Guides:Mainland

These are all the guides for Mainland. If you have any of your own, feel free to contribute! =Landscape= Mainland is, by far, the largest Island in Survival 303, easily capable of supporting many tribes. It has the advantage of being almost entirely flat, although some "mountains" are present. It has many essential resources; water, food, ores, and trees. However, it does lack both wheat and coal, vital items to progressing in the game, making farms important and mining trips necessary.

As the island is so massive, it different sections of the island can make certain objects abundant and others hard to find. As an example, living near the mainland oil spill will give an abundance of ores, and chicken, yet a lack of wheat, coal, and freshwater. On the flip side of the coin, the forest closest to spring island makes for a completely different experience, wheat and coal is abundant, while iron or chicken requires a long walk.

As of such, the island is very different depending on where you are, and what resources you are next to. Soloists will find living next to mainland mithril the easiest, the few food sources nearby are enough to feed them, and since metals are plentiful when you don't have to share, the rarity of the mithril is counteracted by the lack of people who need it, and no mining trips for coal to for steel gathering tools are required. Tribes will find it easiest to live nearby one of the cow spawnpoints, as the nearby cave and massive plateau makes for a good metal collection area and natural defence, while the cows can produce masses of food with little effort. Living on mainland is certainly one of the most unpredictable islands in the game, and whatever happens, it'll be a unique experience. =Soloist Survival - Core Survival= Once some basic structure is set up, mainland is a fairly easy island to live on. You have two choices of where to settle. You could settle near one of the small forests with a pond, which would give easy access to water and trees. This also has the unfortunate consequence, however, of random people spawning, burning everything, then saying "d00d i wuzz iust r@!ding!!!!". The other option is to put your base near another resource, such as the corn, forests that lack ponds, or near the mountains, as these don't contain spawns. Later on, your choice will matter somewhat less. To get started, you should probably visit the other islands first to gather certain materials; mainly lots of Wheat, Berries and Apples for farming, but we'll go over the exact details later. After getting any necessary supplies, the next most important thing should be to get a good source of food.

If you settled near the corn, that should be enough to keep you alive by yourself, should you spend a lot of time nearby. Otherwise, without going through the tedious act of killing cows with low end weaponry, you should farm. Since you start off with only Level 1 Farming skill, you can only plant berries, onions, flax, and carrots, none of which grow on the island, so if you haven't done so already you should get some so you can grow more. To do this, get small leaves, then use the craft tool on them, but this times, instead of clicking "create item" or "create tool", click "process item". The leaves will change into "Rotting Small Leaves", and will stay like that for about a minute until they become small compost! All manner of small crops can be grown on this, including all the level one crops and some more advanced ones too!

With the compost, you can plant any of the items mentioned earlier to increase your farming skill (and get small amounts of food for later). To plant them, use the craft tool and click on the compost, then on the berry/carrot/onion/flax, and again, pressing the "process item". Continue this until you reach farming level 2, which requires 6 crops to be planted (excluding during special XP events), and then at level 2, you can plant apples, but they require a large compost instead, made by processing large leaves. At level 3, you can plant wheat, which also needs a large compost. To make the wheat seed, simply craft one wheat by itself into an item. With this wheat, you can craft a wheat bundle out of 2 wheat. To use it, you need a mill, which is created with 2 walls and one large leaves, created into a tool. If you put your wheat bundle in the top of the mill, it comes out the bottom as flour. Using a bucket (recipe: small bush stump + rope), click on some fresh water (not sea water). Then, with water in the bucket, click on the flour. This changes it into dough. Next, craft the dough into Uncooked Bread. Finally, cooking it (putting the bread near fire until it becomes yellow) willl make it ready to eat (make sure you don't burn it)! After you have a food source, you are pretty much set up for life on mainland, assuming you don't mind the occasional walk to the nearest pond forest. This guide could go a lot of different ways from here, but that would make it far too long. You'll have to figure the rest out yourself! =Tribal Survival - Core Survival= You don't need someone to tell you mainland is big. But it's so big, people will remind you anyway. As of such, the massive size of mainland makes it perfect for tribes (and castles), and subsequently you will want to take advantage of this. However, even mainland can be hard to settle at should you have no idea what your doing.

Preparations
And even mainland needs you to gather stuff in advance.

Your checklist should be pretty small, as this island is very forgiving, and about half the island has quick and easy access to an effective food or water source. It depends on your intended playstyle, but in general it should look something like this: And furthermore, you will want to pick a location. It should certainly be next to a plateau (or even on top of one should you be feeling ambitious), and other key features you will want to be near to are cows, the mithril mine (should you know where it is), one of the gold/iron caves, and a forest. You can mix and match what you feel is most important depending on what the server's been like (if you've been killed three times over while collecting your preparations, you might want to prioritise metals over cows), but you should find yourself within reasonable walking distance to all of these.
 * 1) Wheat
 * 2) And Lesser Farming Supplies
 * 3) Architecture 4
 * 4) Lantern

Food and Water
After picking a spot, place some farms and focus on getting level 3 farming, enough to start farming wheat. Use some of the wheat and some loose stones inside the iron caves to make a well (or multiple), and use the remaining stones to create quarries (after first creating a catapult or two carts). The quarries can be used to make more wells, and you should repeat this until you feel you have enough to sustain you, your tribe, and any mass-fireproofing and bread baking sprees you may endeavour. You can at this point bake bread, and potentially pies, but the better option is to kill cows for beef. Since cows, unlike farms, do not require a long wait, you can place a hut on the spawnpoint, and kill the cows that spawn repeatedly for food. Even a battle club will suffice for most purposes, but you will most likely want a better weapon to use. Should you create a stone pickaxe and mine enough iron for a forge and iron pickaxe, you can create iron weapons with little difficulty, and then decide between a hatchet or sword as your primary melee weapon (spears and javelins are not effective for killing cows). Do note that cooking beef on a stove requires 6 cooking, so unless one of your tribe members has come with a high cooking skill, a stove will be mostly useless.

Buildings
And finally, one of the most important parts of being a tribe is having the biggest collection of buildings. Since the vast majority of players have a sort of magnet towards buildings, you'll attract players of all kinds, and therefore fireproofing is also very important. To save on the tedious task of having to fireproof complicated wooden structures with about 50 small parts, you should try to make everything from stone where possible. Doing this requires both wheat and stone, so make sure you have plenty of both.

Your general layout should have food, wells, and storage buildings near the centre of your tribe, as passerbys will not hesitate to nab any unprotected steaks they spot, and your more sturdy "Filler" buildings, such as lighthouses, medieval houses, and stone longhouses on the outside. Farmland should be in the middle (and fireproof). This will certainly attract visitors, and fortunately the majority of visitors are friendly. Be sure to welcome them with open arms, and help arm them in the constant battle to fend off those who mean harm. Hopefully, they will do the same to you. The demon that is basic survival has been vanquished, and you must now focus on the new ones that you face.