Scrap Mechanic Useful Tips for Survival Mode

Useful tips for Survival Mode in Scrap Mechanic. Relevant as of 5/10/2020, in no specific order. Btw, if you want to use cheats in survival mode check this link: Scrap Mechanic Cheats.

Useful Tips for Survival Mode

1. The beginning wheels are terrible, you’re better off running until you can make normal wheels. Running will require you to eat more often, but the early game has so much food and drink lying around the start that it’s not an issue. The hunger and thirst don’t drain that quickly either.
2. Look for a large building with a glowing wrench sign, it has facilities for crafting advanced materials, items, and specialized craftbots.
3. The countdown on your farm indicates when robots will attack your plants. You can use this as an opportunity to farm robot parts. Make sure to build protective walls around your crops, the robots will target the crops with priority until you get very close to them. Don’t worry if you’re far away from your farm when they arrive, they won’t really be there until you get close enough to your farm again. As long as you’ve made walls, you can clear them out before they get to the crops.
4. If you want to carry something around but it slows your character down, attach it to your vehicle, put your vehicle on a lift, and then carry the whole thing that way without a movement debuff.
5. Look for beehives on tall rock formations, not trees.
6. If you find dormitories with hostile robots inside, don’t refurbish it for later use, those hostile robots will likely respawn.
7. Bigger buildings have stronger robots, don’t bother with the really huge ones until you graduate from starter gear or you’ll die in two shots.
8. Swimming is really buggy, mute your volume and don’t stay under for too long at a time or you’ll blow out your eardrums and the game will stutter and crawl worse and worse until you resurface.
9. Press H for the basics and don’t skip any steps on building your first car.
10. You may need to make two beginner engines to attach all four wheels on your first car.
11. Backpedaling while swinging your hammer at robots will prevent you from getting hurt most of the time. Robots also have a hard time hurting you if you jump and use your lift.
12. Get to the middle of a building before starting a fight or you might get punched off the ledge and fall.
13. You can craft a respawn bed after making the advanced crafting robot at the wrench-sign garage.
14. Items dropped instead of placed will take an hour or more to disappear. Try to make a large crate & other containers as soon as you can. For objects that can be placed like blocks, do that in the meantime to preserve them.
15. Carrots aren’t great as food but are useful for expanding your farm since you can make them into Soil.
16. If your vehicle is flipping itself over, lower the power output. You’ll still reach the same top speed, but start slower. If it’s still flipping, redistribute the weight by adding blocks, keeping in mind that different materials have different weights.
17. If you find a caged farmer, they are used as a type of currency at the trader. I’ve only found the trader inside an enclosed canyon, in a large barrel-like building, with lots of warning signs at the entrance. You’ll need to transport the whole cage to the trader. My simple caveman way was to make half of a larger cage on my car, lower it on the lift, smack the farmer cage into the car with my hammer, and then build the rest of the car cage around him. (Edited in on 5/9 thanks to comments)
18. You can’t eat potatoes, they’re ammo for the spud gun. You can get the spud gun from the trader. They are an ingredient that Cookbot can use, though.
19. If you unlock more clothes in one world and equip them, you’ll still have them if you start another world.
20. You can juke the robots with guns by strafing left and right in a zig-zag motion with good timing, but you’ll probably still get shot if you get close. They try to shoot where they predict you’re going to be based on your current movement direction, accounting for the travel time of their shot, so changing direction makes them miss by a mile.
21. You can use your lift and/or attach material blocks to a building to reach the very top if there are no more slopes or stairs to use. Some buildings have extra item spawn locations up there, and it gives you a good view of the area.
22. Once your lift is fully expanded, you can jump and replace it directly under you (assuming you’re climbing a wall) to go even higher. Stand still before you start expanding the lift or you might slide off.
23. Glue is from clam meat, Crude Oil is from underwater vents, and there’s a little slug friend down there you can take home and name Goobert. From firsthand experience, Goobert can survive an accidental hammer swing.
24. If you’re struggling for food and can’t wait on crops or risk running into robots while searching for crates, you can feed Corn to Wocs to get Woc Milk. Dying doesn’t matter too much as long as you’ve got a respawn bed and you’re close to base, so starving/dehydration is fine if you’re just spending a lot of time at your base anyway.
25. The game keeps going while you’re paused, go back to the main menu to be safe.
26. Your vehicle will probably be unpleasantly shaky until you craft suspension bars. Once you attach them to your vehicle, you’ll want to press E on them and adjust the stiffness or they’ll make the vehicle wobbly instead.