More Realistic mode can be pretty intimidating, but exploring the world and getting lost in it, then struggling to find my way home, is my favorite part of the game. I went from constantly doubting whether I was properly interpreting the compass to venturing beyond the edge of the world for a week at a time, and I want to share what I’ve learned so you can do it too!

One thing to note before we start: the map that you see in-game is not the totality of the world. It is only the main "play area" so to speak, where the story content will take place and everything you need to progress can be found. A new world is procedurally generated for every playthrough, so no one can point you to a specific place in your game. When you venture beyond the edge of the map, new "world chunks" are created on the fly, seemingly without limits, but these chunks differ in some ways from the main area. Therefore, I will use two terms to differentiate them in this guide: the known world and uncharted territory.

Less Realistic mode has automatic map markers for:

• your home town;
  
• your current position;
  
• each of your fire pits;
  
• vehicles like rafts, wheelbarrows and carts.

In contrast, More Realistic mode only marks your home town for you. In either mode, you can add your own "X" markers by right-clicking the map, and remove them with a left click. But only within the bounds of the known world — there is no blank map that continues on all sides for you to add markers in approximate places.

More Realistic mode also adds a compass to your starting equipment, which you need to hold in either hand to use. This is crucial if you intend to explore beyond the known world — in Less Realistic mode, your position marker will stay at the edge of the map, so you can use it to see your orientation and roughly gauge your alignment with the known world, but not your distance to it:



Other markers will also be barely visible at the edge regardless of how far off they actually are:

When you have the compass in either hand (in More Realistic mode only), you can see the corresponding display at the center bottom of your screen:



A few things to keep in mind:

1. On the map, up is north.
   
2. The compass responds to your camera’s facing, not your character’s.
   
3. The red half of the needle always points north. If you are colorblind, there is an extremely faint "N" near the tip, but hopefully this will be improved.

If you aren’t used to compasses, keep in mind that the body/frame of the compass itself doesn’t move; only the needle spins to always point north. In real life, you would then rotate the compass so that the needle aligns with the cardinal directions printed on the background, but here you can’t do that, so they are more misleading than anything; ignore them (they are barely visible anyway).

Instead, imagine that the needle itself is a wind rose. Thinking of it like a clock, where red is 12 and blue is 6:

• 12 is north;
  
• 3 is east;
  
• 6 is south;
  
• 9 is west.

So what you need to do is follow the red, and imagine the other positions of the clock going from there. If red (12) is to your right, then 11, 10, 9... west is where your camera is facing.



In either mode, the map itself will look the same, with pictograms indicating geographic and geological aspects of an area. Here is an example with a bit of everything:

• Towns, roads, rivers and lakes are self-explanatory.
  
• Trees indicate dense forests, where you will find mature trees and mushrooms. Plenty of trees are also found outside these areas.
  
• Swamps are recognizable by the vegetation surrounding a lake. Avoid them until the story brings you there, as they are heavy with Blight and mosquitos.
  
• Other "clear" areas are plains where you will find various plants, flowers and bushes, and the occasional rocky patch replete with small and large stones.
  
• Cliff faces are indicated by squiggly lines, like the long row near the middle in the above example. These often have mineral deposits, and sometimes cave entrances.
  
• Individual boulders are "rocky outcrops", which are also likely to have metal ores. Some are essentially cliff faces as well and can also have cave entrances.
  
• Lastly, note how some areas are colored differently. Lighter areas indicate higher altitude, so you can loosely recognize taller hills on your map.

As a side note, carts and wheelbarrows travel faster along roads and exposed dirt, and slow to a crawl on sand. They also slow down noticeably in taller grass and going up steep inclines, and easily get stuck on trees and the many boulders in forests. Planning your routes can be worthwhile when pushing or dragging one.

This section is primarily about More Realistic mode and only really applies within the known world.

You always start a playthrough immediately outside your home town, which is marked on the map, so make sure to locate it immediately and equip your compass to find out where you are relative to it. For instance, if you are on a road heading north away from a huge Blight cloud to the south, you are north of your home town. Knowing your starting position is crucial in understanding the rest of your travels using the compass and surrounding landmarks.

I won’t go into detail about what makes a good place for your base, but as a general tip, you’ll have an easier time getting back to it in More Realistic mode if it isn’t hidden in the middle of a dense forest, as you will be less likely to walk by without noticing it. Besides that, it comes down mostly to personal preferences regarding what resources you want to have close by and how you want to keep predators away.

Sooner or later, you’ll go off track chasing an animal or picking up rare resources, or you’ll need to travel with your hands full without a compass equipped. How can you figure out where you’ve ended up if nothing around you looks familiar? Mostly, it comes down to looking around, noticing features of the terrain that you can cross-reference on the map and their positions relative to each other.

Precision-wise, you can’t beat towns and roads for two reasons. First, each town is a specific, named spot on the map. Second, road intersections have signposts that you can hover to see the nearest town’s name in each direction (sometimes, not all directions are labeled). So if you find yourself at a crossroads, you can see exactly where you are. If not, following the first road you find will lead you to a town or crossroads eventually (or to the edge of the map if you’re unlucky, in which case the road just ends and you can probably figure out which map edge you’re at based on your direction of travel).



Besides signposts, following rivers and roads and paying attention to how they bend can let you narrow down your position quickly if you have even a vague idea of what part of the map you’re in. There are only so many places where a road bends north then west three times in a row inside a forest, for example. Look for these distinctive patterns and find them on the map.

The edges of forests and the orientation of cliff faces, as well as the shape of lakes, can also help. All of those can be cross-referenced on the map, so it’s only a matter of time before you find a matching pattern. Based on the map above, if I told you I’m on the east bank of a large lake with two rivers heading east from it, you should have no trouble guessing exactly where I am. If I told you I’m on top of a cliff with a forest to the east, you might need a few guesses, but you would narrow it down eventually.

When it comes to finding your way back to places you’ve already been, small stones can be crafted into cairns, which are... helpful, but not necessarily life-savers. You’ll see their name tags from farther than other objects, but not terribly far still, and since you can’t write notes on them, they don’t innately say anything other than "I’ve been here before". Placing a series of them within sight of each other can turn them into a breadcrumb trail of sorts, but requires a lot of stones.



I sometimes use stockpiles instead: a partial pile of 3-5 stones creates an obviously man-made line that gives you a specific axis to follow. Putting one on the side of a road, for example, is a clear indication that there is something of interest in that direction. You can add a note on your map to know what exactly. This one might tell me to head west from the lake:



When "breadcrumbing" your way back to camp after a discovery you want to come back to, I recommend first going in the straightest possible line to the nearest landmark you can’t mistake (e.g. a road, town or lake). Ignore any resources that would break that straight shot. Place a few cairns or stockpiles along the way, anything to show you’ve been there. Once you’ve reached a place you’re confident you can return to anytime, identify it on your map — something like "iron stockpile southwest from here". Then you can start wandering again or return to camp. You’ll know that you only need to reach that landmark to find your breadcrumb trail again.

Lastly, on the topic of cairns, don’t underestimate placing a few around your camp, especially in a forest. I can’t tell you how much time I’ve wasted looking for my camp in a forest even when I had gotten familiar with its terrain and had mapped out multiple areas of interest around it, circling around the wrong hill or following the wrong side of a Blight cloud. Cairns will make it easier to find your way to camp when you’re just slightly off-track.

And then there’s going off the map, to a place that can offer a pretty different playstyle, avoiding certain dangers and emphasizing others. Let’s lay down a few basics about the game world before we go any further.

1. Each playthrough uses a unique, procedurally generated map. This is true for the known world as well as uncharted territory. However, the known world obeys certain rules to ensure that the main quest can be completed: certain resources, habitats, etc. must be present in the right amounts. Outside, things are a lot more random, but also more limited in variety.
   
2. The world beyond the map is endless, unless proven otherwise. Each time you get close to the edge of your playthrough’s world, a new "world chunk" is generated. There is no invisible wall. (For this reason, the more you explore, the bigger your save files get, as the entire world is described in your save rather than the game’s core files.)
   
3. In the few worlds I have explored so far, there is always a huge mountain chain off the map in the opposite direction from the sea. Though it looks impassable, it can be climbed in certain places, and tapers off eventually if you follow its flank. Beyond lies more uncharted territory.
   
4. My current observations (i.e. 35 minutes paddling in a random direction and over an hour following the seashore) suggest that while more chunks of sea can be generated indefinitely, there likely are no major islands that can appear besides the one that is mandatory in the known world. Even the small ones that are found on lakes and can occur near the shore seem to vanish entirely a short distance away. There might be randomness involved, but the game seems to assume that all that lies beyond the sea is more sea, unless the current chunk also contains land that needs to be extended. Let me know if you find anything to the contrary!

Now that we understand a bit more about world generation, let’s look at the differences between known world and uncharted territory. These are all things you won't see outside the known world:

• Rivers and roads — notice how those in the known world just end abruptly at the edge of the map
  
• Swamps
  
• Blight clouds (but those near the edge of the map can grow past it)
  
• Metal nodes (but flint and sandstone do occur)
  
• Cliff faces, rocky outcrops and caves

It is worth noting that despite the absence of Blight clouds, Blight storms still occur and the fauna and flora is still contaminated.

Without spoiling why, the absence of swamps and caves means that it is impossible to progress the main story while playing entirely off the map. But you could probably guess that since the aim of the game is to remove the Blight from your town(s) ;)

However, that doesn’t mean you can’t build your base of operations a little ways off the map to make the spread of the Blight much less of a concern. The downsides are that you will need to travel more to engage with the story, and you are more likely to get lost out there. Settling by the sea shore is likely a good way to alleviate both issues, as it limits the directions in which you can get lost and lets you travel faster by raft.

At the time of writing, the only non-story resource you cannot get outside the map is wrought iron (used notably for cart wheels), so you can easily spend most of your time in uncharted territory if you don’t care much about progressing the quests or have already completed what’s available so far.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Joking aside, my biggest safety net is to always travel in a straight line in one of the four cardinal directions, leaving cairns or stockpiles behind. That way, as soon as I find one, I know which way I came from and which way I was going when I put it down. If you meander too much, you risk completely losing your bearing relative to the known world and your markers, at which point knowing which way is north becomes mostly useless. Even knowing this, I spent two days travelling mostly east, then five days finding my way back to the known world, reloading three or four times to start over from my last reliable landmark (the mountains) because I couldn’t even tell if I was north or south of the map anymore.

Speaking of mountains: in third-person view, their outlines are visible from an incredible distance. As such, they can be used as a pretty solid reference point to explore a decently large area as long as you stay within view of them. Even in the known world, tall hills also show a similar outline that can help you recognize areas of higher elevation on your map. This behemoth is still a good few minutes away when it becomes visible:



One strategy that could work if you are irreparably lost is to head towards the sea (though this makes certain assumptions about the game’s world generation logic and how the various sea chunks must connect at some point, and is reliant on luck since you could theoretically end up on a weird stretch of land that goes on "forever").

In my current playthrough, the sea is west and I ventured eastward before getting lost. I knew that if I kept going west, I had to find the seashore eventually. From there, if I went north or south long enough, I was bound to start seeing Blight clouds, rivers or roads meaning I was back in the known world. The key is to have a decent idea of where the known world is on at least one axis — for me that failed because I couldn’t tell for sure whether I should go north or south. I tried north first and found nothing for a long time. Then I went south by southeast even longer and ended up back at the mountains. So I likely should have gone even farther north initially, but at some point you start really doubting yourself.

Of course, when going on a particularly long or winding journey, the most important thing to do is to make a manual save before you leave. If all else fails and you become desperate, you can always load back home at the cost of the progress you made to avoid scrapping a playthrough altogether.

It’s convenient that you can sleep anywhere without a bedroll (using the Actions menu, shortcut P by default), but the 70% energy restoration cap poses a practical problem beyond the numbers: it completely throws you off the usual day/night cycle. You get exhausted hours before sunset; if you sleep immediately you wake up in the middle of the night with predators prowling everywhere, unable to see landmarks around you; if you don’t you have to suffer through hours of sluggish movement due to low stamina. Various concoctions can alleviate this, but if you’re travelling light and not spending too much time camping and brewing, they only go so far. BYOB and keep up your good sleeping habits.

Another trick I have been using while out exploring is sleeping in abandoned cabins to save time making fire pits and collecting wood. Cut down a single tree and you have enough logs to block the entrance — bears are powerless against upright logs, so you can sleep tight without bothering with a fire. This has now been patched out, so the next best thing I would try is cutting a young tree and dragging a thin trunk to the entrance. If you are able to drop it (not place it! as it would then count as a structure) in just the right way, my guess is that predators wouldn’t think to attack it and wouldn’t be able to go around it. In the morning, greet them with a few spears to the face, or you may be able to simply escape through a window, depending on the cabin's layout and the size of your welcome committee.

Other things I like to bring:

• Ginseng soup: you never know when you’ll get caught in a Blight storm out there, so keep a bottle of soup and drink only a bit at a time (by interrupting the animation) to stay in top shape.
  
• Chamomile tea: between unexpected fall damage on mountainsides, run-ins with predators and the effects of Blight exposure, adventurous types can use a bit of healing at times.
  
• Water of course, so you don’t have to stop as often to boil lake water and can afford to sleep at any cabin you happen to find at sundown. Though blueberry juice also works in a pinch and gives you something to do while waiting for stamina to regenerate.
  
• A couple tools, depending on what I might be interested in collecting. An axe at the very least to cut trees and defend myself, and a knife to collect or process certain resources. Bring a saw if you expect to make a raft or shovel at any point. Steel rusts and you’ll be out in the rain, so bronze might be preferable.
  
• A piece of flint or a flint chisel to start fires reliably.

Just about everything else can be found along the way or crafted quickly from basic resources (like a large stone into a rudimentary bowl to make blueberry juice in).

I think that covers just about everything I have to say about the subject. Feel free to ask for other tips if you struggle with any parts of the experience!