Delverium Beginner Guide: What to Do First in Early Access

What to Do First

Delverium is an open-world survival sandbox built around exploration, gathering, building, farming, crafting, recruiting NPCs and exploring dangerous underground areas.

The world is procedurally generated, so every player may begin in a different environment. Any guide that hands you coordinates is describing someone else's map.

A practical early-game route is:

1. Gather nearby resources
2. Build a small enclosed base
3. Set up basic crafting
4. Start a small farm and a food supply
5. Recruit your first NPCs
6. Improve food, light and equipment
7. Explore caves and dungeons when ready

This is a recommended progression path, not a required quest sequence. Nothing in the game punishes you for spending a session on farming instead of descending.

One thing worth knowing before you start: if you played the demo, your demo character can be imported, but your demo world cannot come with it. The developer recommends starting a new character for the best Early Access experience, and the Early Access overview shows what the release build adds over the demo if you are weighing that up.

Gather Basic Resources

Early gathering matters more than it looks. Your base, your first tools and your first crafting stations are all built out of material you collect near where you start, so the first trip out is about covering the basics rather than volume.

In the demo, the materials most often mentioned for early gathering were:

• Wood
• Straw
• Stone

We have not re-verified that list against the Early Access build, so treat it as a starting point rather than a complete list.

Stay relatively close to your starting area at first, and avoid filling your inventory with items you have no immediate use for. You can always come back for the things you left behind; you can't easily come back for the time you spent hauling them.

Craft Useful Early Tools

Delverium officially includes crafting for food, tools, weapons, armor and building materials. Crafting is the system that turns the pile you just gathered into something that keeps you alive underground, so it comes early.

In the demo, guides referred to crafting stations such as a workbench and a furnace. We have not re-verified those against the Early Access build, and exact recipes and material costs are exactly the kind of thing that shifts between updates — so treat any specific recipe numbers you see elsewhere, including ours, as provisional.

Recommended early priorities:

1. Useful tools
2. Lighting
3. Storage
4. Basic weapons
5. Farming equipment
6. Exploration equipment

Treat that order as a starting point rather than a rule. What it encodes is simply that light and a usable tool come before everything else.

Build a Safe Starting Base

Building shelters and settlements is one of Delverium's confirmed core systems, and it is the anchor for the rest of the early game: crafting, farming and NPC recruitment all want somewhere to happen around.

Start with a small enclosed structure rather than a settlement layout. You will understand the space you actually need far better once you have built one room than you will from planning several — and a finished small base is safer than an unfinished large one.

In the demo, the simple rooms used to house NPCs were built from four things:

• Walls
• A door
• A bed
• A light source

That is demo-era information, and we have not re-verified it against the current build.

Start Farming and Food Production

Farming is officially part of the game. Confirmed systems include planting crops, watering crops, raising animals, fishing, gathering ingredients, cooking, and trading food and ingredients.

Start with a small farm near your base instead of building a large farming area immediately. A few plots you walk past on the way in and out are enough to learn how the system behaves before you commit space and materials to it.

Food is the resource you are most likely to run out of underground, so the farm is not a side project — it is what makes longer trips down survivable.

We do not list specific crop growth times, prices or yields. Those are balance values, they move during Early Access, and we have not verified them for the current build.

Fishing sits alongside farming in the same food loop and has its own guide. Raising animals is also listed as part of the farming systems, but we have not verified how animal husbandry actually works in the current Early Access build, so we are not going to describe it.

Understand NPCs and Trading

NPC recruitment is a confirmed gameplay system, and it is tied to the settlement you build rather than to a separate progression track. That is the practical reason to expand your base at all: NPCs want somewhere to live and work.

Demo and playtest information listed NPC roles associated with:

• Gathering
• Blacksmithing
• Farming
• Trading

NPC roles, shop inventories and requirements may change during Early Access. We have not verified which roles exist in the current build, what any of them cost, or what they stock.

Prepare Before Exploring Caves and Dungeons

Caves, dungeons and the mysterious Faults are important parts of Delverium. Before you go underground, it is worth having the following ready:

• Light source
• Food
• Weapon
• Mining tool
• Free inventory space

Demo-era guides recommended torches, a pickaxe and proper combat equipment before going deeper underground. The general advice still holds; the specific kit list has not been re-verified.

We do not cover specific enemies, bosses or loot tables. Early Access adds more bosses than the demo had, but we have not verified the current roster or what any of them drop, and we are not going to guess at names or loot.

The single most common way a first descent goes wrong is running out of light or food rather than running out of health. Go down with more of both than you think you need.

Use Journey Shrines for Travel

Journey Shrines are part of Delverium's world. They are the game's fast-travel points — the way you get between parts of the map without walking the whole route again.

That is worth knowing before you commit to a base location. A shrine on hand is what turns a resource that sits some distance away into something you can actually use, rather than a trip you keep putting off.

What we have not verified is how they work in the current build: whether you find them or build them, what activating one takes, whether they are gated behind progression, and what limits travel between them. We would rather say that than describe a shrine system that does not match the build you are playing.

This is one of the first things on our list to confirm against the live build, and the section will be expanded once it is.

Improve Your Equipment as You Progress

Delverium's confirmed crafting covers tools, weapons and armor, and the game's own framing is that you dig deeper for better materials and then craft the gear you need to survive the next layer down. Progression and gear are the same system rather than two parallel tracks.

In practice that means the answer to "this area is too hard" is usually not better play, it is a better pickaxe, a better weapon and a better light source — built from what you can already reach.

We do not list damage values, armor values, tier lists or upgrade costs. Those are balance numbers in a game that is still being tuned, and publishing them would mean re-publishing them after the next update.

First-Hours Checklist

• Gather basic resources near your starting area
• Check your starting tools and inventory
• Build a small enclosed base
• Place basic furniture and lighting
• Set up basic crafting
• Start a small farm
• Prepare food and light before descending
• Obtain a usable weapon
• Recruit your first NPC once the base is standing
• Explore nearby caves carefully, then expand