Last Oasis – Solo Nomad Guide (Useful Tips and Tricks)

This is a bare-bones guide (Solo Nomad to understanding life alone in the dangerous and shifting sands of Last Oasis.

Solo Nomad (Useful Tips and Tricks)

Introduction

“Nomad, if you are to return to the Flotilla you must always keep your wits about you and your eyes on the horizon.”

What This Guide is Not?

It is not exhaustive and it is not written by a deeply experienced player. I developed these tactics during beta and tested them in some fairly hot (but not zerged) servers today so I know they are helpful tips. I also know there are more experienced solo players than I who might give better advice. A lot of it is based on real life sneaking around that works even ingame but that’s never entirely perfect.

It is not a guide to playing Last Oasis without conflict, dying, getting ganked, losing everything and sometimes wanting to throw your computer out the window in rage. It will happen. As a full PVP MMO you don’t have a choice in who ends up on the server with you. As a solo you can’t compete with a clan so there isn’t any point in trying.

What this Guide is…

A work in progress. I started putting these ideas together at the end of beta and we’re just barely out of the gate with Early Access. I’ll update it as we go along. I’m assuming the meta will change as the game and players shift and react to each other.

First: Accepting the Limitations

This game has mechanics to support solo, small group and casual play but it is also designed to be engaging for large groups (even VERY large groups) that have an easy time breezing through what is very challenging for a solo player.

Simply put there is a lot of content – stuff on the Tech Tree – that you just aren’t likely to ever get to on your own. You aren’t going to have the larger walkers. Fortunately the smaller walkers are better for solos, anyway, for the most part.

No matter how good you are, how careful you are you will still get killed and have to deal with recovery. Its a PVP game so that’s just part of it. That means part of playing solo is preparing for losing everything so you’re as ready for it as possible. The key to playing solo more or less on your own terms is understanding and using the mechanics available to mitigate loss.

Second: Keep Your Eyes on the Horizon

Since a solo nomad can be at a disadvantage against groups of nomads (with equal skill) the simplest way to avoid getting killed it to avoid the fight altogether. A solo nomad is well served by ~constantly~ paying attention to the world around them, keeping track of terrain variations that could hide another walker – or be used to hide your escape if you see another walker- and always looking for the wings of potentially hostile walkers.

After you’ve been wandering for a little while you’ll start to see that most nomads fall into certain patterns of movement. You know where all the bone shards are, for example, so you’ll approach it carefully assuming other nomads are there, too. You can pretty much expect a walker at one loot drop to go to another visible loot drop next – and if you avoid that line of travel you’ll likely avoid them.

You’ll also start to see the pattern in the places most nomads don’t go. And its in those places where you can find a few precious moments of peace.

While this is entirely un-immersive…. I suggest you also keep an eye on the global chat log. When you see lots of people dying its time to decide if you’re in a safe enough place, where the hot spots are likely to be, if you have an escape route and if its times to just log out – especially if you have a lot of valuable stuff that you aren’t quite ready to use, yet.

Speaking of logging out…

Mitigating Loss: Transferring Walkers to the Lobby

There is nothing at all immersive about this but its a mechanic that serves large clans and solo nomads equally well: you can safely log out many walkers and their contents using Transfer to Lobby.

You’ll probably transfer your first walker to the lobby as part of the tutorial quest for building your second walker so I won’t go over the mechanic here. I will mention a couple of things about it, though:

1) Your character has to be on the same map as the one where your walker was transferred to the lobby. If you left a walker safe logged at an oasis that has burned then it’s gone unless….

2) You can have up to 5 “favorite” walkers that are automatically transferred to a living Oasis eastward when the Oasis it was parked at burns.

Those 5 favorite walkers are your safety net, your bank and your way to mitigate the (extreme) risks of being a solo nomad.

While the first day, for example, I had a camp set up in a little hidey hole and realized it would take a little time for the water to purify, the earth wax to be pounded and the various parts of the nomad cloth to be made. I had almost enough to make another walker so I split my time between managing the crafting devices and finishing up the farming. Then I made another Spider Walker and upgraded its water, cargo and hatch and loaded them up with some essentials and some walker modules I might want later. I also packed the crafting devices I had made into it since the Ballista Spider Walker isn’t able to pack a camp at all. Then I transferred it to the lobby.

The idea is pretty simple: a solo nomad can easily farm far more than the small walkers we ride can store… so we “store” those materials in the form of a backup walker that we can use as banked storage and a backup walker ready to go when (not if) we get ganked, camped and wiped.

Believe me, having a few walkers in the lobby GREATLY eases the stress of playing solo. Just knowing that you have a backup (or 4) lets you relax a little more about loosing the rig that you’re currently using.

Walkers

Those big walkers are really cool. And I mean REALLY cool. And… the coolest of them are both mostly out of reach for solo nomads and completely impractical. If you want to work up to them you can certainly figure that out but your bread and butter is likely to be the smaller walkers. And I’d suggest the tiny ones.

My favorites for solo farming and exploration are the Spider Walker, the Spider Walker with Ballista and the Firefly.

The Firefly is dirt cheap, you don’t need Vision Powder to build it, has enough storage for solo nomad level farming and is a lot faster than you think once its got wings.

But… about those wings…

Those wings are what makes a walker very easy to see over vast distances. And the larger the walker and wings the more visible it is and the harder it is to find places to conceal it from view. The firefly is small enough that it can get into some pretty tight little hiding places but it isn’t really all that agile. And if you have to run in one be very careful with your driving: they tend to bottom out on small landscape variations and that will slow you down.

Which brings us to the Spider Walkers. In my mind these are the perfect solo nomad machines as long as you have (at least) the Dinghy you built for the tutorial tucked away just in case.

Why?

1) Having no wings they are nearly invisible on the landscape and can be hidden in many, many places in the Oasis maps I’ve seen so far.

2) The regular walker cargo upgrades make it hold quite a bit

3) The ballista spider is an easy way for the solo nomad to break open those harder crates. This REALLY speeds up advancement.

4) Both spiders have great maneuverability and traction: they are like the ATV’s of Last Oasis.

They are small, not as fast as winged walkers and will certainly feel cramped, so….

Dinghy

The nice thing about the Dinghy and larger walkers is that you can pack entire camps in them and not just individual crafting devices. So you can make a small camp that has a variety of crafting devices and storage placed in it and pack them all up – along with their contents – into the walker. And just as quickly unpack the entire base and have it ready to go in short order.

So a solo nomad might log in with a ballista spider, explore a bit while farming fragments from crates then settle in for some cattail farming to make nomad cloth at a temporary camp. After breaking down the camp we ride the ballista walker to the edge of the map, grab all the material farmed that session and send it to the lobby and log in the Dhingy.

The Dinghy has a camp with some more storage and a woodworking station so we unpack that and get some Wood Shafts going while adding the day’s stash of Nomad Cloth to the walker storage and the wood, fiber and extra cattail to in the fiber crafting station of the camp for later. After that’s all done camp is packed back into the Dinghy and we safe log to the lobby.

That ends up making the larger walker VERY valuable (to the solo nomad, at least) so I tend to bring it into the game only when needed and try to keep enough packed in it to make another Spider so I don’t have to drive it around if I lose everything else.

General Tips

1) Even in the wingless walkers avoid being on top of ridges for long. You’re very visible and any movement will draw eyes to you.

2) When going over a ridge stop before you get to the top and see what’s on the other side. If someone could see you if you went over the edge you then have the option of watching to see what they are doing or turning around.

3) Fight the rupu, especially the larger, smarter ones. You’ll want all the practice fighting you can get and the rupu are the best practice you’ll get for melee practice. If you have trouble with a White Death you will certainly have trouble with a player that knows what they are doing.

4) If you are being attacked use it as an opportunity to practice fighting and learn.

5) Get REALLY good with your grapple. It can save you from fall damage, allow you to move in ways that are much harder for ranged weapons to hit and is just generally a cool way to move around.

And finally (for now)…

6) Don’t be too afraid of making friends and teaming up with other players. Once you’re set up with your backup walkers its less of a risk to talk with other nomads, share news and team up to do things that are harder or more time consuming for 1 person to do. Its a dangerous desert and, sure, plenty of people will attack you just because you are there. But not everyone will and finding other like-minded nomads can also be a fun part of the MMO experience of Last Oasis.

by Shade