benefit from. thulecite club is self-explanatory, and the sanity aura from the tentacles doesn't affect waltuh, neither does the one spawns from cursed round.

bone armor is a really nice item if you know how to use it, i don't :flustered:. refueling it takes nightmare fuel. and so is the magi and lazy forager, which are all great amulets. i especially think that the lazy explorer is underrated and i will try to use it more in my future runs.

that's all i can remember

and beard hair is butt cheeks. i never crafted a meat effigy once in my 1k hours, life giving ammy is so much better. you can use it as fire fuel though.

quick question why were you fighting shadow creatures nonstop though? unless you are in the ruins

 that got me thinking, this thread can turn into a waltuh QnA megathread too :flustered::encouragement: @kroban what do you think abt changing the thread title?

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