No Place Like Home – EARLY ACCESS game guide

Guide for No Place Like Home – EARLY ACCESS game guide

Introduction – and Warning

Version Disclaimer:

As I write this, the game is in early access phase 1. It’s basically like a demo version at this point, the only region you can access is the starting farm and nearby village, you can only grow a handful of things on your farm, and only three tiers of upgrades are available in the shop. The developer is working hard to add more content and solve problems but be advised it is still VERY EARLY VERSION of this game and there WILL BE LOTS OF BUGS AND GLITCHES, and many things WILL CHANGE in future updates. And I’m not sure if I will keep up with it all, I may get tired of this game or get busy with other things and neglect this guide at times. So this is the current date I’m writing this, if it is significantly later than this date please a*sume a lot of this information is outdated now:

3. December, 2020

Introduction:

So what is this game, exactly?
The world has become a landfill. Literally there is trash EVERYWHERE. Armed with a magical vacuum cleaner you have to clean up the world and restore civilization. You can convert the trash you suck up into recycled material which you can trade for items and upgrades at the shop. But that is not the only form of currency the shop wants. You will also be farming some fruits and vegetables, some items at the shop will cost a certain number of veggies (or eggs) in addition to various types of scrap and parts. You can also buy machines to cook the veggies and eggs into a sort of stew, which is the thing you will need in order to buy most of the items at the shop. So you clean up trash piles, turn trash to scrap parts, plant and farm veggies, and buy new farming equipment at the local shop.

As you roam the world you will also find some aggressive robots (spiders in this first area) that will attack you on sight. They have various types of attacks depending on the type of enemy. Killing them drops items, usually batteries. A few items at the shop require batteries for trading, but they are also used to feed and tame some friendly pets called “cubots” who then live at a cubot ranch on your farm, and they give you items daily as long as you take care of their needs. There are also wild chickens you can collect by feeding them potatoes, they live on a chicken coop at your farm and give you eggs each day as long as you take care of their needs. As you venture farther from home you will find secret areas, more advanced items in the trash piles, additional things to grow and cook with, areas sealed by hardier trash that you need special tools to destroy, and some interesting new landscape areas.

So in a nutshell it is a first-person adventure game crossed with a farming simulator. I enjoyed it, it’s not at all difficult but it is good fun for casual play.

Please note: I do not plan to extend the walthrough part of this guide into any zones beyond the starting area, the shop, and the riverbank/lake. This is the type of game where exploring on your own should be part of the fun, and once you understand the basic mechanics you can totally figure out the new stuff that comes later on your own. So I’ll first go over the game mechanics of farming and exploring, then I’ll do a mini-walkthrough that takes you up to the point where you are ready to leave the first major zone.

How to Play

• TAB: open backpack and view instructions/quests
• Left click: swing your weapon to break trash or hit an enemy.
• Hold-left-click: use your hammer charge attack if you unlock the pickhammer at the shop.
• Right-click: fire your gun (water-gun or super-chicken).
• Hold-right-click: use your drill if you unlocked it from the shop.
• Mouse-wheel: switch ammo between water-gun and super-chicken (if you unlocked super chicken from the shop). Super chicken is good for killing enemies that get stuck in weird places, or breaking trash bricks that are somehow floating in midair and you can’t reach them. Water gun is mostly used for watering your plants, but also you can spray your pets to make them happy if you see the bathtub icon after collecting the item from them in the morning.
• Space-bar: hold it down to use your vacuum cleaner to suck up trash, water, and items nearby.
• Each day at 22:00 (10:00 pm) you automatically end the day and go to sleep. You start the next day in your bedroom. Waking up the next day in your room is where the game automatically saves your progress.
• E – Some things need to be interacted with, you will always see a pop-up prompt if you can use it.
• GLITCH ALERT: there are some places where you could be running around exploring and you will get stuck on some weird piece of terrain. There is NO JUMP BUTTON in this game, but if you hit ESC for the menu there is a button there called “UNSTUCK.” This will respawn you directly inside your house. Good to know, if you get stuck on a weird rock or if you are far from home and realize you forgot to water your potatoes LOL.
• Number keys – drag items into your “hotbar” along the bottom of the screen, then hit the number shown over that item’s slot in order to activate/use it. This is how you place soil plots, plant seeds, build chicken coops and cubot ranches, etc.
• Reloading ammo:
  Super Chicken – get one bullet when you collect 250 Trash. (Unlock super chicken from the shop and it will automatically be equipped.)
  Water Gun – get one shot from sucking water from certain rivers and wells. (Buy wells from the shop, then build it the same way as placing a soil plot or building a bird feeder.)
  Remember to switch your gun using mouse wheel before you fire! Don’t want to waste a super chicken shot when you are just trying to water your tomato garden!

Useful Tips

There are three areas you can safely build on after the first time you clear them out: your main farm (where you start), the area just past the farm on the way to the shop, and the area to the right of the farm after you unlock the hammer and get past those red trash bricks. You are technically allowed to build on almost any piece of solid ground though, but certain areas the trash and enemies will respawn if you load your game. Personally, I like to put all my veggies in one place (in distinct plots so I can tell which is which when I’m planting seeds), all my cubot ranches together in one area, and all my chicken coops next to each other. Also remember to leave some space for kitchen stoves, recyclers, and mayonnaise machines.
Buy one chest for each type of item when you first find that item. One to hold potatoes, one for potato seeds, one for trash, one for recycled material, one for tomatoes, one for tomato seeds, one for books, one for batteries, etc. Place the chests near where you FIND or where you will USE each type of item. I like to put my kitchens and recyclers down near the shop, for example, because I spend all those items in the shop. But I leave my farm close to the house so I never forget to water my veggies in the morning, and I put my seed chests near the farm instead of near the shop. Just makes it easier to stay organized. It is useful to do at least five minutes of planning before you start building your farm, because some things cannot be moved once you put them down! So just get an idea of how you want to arrange things before you start going crazy with the construction. Here are some other tips that should help you out in the early part of the game:

• If you try to buy something at the shop when your backpack is full, the shop will take your “money” but you do not receive the item because you have no place to carry it. Leave some open slots in your inventory before you go shopping. Buy chests to hold your extra stuff.
• Your house is up the ladder in the tree right before you step onto the main farm area, at the start of the game. A lot of people don’t realize it’s there at first.
• You will need a few pieces of wood to fix your bed before you do anything else. So as you clear trash on the farm, don’t throw out those pieces of wood that you find.
• If you run out of water, you can get more by vacuuming it out of a river or a well.
• If you fill a whole chest with one type of item, any additional of that item you can safely throw away by dragging it over the trash can icon in your inventory. If your chest of that item is not yet full, DO NOT throw it out go put it in your chest if it’s in your way and you need more space in your backpack.
• Remember to WATER YOUR VEGETABLE FARMS every morning.
• Remember to satisfy your chickens and cubots after you get your daily item from them by petting, feeding, or spraying them.
• Red trash bricks require the Hammer tool from the shop – hold the left mouse button for a power-hammer strike to break them.
• Blue trash blocks require the Drill tool from the shop – hold the right mouse button to activate the drill and remove them.
• Blue trash blocks drop “electrical waste” which at this point in game development has no use, but perhaps in future updates it will be important. So keep a chest full of the stuff just in case.
• Sometimes you can break trash piles or vacuum up trash from the other side of a fence.
• NEVER build ANYTHING right up against a fence or rock or other obstacle! Whatever it produces might spawn BEHIND the obstacle and then you’re screwed. Leave 2 spaces of clearance around obstacles.
• Soil plots for veggies can be placed side by side, no problem.
• Buildings (coop, ranch, stove, recycler, even bird feeder) will need at least one square of space between them! Otherwise you might find the product stuck on top of them and unable to get it down into your backpack. Same for trees (later you will find apple trees and such).
• Got a floating trash pile, or an enemy that ran up a hill that you can’t climb? Unlock the super chicken tool at the shop and fire one at the thing to destroy it.
• Switch between water-gun and super-chicken ammo with your mouse wheel. Careful not to waste a super chicken when you’re trying to water your farm! LOL
• Buy the cat, dog, and raccoon houses. They give you FREE STUFF daily and you don’t even need to feed them (at least not in this game version).
• First thing you should buy: Bird Feeders. Put in a vegetable, next day you get three seeds for that vegetable. Without these you may run out of seeds and then you have to depend on RNG to maybe find some in a trash pile. I suggest getting four of each before you start focusing on other items on the farm.
• Second thing you should buy: NINE each of the recycler and the kitchen stove. Put down THREE of each and save the other six to trade for upgraded versions later. Ultimately you will want to have three of each version placed on your farm. Each upgrade requires more items to operate, but it also gives you more items when it finishes cooking.
• The recycler converts plain trash into recycled material. Useful for spending money in the shop.
• The kitchen stove converts ANY food item into a cooked meal. Useful for spending money in the shop.
• The mayonnaise machine converts eggs into mayonnaise. Needed to purchase some of the more advanced items in the shop.
• Bee hives produce honey FOR FREE every day. Currently the only use for honey is to cook food in the stove.
• Items that are FLOATING or BURIED are glitches that the developers need to fix by adjusting their height. You cannot interact with anything unless you can stand at the same height as it.
• After you tame a wild cubot, sleep for one night and then exit/reload your game to clear a glitch where ti ends up floating on the roof of the ranch.
• Most items, including soil plots, can be removed by hitting it a few times (left mouse button) and you can pick up the pieces to put it back in your inventory so you can use it again.
• The well can be placed almost anywhere and is a great source of refilling your water-gun ammunition. But once you place it down it is PERMANENT and can never be destroyed or moved. So plan carefully.
• Chests also cannot be destroyed or moved once placed. Plan carefully.
• Apple trees – permanent once placed.
• Recycler and stove – permanent UNLESS it is full of food/trash in which case you can hit it to break it down but you lose any food/trash it had inside.

Pro tip: the stove cooks WHATEVER food is in your backpack, and can take several types of food at once. Hit TAB in front of it to manually choose what food to give it, or arrange the food in your backpack – it will take whatever is first in line before moving to the next food item in your inventory.

Seeds, Veggies, and Watering

Hold spacebar to use your vacuum. This will let you clear away the round trash piles and suck up useful items nearby. The tall square trash piles can’t be vacuumed, you need to hit them by pressing left mouse button. The red ones are harder, need a hammer (hold left mouse button for a stronger swing) unlocked form the shop in order to break. The blue ones are similar but require the drill (hold right mouse button to use the drill) unlocked from the shop first. There is a GLITCH – as you go you will find trash piles that are stacked two high, or some that are just floating above the ground because the developer messed up their z-coordinate when placing them. In this game, ANYTHING (trash, enemies, chickens, cubots…) that is above or below the level of the ground you are standing on CANNOT be touched. You can’t vacuum it, you can’t hit it, you can’t give that chicken on a hill a potato. The super-chicken ammo can be used to zap enemies and trash piles that are stuck at a higher elevation than the normal ground, but you have to unlock the super chicken first. Related to this glitch – if you tame a wild cubot (the robot with trash on his back) and go to bed for the night, the next day it appears at your cubot ranch but it is FLOATING ON THE ROOF so you cannot touch it. Exit and re-load the game to fix this, then the cubot will be reset on the ground and you can interact with it.

Once you clear enough trash out of the way to reach the shop, you will find yourself visiting it very often. They have upgrades for your character that will make you hit enemies harder, carry more ammunition (water or super-chickens), have more HP so you can take more hits in battle, and things like that. Those are nice, but you need to get a good farm going first or you might find yourself running out of seeds and unable to plant more veggies to cook more food and then you can’t buy anything new from the shop. So let’s focus on building a decent farm first. You can unlock those character upgrades as we go, once you’re confident you can afford them without ruining your ability to “make money” in the game.

There are three vegetables you can grow to start out with, a*suming you have seeds for them. There are potatoes, tomatoes, and pumpkins. After you unlock the Drill tool you will be able to reach trash piles that contain apple seeds, too, but that comes a little bit later. Potatoes grow quickly, in just a couple of days. Tomatoes I think grow just one day slower. Pumpkins take a few days. These three vegetables must be planted using the proper seeds, and only on soil plots. The game gives you a little patch of soil right next to your starting point, and you will find more buried in trash piles or hidden behind them. They are pretty rare to find though. I suggest starting out with a 5×4 plot for each of the potatoes and tomatoes, no pumpkins yet because you won’t have those seeds for quite a while.

Seeds stack in piles of 10 in your inventory, and when you plant one you use up one seed from the stack. You can sometimes find seeds by breaking or vacuuming trash piles, but a better way is to buy a bird feeder from the shop. In fact, buy 4 each of the potato and tomato bird feeders (and later get 4 pumpkin bird feeders too). Set them up in your farm. Feed them the appropriate vegetable each day and the next day they will provide THREE seeds for that vegetable. Once you get your farm to be pretty self-sufficient you can even buy a fifth bird feeder for each vegetable so you start stock-piling seeds just in case something bad happens and you run out later. My advice is to get those first four bird feeders AS QUICKLY AS YOU CAN.

When you plant veggies, you have to spray water on the farm to help them grow, or else they will never grow. Every day they need more water, until they are ready to be harvested. You suck water out of the river (or you can buy a well and put it ANYWHERE – maybe right beside your fields) just by using your vacuum on it. Then you select the water (not the super chicken) using your mouse-wheel, and right click to spray water. At the beginning you will need to refill your water once or twice in order to irrigate all of your crops, but there are upgrades in the shop that increase the size of your water tank and your super-chicken ammo reserves at the same time. (Super chicken is a tool in tier two that comes in handy sometimes but for this initial zone you don’t really need it. If you don’t buy the super chicken yet, you don’t need mouse wheel to select your water ammo because you ONLY have water ammo.)

Fruit trees DO NOT need to be watered. They DO NOT need a soil plot to grow on, just bare gra*sy land is fine. And they take quite a long time for the fruit to ripen but when it does it falls from the trees automatically and you just run up to it to collect it.

Left click swings your weapon to hit stuff. After you unlock the first tool at the shop, hold left mouse button to do a stronger swing. In addition to killing enemies and breaking the square trash piles, hitting decorations, soil plots, buildings, sign posts, etc. will break them and return them to your inventory so you can move them somewhere else on your farm. Certain items, at this point in production at least, CANNOT be destroyed or moved. These include the following that I’ve found so far (but I haven’t tried it on everything yet):

• Chest (bought from the shop, holds a few stacks of items for you, cannot be moved once placed)
• Fruit Tree (once planted it is permanent)
• Well (water source bought from the shop, can’t move it once it’s placed)
• kitchen (only destructible if it has food cooking, and you lose the food)
• recycler (only destructible if it has trash recycling, and you lose the trash/scrap)
• sign post (you can knock it down and pick it up, but you cannot place it back up)

Pets on the Farm

Starting very early, you will see wild chickens running around. It is possible to tame them. First you will need to but a chicken coop from the shop and place it down on the ground. Each coop can hold up to FIVE chickens, so if a coop is full you can’t tame any more chickens until you buy another coop. To tame the chicken after you have a coop you need to feed it a potato. From then on it will live at the coop and each morning it will give you an egg IF you take care of it the day before. Pay attention to the speech bubble above the chicken! They randomly want different things each day. Sometimes they want you to feed them a potato. Sometimes they want you to pet them (hit E to feed or pet them) when you see a hand/petting icon. Sometimes they want a shower so spray them with water if you see a bathtub icon. If you do it right you see a heart pop up for a second. If you forget to take care of your chicken it simply won’t give you an egg until the day after you remember to do so.

You will also find wild cubots. They are little robots with trash on their back that try to run away from you in the wild. Vacuum the trash off their back and you can tame them by feeding them a battery. But first you need a cubot ranch from the shop. Like the chicken coop, each one can only hold up to five cubots. Also like the chickens they will give you items daily (recycled material) as long as you take care of them. Some of them want to be petted or get a shower like the chickens, some want you to feed them another battery. I said it before but I will remind you here: there is a GLITCH with cubots. If you tame one of them in the wild then go to bed it will appear the next morning FLOATING ABOVE THE RANCH. As long as it is stuck up there, you cannot interact with it at all. Exit the game, reload the save from that morning. Now the cubot should be reset on the ground near the ranch so you can play with it like the chickens.

The shop also has additional pets you can buy. They all give you random items daily. The dog mostly finds potatoes and wood. The cat finds tomatoes and wood. The raccoon finds pumpkins and recycled material. These animals, at the present stage of game development, do not need you to take care of them at all, just make sure you put their house down and they’ll run around your farm finding random items every day. You can even have multiple of each animal if you want more free stuff from them. Their houses are very small compared to the chicken coop and cubot ranch.

Utility Buildings

You can buy several more buildings at the shop.

The Mayonnaise machine turns eggs into mayonnaise. Useful for spending money on some of the more advanced items at the shop, or for turning into cooked meals.

The Bee Hive gives you honey daily for FREE. Good for cooking meals.

The Recycler converts your trash into scrap; most items at the shop ask for scrap instead of trash.

The Stove converts ingredients (potato, tomato, egg, honey, mayonnaise, pumpkin, apple) into cooked meals. You’ll need a lot of meals to get everything from the shop. If you simply press E on the stove it will automatically take food starting with the first item in your backpack… if you don’t have enough of those it will start on the next stack of food… if it asks for 5 food and you only have 2 it will take ALL of it from you and still ask you to come back with 3 more before it will start cooking. Or you can stand in front of it, press TAB, and manually feed it food items by hovering your mouse over the item and pressing E. Note: some food is better than others. Potatoes are basic, and inefficient in terms of converting to meals. Pumpkins, eggs, and honey are much better and you will get more meals per cook cycle if you feed the stove better food ingredients.

Upgrades to the recycler take more trash but give you more recycled materials.

Upgrades to the stove take more ingredients but give you more meals.

Bird feeders – notice how often I mentioned these so far? They are THAT important. They require one vegetable to produce three seeds. Get them or risk running out of seeds and not being able to grow any more vegetables on your farm! You’ll want four or five of each type. WARNING there is a BUG currently that will randomly REMOVE your pumpkin bird feeders if you reload the game. Not every time, but often enough that it will make you angry.

Irrigation Sprinkler – in their current state these are NOT WORTH BUYING. You put them on the corners where four of your soil plots meet, and it irrigates only those four tiles that touch it so you don’t have to water it every day because it does it automatically. These are only worth it if you can afford to buy 9 for each of your 5×5 or 6×6 farm plots. Any soil plots not covered by the irrigation sprinkler, you will still need to manually water it daily.

Seeds and soil plots CANNOT be bought at the shop. Ideally you should have three soil plots on your farm by the time you finish this first phase of the game, one 5 x 5 plot for each vegetable (potato, tomato, and pumpkin). But at first you won’t have that much soil so plant 20 potatoes and 20 tomatoes to get started. Your chickens will eat a lot of potatoes so save some from each crop. Tomatoes are useful for buying the cat house (give you a pet cat) but otherwise put a few into your bird feeders and the rest into your stove for meals. Pumpkins are much more valuable – they allow you to buy more items at the shop AND they are one of the best things for making meals in the stove.

Mini-walkthrough: Day One-Two

From where you start, there is a billboard with instructions on how to play. But you get a better view of the controls plus your quest list plus your inventory items by pressing the TAB key. Use it often. Just past that is a tree with some free stuff in a bush nearby and a ladder that leads up to your bedroom, where you find a broken bed. Just past the tree is the main farm zone which is full of trash piles. Start your farm by clearing that first zone of trash by using your vacuum and hitting it with your stick.

To the right from the entrance is a little plot of farm-able soil for growing vegetables. Feel free to tear up that first farm plot and move it someplace more convenient for you. I recommend starting with a 4×5 size farm plot, plant some potatoes there. Leave room on one side to make it a 5×5 plot (or 4×6 if you prefer) a little later. Remember to leave at least TWO soil-plot size squares of clearance around any obstacles. This goes for ANYTHING you are building! Any additional soil plots you have left, make a second farm plot up to size 5×4 (leave room for one additional row later) that you can use for tomatoes as soon as you find tomato seeds.

As you clean up this area you should pickup some potato seeds, wood, and trash. Plant your potato seeds on the soil plots, REMEMBER TO WATER IT (right-click) so it will grow overnight. Then click on the nearby Recycler machine to turn 50 of your trash into Recycled Material overnight.

Continue straight across your farm from where you entered, through the litlte gate in the fence there is a smaller clearing by the river. Clear all the trash here, fill up your water-tank by vacuuming the river. Go back to your main farm and water any vegetables you planted. Come back here and fill your water from the river again. You should notice a blue disk on the ground, this is a sewer lid. Go down there to vacuum up some free stuff, then climb back up out of the sewer.
Now go down the little path, following the sign pointing to the shop. Halfway there you should look to your left (just after a little archway) and notice there is a little ramp you can climb up to reach an item on a ledge – go get it now.

Head to the shop. Take a look at all the prices, maybe write them down (or check my next chapter for reference) so you know what you need to focus on next. Come back often just to check prices and maybe buy some new equipment from time to time. NEVER come to the shop with a full inventory! If you try to buy something with a full backpack they take your “money” but you don’t get the item you paid for because you have no place to carry it.

If you can afford it, buy the Bird Feeder. The goal for now is to get FOUR of each type of them (one type for each of your vegetable farms), but later you will want a fifth one of each. You can’t afford all four potato feeders right now, but set that as your first real goal. That, and unlocking the Hammer, should be tied as your primary objective for the first few days. Second objective is to buy 2 or 3 each of the recycler and stove machines. As you progress later into the game you will want to keep 2 or 3 of each version (there are two upraded ones) on your farm for you to use to produce recycled material and cooked meals, but for now just 2 or 3 of the tier-one basic version is fine. Third objective should be to buy 2 chicken coops and 2 robot ranches. Later you might want a third of each of those, but for now just worry about getting 2 of each. Fourth objective should be to buy the tier-one skill upgrades for your ammo capacity and damage strength. Maybe even the tier two versions if you can afford them. But it will take a few WEEKS (in-game time) before you can afford the chicken coops or skill upgrades. For now we’re just making a list of things to do in the early game so we don’t get confused about what we’re trying to achieve.

Now you know what you are working towards, it’s likely almost the end of the day. If you can’t run all the way back to your house in time, the game will just automatically send you to bed. No big deal. Or you can go to the menu and select “UNSTUCK” button there, it will respawn you at home and then you can select your bed to end the day and go to sleep. REMEMBER THIS, it will be a useful tip if you ever get stuck on the terrain or if you want to come back to your farm from far away. In any case, every day will end just like this – at 22:00 hours on the clock you will go to bed no matter where you are.

Mini-Walkthrough: Day Three-Four

You wake up in your room. Exit the house. On the farm if you remembered to water your vegetable plants you should see them ready to harvest. There might also be a few trash piles that randomly respawned, you can clear them away now. And water your vegetables again!! If you ever forget to water them, they won’t grow any more that day. ALWAYS first thing you should do every morning is water your vegetable garden.

Place the recycler and the kitchen that you bought. Put any trash you have into the recycler. For the kitchen, it will be a game of resource management for a while now – trying to decide whether to feed your potatoes to the chickens or put them into the stove. But always your first thing to do with a potato should be to put it into the bird feeder so you are always getting seeds. Without seeds, you can’t grow anything – so you can’t get any meals. Meals are part of the “money” that you need to spend at the shop.

Keep working on your farm with those potatoes and tomatoes. Eventually you will be able to afford the Dog House, Cat House, and Mayonnaise machine from the shop. You’ll want three Mayonnaise machines and basically feed all your eggs into them. You should also get the dog and cat because they give you FREE STUFF every morning.

By now you should also be able to afford a couple of Cubot Ranches and Chicken Coops. As you roam the wild world, if you carry some potatoes and batteries with you then you can tame chickens and cubots to live on your farm and give you items every day (but you then have to pet/wash/feed them in order to get another item the following day). Chickens give you eggs, Cubots give you recycled material that is used in the shop – much easier this way than hunting for this stuff in trash piles.

At this point you should start buying chests too. One for each type of item that you’ve found so far. Here is a list, to help you keep track of how many chests you still need, though you probably haven’t seen all these items yet and you only need a chest if you have some of that item in your backpack and you want to move it into a chest to free up space. Pro tip: toolboxes and books (used for buying skill upgrades) are very rare so you can probably put those two together into a single chest along with any spare soil plots you might have, effectively reducing the number of chests you should have by 2.
:

• Potato Seed
• Tomato Seed
• Pumpkin Seed
• Apple Seed
• Potato
• Tomato
• Pumpkin
• Apple
• Egg
• Honey
• Mayonnaise
• Trash
• Recycled Material
• Wood
• Rubble
• Toolbox
• Electronic Waste
• Battery
• Book
• Soil Plot

Mini-Walkthrough: Day Five-Six

You’ve got your potatoes going, got setup and ready for tomatoes (coming soon!), got a few chicken coops and even maybe got a chicken or two! Then you got some chests to store your items so your backpack doesn’t just overflow. Good for you.

Now, go ahead and unlock the Hammer in the shop (bottom of tier 1 farm items). This allows you to hold left-click to do a hammer-smash attack that breaks through the trash piles with red veins on them. There is one such place right on your main farm. Go get that out of the way now. There is a second such area on the right side of your farm (looking at the farm from your house in the tree) that blocks off a path to the next area. Go ahead and get those knocked down now and get in there.

As you clear this area out, you will find a few new things to worry about.
1. Plenty of robo-spider enemies try to kill you. Some of them jump on you and some of them spit acid at you.
2. New robots covered in trash – these are the cubots that you can tame to make them your pets. Vacuum the trash off of them then feed them a battery (found from killing a spider-bot) and they will be your pets tomorrow (remember about the GLITCH on the Cubot ranches! Re-load your game after waking up the next day in order to set the cubots on the ground so you can actually reach them to get their items).
4. Floating trash piles – quite annoying but harmless. The big one at the back of the area can be vacuumed if you go up the nearby ramp first, but there is one piece of it that you can just never reach.
5. Tomato seeds!! Buried in trash piles. Use them to get your tomato farm started. Remember to always feed your first bunch of tomatoes from every harvest to the bird feeders to get more seeds, very soon these seeds (and potato seeds) will become VERY RARE in the trash piles so it’s necessary to grow your own seeds in the bird feeders!!
6. Behind that floating trash pile is a ladder that goes to the top of a cliff. There is a little bit of free stuff inside a shack there, and behind the shack there is more free stuff on a ledge you have to drop down onto. There are one or two spots as you drop down the cliff where you might get stuck and need to use the “UNSTUCK” option from the menu.
7. On the left side of the area is another group of red-vein rocks blocking a bridge to the next zone. Knock those down. On this side of the river, to the right, is a small ramp that leads to a fence and over the fence is an item you can’t reach. Get one of the glowing boxes you probably found by now

and put it between the ramp and the fence. Walk up the ramp, across the box, into the area with the item. Knock your glowing box down and use the “UNSTUCK” menu option to get out of this little area. Then come back this way and cross the river. To the right is a ladder up a tree that leads to some free stuff, past the ladder there is more free stuff hiding in a waterfall. If you fall off the edge of the walkway in the waterfall you get stuck and need to use the UNSTUCK menu option.
8. To the right from the bridge is more free stuff, buried under trash piles.
9. Past all that behind the fenced area:
– More spider bots
– More trash piles
– Blue-veined trash piles like the one by the shop, will need a Drill to clear BUT you can walk around all of these ones they won’t stop you just slow you down like you’re walking through a maze.
– More cubots to tame
– Possibly your first batch of pumpkin seeds – buried in the trash.
– Near the back of the area is a GIANT blue spider hiding in the trash piles. Maybe come back when you unlock the Super Chicken ammo? Super Chicken kills it in one shot.

Once you’ve managed to clear out these two areas sort of behind your farm, you should by now have a good idea of how the game works. Since you have your tomatoes and pumpkins growing now, and you have your tier-one kitchens and recyclers and mayonnaise machines running, it is time to focus on some new tasks.

Get a few Bee hives to start making honey.
Get your fifth of each version of the bird feeder so you always have plenty of seeds being produced
Get your farm plots expanded to 5*5 size for each of your three main vegetables.
Make as much mayonnaise as possible, to spend at the shop.
Unlock the drill (bottom of tier two) and the super chicken ammo at the shop
Get your dog, cat, and raccoon pets from the shop. Maybe two of each?
Set aside a little plot of land to turn into your apple orchard, soon you will get seeds for that. Apples are NOT like the vegetables! They never need to be watered, the trees are HUGE and require a couple of squares of empty space between them! If you don’t leave space between them when you plant the seeds, the apples will get STUCK in there and you can’t reach them to pick them up. And you CANNOT knock the trees down in order to relocate them like you can with soil plots. So PLANNING IS ESSENTIAL for these trees. Do your planning now.
Buy some upgraded versions of your stove and recycler. Each one requires one of the previous upgrade tier as part of its cost. Try to have 2 or 3 of each tier active on your farm, sometimes you need a few extra recycled material or cooked meals, but you don’t have enough ingredients to run the tier 3 upgrade (40 food items or 500 trash). So maybe even though you can afford the tier three machine, you still want to keep a tier 1 machine available for use sometimes.
Break those blue blocks below the shop and explore the new area. More chickens, more cubots, more enemies. Those glowing boxes you might have found – they can be placed in front of the cannon blocks to stop their bullets.
Buy a few Bee Hives and start making honey. You can’t use it yet for anything other than cooking meals, but you get it free every morning and perhaps in future updates it will have some other use.

Once you have a farm that is working pretty well, you can start to get more skill upgrades and you can play around with some of the decorative items. At this point in the game’s production, these decorations cannot be used for anything, they are only meant to look nice.

Remember that as they currently are, the Sprinkler items are pretty stupid, not worth the cost. Perhaps in the future the developer may give them an update so they are not so bad. We shall see.

The Shop

Cost item key:

P potato
T tomato
U pumpkin
E egg
H honey
A apple
CM cooked meal
MA mayonnaise
RM recycled material
OW old wood
TB toolbox
BA battery
RU rubble
EW electronic waste

Items will be listed for each tier, in the order that I suggest you try to buy them. I’m not listing decoration items because it would take too long! There are two pages of those in the shop, look them up for yourself. 🙂

Farm Equipment: Tier One

Farm Equipment: Tier Two

Farm Equipment: Tier Three

Skill Upgrades: Tier One

Each costs: 10 RM + 5 CM + 1 Book
Availble: HP+, Damage+, Ammo+

Skill Upgrades: Tier Two

Ammo++: 20 RM + 10 CM + 2 Book
Others: 20 RM + 10 CM + 2 Book + 2 RU + 2 TB
(HP++, Damage++, item drop-rate +, crop yield +, wake earlier +)
NOTE: The upgrade to wake up earlier is glitched, only able to buy it ONCE and it only works for THE NEXT MORNING you will wake up at 07:00, then on the second day you go back to typical 09:00 wake up time for the rest of the game.

Skill Upgrades: Tier Three

Each costs: 3 Book + 3 U + 3 TB + 30 RM + 15 CM
Available: HP+++, Ammo+++, Damage+++

Advice for further explorations

Now you have access to the area below the shop (since you unlocked the Drill you can destroy those blue-veined bricks). Some advice to help you survive deeper into this game.

0. There are some side quests here that will require items, so be sure to carry these with you:
– 15 Apple Seeds (you find them in seed blocks in this area)
– 40 Rubble (fix the house on top of the hill across the river to unlock pig barn)
– 5 Honey (to feed the pigs)

1. Some of the bricks in this area have cannons embedded in them. If you are quick and precise you can place those glowing boxes in front of them to block their bullets.

2. Occasionally you come across a big polluted tree with an action bubble that pops up when you get close. These are TOXIC TREES, chop them down by interacting and then plant an apple tree on top of the stump. Do this several times when you find these trees to complete one of the quests. There is a GLITCH where sometimes the game spawns the staircase leading down to one of the trees at the wrong height so you cannot walk onto the staircase and you can never chop that tree down (to replace it with an apple tree). So sad. Hopefully it will be fixed in a future update.

3. Beware the big green “mini-boss” spiders, they have more HP and hit harder than the little ones.

4. When you see a fox trap on the ground, hit it with left mouse click to destroy it. Break several of them for a quest.

5. There is a fox den that is all polluted. When it is highlighted green, click on it to fix it.

6. If you ever see a big red button, hit it. These open areas that were previously inaccessible to you, allowing you to progress further or find secret zones. Someone told me they also enable fast travel locations but I have not found that yet so cannot confirm if it is true. At the current stage of game development there is NO notification that you activated the button. Just swing your weapon on it (Left Click) while it is highlighted green and you’re good to go.

7. Your quest list has an entry for installing a water filter in a toxic water source. The filter can be found basically at the far end of this zone, after going up some concrete stairs and crossing a long narrow ledge (the ledge you see to the RIGHT as you come down the hill from the shop when you pa*s those first blue blocks). Once you find it, I hope you remember where the toxic water was that you pa*sed on your way here. Unfortunately there is a GLITCH where sometimes the water filter will DISAPPEAR FOREVER when you load your game. Makes it impossible to fix the toxic spill and finish that quest. Hopefully that will be fixed in a future update.

8. There is a quest to tame five pigs, and you find some pigs in the area past the blue bricks below the shop. They want a certain “pig barn” built that is a reward for fixing a house across the river. You only get ONE pig barn, it can hold five pigs. You tame pigs by feeding them honey. Like the chickens and cubots, they give you items every morning if you take care of their needs.

9. You can start exploring some other areas a bit if you walk past the billboard signs, but there is really nothing there yet. That is coming in future updates as the developer continues to add content and fix bugs.

10. You will find some new seeds here. Peaches, oranges, strawberries, and eggplants. While these don’t yet have any explicit use in the shop or other recipes, they work just like the other food in the stove: cook them to get meals. Peach and orange grow as trees (leave lots of room around each one) and the other two require soil plots to plant and water them.

11. Pro tip: at the house on the hill that you need to repair, once you fix it there is a garden beside the house. Use your pickhammer smash attack to steal the soil plots from this guy. He deserves it because he won’t give you any more pig barns.

I do not plan to continue this guide beyond this point in the game at all. Part of the fun is exploring the world and finding things on your own, and now that you have a grasp on the fundamentals of the game I think you can handle the areas that will be released in future updates without my help. Good luck!

Known bugs and glitches

Glitches with workaround:

• Various places you will get stuck on the terrain and cannot move. Hit ESC for the menu and use the “UNSTUCK” button to get out – it will teleport you inside your house.
• If you build fruit trees to close together the fruit gets stuck in the branches and you can never collect it. Leave a lot of space between each tree.
• If you build houses for the animals you tame in the wild, leave a good amount of space between each one or the animals will spawn on the roof and get stuck there so you can’t collect their items. Also leave space around these animal houses so the animals don’t spawn on the other side of a rock, fence, or other obstacle that you cannot get past.
• Several pieces of trash are floating. Anything above your knees in this game cannot be touched by you; but you can use Super Chicken attack to destroy floating trash.
• Occasionally the stoves, mayonnaise machines, beehives, and recyclers (all upgrade versions) will get stuck during their work. You will be unable to collect your items from it. You have to break it with your pickhammer attack (takes 2-3 swings) then you can place it down again and it will work – but you lose whatever items were inside it. Since you need the pickhammer to break equipment on your farm, it is possible for you to get permanently screwed by this bug if it happens to your only stove or recycler before you unlocked the pickhammer in the shop.
• Sometimes you will temporarily be unable to shoot water or super-chickens, or interact with objects. To free yourself from this situation just L-click to swing your weapon and reset your character’s action that they were stuck on.
• When you tame a wild Cubot, the next morning it spawns on your farm but it will be stuck on the roof of its house. To get it to drop onto the ground where you can reach it you must quit and then load your game AFTER the thing spawns on the roof.

Glitches with NO FIX yet:

• Loading your game will sometimes make strange problems happen. Just random items will vanish, your farm machines will get stuck and never finish their work, chests that were full might turn up to be empty, and a few other bugs. It is EARLY ACCESS / ALPHA TESTING so please be patient with the bugs. The developer is working on it.
• WATCH THE CLOCK! If you are in your backpack or in a chest/stove menu when it hits 22:00, it will FREEZE when you exit the menu because you went past 22:00 so it ends your day with the purple screen but it won’t let you have the button that makes you wake up the next morning. Just have to quit and load the previous day and do it again.
• Pumpkin bird feeders will all disappear when you load your game, but only the pumpkin ones.
• The areas where trash respawns when you load your game will ADD extra copies of the trash each time you load, eventually you can end up with 20 trash piles all stacked inside of each other, along with 20 spider-bot enemies hiding behind them. This many items on screen can cause issues with lag and crashes if the game runs out of memory allocation.
• One of the shiny boxes is buried underground in the region to the right of your main farm. You can never reach it because it is below your feet.
• Sometimes enemies, wild animals, or trash/food drops will end up on top of a rock or hill that you cannot climb. Anything above the level of your knees is untouchable, but those spiders can still attack you from up there.
• Certain items (chests, fruit trees, wells, and a few others) cannot be broken or moved once you put them in place. So think carefully before you build something on your farm.
• If you have a full inventory when you are visiting the shop, you can still PAY for shop items but you cannot RECEIVE them because you have no space to carry it. So the shop just steals your “money” in that case.
• Past the blue blocks by the shop there are some seed piles that give off red sparks when hit but they are COMPLETELY INDESTRUCTIBLE. No attack works on them. This might be a glitch, or might be that we need a better tool that will be unlocked in future updates.
• After the fox den you go around the back side of the lake and you need to climb a tiny path up the side of a hill to continue. Sometimes the game glitches out and it will not let you climb that path because it is TOO STEEP. I’ve asked the developers to revise that hill slope.
• Past that previous glitched hill, where you climb up a bit staircase to get on top of the dirt/concrete wall, there is a staircase leading down the other side. Down there is one of the toxic trees you’re supposed to chop down and replace with an apple tree for a quest. Sometimes the game glitches and draws that staircase at the WRONG HEIGHT so you can never get onto the staircase, and trying to climb down that hill will just get you stuck so you have to use “UNSTUCK” to teleport back to your house. I’ve asked the developer to kindly revise this staircase.
• Past that wall that you run across, you can hit a red button to open the gate behind the shop. There should be a water filter item right there for you to pickup but it randomly might DISAPPEAR FOREVER if you load your save. This is needed to complete the quest with the “toxic water” so if your filter vanishes you can never finish that quest.

The clock seems to run REALLY FAST; it took me 59 in-game days just to reach the point where I could fix the house on the hill and unlock the pig barn. 38 of those days were spent behind that blue brick by the shop, trying to clear a path through that zone leading from there to that guy’s house on the hill, because I had to walk so far from the house after watering my vegetables and collecting eggs, by the time I got to the gate where the blue blocks were the clock was at 16:30 already. So I only had about 10 minutes per “day” to clear a little bit of trash and kill a spider-bot or two. Does anyone else notice how fast this game’s clock runs?

Thanks for checking our blog. I hope the information you found about No Place Like Home – EARLY ACCESS game guide helped you somehow. If you believe we forget to add something or update the post with more information, please let us know via comment below! See you soon!