Greetings and welcome friend, I'm Ash and I'd like to share with you eight tips and tricks that I wish I knew before starting Lost Skies - an exploration focused crafting/survival game. Without further ado, let us begin!

1) Don't be a hoarder

At the time of writing the items in Lost Skies take up a fair bit of space, yet storage for them is extremely limited and very clunky. So unless you want to painstakingly sort everything into dozens upon dozens of low capacity chests, my advice would be to not hoard random knickknacks like some sort of dragon.

If you have dozens of something and you don't see yourself using it any time soon, just chuck a portion of it off your ship. Have a bit of extra lumber after upgrading your ship? It's huge and it literally grows on trees, so toss it all away. Got any leftover ore after smelting? You betcha - right down the toilet! Those items are huge and there's no guarantee you'll find the exact same ore any time soon, so best not have it clog up your chests for the next two dozen hours.

Stick to this sort of mindset and you'll find the crafting system a lot more pleasant as you won't have to slowly rummage through scores of random chests looking for a specific gray item in a sea of other miscellaneous gray items.

Video version of this guide (~10 minutes)

2) Did you see the saw?

Once you get the Energy Saw its main purpose will be to chop down trees in order to build and upgrade your ship. However, that's not all it can do, as I unfortunately took way too long to figure out. You see, the game tells you that you need to use the 'Cutting Tool' to butcher animals in order to get special ingredients out of them, but what it doesn't tell you is that the Cutting Tool is just the Energy Saw and not some new item you might not have seen yet.

So if you're wondering how you can get key ingredients like Conductive Vessels or Fibrous Sinew, that would be by using the Energy Saw on manta rays and cave bugs respectively. And speaking of cave bugs, those only spawn to attack you while you're mining, so don't follow my example and waste your time trying to look for them in the wild.

3) Keep yourself well fed

Unlike a bunch of other survival games you don't need to eat, drink or sleep in Lost Skies. Instead, the various food items you can find or cook are used exclusively for buffs. You can have three different buffs rolling at the same time, and while they might not seem all that impressive at first glance I found them to be quite instrumental at handling some of the harder islands.

The best thing is, you don't even need to do anything complicated to reap the benefits. Even a basic combination of cooked berries and animal meat, both of which are found almost everywhere, can double your health and give you a Wolverine-like regeneration for a 10-15 minute period. So if you're ever going into a combat heavy area, do yourself a favor and eat up!

4) The ship layout matters

It doesn't matter if we're talking about sails, wings or just engines, the exact way you arrange your ship's layout is actually important. For example, a triangle sail placed vertically will catch side winds and give you a little bit of a boost, while placing it horizontally like a wing will make you ascend or descend faster.

Similarly, the orientation matters. If you place your main square sail facing the opposite direction it'll be nowhere near as effective as if you did it properly. Same thing with engines. If you install them facing the wrong way you might even find yourself driving backwards!

As such, before you commit to any major upgrade or refit and set off on a grand voyage, make sure to do a bit of a test run to see if your new parts actually work. And if they don't, fixing things is thankfully fairly easy since you can freely rotate and move things around while in the shipyard.

Even slightly wonky ships work well, so don't worry about the details too much

5) Don't be stingy with research

Once you get a research table up and running you'll be able to learn new recipes, as well as upgrade them using Saborian tech tables that can be found out in the wild. Now if you're like me you'll probably be hesitant to upgrade your early game stuff since you'll likely replace it soon and it would feel like a waste of resources. Luckily, that's not how it works in Lost Skies.

The Saborian tech tables are plentiful, so much so that they're going to start clogging up your chests real fast. So as soon as you get an item that feels sufficiently more powerful than the stuff you have right now, make sure to upgrade it as far as it'll go and then craft it. These types of items will last you a long time and provide you with a surprisingly big power boost, so they're definitely worth the investment.

Be warned, however, that the order of those operations actually matters. Crafting an item and then upgrading its schematic will not automatically upgrade your gear. You'll have to make another copy. As such, always make sure to upgrade first, and then craft second!

6) Materials affect quality

The reason Lost Skies has so many variants of the basic crafting materials is because the quality and type of ingredients has a notable impact on the end product. For example, if you use aluminum to make frames for your sails they'll be lighter than if you used lead, though obviously less durable. Because of this, mixing and matching the right kind of ingredients can get you some very potent toys to play around with.

While this system might sound complicated, in reality you don't have an infinite amount of resources so you'll never be able to make perfect items in every slot. As such, I'd recommend taking the time and effort to spruce up the big important pieces like your engines, and then just outfitting the rest with whatever you have remaining. Don't waste too much time trying to perfect everything. I've been done this road myself, and it's not worth the effort.

Do be warned, however, that this system only applies to ship parts. As such, if you're crafting any weapons or gear for yourself feel free to use the worst possible ingredients as they don't make any sort of difference.

7) How to orient yourself?

Lost Skies' world is quite big, and since all of the islands are floating in the sky over a bottomless abyss there is a very real lack of landmarks to orient yourself with. From what I can tell the intended way is for you to keep an eye on the compass and use that in order to figure out where you are. Maybe I'm just plain ol' stupid, but I found that approach to be quite flawed as not only do you have to remember where everything is, but a lot of the islands are on different elevations which means that even if you go the correct way, you might just fly straight past your target.

You could also use the in-game ping system in order to help you navigate the world, but that has problems as well. You cannot tag something that's far away and since the game is still quite unstable and the pings don't persist through crashes or reloads, they can also just disappear on you. Again, not ideal.

Thankfully, after a little bit of experimentation I did discover the perfect solution! If you die with some items in your upper inventory they will drop on the floor as a glowing bag so you can easily pick them back up once you return. And in order to help you reach your goodie bag the game will mark its exact location on your compass, including how far you are and whether it's below or above you. So if you intentionally leave one of these death bags somewhere you can create a permanent marker that you can then orient yourself with.

Personally, I left mine at the very start as I view that as the sort of center of the world, and let me tell you, it came in handy a bunch of times!

If only ancient sailors knew of the power of a single sack!

8) If all else fails, Alt + F4

While I hope things are much better by the time you're reading this, right now Lost Skies might as well be called Broken Skies. As I've mentioned throughout my review there are bugs and glitches everywhere, some of which can straight up soft-lock your character or make you lose large amounts of progress.

There is, thankfully, a very easy way to fix this. If something insane happens, like your character turning into a Lovecraftian abomination and falling through the world, simply Alt + F4 and quit the game without saving. You'll lose some progress as you'll go back to your previous save or autosave, whichever is newer, but it's definitely better than losing everything!

Additionally, if you end up getting stuck in such a way that you aren't even able to log back into your world, there is a potential workaround. Create a brand new world, load into that with your character, and then return to your main world. This has fixed the problem for me every single time, and hopefully it'll do the same for you.

Closing thoughts

And there you have it, eight simple tips that will hopefully make your first few hours with Lost Skies all nice and pleasant. That said, Lost Skies has just launched into Early Access so things are likely going to unstable for a little while, so try not to be too annoyed when something insane happens and ruins your plans. It's all just part of the process.

Have fun, and I hope my advice comes in handy!