Once Human Beginner’s Guide – Top 10 Tips & Tricks

Once Human throws you into a vast world full of resources. You start with basic gear, and equipment and work your way to arm yourself to the teeth. While a lot is going on in the game, it is very easy to get lost in the mix and lose focus. This could lead you to waste more time than actually making progress. For this, we have listed the 10 best tips and tricks in this Once Human beginner’s guide that you should not sleep on.

Frequently Relocate Your Base

After completing the introduction mission, you will be teleported into the game’s vast world. While selecting a location to establish your base is important for the first time, it is not always super necessary to find the perfect spot.

After you have scouted a place, made your base, and acquired higher gear, equipment, and weapons, it is best to relocate after a while.

The late-game areas contain some of the rare resources that you will find yourself going to and fro from them to your base. Therefore, it would be wise not to stress too much about the starting location as you can relocate later.

Focus on Story to Unlock Features Faster

The top left corner of your display will highlight the most important tasks. Completing these will give you the resources and skill points to unlock more Memetics faster. Therefore, instead of chopping wood and mining copper ore every now and then, consider completing these tasks first.

Besides the in-game currency and XP boost, you will unlock new weapons, blueprints, motorcycles, and other features faster in Once Human if you focus on completing the Story missions/objectives first.

Don’t Overlook Side Missions and Objectives

Completing side objectives is important. It will give you some high-quality gear, materials, and XP. When you enter towns or strongholds, you will find a list of side objectives with a purple header. These mostly involve killing a certain number of enemies, finding a chest, or collecting a Mystical crate.

Craft the Crossbow Early

One of the most important tips we suggest in our Once Human Beginner’s guide is crafting the crossbow early on. While you get to craft the crossbow weapon in the intro mission, you must craft the Tier II or above crossbow once you have settled at your base. To do this, you must first build the Gear Workbench.

Once that station is up and running, go to the craft weapons section, and near the end of the weapons list, you will find the crossbow. Near the stats, you will various tiers. Go for the tier II crossbow.

Crossbow helps you worry less about running out of ammo. That is because the arrows can be recovered by going over a corpse you killed. Also, most enemies die easily from crossbow if you shoot them in the head.

Unlock the Garage as Early as Possible

While the early-game means of transportation is running on foot, this changes when you unlock the Garage from Memetics. After setting up a garage inside your base zone, you can use it to craft a bike/motorcycle for yourself in Once Human.

The bike will come in handy to transport you from point A to point B easily. It will conserve your stamina as you will not be running too often. However, the bike will need fuel, and it will stop running if you run out of it.

Other than that, you will also need to look out for the physical health of the bike. Taking too much damage will also render the bike unusable and then you will be forced to do some repairs in order to start using the motorcycle again in Once Human.

Don’t Overlook Journey

Pressing your keyboard’s “J” key will reveal the Journey tab in Once Human. This showcases all the requirements you need to craft or make to advance your journey or story progression in the game. Each journey involves multiple steps, so completing each milestone will allow you to claim rewards such as skill points and XP.

For example, in the “Racer” Journey, you are required to build a motorcycle. The first milestone in this task is to build a garage. When you have built it, you can claim the milestone rewards.

Mod and Repair Your Gear

Your equipment, weapons, and gear come with a durability meter. This will start to deplete the more you use a particular item. For example, if you use the pickaxe too much to mine resources, its durability will fall significantly. Similarly, using a melee weapon too often, such as a baseball bat, will deteriorate the weapon’s durability in Once Human.

This can, however, be fixed by a simple method. If you craft the weapon or any part of the gear that needs repairs, walk up to the Gear Bench and press “H”, this will prompt the repair menu and showcase the gear requiring repairs.

Repairing and modding your weapons is the best way to be ready to take on any adversity in Once Human. However, if you loot a weapon in the open world and basically did not craft it yourself, then you will be unable to repair it.

Use Deviations to Your Advantage

This just might be one of the most crucial tips in our Once Human Beginner’s guide.

There are Combat and Territory Deviation types in Once Human that you can use to your advantage. The combat deviations help you strike the enemies you’ve engaged in combat with.

On the other hand, the territory deviations will help you gather certain resources based on their deviation type. They will also help you generate a massive supply of resources passively.

You can check out our tier list, which ranks all the best Deviations to use in Once Human.

Team Up Using Hive

It is always not an ideal situation where you play PvE games with your buddies. However, the world of Once Human demands PvE engagement with other players and working in synergy.

To do this, go to the Hive option and create or join one. This will allow you to fight tough bosses with other players in your team, and collecting powerful deviants would not be a bigger problem.

Manage Your Sanity

There are a couple of status effects your character has in Once Human. When you are inside your base, you get -an 80% modifier. Basically, all the status effects drain really slowly. However, this changes when you step outside the base, do chores, collect resources, get hit while fighting monsters, and more.

All of this contributes to the loss of Sanity. When you start to lose your Sanity, this will affect the rest of your status effects. For example, your maximum health will be reduced, and this will be visible by a blue bar on the right side of the health bar.

The fastest and the best way to recover Sanity in Once Human is to craft a bed and sleep on it. It will take a minute of sleep for your character to fully recover Sanity and remove the negative status effects.

These were all the best tips and tricks that we’ve got to offer right now in our Once Human beginner’s guide. As a bonus tip, we suggest you also optimize your in-game settings to improve the game’s performance. If you’re looking for teammates, I suggest joining Once Human Discord and recruiting allies there.