Survival: Fountain of Youth

Highlights

Craft basic tools like Stone Axe, Spear, and Cutter for survival and harvesting resources efficiently in the game.
Use melee weapons over ranged ones to save resources and gain experience in combat before venturing into riskier areas.
Memorize plants to identify key crafting ingredients like the valuable Big Branches, and use blueprints to streamline crafting processes.

Survival: Fountain of Youth puts players in the shoes of a shipwreck survivor who has crashed on the shores of a mysterious island. As a survival sandbox, the basics of this game are what players familiar with the genre have come to expect.

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However, there is a surprisingly deep layer of complexity underneath that needs to be understood before players are truly ready to tackle this single-player adventure on their own terms. Here are some basic tips for players just starting out on the Island of Hope.

Stone Axe, Stone Spear, Stone Cutter

basic tools in survival fountain of youth

Before players head out exploring, it’s highly recommended that they craft some basic tools for the journey ahead. A Spear is used to deal with any animal attacks, a Stone Axe is used to harvest plants, and a Stone Cutter is used to harvest ingredients from animal carcasses and some plants.

Without these basic tools in the inventory, players will be forced to ignore any resources they find that require a tool to be harvested. Or, they’ll need to backtrack to find the ingredients to craft these tools. It’s better to prepare first.

8 Memorize Plants

Visual Cues to Identify Foliage

looking at jurema preta tree in Survival Fountain of Youth

Gathering resources and managing inventory is the core gameplay loop of the game, and there are a ton of resources to be found in the game. While players will get familiar with which plants drop which items fairly quickly just by playing the game, it is worth keeping an eye out to identify plants that drop rarer resources that are harder to come by.

Things like Big Branches are key crafting ingredients in Survival: Fountain of Youth. They are used for a lot of the items players will need during the course of a playthrough, and identifying the exact trees that drop this item is useful information. This way, players won’t have to consult the map every two seconds to figure out resource locations and can directly identify useful spots if they’re in the line of sight. Not to mention that some plants – like the Orange tree – are never marked on the map.

7 Stick to Melee Weapons

Ranged Weapons Consume Resources

iron axe melee weapon in survival fountain of youth

Combat in Survival: Fountain of Youth is unforgiving and often punishes players for getting into melee range with the local wildlife. Despite the dangers posed by bites and tusks, spears and axes are still preferable to bows.

Why? Because crafting ranged ammo is a resource-intensive task that forces players to dedicate a lot of their time to just finding more ammo for their weapon of choice. Relying on ranged weapons early also prevents players from getting familiar with the rhythm of melee combat in the safety of the Bird Region (starter area) so that they’re prepared to venture out into riskier territory later in the game.

6 Use Blueprints

blueprints in survival fountain of youth

Players can select any item inside the inventory, click on Blueprints (F) on the bottom right, and the game will take players to a menu that only contains items that can be crafted using that item in particular.

Doing so can save players tons of time because of the sheer number of possible items that can be crafted in the crafting menu. For example, instead of browsing through a hundred types of flooring to find the Stone Axe, players can simply select a Stone or Branch and access relevant blueprints directly.

5 Don’t Walk in the Dark

Risk of Injuries is Increased

walking in the dark in survival fountain of youth

Survival: Fountain of Youth does its best to boost player immersion by imitating reality as closely as possible. One of the ways it does so is by increasing the chance of injury when traversing the island in the dark. Both inside a cave and outside in the jungle at night.

To get light, players can craft and equip a torch from the crafting menu. This will not only reduce the chance of injury from walking but also offer a layer of protection from pests like Scorpions and Mosquitoes.

4 Follow the Main Story

Until Finding the Spyglass

The map of the Island of Hope from Survival: Fountain of Youth, showing the location of Columbus' Spyglass

The main story’s entire purpose in Survival: Fountain of Youth is to familiarize the players with the world’s setting, how the crafting system works, how to map the regions, and how to approach combat (among other things).

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Following the guidelines for the first hour or so is like taking a guided tour of an inhospitable island and getting familiar with all the dangers it presents. While players are entirely free to pick a direction and walk, it’s better to let the game teach the basics, at least at the start.

3 Unlock Fast-Travel

Build a Dock on a Waterfront

A dock with a raft moored to it in Survival: Fountain of Youth

After players reach a certain point in the game, they’ll find they can leave for the islands surrounding the bird region and explore outward. New islands unlock either by crafting better rafts, finding pieces of the native’s map, or getting a clue from a survivor.

What players may not realize is that they can build a dock on any beach and fast-travel to it while helming a raft out at sea. This drastically cuts down on travel time when traversing between regions. Building five docks – one in each region – will allow players to warp between the regions instantly.

2 Get Water from Coconuts

Green Coconuts Grow on Palm Trees

green coconut on palm tree in survival fountain of youth

One of the biggest problems players face during the early parts of Survival: Fountain of Youth is the scarcity of water. The island might be filled with animals, but watering holes are rare.

The best solution to the thirst problem is Coconuts – Green Coconuts in particular. Drinking from a Coconut restores thirst by +30 in the Normal difficulty tier, making it one of the absolute best early-game food items to bring along. Coconuts can be found growing on tall palm trees or lying about near beaches.

1 Map Everything

Mapping Charcoal only Requires one Small Stick

A player standing under a Cartographer's Tree in Survival: Fountain of Youth

During the tutorial, players will be guided towards Cartographer trees, gigantic behemoths of nature that stretch far, far above the jungle canopy. Players then climb these trees using a liana rope and use the mapping tool while overlooking the region. Doing so reveals all points of interest, resources, and interactables in a large area surrounding the Cartographer tree. Each island has only a few of these trees, and players will want to repeat this process for every single tree to unlock the entire map.

A key thing to note here is that mapping can be done from anywhere, but the size of the map revealed will depend on the player’s elevation. Cartographer trees are obviously the best spots for it, but if a player is standing above a valuable resource with no large tree in sight, it’s better to use a mapping charcoal right then and there to mark that location on the map for future reference than wait to find a tree and potentially lose track of it.