Good Heavens Beginner Guide: Survival, Tech, and Base Building

Starting your journey as the Chosen One in Good Heavens! requires setting up a functioning camp, understanding the dual-essence progression system, and gearing up before exploring hostile lands. Because the clumsy god Rar has left the realm of Xant-Rar in disrepair, your primary goal is to establish a base, craft starter equipment, and complete city quests to earn your official Chosen One badge.

Here is everything you need to navigate your first few days, set up crafting stations, and avoid early progression traps.

Establishing Your First Camp

After arriving in the world, your first objective is to mark a safe territory and establish a respawn location.

1. Place Your Totem: Select the Totem from your hotbar to mark your camp's boundary. Be mindful of where you place it, as uneven terrain or world obstacles can limit your building zone. If you place it poorly, you can hand-craft a Dismantle Mallet to take structures down and reposition your base.
2. Scavenge Loose Materials: Search the ground for loose branches and stones. You cannot chop down trees with your bare hands.
3. Craft a Stone Axe: Combine two branches and two stones to hand-craft your first Stone Axe.
4. Gather Timber: Chop down nearby trees. Smaller trees generally take around eight hits to fell, while larger trees take ten. If you position your character between closely packed trees, your axe swings can strike and harvest multiple trees at the same time.
5. Erect a Tent and Workbench: Build a Tent and interact with it immediately to set your personal spawn point. Without an active spawn point set at a tent or bed, Wayhome Scrolls and respawns default to your original game arrival site.

Understanding Blue and Red Essence

Progression in Good Heavens! does not rely on strict class locks. Instead, you unlock recipes and perks across six tech trees by pressing the T key and spending two primary forms of essence:

Food does not function as an instant death timer. Instead, items like berries, raw mushrooms, and cooked carrot soup boost your stamina recovery, increase your maximum stats, and restore health over time. Keep food active in your system before engaging in sustained logging or combat.

Navigating the Six Tech Trees

As you collect essence, spend it on the tech paths that match your playstyle:

• Warfare: Unlocks melee weapons (clubs, blades, heavy weapons) and heavier defensive armor.
• Trickery: Specializes in ranged attacks (slingshots, short bows), daggers, and mobility.
• Sorcery: Grants elemental magic paths, including fire, ice, and lightning spells.
• Homesteading: Covers land management, including carpentry, tilling hoes, crop seeds, irrigation, and cooking prep tables.
• Exploration: Focuses on survival tools, wayfaring upgrades, furnace smelting, and fishing.
• Influence: Unlocks weaving stations, gem crafting, brewing, and accessory upgrades.

Essential Early Crafting Stations

To progress through the initial questline, build these processing stations at your camp:

• Loom (Weaving Tech): Requires wood, sticks, and rope made from harvested grass. Use the loom to craft Grass Fabric, Ambassador Grass Pants, and protective headpieces like the Flower Bandana.
• Weapon Bench (Warfare / Trickery Tech): Allows you to craft your first dedicated weapons, such as the Wood Club or Slingshot. If you build a slingshot, craft pebble ammunition at your workbench using regular stone.
• Sawmill & Carpenter's Table (Carpentry Tech): Turns raw logs into wooden planks. Planks are required to build storage chests, saving you from inventory overload.
• Furnace (Smelting Tech): Requires stone and planks. Uses raw wood as fuel to smelt ores into metal bars and process Woodstone.
• Prep Table (Cooking Tech): Lets you prepare basic raw recipes, like Garden Salads, without needing fire.

Combat Basics and Hidden Abilities

Good Heavens! displays four circular ability slots directly to the right of your hotbar at the bottom of the screen. These correspond to gear-based combat skills:

• Weapon Ability: Bound to Right-Click by default.
• Boot Ability: Bound to Spacebar by default.
• Chest Armor Ability: Bound to the Ctrl key by default.
• Headgear Ability: Bound to the Shift key by default.

When an equipped item grants an ability, its icon and active cooldown timer appear in these circles. Basic combat drains your stamina bar quickly, so avoid swinging wildly against fast-moving targets like wolves or foxes. If an enemy begins to overwhelm you, retreat until your stamina regenerates.

Farming and Helping City NPCs

To earn the Chosen One badge, you must travel to struggling settlements (such as Fang City) and solve problems for quirky locals. Many NPCs require agricultural aid or specific cooking recipes:

• Tilling and Planting: Craft a Stone Hoe at the workbench, clear a patch of soil, and plant seeds like tomatoes, carrots, or potatoes.
• Irrigation: Unlock Irrigation in the tech menu, craft a Wooden Watering Can, fill it at a nearby water pool, and water your crops so they grow while you explore.
• Recipe Purchases: When an NPC asks for prepared food like Mushroom Stew, buy the recipe from the town's vendor shop building rather than trying to interact directly with the shopkeeper's dialogue.

Common Beginner Pitfalls

• Full Inventory During Quests: Keep several inventory slots open before speaking to quest-givers. If an NPC awards you seeds or quest items while your inventory is full, the items may drop onto the dark ground or glitch out, stalling quest completion.
• Branch Scarcity: Chopping mature trees yields logs, not branches. If you need branches for tools or hoes, search the ground terrain rather than felling more large trees.
• Managing Chests: Items inside storage chests must currently be transferred manually. Keep raw building supplies (wood, stone, grass fibers) separated from seeds and food ingredients across multiple chests.
• Hotbar Layout: Your hotbar acts as the top row of your backpack. When you open the inventory screen, rearrange items into the first row to place them on your number keys.