The Falconeer – Beginners Guide

This guide is for everyone who is like me. I wish I had this guide when I started the game. So here I will talk about all the small hints and tricks and explain a few things that I came across while playing the game.

What Do I Do in the Game?

You will only fly around on your warbird, in an open world. There are story missions or side missions you can do whenever you please. The missions are divided into about three main types (deliver something to a destination, guide someone to a destination, go and defeat enemies), all of them usually include a bit of aerial combat.

Also: if you don’t like combat, you don’t have to do that at all (even though then you will probably never finish the game, that is up to you). You can just soar through the sky and take in the scenery and atmospheric music.

While you explore the world, you will learn about its factions and history. All of that information is scattered about.

Starting the Game

When you first start the game you can choose a chapter, also, after you finish a chapter (after 10 story missions), you choose a chapter. In every chapter you belong to a different faction. Also, after choosing the chapter you can choose a class. For the Cleftspire chapter, where you belong to the imperial faction, for example, you can either be a private (drawn from a low noble house) or a mercenary. Your class will only affect how much you amplify the status values of your warbird. Please see “Getting better” for an overview on the status values of the birds.

User-Interface

For me the UI design played a big part in why I was so confused in the beginning. The overall UI design is very simplistic.

Here is an example of the menu in a settlement: navigate the menu, by going left or right to switch between people (who you are talking two right now).

Then, with the selected person, you naviagte down to further select options (e.g. start a mission/ Sidequest, buy something)

If you want to buy something you do that by clicking twice on the selected item. If you go further down you can sell your stuff by clicking on it.

The example shows a selected story mission. How far you are in a chapter is indicated by the small box on the bottom left side of the speech bubble in roman numbers.

How Do I Play?

I recommend looking through the user manual, which is free to download. Here I included the important pages of the manual (please don’t sue me Sala-senpai). But the manual doesn’t explain everything, that’s why I wrote this guide.

But to put it into a few words:

Flying:(I only have experience on a controller)

First: The controls are very sensitive!

Help! I can’t land: All settlements are only reachable for landing from a certain direction. If you approach the landing spot, the required direction will be shown via arrows.

If I want to cover a great distance over the map, I always start with a slow and steady ascent. If you tilt the left stick in the right angle, you will rise without consuming energy (maybe even still gaining energy). You should try to master this technique first.

After that, try to get yourself comfortable with the left bumper, which makes you gain speed or do a barrel roll. To further familiarize yourself with the flight controls and to get a good feeling of how to navigate in the air, try the first and second race courses, which are in Dunkle and The Maw.

By doing these, you will get first-hand experience on how to cut corners, when to gain speed and so forth.

Also, as is mentioned in the manual, whenever you see a small tornado in front of you, fly above it for a sudden height burst. The game is programmed so that usually one will pop up somewhere in front of you whenever you leave a settlement and during longer flights.

Combat:

Do not press the right stick to lock your aim!! (The right stick will enable/disable the UI and mini map) The X-Button is your friend. Don’t aim at the enemy, but the small white circle that appears close to the enemies target cross. You have to position your aim cross into that circle to hit the enemy. I know thats still difficult, so try and fire whenever the red lock indicator around the enemy starts blinking. Then you have aim assist.

In combat, I always try to stay at the current height that I started the combat with. If you do too many harsh height changes you will run out of energy which makes you vulnerable.

If you get hit, do a barrel roll to evade further damage as most enemies fire a consecutive barrage of bullets at once. Note that you can’t do a barrel roll if your bird carries an item!

Ammunition:

There are four kinds of ammunition: fire (red), lightning (blue, standard ammo), poison (green) and target seeking (gray). You will lose ammo over time when you are battling, but don’t worry, they recharge. Fire ammo has the great side effect that it will put your target on fire. But fire ammo can only recharge in volcanic thunder. (With this information, I’m unsure if it is true. It says so, but I play on german so there seem to be a lot of poorly translated parts in the game. Someone please verify this)

You have to buy new ammunition tanks if yours get destroyed from overloading! That’s why I recommend buying the overload protection song for one of the sea chantresses as early as possible. It can be bought at witches rock.

What Is My (Current) Goal?

Your “home” gives you the next story quests.”Home” is always different depending on the chapter you are in. Other than that almost all settlements you come across offer you side quests.

For the beginning, try to do the first few story quests. Also, in Dunkle, if in the Dunkle chapter, there is an NPC which gives you excellent side quests to start your journey, that help you to get to know your way around.

Remember that if you can’t progress, you can always go anywhere on the map. Try to explore and find new places if you are stuck.

If you fail any quest, it is available to be repeated if you fly back to where you started it. If you die during the quest, you respawn in the last settlement where you landed.

The difficulty of a mission of side mission is indicated by a number of skulls shown below the reward.

If you start any mission, the mini map shows you the path to where you have to go.

Getting Better

Settlements:

To interact with the people in most settlements, you need prerequisites, which are mostly trading permissions. The people will always tell you what they need in order to interact with them. Permissions for example are scattered around. If they don’t tell you, usually you don’t belong to their faction.

The imperial embassy offers almost all permissions.

Birds:

The bird you will start with is not the best. Sooner than later you will and can buy a better bird.

Doing the flight-race challenges unlocks a bird you can buy at the (usually) nearest settlement to the race location. The birds get better bit by bit, but as I mentioned previously, start with the races in Dunkle or The Maw.

Seachantresses:

For information on where to find the sea chantresses see the other guide by . When you find them, you will see what you can possibly buy. But to buy the things, you have to find a shire first. The item will tell you which shire is needed. If you are impatient, again, I recommend the Achievement Guide, it includes a full map.

As mentioned earlier I recommend buying the no-overload-song as early as possible. It protects you ammunition tanks from being destroyed.

Money:

For money it’s best to do side-missions. The good thing is: all of them are almost infinitely repeatable. For starters, do the seachantresses delivery job in Dunkle. It gives you 1000 and you can do it again and again??? That seems almost broken to me. Maybe that was a bug in my case.

Help! I Became a Pirate

If you accidentally attack friendly units your status will change to pirate.

To un-pirate yourself you can buy a liberating notice, which lifts up to two “pirate levels”, indicated by stars.

You can buy this in a pirate hideout.