New World is hosting a Closed Beta until August 2nd that allows players to experience what the game looks like currently. Starting the game is relatively straightforward with the tutorial teaching you all of the basics of fighting, crafting, and gathering. However, there are several crucial tips that can make your life much, much easier.
1. Craft the Coarse Leather Satchel
The tutorial will provide you with a basic satchel that can improve your encumberance by a small amount. However, the first craftable leather satchel can increase your encumberance by 1000 – roughly translating to carrying 100 more item weight.
This will greatly improve how long you can harvest/gather raw materials for before having to go back to a settlement. With how long it takes to actually move around in this game, this will alleviate the headaches that you will end up facing. One other benefit is that using this satchel will ensure that you don’t run out of space from gathering random things on your way between settlements. You won’t have to throw out any materials just to make room for the iron deposit you just found.
2. Level “Harvesting” to 30
Regardless of which skill you want to dedicate time to in the future, levelling up Gathering to 30 allows you to collect from plants that provide Motes (and higher level versions of Motes). This plays a role in crafting gunpowder, lifestaff, firestaff, and many more. Keeping a healthy stockpile of motes is infinitely easier if you can just collect whichever ones you end up seeing when travelling between points. Gathering can be rapidly increased by gathering herbs and hemp.
3. Use wells in towns for Water
You don’t have to run all the way outside to the nearest stream for freshwater. All towns (as far as I know) have a well either inside it or just outside. This saves you a ton of valuable time if you are mass-crafting potions and need a reasonably close source. Using the town well will also remove the need for storage space dedicated to water.
4. Items placed into storage can still be used for crafting
Feel free to dump all of your gathered resources into the storage at your main settlement. Occasionally it will glitch and say that you don’t have a certain resource, but it is easily fixed by picking it up and putting it back again. It is a great quality of life measure that helps with improving item organization. Keep in mind that once you craft new items, the new items are now in your inventory. You will have to get into a habit of dumping everything as soon as you get back and making another trip to the storage before you leave again.
It is important to know that each settlement has its own unique storage. If you decide to move to a different city, you will have to bring all of your resources with you. One way to overcome this is to always set your “Inn” at the same city that you have all of your resources. Choose your city very carefully as well – usually one of the ones in the middle of the map are the most popular.
5. Craft Iron tools
Tier 2 tools are very easily accessible early game. These improved tools will speed up the gathering process much more than basic tools and there really is no reason not to craft them. Once you get to the first settlement, you can easily create a set of these tools just from resources you pick up on the way.
6. Push to level 20 before grinding Tradeskills
By the time you hit Level 20, you will have experienced enough of the game to know more about what you want to dedicate your time to. I initially really liked the magic in this game and spent half the day grinding out gathering and arcana only to realize that I enjoyed the sword/shield and smithing aspect much more. One other benefit is that Level 20 is when you unlock a second satchel spot. This increases your max weight to 300 (without other bonuses) and can help a ton with actually grinding.
At the same time, definitely explore as much as you can about the different available skills. Try out everything before you commit, but don’t feel the need to actually grind things out until later on in the game.
7. Join a Company
New World is definitely a group-based MMO that has amazing benefits for those who decide to party up. EXP is not currently split between team members, and having a group of people to play with helps you all progress extremely fast. Instead of killing mobs one-by-one, a group of you can take down multiple mobs at the same time. Many of the missions are also “Kill X amount of monsters” type quests, and landing a single hit on the mob will give you credit. Joining a Company is the easiest method for you to find a group of players to explore the game with.
8. Specialize Refining within the Company
Once you join a Company that you like, talk amongst yourselves and dedicate yourselves to specific refining roles. This tip is NOT meant to be restrictive – it just helps a ton with crafting and avoids frustrations. For context, the Auction House in game at the moment is not very well-populated with resources. To craft a Tier 3 Steel Sword, you need Tier 2 Leather, Tier 2 Wood and Tier 2 Ingots (Steel). If your company gets organized and splits up the trades, everyone will be able to craft whichever item they wish.
One added benefit is if you have a funneling agreement with a small group of Company members, you can each level up your respective refining skills much, much quicker.
9. Keep equipment that has bonuses to Trade Skills
In your journey you will find equipment that has certain bonuses like “increase chance of obtaining rare resource when logging by 2.5%”. Even if you do not think you need it now, having a full set of these bonuses in any Trade Skill will be very useful. Specifically for mining, it enables you to gather Gems that you can later refine and place into sockets. Without it, it is much more difficult to find these resources.
Another reason to keep them is that it is difficult to craft the ones you specifically want. Crafting an item with a specific perk requires you to add on an ingredient that has that trait. These items are obtained by gathering the related resources. It can take a long time to grind for the specific one you are looking for and it is much easier just to hang onto them as soon as you see them.
10. Scrap everything you don’t need
For beginners, the drops you get in the early game aren’t worth very much. You very likely won’t be able to sell them to other players and there currently is no way to sell them to an NPC. If you don’t need it (and it doesn’t have a Trade Skill boost as mentioned in Tip #9) then you should scrap it for materials. You will always need the extra resources it provides and will actually be of use to you rather than being thrown out.
11. Resources spawn in the same location
Once you find a useful resource, make a mental note of it or make a note of it on a PDF of the map. Alternatively, you can refer to this map here since it appears to have most of the resources annotated already. Crafting in New World requires using the previous tier as materials. For example, crafting a Steel ingot requires Iron ingots. This means that all of the basic resources like Iron and Oil will be in demand no matter where you are in the game. Making a note of where to find resources will be important to reducing wasted time.
12. Always have Food and Potions
It is incredibly easy to have food up 24/7 since you have the ability to set a camp virtually anywhere and there are turkeys all over the place. The basic boost to constitution and the constant heal from food is valuable to reducing downtime.
Having a supply of potions is likewise very simple once you collect a few herbs and some water. Potions can be used to quickly regain some health, but it does take some time to actually use. Unfortunately, if you are playing alone then it may be difficult to find a time in the middle of combat to chug a potion. However, if you are playing with a group then this minimizes your down time and enables your entire group to continue grinding.
13. Take it slow and enjoy the game
Try to take a step back and just enjoy the game for what it currently is. I personally really like the Trade Skills aspect of New World – I definitely spent more time crafting and gathering than I did actually doing quests. Every player will enjoy a slightly different aspect of the game, but do explore as much as you can before committing to a certain playstyle.
14. Resource size affects respawn timer and EXP efficiency
Larger resource nodes (i.e. large mountain of iron vs. small pile) take longer to respawn after you have gathered it. Most obvious example of this is for oil when you try to make an efficient run gathering all you can. The large oil nodes take a few minutes longer to respawn even though you mine the small node first. Keep this in mind when you are planning your gathering route in the area.
Gathering larger nodes will give you more of the resource per second, but the smaller nodes are better for leveling up the Trade skill in the first place. An example of this is when you are chopping wood – try logging the skinny trees and keep track of your EXP gain in a minute vs. logging large trees. You will notice that you end up gaining EXP faster, but will gain less wood. Keep this in mind in the early stages of the game when it is more important to level the skill up than it is to gather tons of wood for crafting.
15. Craft the highest tier possible for the most efficient EXP per material
It is pretty obvious that crafting higher tier products will give you more EXP. However, if you are not a big fan of gathering or spending gold on the basic resources, crafting ONLY highest tier products will give you the most EXP for the resources that you have. Gone are the days of spamming iron daggers in Skyrim. If you have the materials for it, always go for the higher tier item.
That being said, higher tiers require more specific resources that tend to be in short supply. For example, rugged leather requires tannins that you can really only farm from level 45 mobs and above. Otherwise you have to run around opening chests just to gather a few here and there. At least on my server in Everfall, tannins are almost always out of stock. Same thing goes for Oil at the moment due to the limited supply.
One way to get around this resource shortage is to simply ask to trade with someone in your Company that has a different Trade skill focus than you. Do keep in mind though that tannins and oil tend to be some of the most sought-after materials due to how they are needed in weaponcrafting.
16. Pick up town quests whenever you are grinding Trade skills
When you are grinding any of the gathering related Trade skills, picking up a few of the town quests will net you some EXP, standing, and gold. Most important of these is town standing since the bonuses that will provide will be much more useful. Other than benefits like reduced cost, faster gathering, more tokens for faction quests, and increased EXP gain, you will also need to be at level 15 standing in order to purchase a house.
Doing random town quests while you are out gathering does not take up that much extra time. Most of the ones that I have picked up are ones like “Hunt ____ Elk/Rabbit/Wolves” and I just complete them idly as I walk past. Specifically for wolves, they tend to walk around areas that you are gathering in and you usually have to fight them regardless. Town quests are a small bonus you get for doing what you usually do anyways.
17. raft armour sets that give bonuses to Trade skills
The bonuses from a full set of any of these traits can be huge for Trade skill efficiency. An example of this is that even just having 3 items with the “increase woodworking” trait improved my “extra resource” chance up to around 20%. When you refine 100 wood, you now get 20 extra. If you are focused on crafting in any way, getting a full set of these traits is an absolute must.
To actually obtain the items that you use to craft armour with these perks, you can either go to the auction house or you can gather more from related resources. For example, I have found a ton of the woodworking perk item just from logging constantly. These items can be applied to any type of armour when you craft – it is not limited to just leather or just cloth.
18. Save up vegetables and create food that boost Trade skills
Vegetables are fairly hard to farm in New World. Most of the ones I have seen come from the provision boxes that you see around the world. Some vegetables do exist in the wild and can be gathered consistently, but things like Broccoli mostly come from boxes. Whenever you encounter one, make sure to save what you find. The reason behind this is that the food items you can make can boost any of the Trade skills.
If you are not a big fan of cooking, you don’t necessarily have to go out of your way for them. However, even crafting the first tier food items can be helpful in things like resource gathering. It can speed up the process for you and help reduce the grind that is needed to level up refining or crafting trade skills.
19. Approach “open X boxes” quests systematically
These quests can get annoying once you have opened 4-5 of the boxes and can’t find the rest. One way to combat this is to approach the area systematically. Look on your map once you arrive and make a mental note of all of the buldings in the area. Comb through each one step by step so that you don’t end up missing any by the time you get to the end.
I am personally not a big fan of these types of quests and I really do hope the devs change up how it is done. However, until they change it this is one of the methods to reduce your frustration when questing.
Another alternative is to actually use this map that some people have developed that marks down all of the chests in the area. Whenever I have used it, it has always been enough for me to complete my quest. However, some people may not like having to alt-tab back and forth and the systematic approach might be better suited for them.
20. Join a group and do PVP faction quests
This is one of the best ways to level when you are in the level 25-30 range. Most of the quests are best completed with a group since they commonly consist of killing a certain number of things or opening a number of boxes. Having a group also helps prevent you from being jumped by enemies since you will have forced active PVP status.
The extra EXP from killing mobs is also a great bonus to the quests when you are in a group since all you need is one hit to get the reward. Opening chests is also a good way to gather useful resources that are needed to craft higher tier products. There are other ways to gain EXP effectively, but this is the most well-rounded method I can find. Some people like to spam corrupted breaches, but that can be difficult for you depending on your gear situation and on the level of breaches that are available.
21. Armour weight determines dodge distance
Wearing all heavy armour will turn your dodge into a tiny hop that barely travels any distance. Similarly, wearing all light armour gives you that long distance dodge that can get you away from your enemy more efficiently. You can monitor this by going into your inventory and highlighting the bar right next to your equipped armour and seeing which category you currently fit into. You can mix and match different types of armour and it is the final weight that matters the most.
Equipment sometimes have the perk that lowers the weight of the armour. This can be very valuable if you allocated very few points into constitution since it will give you a better escape mechanism. This is especially true for ranged weapons since being able to back away even for an instant is important to getting your shot off. Avoiding enemy interruptions of your attack is crucial and having lighter armour will allow you to dodge away to do so.
22. Pay attention to defence type
Many beginners fall into the trap of just choosing the gear that has the highest gear score. Unfortunately, this is how you end up dead when fighting against the wrong enemies. It is a good idea to mix and match armour types to make sure you have both physical and elemental defence.
This tip isn’t meant to tell you to avoid high gearscore items, but rather to pay attention to your overall blend of equipment. High score is better, but not if you end up one-dimensional with no elemental defence.
As long as you are mindful of this pitfall, don’t be too concerned about min-maxing anything. Most people end up with a mix of armour due to randomness of drops anyways, but do keep this in mind from time to time when you equip new items.
23. Re-speccing is free until Level 20
Use the early game to mess around with your stats and explore what type of character you want to build. It is completely free for your to try different things and different weapons.
It is also free to reset your weapon skills as well! There are two trees for every weapon and each have 3 unique skills you can try out. This allows you to customize your playstyle since you can use skills from both trees at once.
This is a great opportunity for you to try out crazy builds like going all Focus as an archer to spam triple shot or to adapt your build to your current situation. I’ve personally used this method to change all my points into constitution when I partied up with higher level friends just so that I can survive in the areas that they were grinding in. Take advantage of this and use it to improve your gameplay.
24. Use the player-made maps to track resources
There are a few different maps floating around that can be used to track almost all of the resources. The one I use is here and is great for finding resource nodes like oil and iron. This is also the same map mentioned in tip #6 since it has the function to find chests.
This can also be used to map out your gathering route to maximize your time efficiency. Instead of manually running around certain zones, this will allow you to directly go from node to node. I personally used this method when gathering Oil early on since it was very important at that point to avoid the mobs (specifically the alligator).
Bonus Tip: Alligator attacks can reach you even when running away – climb on obstacles to avoid them
For whatever reason, alligator attacks can catch up to you even when you are sprinting away. Very few early game mobs can do that, and the alligator is the most common one I have seen. If you have the misfortune of pissing one off, climb up onto obstacles. If you don’t have an unreachable obstacle nearby, climb over anything you can and force the alligator to take the long path around. If you try to sprint in a straight line, it will likely kill you if you don’t have enough physical armour.
The most problematic area I have seen this in is in the Marshes when gathering Oil. One wrong move and you end up slowly moving through water and the alligator eats you. Fortunately, there are these boulders here and there that you can climb up on. From that point, you can actually use your ranged weapons to kill the alligator and continue gathering your oil.
