Scrap Mechanic – Beginner Gamplay Guide and Tips

This is a beginner friendly guide for newcomers. This is depending on my experiences and research about the game. You can find a lot of other useful guide in steam or google. What i will explain here are only a proper (maybe) way to start play Scrap Mechanic Survival.

#1 Go Around Your Ship and You Should Find Two Things

Note: Credit goes to Xtron135

So you will first spawn at your burning ship. Don’t go away leaving your ship yet!!

Go around your ship and you should find two things.

• Master Battery = a quite big red-yellow battery. Why this matter? Because later on you will find another kind of batteries which is yellow-black
• A fenced path toward a lake.

After collecting the Master Battery, go to the lake. There you should find another 2 things:

• A water bucket
• Farming stuff

#2 Extinguish the Fire on Your Ship and Start Farming

Use the bucket to take the water to extinguish fire on your ship, exterior and interior. The big fire on top of your ship cant be extinguished anyway. At the early phase, the smoke from the fire will help you find your way back to your ship when you go exploring and looting.

There is a place to put the Master Battery in your ship. This will turn on the ship, and the most important thing = The Craftbot. You can collect pretty much a lot of things inside your ship but most of them are for decorative purpose and useless for your at the moment (Decorative stuff will be useful later in the game when you want to build your very own base).

Go to the lake, take some soil, and start farming. There are already soils on the ground, pick it up and arrange it to ease yourself.

IMPORTANT = Dont plant more than 6 soil at a time. I will explain why:

When you plant on more than 6 soil (means you put 6 soil in a group and plant seeds. Soils with no seeds are not a problem), this will trigger “Unauthorized Farming Detected” which will start a red timer countdown on the area. When the countdown reached 0, bots will come and destroy your crops. I tried at the Workshop (later i will explain this), planting several group of 6 soils quite far from each other. One in front, at the side of the Workshop, and at the back of the Workshop, and these were not triggering the Unauthorized Farming.

Time in the game is 1 minute in game = 1 second in real life. So 24 hours in game = 24 minutes in real life. The countdown usually end at 0000 hours in game, which is midnight. This Unauthorized Farming will become helpful for you later.

Lets know about the bots before i explain more about this Unauthorized Farming:

• Totebot = A small green bot. 3 hit from melee or ranged weapon to kill. Deduct about 10 to 15 of your hp when being hit.
• Haybot = A yellow bot holding a farming fork. 5 hit from melee or ranged weapon to kill. Deduct about 25 to 30 of your hp when being hit.
• Tapebot = A blue tape-face bot. 3 hit from melee or ranged weapon to kill. Deduct about 35 to 40 of your hp when being hit. This bot shoot tape. Better dodge them than being hit. This bot usually found at Warehouse(Later i will explain). So dont worry about this bot attacking your crops.
• Red Tapebot (idk if this is the correct name) = As the name, it is a red coloured tape bot. Took the same 1 hit to kill. But the tape shot from this bot explode on impact. Im not sure how much it will hurt if being hit or near the explosion range.
• Farmbot = A big fat red robot with a metal cresent at his hand. Took 60 shot only from ranged weapon (Spud Gun or Gatling Spud Gun) to kill. I dont know if u cant even try to hit him with melee. This bot swing his cresent, pretty much can one-hit destroy metal or wood wall. So idk how much it will hurt if u got hit. This bot also can shoot chemical (pink liquid) bomb from his other hand. Your hp will decrease if u stay in the chemical area.

So this is every hostile bots in this game at the time im writing this. Let me know if i missed anything.

Basically if your dead, you will respawn at last bed you ever slept (There is couple of bed in your starting ship). If you havent slept on any, you will respawn outside of your ship like the beginning of your world.

So back to the Unauthorized Farming. The first time you get this notification, when the timer countdown reached 0, a couple of Totebot will come to attack your crops. Easy fight right? Now after this wave, if you keep the same amount of planting area, you will get another notification a couple hours later (in game hours). So the waves of Unauthorized Farming raid are as below:

• Unauthorized Farming Wave 1 = A couple of Totebot (total of 3-4 maybe)
• Unauthorized Farming Wave 2 = A same amount of Totebot from previous raid, plus 1-2 Haybot
• Unauthorized Farming Wave 3 = Decreased amount of Totebot and drastically increased amount of Haybot
• Unauthorized Farming Wave 4 = Pretty much same as wave 3 but plus a Farmbot. There you go our star in action.
• Further Wave? idk what happen bcs i never got or see one.

Then how are you gonna settle this? Heres the solution. If you want to farm a lot of crops at a time, do it for about 1 or 2 wave only. Remember to come defend your crops at midnight. After the raid, [bSTOP][/b] farming for a day at least. Then the next time you farm, the Unauthorized Farming raid wave will reset to wave one. So basically if you farm and rest day after each other, you will only face easy Totebots on the Unauthorized Farming raid.

Thats pretty much all about farming.

#3 Looting

Basically loots you can find from loot boxes. Loots also dropped by hostile bots:

• Totebot = A Circuit (used in crafting recipes), and a Totebot Head (you can use this with other technical components to make sounds and songs)
• Haybot = A circuit, a metal rod (you need to refine this to get 10 scrap metal blocks), and sometimes a “Component Kit” (this is i thing a very very important things u need to collect as most of useful stuff need this in their recipe)
• Tapebot and Red Tapebot = A battery (Yellow-black one. Use as power souce for some components)
• Farmbot = A Warehouse Key for sure ( you will need this to access Warehouse later),sometimes Component Kit.

Any loots you found besides the road, in the buildings, and anywhere, they will respawn after a couple days in game. So if you are staying at a place and they are buildings nearby, make sure to pay a visit once every day or 2 days. This also apply for flowers, corns, cottons, and underwater resources.

So these are pretty much all about looting.

#4 Exploring

At the early phase of the game, after you are quite stable about food and resources, you might wanna consider to find next building, the Mechanic Workshop. U might find a couple of buildings near you ship after you walk for a while, and you should find a road. A black asphalt road. Follow the road and you should find the Workshop. The buildings tips are same for every time you play. The randomness of the map are only the distance, and the pattern of the road. So some of you might found the workshop pretty soon and some might need to walk for a while.

You might be really really excited to build a vehicle right? In my opinion, from your ship to the Workshop, for the sake of efficiency, DONT CRAFT VEHICLE YET. This is why, the craftbot on your ship, it is a basic craftbot. The scrap engine are only capable of powering 2 tires. So its just 2WD vehicle. And this other reason is the main i think, the scrap tires crafted by that basic craftbot are very very unstable. To travel from point to point, you will need to stabilize your driving that keep vibrating left and right, ending up wasting up your fuel to travel which took pretty much same duration if you run. That scrap engine fuel consumption is also bad compared to advance engine. So my suggestion, use your leg until you find the Workshop. Its actually the same in comparison, run = use food to fill hunger and thirst, basic vehicle = use a lot of fuels, both took about the same duration to move from point to point. Its all up to you. For me, ill save fuel because its only can be loot, and took pretty much resources (5 gas) to craft it.

After you find the Workshop, you should find “3 sleeping capsule” building beside the Workshop. Search for the Master Battery in there to power up your Workshop. Be careful in each capsule there is at least one Haybot in there.

So when you Workshop powered up, that is your very first base. You should focus on gathering resources to build the most important bot, the Advance Craftbot. This contain recipe for all craftable item in the game.

Next, you might wanna explore to find nearby lake. There are definitely at lease one lake nearby. Again, the randomness of the map are distance. Some may found lake right behind the Workshop and some might need to walk a little bit. If you walk quite far but still not found the lake, return to the Workshop and search in another direction.

Anytime anywhere you explore, dont forget your way back to where you came from either your base or vehicle. Theres no map in game unless you are very hardworking enough to draw them on a piece of paper by yourself

Keep on farming and looting. Remember if there are buildings nearby, pay a regular visits. Now you can happily craft your very own first good vehicle. Upgrading the components to max level helps you so much in every way especially fuel consumption.

Next is craft the Refinebot and Resource Collector. this will help you so much to save time refining logs and metal rod from Haybot. Put Resource Collector on your vehicle and drive on the logs. It will automatically picked up into the collector. Back at the base put the full collector beside Refine bot and it will automatically refine them for you. Refinebot only output one type of block. So if there are wood logs and metal rod, and it refine all the wood first, it will stop working until you collect the wood block. It also stop working if the block stacks full. Every building block should have 256 quantity as “full stack”.

The next thing is you should craft the Drill. It will help you to collect metal easily beside searching for Haybot, and collect stones that can basically be use to build protection for your farm to defend the raids. Drill can destroy cube-shaped rocks (Not the rocky-shaped rocks) into smaller chunks which can be hit using your Sleidgehammer to turn them into logs.

Keep exploring to find 2 important buildings:

• The Trader Mountains
• Packing Stations

Trader Mountains are off the road. You need to walk on the clear green area and you should find a fortress-like mountains like theyre protecting something at the middle. Find your way in and you found the trader.

You need “packed food” to trade with the trader. Obviously, everyone want the guns right? So if you firstly go to the trader having 2 tomatoes in you inventory, and want to trade something that cost you tomatoes, it will prompt that you have 0 tomatoes with you. That is “0 Packed Tomatoes” not regular tomatoes. You need to find Packing Stations. How? Back to your workshop, keep on following the road. You should find your first Packing Station and if you continue the road, you should find the second Packing Station. There are 8 different crops in the game and each Packing Station only pack 4 types of them.

At the trader price list, there are a weird green-packed-thing icon for some item you wanna trade. Idk what its actual name but for now im calling it the “caged-man”. Where to find it? You need to find an abandoned campsite and you should find him. Basically if you wander around the trader mountains, you should find pretty much all type of biomes exist in the game. “Burning forest”, “autumn forest”, even the campsite should be nearby the fortress. Two ways to carry the caged-man to the trader:

• Keep hitting with your Sleidgehammer toward the trader
• Wield the cage to your vehcle

Thats pretty much all of the basic exploring and finding resources.

#5 Further Exploring

After you got your gun, it should be no problem for you to farm or loot or fight anything. Dont forget to keep planting potatoes for your ammo gun.

Keep following the road and you should find Warehouses and Scrap Cities. Dont forget to fight the Farmbot to get the Warehouse Key.

There are a lot of Warehouses in the game. 1 Warehouse = Need 1 Key. Currently you cant collect any decorative things inside the Warehouse (maybe can in further update) except on the roof of the Warehouse.

There are plenty of high durability item parts for you to collect to help build your own new base. You may need or want to move to a new place which is near the lake and trader fortress.

Then whats the point of the huge Warehouse for now? Well there are a lot of loot box even rare one, inside. Not to mention there are also a lot of Tapebots and Red Tapebots inside.

Maybe in further update the Warehouse will bring us a few more excitement.