Particular recipes have to be made in a specific order. Still, the food acts as your health - with the stew in particular offering an extra boost in health/energy - and it’s important to mix and match ingredients as some offer more nutrition than others and this becomes a rather complex minigame.

The combinations are a multitude of concoctions you’d likely only eat if you were in fact stranded on a desert island - we can probably live without ever knowing what sweetcorn, onions and absolutely nothing else tastes like. Once the cooking station is up and running you’ll be tasked with combining various ingredients you’ve grown in order to make food for yourself and your fellow crewmates. From there you’ll be sent to explore and find materials to build a cooking station. Naturally this is a process you’ll rinse and repeat throughout the game, so it becomes second nature fairly quickly. From the outset you’ll have a gated area where you can begin to grow various foods such as sweetcorn, potatoes, tomatoes and onions. You’ll discover a camp that’s been hastily thrown together by a crewmate you discover early on, and it’s up to you to bring it to life (yes, it’s one of those RPG’s where it’s your job to do everything whilst your fellow characters act really grateful and then keep asking more of you). Crafting, cooking, farming and exploring are your core basics and the game does a brilliant job of balancing out the learning experience across the opening few hours.įirst and foremost is the farming. The opening two or three hours of the game tasks you with most-everything you need in order to survive in the harsh conditions and exploring the surrounding islands for your fellow crewmates. You awake unprepared and without the tools or necessary supplies to survive in such conditions.

The beginning of the game finds you marooned on an archipelago after your ship crashed during a storm. Stranded Sails - Explorers of the Cursed Islands from Lemonbomb Entertainment wants to take the experience of the classic farming sim and drop it slap bang in the middle of a swashbuckling high-seas open-world adventure game. The joy of them, of course, is that feeling of accomplishment when you witness the literal (digital) fruits of your labour blossoming into life. From the likes of Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley and, well, Farming Simulator, it’s a genre that has crept into the mainstream as mellow experiences that can be tackled at your own pace. There are few things in life as relaxing as a farming simulator.

Stranded 2 crafting recipes