Tips for beginners

You play the first stretch before you reach the village, so you look after your party with whatever you're carrying. Each hero has their own gear and resources, but inventory, gold and food are shared by the whole party.

Resting restores health, Mana and Stamina, and it costs food from the shared supply. You can't rest with enemies nearby, so sometimes you'll have to pull back somewhere safer first. Pick up food as you go. Winning one fight doesn't mean your party is ready for the next one straight away.

Digging graves uses up food too. If you're planning a lot of digging in the cemetery, work out how much food that leaves you for resting. And don't confuse food in your supplies with a healing potion, which you can drink mid-fight.

A community guide recommends buying supplies at the tavern in Underkeep Village before a long trip. Once you reach the village, you can restock what you used on the way.

Once any hero acts in a round, the party can't leave its tile until the round ends. Before you attack, look at where you could back off to and which enemy you're taking on.

The hourglass ends the round before everyone has acted, and the unused actions are lost. That's handy when you want to let the enemies take their turn or wait for a temporary effect to run out. It won't give you back an attack you skipped by mistake.

A Mana potion helps heroes who cast with Mana, and a Stamina potion helps classes that pay with Stamina. Drinking a potion doesn't use up the hero's action; using a healing skill does.

A harmful status isn't the same as missing health, and poison, burning and being unable to act each need their own cure. Pack cures for the enemies you're actually running into.

A Pickaxe opens some passages blocked by rocks. With a Shovel you can dig in shallow graves. The Mortar and Pestle is for alchemy and cooking. Without these tools there are parts of the world you can't do anything with, so don't lump them in with the spare weapons you're thinking of selling.

Try hitting breakable crates and fragile obstacles with a melee weapon. A blocked path isn't always a locked door: it might need a tool, a mechanism, or just something smashed. If you need a better tool to get through, write down exactly what's in the way.

According to a community guide, crates, barrels and some furniture can drop supplies when smashed with melee attacks. Try these when you're running short, though finding loot isn't guaranteed.

The guide also suggests checking scenery that looks usable, such as fruit trees, a shovel in the ground or a hollow tree trunk. Loose items on the path aren't the only things worth checking for supplies.

The automap shows where you've been, but not why you need to go back – that part you have to write yourself: “silver keyhole”, “rocks need better pickaxe” or a quick note on what a mechanism changed. “Come back later” won't tell you what to bring when you pick the game up again a few days later.

Save before you start trying things out on a puzzle, so you have a starting point to compare against. That's most useful where moving objects changes which parts of the room you can reach. Not every puzzle is ruined for good by one wrong move, though.

You can change the difficulty mid-game. You can rebind the controls, and the options cover movement animations, tooltip delay, screen effects and more. If turning animations or hit effects make it harder to get your bearings in a room, try adjusting them – that discomfort isn't meant to be part of the challenge. Turning off flashing covers weather lightning too. You can also play with a controller.