Elemental Beasts is an elemental magic themed survival game that you can play on dot big bang. This page holds answers to some common questions that players have asked. Just a warning, this page does contain spoilers if you are the type who likes to figure things out on your own!
What kind of game is Elemental Beasts?
Elemental Beasts is probably best described as a gathering, crafting, and base building survival game. You need to eat to survive, and you also need to be careful of drowning and hot and cold places. Explore your environment to find resources, and craft armor and other goods to improve your circumstances. Make an epic base on your home island to show off your survival skills to your friends. The elemental beasts themselves are creatures that occasionally move through the environment spawning strands and wisps of elemental magic you can collect!
What devices can I play on?
For now, you will need a PC or Mac to play. But mobile support is planned and hopefully coming soon!
What are the controls?
Use your WASD keys to move around the world.
Hold “Shift” to run as long as you have available stamina.
The camera will move as you move your mouse, if you are in pointer lock mode. If you are not in pointer lock mode, you hold down the right mouse button to control the camera. The “Esc” key takes you out of pointer lock mode and lets you move the mouse around, clicking on an empty area of the screen will put you back in pointer lock mode.
The mouse wheel will scroll choices on the hot bar.
“E” Interacts with crafting stations and other interactables
“Q” Lets you eat, drink, or use the selected hotbar item
“I” Opens inventory
“C” Opens personal crafting (other crafting is done on stations)
“B” Starts build mode if you are on your island or campsite
“M” Opens the chat window
“O” Opens the emote wheel
What should I do and how do I play?
Start off by exploring your world a little. You should have started on a small campsite, that is your first base. You can look around the world and find mushrooms to eat, leaves from bushes, obsidian, and sticks to craft with. New recipes will unlock as you discover items and start crafting the early recipes.
After you find food, water, and a knife, you should make a rickety crafting bench for your campsite and start building a better base and gear for yourself. Process some cattails! It unlocks some recipes that will be very useful to you 😉
How do I find food?
There is food all around you, but the easiest food to get is probably the mushrooms in the swamp and beach cave. When you are near a fire, you can use mushrooms and sticks to make mushroom skewers.
Harvest and process more resources to find other foods, and build yourself an outdoor kitchen to get access to more types of recipes. There are also kitchen upgrade furniture items that can be placed nearby to enable more recipes. The mortar and pestle, fire, and well are early upgrades that can improve your kitchen!
How do I get water?
Stand in a body of water with a bowl or cup selected and then press “Q” to fill the container. Be warned though, some types of water can harm you unless they are processed into clean water. There is a nice clean little lake to the north west of the campsites.
You can eventually craft a well and put it near your kitchen to be able to just craft stacks of full water containers. It saves a lot of time compared to harvesting water from lakes.
How do I heal?
If your food bar (the green one) is above zero, you will slowly heal over time. But you can also craft some healing items. The first one you can unlock is a gel made of cattail stalks or cactus. To make it, you will need an outdoor kitchen with a nearby mortar & pestle.
Please note, if you have recently died, you will have a debuff on you that prevents food from healing you. That will last for a few minutes!
Why can’t I run?
Your stamina bar is probably empty. The stamina bar drains when you do an activity that takes stamina (like holding shift to run). It will refill as long as you are hydrated, but if your water bar is empty then it won’t refill.
Where do I find resources?
Many of the early resources, like sticks and speckled rocks” can be found right around the campsites. But you will need to go exploring to find some of the later game materials.
Copper can be found up the mountain, iron can be found in the hot cave, and gold can be found in the flooded tunnels under the island.There are a pair of small islands to the south east beyond the swamp that have special resources. Finally, some resources can only be found by processing others. Try processing cattails, flax, cotton, speckled rocks, striped rocks, and lava rocks!
What are elemental beasts and how do I get wisps and strands?
The elemental beasts spawn periodically around the island. Right now there is an earth beast and a fire beast. They will show up on your compass while they are active. They drop resources as they move through the world that you can use for enchanting. They will drop a mixture of wisps and strands of their element type. Be careful though! The fire beast will hurt you if it hits you, and the earth beast spawns traps along with its strands 🙂
How do I craft?
You can open your personal crafting by pressing “C”, but that only has a limited number of recipes. Most of your crafting will be done on assorted crafting stations that will unlock as you progress through the game. The rickety crafting bench will be the first, but there is a smelter, enchanting table, gear crafter and many more.
What are crafting station upgrades?
Crafting station upgrades can be placed near a station to enable more recipes to be crafted. For example, you will need an anvil near your crafting table to do most of your metal working. And the smelter needs a bellows to be able to make glass. The fire is probably the first upgrade you will encounter, it enables you to make mushroom skewers in your personal crafting menu or a kitchen.
How do I unlock recipes?
Recipes all have different requirements to unlock. Some need you to discover specific resources, others require you to have crafted a recipe. There are also premium recipes available only in the store. (They are cosmetic in nature, and have the same stats as normal recipes.)
If you are having trouble unlocking new recipes, try crafting everything marked with a white dot. Those are recipes you haven’t tried yet, and they may just give you the next unlock you are looking for!
How do I build?
Once you have crafted a building or furniture item, you can press “B” to enter build mode and place your item in the world. This only works on your own lot or your personal island. Campsites have a budget of 30 and Home Islands have a budget of 100. You can see the budget cost of each item in its description.
How do I upgrade the raft?
Interact with the navigation table on the raft and then pay the required resources. Upgrading the raft gives you access to your home island, with further upgrades unlocking more islands in your home island game. (Right now, the limit is 2 islands but 2 more are planned.)
What is my home island for?
The home island is intended to give you a bigger space to build and express yourself. Once you get further in the game, you will find you start running out of space for crafting stations and storage. Home islands also let you use some of the bigger buildings that don’t fit in campsites. Other players can follow you to your island via your raft if you want to show off your base.
How do I visit my friend’s islands?
Your friends can give you the link from their browser bar to directly share their island with you, or you can follow them to their islands via their rafts if you are playing together.
What is the merchant’s daily trade?
The merchant offers a small trade each day so that you can trade an early game item for something that may be useful to you. There are quite a few potential trades, and they will rotate every 24 hours. An exclamation point will appear on your compass if there is an available trade.
Can I get a free enchanted island recipe or enchanted armor recipe?
Yes! You will unlock enchanted islands of each type, as well as enchanted armor sets just by playing the game. The ones in the store have fun cosmetic differences, but they act the same as the ones you can unlock just through gameplay.
Why is there a store?
We love making elemental beasts, and we are super excited that the vast majority of its content is free for everyone to enjoy. However the game takes a lot of work to build, update, maintain, and host. Having cosmetic microtransactions is a way to help pay the devs and hosting cost of the game. If you want to support the game by having a fancy islands or gear, it is greatly appreciated <3
Where can I report bugs and give feedback?
Discord is the easiest place for us to respond to feedback, but if you are unable to join discord then just post in the comments for the game and we will do our best to get back to you. Posting bugs and feedback is super helpful to us so thank you so much!