Survival Guide
Here are some useful things to know before we get into anything else:
Use your computer to save.
If you lost a critical item (like your jerry can *cough* *cough* ): When at 5 friendship points, Gilles, the guy on his porch in town, will find an item for you and leave it in his driveway the next morning.
Always! Keep your jerry can full! Nothing worse than wanting to save on Saturday night, only to realize your generator is out of fuel so you can't turn on your computer to save.
Talk to everyone everyday. Friendship is important!
Keep a bottle of maple syrup, a box of poutine and some coffee in both of your cars, in case your needs become critical while out and about. Walking back to your car because you died of thirst suuuucks.
Trees don't grow back on their own. Use pruning loppers (from the gas station) to plant new ones. This is especially important for maple trees near your sugar shack.
Press B in a vehicle to change the camera perspective. Breaks the "immersion" a little, but it's very helpful in some situations.
The Map
I marked some of the major landmarks on the map, but there are some unmarked spots to discover goodies :)
Making Money
To start off, there are 3 basic ways to earn cash right off the bat from day one:
1. Selling (fire-)wood
Probably the most lucrative job for the first couple of in-game weeks. It's quick cash and has no buy in.
Some things that might be useful to know:
Before you cut down a tree, use pruning loopers (you get them at the gas station) on it and plant a new one to keep your wood supply up.
Loose objects in the truck bed don't like it when the handbrake is on (they kind of stutter around, slowly working their way out of the truck).
To get around the handbrake situation, either park in front/behind of a tree to use that as a stop or, to be a little more flexible, stop your truck wherever you want, check which way it's rolling and use the hoist puller to keep it in place, it'll only sway back and forth a little bit, but with firewood, that actually helps "settle it in" :)
Don't bother pulling the log splitter with your big ol' truck, just use the quad for much easier navigation through the trees.
You can either sell firewood to your brother who lives just down the road or sell whole logs of wood to the sawmill in town.
Your brother only accepts 60 pieces of firewood each day (worth roughly $400-500).
The Sawmill accepts 50 logs per day (worth about $550).
A Pine tree drops 6 logs ($90 if sold as logs, $84 if sold as firewood), a birch tree drops 8 ($64 as logs, $80 as firewood), and a maple tree drops 10($100 as logs, $160 as firewood).
It seems reloading the game causes all the logs to turn into a uniform shape, making them much, MUCH easier to transport!
You can use logs placed vertically to increase the back panel height, letting you store way more logs. In the picture below, I managed to stack 72 logs of maple wood (after reloading), losing none on the way to the sawmill :)
(Beware: your truck will won't be able to go faster than 20-30 mph)
Don't bother with unloading manually, just back your truck up over the green circle
2. Delivering pizzas
Every day between 17:00 and 18:00 you can head to the restaurant to deliver 3 pizzas.
Don't bother getting in and out of your car to deliver the pizzas, just put them in the drivers seat and drive through the green circles :)
All in all this usually nets you around 50-70 bucks. It's unclear how much speed factors into payment. (@Charismatic Zombie got $66 for delivering all 3 Pizzas to the same house, so that's probably close to the maximum)
My usual routine was to refuel whichever car is low and my jerry can shortly before 17:00 so I can earn back most of the money by delivering pizzas while I'm in town anyway.
3. Racing
Everyday between 22:00 and 3:00 the racing crew will rise from the depths to accept racing challenges. You need 50 bucks to enter, and get 100 bucks when you win. The races are pretty easy, just don't try running the AI off the road :D. After 5 consecutive wins, you can get a spoiler for your car from the rewards tab when talking to the guy where you make the bet.
Of course, there are some other, more lucrative ways to earn cash long term:
4. Growing weed
This is a nice passive income that doesn't require a ton of effort, though the overall pay is fairly low (compared to the Sugar Shack at least). I'm guessing it'll really take off and bring in the big bucks once the cottage cannabis farm is implemented and you can sell big batches of weed at once. Maybe some night-time boat-smuggling :)
It's best to get this started ASAP, since it's 99% passive, while you wait for your plants to grow.
First off, you'll need seeds and a harvest basket. You can get the basket at the gas station.
I'll put spoilers around the text where to get the seeds for those that like to find out for themselves.
There are 2 cannabis seeds on top of one of the 3 windmills. I'm not sure if it's random on which one, I think I found mine on the eastern one.
Once you have them, grab the shovel from your tool shed, dig up some dirt and plant and water your seeds every day. After a few days, you can grab your basket to harvest your weed. Harvesting a plant also drops 1-2 seeds, so your farm will grow slowly over time.
Take the harvest to the couch to roll joints (by using the weed grinder). One pack of 10 joints requires 10% of the harvest basket's capacity, 10 packs can be bundled by using the blue tape.
Be careful not to use your packs by accident!
Pressing E on a pack will add it to your inventory, giving you 10 joints to smoke at your leisure (to lower anxiety). You lose all your joints when you die.
A pack of joints sells for $65. A bundle of 10 packs sells for $500.
You can sell joints to most people you have at least 5 friendship points with, by just handing them the joints.
I usually carry a bundle and a few lose packs in my trunk, so I can sell it whenever I'm in town.
5. Selling car radios
I guess this could be considered a "spoiler" so here goes:
Once you reach friendship level 25 with Jacques, he will give you access to his junkyard. Besides cool auto parts, there are also tons of radios in the car wrecks you can remove by right clicking them.
The radios slowly respawn over time, so check back every couple of weeks (Thanks @harlow112!)
You can sell the radios to Raymond for $110. He spawns next to the abandoned grocery store on some nights. (I might be stupid, but I don't think he has a fixed day when he spawns, it seems random)
6. Making maple syrup
Currently this is the big money-maker and I'll give it its own section
The Sugar Shack
To the east of your cottage is a wooden pallet where you need to drop 64 pine logs (about 11 trees worth) to build the sugar shack.
Don't park your Truck anywhere near the pallet when you step back to build it! I had to get my truck towed because it got stuck under the water tank T_T.
Here's a quick step-by-step to get you started:
Go to the Maple Syrup foundation between 8:00 and 16:00 and grab a bunch of tubing, spouts and a tubing post or two. You usually only need a few more tubes than spouts (depending on how many tubing posts you need depending on tree spacing)
I recommend just getting as much as you can, since they're fairly cheap and you only get a couple per day. It all depends on how quickly you want to get things rolling
If you have enough cash, also buy a barrel for $200, you'll need it to sell your maple syrup.
(Ignore the canning for now, that's only for when you want to start drinking your own maple syrup instead of buying it from Kali-Gas. It takes a long time for this to actually save you any money, and it has a huge buy-in price.)
Find some maple trees near the sugar shack and put a spout in each one.
Connect your trees with tubes, preferably in a single loop. This can be a little weird, with tubes not wanting to connect for no clear reason, just try repositioning your spouts when you need to (sometimes reversing direction is enough, so when A>B won't connect, B>A might). Depending on how they're spaced, you might have to put a tubing post between two trees to connect them.
Connect your trees to the pump next to the water tank.
Make sure your generator is running between 9:00 and 16:00. During this time, it will be warm enough for the pump to work, so make sure it does :) (it'll say "Too cold outside" any other time)
Depending on how many trees you connected, it'll probably take a few days for the tank to fill completely(if you want to check off that point on the to-do-list :) )
Inside the sugar shack at the back is a valve connecting the tank outside to the boiler, I usually just leave that open forever.
While the tank is filling up, gather some firewood for your sugar shack. It doesn't matter which wood you use. You can just stash it outside and take it in as you need it.
Don't place your fire wood too close to the evaporator/furnace! The fire can jump and ignite your whole pile!
When the evaporator in the shack is full, you can fire up the furnace. Put some logs in the furnace, along with a piece of newspaper (next to the evaporator), and light it up with a map torch (found in the wooden shed at the start of the game or bought at Kali-Gas).
To get the evaporator up to optimal temp (the gauge near the wall), you need about 4 logs. To keep it there, it takes about 1 log every hour.
When there's at least 120 liters of maple syrup in the reservoir, you can put a barrel underneath the spout and open the valve to fill it.
You did it! Take the barrel to the Maple Syrup Federation between 8:00 and 16:00 to sell it!
You'll instantly earn $200 for each barrel, and another $200 every Sunday for 5 weeks for $1200 per barrel
You can pick up your barrel at the federation on the next work day. (To the right of the big stack of barrels in front)
Make sure you keep using pruning loppers to plant new maple trees around your sugar shack to get your sugar water supply up.
Some things I found helpful
When planting new maple trees, try to keep a clear direct path from the road to the shack, to make picking up/dropping off wood and barrels easier
Keep an extra barrel on hand to expand the syrup storage in your shack by 120l by placing it underneath and keeping the valve open. It's useful for when you need to do other stuff for a few in-game hours or you want to save/skip time.
When your production ramps up, the trailer is really useful to easily get up to 15 barrels (not counting the truck bed) to the Federation!
Your (potential) Friends!
There are lots of people it is worth making friends with :)
Talking to someone gives you one friendship point. Do it! Every. Day.
You can see friendship levels in the Menu
All friendship benefits are marked as spoilers.
Your Mom
Call your mom, dummy! Her number is on the fridge.
At 50 points she'll send you a frying basket. It will just be in your kitchen the next day, you wont really see a difference, but it's there. Homemade Poutine!
Your Brother Francis
He lives right down the road from you and hates chopping firewood. Lazy boy.
At 25 friendship points he'll ask for some firewood to build your garage.
At 50 points he'll give you a compressor with an impact gun (for quick screwing and unscrewing of car parts) and a tire pump attachment.
Gilles
He sits on his porch on the right, right as you enter the town.
He will literally save your live (or more importantly your save file)
At 5 friendship points, you can ask him to find one of your handheld items, most importantly your jerry can.
Jacques
At 25 points he'll give you access to his junkyard. At 50 he'll let you buy gas whenever you want. Yay!
Normand
He's the weirdo behind Jacques.
At 50 points he'll give you the option to open the race track for the low low price of $70000
Eric
He runs the Maple Syrup Foundation
I don't know of any friendship benefits
Anthony
He runs bets at the night meet.
I don't know of any friendship benefits
Antoine and Felix
They're the other two guys at the night meet.
I don't know of any friendship benefits
Melanie
She runs the decoration store
I don't know of any friendship benefits
The Junkyard
Some of this stuff might be considered spoilers, so proceed accordingly, I'm not going to spoiler tag the whole section.
Last warning.
Once you've reached friendship level 25, Jacques will give you access to his junkyard.
Here, you'll find:
Le Missile: A fast car that overheats quickly. It's kinda fun to drive around, and hopefully you'll be able to fix it up properly in the future.
The Manual Transmission: An essential part if you're planning on upgrading your Konig (and who isn't?)
All-Season-Tires and OEM wheels/rims: A free tire upgrade! The tires can be found on the big pile of wheels/tires. The rims are hard to miss in the trunk of a scrap car.
They handle a little better than the old rusty ones (and aren't rusty!). I recommend you mount the tires on the wheels right away, while you're at the junkyard (it's free :). The tire changer is right next to the pile of tires.
The Konig's front bumper: Yuppee, your Konig won't look strange anymore :).
You need 2 screws to attach it to the Konig, so take them with you if you're there with it to attach it right away, otherwise it'll fly off.
A ton of radios in the scrap-cars: You can take them out by right-clicking them. Put one in your Konig to finally listen to music while racing and sell the rest at the night meet (see the Making Money section).
Two parts for the Buggy: I'll post pictures and details in the next section
The Buggy :)
Same story as before: some spoiler-y stuff, so beware.
All in all you need 6 parts for the buggy. Whenever you find one, just drag it over to the buggy-frame in front of your trailer (next to the water tank).
1. Tubes:
These are pretty hard to miss. They're under the table in the wooden shed.
2. Wheels:
Found at the Junkyard, next to the big pile of tires.
3. Steering & Controls
Found at the Junkyard, sitting in the back of a white scrap car.
4. Seat & Plastic
They're sitting between two piles of sand on the beach marked "PARFAIT" on your map.
While you're here, also pick up the Welded Differential in a dumpster. (I forgot to take a picture :D)
5./6. Engine/Fuel Tank and Drivetrain:
Sadly, you're going to have to fork over some cash for this one.
They're found in the entrance of the cottage, pretty hard to miss, but it'll cost you $5299.99 to get there :<
Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2729099378
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- How to get weed
- How to start the game
- Mon Bazou Must-Haves
- How To Add Music To The Game (From Spotify)
- All Pre-Installed Konig Parts
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