New Player Guide

Welcome

Welcome to Beasts of Bermuda - a dinosaur survival game focused on infinite growth and fighting against the weather and other players. This guide will give you the basics necessary for Survival in the game. This does not, however, gurantee it! Beasts of Bermuda can be a difficult game starting out, and you may not be able to grow even past 1.0. But don't worry, as you keep playing and you grow accustomed, it'll become a breeze!

Controls

The first thing you have to learn are your controls. By default you have:

• W A S D for movement
• Space to Jump
• C for Sniffing
• F for Interacting (such as eating or drinking)
• Double tap F for picking up items and other players
• Ctrl for Crouching, changing Stance, Diving, or Swimming Down (where applicable)
• Hold Shift to Run
• Alt to raise your head
• Q and E for strafing while swimming
• LMB for Primary Attack
• Hold LMB for Alt. Attack
• RMB for Secondary Attack
• Z for Ability 1
• X for Ability 2
• G for Ability 3
• Number 1 to 5 for using Calls
• Number 6 for Auto-Walk/Run
• Tab to view the Player List
• Enter to access the chat
• Hold V to view the Player Interactions Menu
• O to open the Character Menu

Although this may seem like a lot to remember, don't worry! Focus first on learning movement and eating/drinking. Once you're more confident, you can start learning more about combat, how abilities interact with each other, creature-specific strategies at survival and so on.

Getting Food and Water

The easiest way to find food and water is by sniffing. If you hold down the Sniff button (C by default), food will be highlighted to you and water will appear on the compass at the top of the screen.

Food Meat won't always have an icon, but can be found by looking for large, red clouds of smoke. However, not all meat is good! If a cloud of smoke is more yellow than red, it may have gone rotten and will make you sick. When sniffing on a carcass, a blurb at the bottom of the screen will appear detailing how rotten meat is.

Add example photos here of the meat becoming more rotten.

Plants and fish will be highlighted with a blue or red colour respectively. Only plants that can be eaten will be highlighted blue! As you grow larger, more and more plants will become edible.

Add images showing the plants and fish colours.

Additionally to plants and meat, all creatures in Beasts of Bermuda have a diet. If the diet is ignored, your creature may go sick. If it's always fulfilled, your creature will survive much easier! Salt (which is required for most herbivorous diets) can be found near beaches or on large salt rocks and will also glow blue when sniffed.

Show off 3 different diets (herbi/Para, omni/Coah, carni/Rex?)

Water Water can also be sniffed out by most creatures. By default, you will see water droplet icons on the compass at the top of the screen, showing you the nearest water sources in all directions. You may also see a tall pillar while sniffinf pointing at the water so it's easier to find from afar.

Show water at the top of the compass and the pillar.

Just like meat, water can also go bad by becoming dirty. Some sources are always dirty, while others start off clean. The more creatures that drink from one water source, the dirtier it becomes. Dirty water increases the water meter and satiation much slower than clean water, and maybe make creatures go sick. You can sniff a water source to find out whether it's clean or dirty before drinking it.

Show pictures of clean and dirty water.

Unlike meat, water sources can become boring. This has the same effect as dirty water, but is instead dependant on how often a creature drinks from the same source: drinking from the same lake 5 times in a row will make it more boring than drinking from 5 different lakes.

Show what the boring and exciting water message looks like.

The best way to get food and water without going sick is to always be on the move. This can avoid boring water or sitting and eating out of rotten gores because you couldn't find a fresh one in time.

Growing Faster

Beast of Bermuda's main goal is growth! Growing larger, and larger, so you can eventually become the king of the island. But by default, growth is pretty slow, especially if you play a larger animal like Apatosaurus. So, how do you speed it up?

Gauntlet
On the LifeCycle Gamemode (the default gamemode), after reaching 1.32 growth, your growth will pause. By going into the Character Menu (by hitting the O button), you can unpause growth and begin the Gauntlet. This will increase your growth to be significantly faster at the cost of an ever increasing food and water drain.

This option is not available on FreeRoam servers, where growth slows down significantly after 1.2 growth is reached instead, but growth is also never stopped.

Blessings
There are 3 Deities in Beasts of Bermuda:

• The Power Deity, who focuses on combat
• The Mobility Deity, who focuses on exploration
• The Survival Deity, who focuses on survival
  
  

Each Deity has its own associated tasks in the Trials menu (found by going into the Character Menu), but those are unnecessary right now. What you're looking for are their shrines. On every map, there are a minimum of 6 Grand Shrines (2 of each deity, 3 of which are found on land and 3 underwater). There are also a various number of Mini Shrines. The only difference is that you can Sacrifice yourself at the Grand Shrines only.

Show photos of the 6 types of shrines (all deities, mini and grand)

By going up to any of the shrines, you're able to interact with them. This brings up the Shrine Menu:
Photo of the Menu

By clicking on Trinket, you're able to pick up a small object from that specific deity. If you bring it to another shrine, you can interact with it again (make sure you're still holding the trinket!) and choose the Blessing option to become blessed by that deity who you're giving the trinket to.

Picture of the blessing menu

To grow faster, you need the Speed Blessing. To get it, simply walk up to a Power or Survival Shrine, get their trinket, then go to a Mobility shrine. The Speed Blessing gives extra growth at the cost of an increase in food and water.

Weather
By being in very harsh weather (typically during a storm), your creature will get a growth buff. It will only last until the storm ends, but can be stacked ontop of other buffs. You know you have the buff when this icon appears on the top left:

Show the growth storm buff icon here.

Nesting
Nesting provides many benefits, for both the parents and the children. One of those benefits is the growth buff given when you have offspring nearby. These must be your own babies, not someone else's, and must be smaller than 0.7 growth to give you this buff. Just like all the others, this can stack with other growth buffs.

You know you're being affected by the Baby Buff when this icon appear:
Show Baby Buff Icon.

Growing... Slower?
That's right! Sometimes, your growth may slow down or stop entirely. There are many reasons for this, which include:

• Restless Debuff - if you have been sitting in a cave for too long without leaving it, your growth rate is decreased
• Low Food or Water - the lower your food or water, the less growth you get
• Pausing Growth - in LifeCycle, it is possible to pause growth; it will always pause at 1.32 before the Gauntlet begins
• Growing Larger - the larger a creature gets, the slower it will grow
  
  

Avoiding Death

Death sucks, right? And maybe you've been able to play the game for an hour or two, had some fun, got to a good enough size, but then you died to someone bigger. Or someone way smaller. Or maybe even someone you thought was your friend! Regardless, there are many ways to die in this game, from weather, to sickness, and even other players. So here's some tips to avoid these scenarios!

Weather and Shelter
If the weather begins to act up, it may be a good idea to find a shelter. Be it caves, trees, or even the giant Apatosaurus and its spikier cousing, Brontosaurus, shelter can be found in many ways. Try to look for opening and caves, sniff around for bright, pink plants, or stick to the trees and forests and hope it's enough.

But how do you know it's enough? By going into the Character Menu, you can see a Shelter stat. This is a percentage, meaning it can only go up to 100. And 100 is where you want to be! In order to avoid lightning or tornadoes, you want to be at maximum shelter. Not everything gives 100% shelter, but if it's just a light rain, then hiding in a log might just be enough to get you by. You can also see the Shelter percentage by carefully looking at your health: if it has a blue-cyan circle, then that's full shelter! If the circle is only half filled, then that's only roughly 50% shelter.

Smaller creatures (like Velociraptor or Pteranodon), are more prone to being scared by weather events, which decreases their Comfort stat. If your Comfort drops too low, you start slowly dying from stress! There are talents to mitigate this, like Weather Resistance or Resilience, but someetimes all you need is another friend in the same group to be close to you and your comfort will shoot way up.

Sickness
If you drink polluted water, eat a rotten gore, or are even affected by the dreaded "None!", you may eventually become sickly. Sickness decreases your stamina and AP regeneration, as well as increase food and water drain and making you louder while sniffing. Not only that, but other players can sniff you and see that you are sick, making you a prime target to be killed!

Although sickness won't lead to death directly, it may lead to starvation or being killed by other players, so it's best to avoid it. Keeping your Diet rating high, avoiding rotten/poisonous foods or dirty water, and eating food that your creature is supposed to eat will make sickness nearly impossible to get.

But if you do get it, don't fret! Look around for charcoal, keep your food and thirst high, and search for yellow and red flowers. They give extra bonuses that, while won't directly impact your illness, will make surviving through one (or in general) much easier!

Other Players
Here it is, the section you were probably waiting for! How do you deal with other players that want to kill you? Well, sometimes you can just... not deal with them! Playing as a fast creature means you can outrun them and eventually get away. You can use water to your advantage, especially if you have the talent Aqua Affinity, or try to run down hills and jump up structures to avoid death. If you're a semi-aquatic or a flier, you can swim away or take to the skies! The easiest way to avoid dying to players is to avoid players entirely.

But that's the boring answer. And while there's a lot of cool strategies you can employ, maybe you want to play as one of the larger herbivores or carnivores and can't avoid fights. Or maybe you want to instigate them yourself. After all, a dead player is one less player that might kill you. So here's some Combat Basics!
1. Use terrain to your advantage. By having the high ground or protecting your back from other players, you limit their options to try and attack you.
2. Sit and Lay Down to heal. Sitting or Laying Down will heal your health, stamina, and AP much faster. Similarly, if you are inflicted with a status effect like Bleed or Injury, you can heal it off quicker by lying down to sleep.
3. Try not to run out of Stamina or AP. Running out of either stamina OR AP will lead to you being unable to attack anymore. This means your attacker is free to do as they please without any risk of dying. Try to back away or keep the opponent away to regain stamina and AP.
4. Use your abilities. Each playable creature has a number of special abilities or attacks they can use: Paleophis and Oryctodromeus can blind opponents, Wiehenvenator can use its Tenton Break bite, Parasaurolophus can stomp and deal massive damage and injury. Learning what your creature's abilities do and using them is crucial.

Although these tips are, admittedly, very basic, the nuance comes more from that last one: the more you learn about your own abilities and talents, as well as those of other creatures, the better you'll get at avoiding death! Sniffing opponents to figure out their build (be it through the blurb or through the colour they are highlighted as) is very useful. Feel free to look through the Group Finder or ask on the Discord Server for groups to help you along and make the journey much more bearable!