Biomutant — Quick tips to get you started

After many a delay, Biomutant has finally graced us with its presence. It’s a big game with a lot of icons to run to, so we thought some quick tips to get you started would be helpful when playing Biomutant.

Here’s a handful of primers that’ll give you a good idea of what to focus on when roaming the world and beating nearly every creature you see to death. It’s a jungle out there. Well, not a jungle. That’s actually not a relevant biome whatsoever, but I’m getting away from myself here.

Get protection suits

You’ve no doubt noticed zones that you can’t walk around in normally. There’s the green radiation zone, the pink one, the hot place, and the cold place. If you attempt to explore these, you will die. Quickly, I might add. But there’s an extremely easy way to deal with this. Once you enter one of these areas for the first time, you’ll get a new quest that’ll tell you how to get a suit resistant to each condition that will allow you to walk around freely. You might not notice these at first if you’re distracted by all the death that’s strangling the life out of you.

Just go to your journal tab and keep an eye out for the suit name that correlates with the zone you wish to explore. Be warned though. The suits don’t offer much armor. You’ll want to apply some add-ons to give yourself a fighting chance, as the 121 armor these provide might get you killed in just a few quick hits. I also suggest adding the suits in the outfit tab in the menu, which has five slots that you can store loadouts in. You won’t be going into those zones very often though, so the suggestion isn’t all that necessary.

There’s a shrine at every enemy fort

The entrances to the three tribe forts that you need to eliminate to conquer the tribe have little tented shrines right by the entrances. If you walk up to them, you can pray at these shrines. Doing so will grant you a shrine point. Fast traveling can take a while in Biomutant, so you might as well take care of it when you’re there. It’s best to hit the shrines after you’ve conquered each place, as you’ll walk right by while leaving. This leads me to my next point.

Unify after the first two tribes are conquered

There are six tribes in Biomutant, but you’ll join one of them, so that means there are only five to conquer. After completing the first two of these, you’ll be given the option to unify the rest of the tribes. I strongly suggest you do this. If you decide to fight the others, you won’t get another option to Unify. This option lets you move on in the main story without having to conquer the last three tribes at all. This does technically take away gameplay, but these fort fights are the same thing over and over again, and I don’t think they’re worth the effort.

On that topic, every time you conquer a tribe, you get its weapon. Most of the weapons suck, save for the bow, so you actually should join that tribe first. That’ll give you a nice head start. I’m fairly certain that you can still get the tribe weapons after Unifying, but you’ll have to go to the tribe headquarters the hard way. That is doable, but will likely be pretty annoying. But once again, the weapons aren’t really worth it. Most are so weak that they get outclassed by what you are able to craft pretty quickly.

Don’t try and do all the side quests

Almost all of the side quests in Biomutant task you with tracking down five appliances and solving simple puzzles on them. They show up on your map with an icon, which tells you exactly where they are. Once you find and solve all five puzzles, you’ll be given a unique crafting item. Much like the tribe weapons, these aren’t that great. Some of them are alright, so I’d only worry about this if you’re a completionist. Or if you just really want to beat enemies to death with a globe on a stick, I guess.

Who you bring on the ark doesn’t matter

Biomutant tasks you with bringing four characters onto the ark. You can offer a seat to the four quest givers that helped you take down the World Eaters, plus there are some folks that you can offer seats to after finishing short quest lines. But it truly makes no difference. If you’re trying to figure out who you should take, just take whoever. It’s just a thing that’s in the game without much of a purpose.

Apply add-ons to your favorite weapons and armor

This one’s pretty obvious, I admit, but it took me a while to care enough to actually do it. You can buff your damage by doing this and also massively increase the amount of armor you have. Since you likely won’t find much good loot in Biomutant, you’ll probably use the same gear pieces for a while. So slap some of those add-ons onto them. Also, the gear with the add-on slots will possibly grant you more armor once you’ve got it put together than gear with higher base armor that lacks add-on slots.

The mounts in the world are identical

You can get new mounts to ride by approaching them after grabbing fruit from a nearby spot. This might seem neat at first, but they’re all the same. Think of them as skins, not as unique creatures. Some do look much cooler than others, though, so at least there’s that

Make the enemies fight each other

This skill can be unlocked very early on, so I’d suggest buying it first. When you come to a group of foes, you can just pelt them with the skill and wait as they reduce their numbers without you having to get your hands dirty. It’s a true win/win scenario.

I hope at least some of these tips have been helpful. If not, feel free to impotently shake your fist at the ceiling while cursing existence. I know that’s one of my favorite things to do.