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Being another open-world Survival Crafting game in the live-service genre,Scumshares a lot of its gameplay aspects with other games, but it also has a ton of unique elements. After launching this game and selecting the server you prefer, you’ll be thrown out of a parachute, and the first thing you’ll have to do is land safely on the ground.
Things only get harder from there since you arrive in a massive unknown world with nothing but your clothes, which you have to get rid of soon after. Thankfully, there are quite a few things that can help you dominate the server, as long as you’re efficient with your survival.
Manage Your Temperature Properly
Body temperature is one of the most important and, unfortunately, the most overlooked aspect of Scum by a new player. When you head over to your Metabolism tab,you can see your current body temperature at 36.6, which is the normal temperature. However, as your character feels colder or hotter, this temperature will fall and rise respectively.
you’re able to easily tell when your temperature is changing by looking on theleft side of your screen where it shows everything your character is feeling. If you’re only feeling slightly cold or warm, your temperature change is very slow, and can largely be ignored. However, if the feeling worsens, here’s how you can help your character reach the ideal body temperature:
Prioritize The Right Items While Looting
As you progress in Scum,you’ll go from barely having any loot to having too much to carry. This happens as you gradually move from forest to small groups of buildings, and eventually to bigger towns and remnants of civilization. However, your inventory space is very limited, especially if you get unlucky.
In these times, it’s important to prioritize the right items to carry. For example, you’d always want toprioritize a smartphone over other things as this can help you finish various questsand earn money. As you play the game more, you’ll also learn that some items are much rarer than others, making them a priority.
For example, if you get a toolbox,you should always keep itregardless of how much inventory space it takes.
Similarly, you’d want tomake space for Bobby Pins, Safety Pins, and Screwdriversin your inventory to help you with lockpicking.
Learn Different Game Menus
Even if you’ve played a bunch of Survival Crafting games before, the biggest challenge with Scum is the sheer amount of menus that you have to handle. Other than the inventory management,you also have the Crafting, Health, and Metabolism menus. Here’s what each of these tabs mean:
Crafting
As the name suggests, this tab has all the items you’re able to craft. It has three further tabs,but you’ll mostly be using the first oneunless you’re making your base or cooking.
Health
This tab is largely used to checkwhat health problems your character hasand how you can treat them.
Metabolism
This is arguably the most important tab in the game as it not only tells you when you need to go to the toilet, but also gives you information about the proteins, carbs, and vitamins in your body.You can see the exact effect of every food itemhere as well.
Furthermore, you can also see yourcurrent temperature and the level of your skillsin this tab.
It’s highly important to get yourself accustomed to these tabs as soon as possible as they’llmassively increase your chances of survival.
Focus Mode Is Great For Directions
Focus mode is a special mechanic that you can trigger when you press right click in Scum. If it doesn’t trigger by itself, you’ll just have to move around a bit and then click the button again.This mode is mainly used to get a better aim when you’re trying to shoot a puppetor other NPCs with your bow or gun.
However, once you get some levels in your Awareness and Survival skills,you’ll be able to see a special compass on the top when you enter focus mode. This will help you run in the correct direction when you’re going from one place to another, and you won’t have to stare at the movement of your red dot on the map anymore.
Prepare Food In Advance
The food and water system in Scum is a lot more advanced than most of the survival games out there. In this game, you don’t simply have to keep yourself filled up and hydrated. Instead, each food item and recipe has a specific amount of protein, carbs, fat, and other items that you can get. This makes it important to have a balanced diet.
You’d want yourprotein to be high at all times while your energy stays below 50 percentso that you can maximize your level gain in different attributes. To make sure this happens, it’s highly recommended to keep some food items in your inventory so that you can eat them whenever possible.
If you don’t save some food and scrounge for some right as you need it, youmight not find the suitable food item and also waste a lot of time.
One of the best practices when it comes to food is looking for mushrooms when you’re going from one place to another and hunting any animal you see.With a couple of meat and edible mushrooms in your inventory, you can easily make some good recipes whenever you want as soon as you get some vegetables.
Scout Areas Before Jumping In
Scum has different types of servers. Some of them offer less danger by having alow population while others can be even easier if they don’t allow PvP whatsoever. However, there are also servers with hundreds of players, which leads to common encounters with people who want to defeat you.
Apart from that, there are also high-level NPCs and even mechs in certain areas. This makes itimportant to scout around for any activity before you charge into a group of buildings for loot. There are a few steps to this scouting:
Increase Your Inventory Whenever Possible
As mentioned above, your inventory will be one of the main mechanics capping your exploration since you can only hold so many items. One way to deal with that isgetting the required items for a base and making a bunch of chests in it. However, it takes a lot of time to do that. Instead, you can use other means to increase your inventory.
You should first focus on either getting a better backpack or making one yourself. After your first backpack that you create at the start, you should aim for the best one you can craft. Outside of that,you can also find various backpacks when you explore different areas, but they’re quite rare and can take a lot of time.
Hiking backpacks are the best in Scum, andyou can sometimes find them in gas stations.
Apart from that,you may also find various clothing that gives you extra inventory slots. You can wear layers of clothing to get more slots as well. For example, a sweater can be worn above a shirt, and a jacket over that. Of course, the more clothing you have, the higher your temperature will be.
Sandbox Is Great For Learning
Finally, there are a lot of little mechanics that you’ll slowly learn as you play Scum. However, one way to learn these mechanics much faster is by playing in the sandbox. you’re able to find this game mode on the main screen, andit essentially lets you have a single-player experiencewhere you can also use a bunch of console commands.
you may also useCtrl + D in the main menu before entering the sandbox, which lets you enter in Drone Mode. This will allow you to move around at a much faster rate and get the idea of what you can expect from each area.
