Below Indie Roguelike: Crafting Tips and Survival Guide

Below was a long-awaited Indie Roguelike video game from the developer Capybara Games. Here, you’ll find some useful tips to help you survive in the world of Below.

- Basic survival needs

In the game, you’ll need to full fill your basic needs such as water and food, otherwise you’ll die. You can see how your character is doing on the display screen. First, only hunger and thirst are important, the cold is added later as a survival element. From the beginning you have a bottle of water with you, which you can always refill when you are in the water reservoir. You satisfy hunger with food, especially cooked meals is more effective and will also fill up the thirsty display a bit.

You can get meat from animals like snakes or rats, vegetables grow in the form of potatoes or beets on the ground.

You overcome the cold by warming yourself up with fires or putting on warmer clothing that you might find in the dungeon.

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- Maintain your health

If you wound in a fight, you’ll lose some health for a period of time, additional life energy from the bleeding. So use a plaster to stop the bleeding. Of course, a plaster does not help against starvation and thirst.

- Lantern

Shortly after the start of the game you will find a magical lantern. This is immensely important in the game and there is only one and if you die, you need to return to the corpse with your new hero so you can recover the lantern. After all, the game shows you where the body lies: At the top left in the middle of the screen next to the floor indicator, the red dot reveals the location of the equipment. If there is an arrow under the red dot, your valuables are below your current floor, if the arrow is above, you need to go up. But that's only true if you don’t die again on your way to your dead body. Because then the lamp is somewhere on the floor and you have to search again - very impractical and therefore avoid! If that still happened to you, the top right next to the floor shows which level the lantern is on.

Why is this lantern so important? Well, not only does it light up the environment, it also opens special gates that remain locked without a lamp. To go deeper into the labyrinth, the lantern is imperative. But do not let the light burn carelessly, because it consumes crystals. This valuable item can drop monsters and you need them to use campfires to teleport and to shop.


- Camp fire

Regularly you’ll find abandoned camps. You can start the fire and rest. There are four actions you can do around a campfire: Cook food, Sleep, Light a teleport fire and teleport.

At first you can only cook. Once you have found the storeroom between floor two and three you can store ingredients and other objects, besides, there's water there.

For the price of 25 crystals you turn the campfire into a blue campfire. To this you can teleport from another campfire. But beware: After teleporting to a blue campfire, it will become a normal campfire again - only once you've died you can turn it into a blue fire once again, making it a high-speed point.

The standard campfires are transient. They go out after some time and you can use them again after a death. So, if you don’t really need a teleportation point or cooked food, it can sometimes make sense not to light a campfire and save it for later.

- Preparing for the next life

It is always good to keep items such as torches, bandages and cooked food in your inventory. In your shelter, you should also store some food and crystals for emergencies. Not everything that you carried with you at the time of death, you will find again at the corpse.

- Take the short path

Keep your eyes open for shortcuts. Unfortunately, these paths are not marked on the minimalist map, so you need to remember how the areas are connected. However, as you can always use the shortcuts and are not dependent on transient teleport campfires, they will help you get back near your corpse quickly or penetrate to deeper levels.

- Shield and sword

The combat system is simple, you are initially armed with shield, sword and bow. Accordingly, it is easy to get familiar with the controller.

Later you will find other weapons that have other advantages and disadvantages, but also their handling is based on similar mechanisms. With the bow you aim at more distant targets. Sometimes you can pick up lost arrows, and craft different ammo such as fire or bomb arrows.

- Listen to sounds

In the darkness of the dungeon and the blurring effect of the environment outside your direct field of vision, you often don’t recognize well what is happening around you. However, Below gives hints with sounds, so you hear about rats scurrying across the floor and snakes biting you. Even when your hero or hunger or thirst suffers, the sounds betray that. Imprint key audio notices so you can see through without a clear view.

- Crafting Recipes

Here are some crafting recipes, first for food - these can only be made around a campfire and you need to have a filled water bottle with you. You need three ingredients for each crafting and cooking recipe.

Broth: 3 vegetables
Soup: meat, vegetables, meat or vegetables
Stew: 3 meat

All dishes fill both hunger and thirst bars, most effectively filling the stew.

Now for the recipes for the crafting. You can make objects anytime, just make sure your inventory is not too full and that there are no enemies nearby.

Bundle: 3 floor
Phosphor: 3 red-hot coal
Sting: 3 shard
Fabric: 3 threads
Torch: stick, thread, coal
Torch +: stick, tissue, phosphorus
Arrow: stick, leather, shard
Bomb arrow: stick, leather, bomb
Fire arrow: stick, leather, coal
Splinter arrow: stick, sting, shard
Pisces: sting, shard, blood moss
Mine: skull, sting, phosphorus
Bomb: skull, thread, phosphorus
Bandage: bloodmoss, mud, thread
Bandage +: blood moss, mud, leather
Ointment dressing: blood moss, mud, tissue

Of all the arrow types, you can make a four-pack directly by using a bundle instead of a stick - this is more economical than making individual arrows.

Finally follow the elixir recipes. You can only make the potions on campfires and if you have a bottle of water with you. Just follow the recipe for soup, stew and broth and replace an ingredient with a mushroom. The color of the mushroom determines what effect your brew has, and all potions also fill your hunger and thirsty a bit:

Red Elixir: Reinforce your attack for a while
Blue Elixir: Your hunger, thirst, and cold ad will freeze for a while
Green Elixir: Enemies drop more crystals for a while
Yellow Elixir: Increases your defense for a while
White Elixir: You look better in the dark for a while

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