Looking for a guide to The Trail: A Frontier Journey? Check out our complete set of beginner tips, tricks, and cheats to gathering, crafting, trading, surviving and succeeding in the new mobile game.
Last week Kongregate released its latest mobile game offering, The Trail: A Frontier Journey. They game is not only beautifully designed but offers fantastically engaging adventure gameplay and a storyline that sucks you in from the get-go.
In The Trail, you play the role of an adventurer, blazing a path across the New World, where you must learn to hunt, craft, trade and survive in the changing environment along the trail. As you move from campsite to campsite, you gather experience and items you can use to fulfill quests or craft items to use or to trade as you make your way towards a new town out west you’re hoping to help build into a flourishing city.
We’ve been playing the game for a few days now and finally feel we’re getting a good handle on the mechanics of it, so we decided to put together a beginner’s tips, tricks and cheat guide to help players survive and succeed in The Trail. Check them out below or feel free to share some of your own in the comments section below.
The Trail: A Frontier Journey Beginners Tips And Tricks Guide
Tip #1: Walk Don’t Run
In the beginning of the tutorial, our guide shows us how to get ourselves moving in the game, which basically involves swiping up on your character to get him or her walking. What some may have missed, however, is an important tip offered about conserving your energy. Basically, it comes down to walk, don’t run. When you’re character first gets up and going, often he/she is moving at a pretty brisk pace, but the faster you move, the more energy you are expending. While on the trail this can be a bad thing because you never know how much food you’ll be working within a given area. The frozen region is particularly scarce on food so conserve energy as much as possible. To adjust the speed at which your character is moving, simply press down on him or her and swipe down to slow or up to increase speed. I’ve found I like traveling at as low of a speed as possible because not only am I saving energy, but I see a lot more good materials to gather.
Tip #2: Eat Often To Keep Your Stamina Up
The tutorial touches on the importance of keeping your stamina up, but this can’t be stressed enough. If your character isn’t eating enough to keep stamina up to at least half a heart, you’ll soon find yourself fainting from exhaustion and you’ll either have to pay to restore your stamina or lie on the ground and wait while other travelers have a go at the goods you’ve collected. Because of the importance of keeping up stamina, I always make sure to gather any form of food I see on the trail. Meat is a particularly good find as it restores more stamina than nuts, berries or even apples.
How to eat in The Trail: There are a few people online who have mentioned not knowing how to eat in the game. If you want to eat something, simply tap on your backpack, press and hold on a food you want to eat and you’ll see a little menu appear. Tap the icon that looks like a fork and knife and you’ll consume the item you’ve selected.
Tip #3: Dress Appropriately And Change Clothes Often
As you get along in the game, you’ll begin crafting various forms of clothing. It’s a really good idea to wear every piece of clothing you possibly can, as each item offers various benefits. All clothing helps ward off fatigue, but various items do even more for you. For example:
Headgear (bandanas, Native American headdress etc.) – these increase the number of stamina hearts you have. This is very valuable, particularly in the cold areas where food is scarce.
Shirts – provide more health but also hooks to place tools on so you have less to carry in your pack
Pants/Skirts – as you upgrade your legwear, you’ll find some come with pockets to store more tools and stuff you find, lessening the load in your pack.
In the menu to the lower right of your game screen, you’ll find the clothing tab. If you tap on it, you can see the clothing items you are currently wearing. Each one will have a number on it, the lower the number the closer it is to wearing out. If you have an item below a .4, it’s a good idea to craft a new version to wear or buy one from another traveler during the trading time and change into it.
How to change clothes in The Trail: Changing your character’s clothing items is similar to eating. Simply tap and hold on the clothing item you want to wear and then tap the icon that looks like a shirt to put it on.
Tip #4: Gather Wisely
When you get to the point in the game where you are crafting items, gathering wisely plays an important role in how well you’ll do during the trading time. As a beginning player, you might be tempted to gather anything and everything you can find, but this isn’t necessarily the best strategy. To get the best bang for your buck, you should gather materials that you can craft into other items. This will require you to get to know your recipes, but if you do, it’ll save you picking up a lot of useless junk. If you are looking for items on the trail this would be my list of priorities for gathering:
High Priority
Quest Items – During the game you’ll be working on various quests that ask you to gather a certain number of a given item (ex: 8 blue feathers). Keep your eyes wide open for these items and don’t be afraid to gather them. They don’t go into your pack so they don’t take up any extra room and completing the quests earns you new recipes to use along the way.
Sticks and Stones – Sticks and stones are useful for building important tools like sling shots and axes, which can be sold for a handsome price or used to replace a worn out tool of your own. These items require no tools to find, so definitely bulk up on those.
Food items – Nut, berries, apples, meat, these are the things that sustain your traveller and will usually fetch a decent enough price during trade as well. Grab any food you see – it’s worth it.
Animal skin scraps – Animal skin scraps are found all along the trail and make up the base of most of your clothing items. It’s not only important to keep you traveler well clothed, but by gather these skins, you’ll also be able to craft more valuable items to sell.
Animal Pelts and Logs – To get these items, you have to have tools like the slingshot and axe to hunt rabbits and fell trees, but they are useful items for crafting clothing and decorative items for trade.
Medium Priority
Nettle Fiber – Early on I would call this a low priority item, but later down the trail you’ll need it to craft shirts to wear so definitely try to throw a couple of these in your pack when you see them.
Feathers – Feathers can be used to craft headgear, which is sturdier and offers you more stamina than just a bandana, but it isn’t essential to gather tons of them. If you’re bag is getting full, maybe leave these guys behind.
Low Priority
Pinecones
Edelweiss
I am pretty far along in the game, and thus far, I haven’t found a recipe that called for either of these items. At trading time, these are considered raw materials and fetch very little money, so don’t waste your time filling your bag with these.
Tip #5 Watch Other Gatherers
This tip is a kind of “cheat” for gathering. Along the trail you’ll sometimes see the face of another traveler in a circle in front of a tree or rabbit. If you see this, it’s a good idea to slow down and pay close attention to that spot. This means that person is either hunting or chopping down a tree. Once they’ve finished you’ll see the materials from the hunt lying on the ground. If you move quick, you can gather up valuable pelts or logs without having to use one of your own precious tools. I'll confess, when I first started playing this game, I grabbed items from a few folks. Later I realized these are actual players I'm stealing from, so since then, I have chosen not to do this. For those reading, your moral compass will help you decide whether to do this or not.
Tip #6: Equip Before You Trade
In order to both survive and thrive in The Trail, you have to practice good resource management. This means you must act prudently at trading time. Anytime I come to a campsite, the first thing I do is check the status of my clothing to see if any of the items is wearing thin. If so, then I focus on trying to craft those items first, or if I can’t craft them, I make a note to check at trading time if other players are selling them. After checking clothes, I also make as many slingshots and axes as I can. Sometimes you’ll craft tools that are better than the ones you currently have. Always make sure to grab the best tool available after crafting to carry with you on the journey. If you sell all your tools, you’ll soon find your luck running thin on the trail.
