Permafrost Beginner Guide: Survive Your First Days

Updated: 2026-10-13

Quick answer: in your first hours, hand-craft stone tools, keep a campfire's worth of wood and stone on you at all times, follow the tutorial quests to Horizon, rescue your dog from the bone cave, then build a workbench and a claimed bed before chasing anything else. The cold — not combat — is what kills new players.

You play Rook, an engineer with rebuilding skills but little wilderness experience. The moon shattered about ten years before the game begins, plunging the world into an endless winter, and Rook is drawn into the frozen region by a radio signal from a long-lost friend, Icarus. The long-term goal is reaching Icarus at the City Mall — but the Early Access build limits you to the starting region, with the rest of the map closed off behind an invisible wall for now. Think of the current map as one big valley to learn, loot and master.

Choose a background and specialization

Character creation offers two picks that shape your opening hours without locking you out of anything:

Background — Survivor, Smuggler or Hunter. These mainly change your starting items (the Hunter, for example, begins with more hunting-oriented gear). It is a head start, not a class.
Specialization — adds +1 to three skills:

Specialization	Boosted skills
Engineer	running, axes, toughness
Tracker	skinning, bows, knives
Scavenger	lockpicking, sneaking, running
Marksman	accuracy, firearms, bows

Skills level by use anyway — chop wood to raise axes, take hits to raise toughness — so pick whatever sounds fun. Tracker is a comfortable first choice if you plan to live off hunting.

You also design your dog here: breed (shepherd, border collie, golden retriever, husky or rottweiler), coat and name. You will not actually meet it until the rescue quest, so do not panic when it is absent from the prologue.

First-hour priorities

Loot everything in the starting area. Some containers give no interaction prompt at all — walk up and press the interact key anyway. R loots everything in a container at once.
Hand-craft stone tools from the inventory craft menu (TAB/I): a stone axe for wood, a stone pickaxe for stone and flint, and a shiv for skinning animals and prying locks.
Always carry fire materials. Two stone plus a little wood is a campfire anywhere. Getting caught out at night without one is the classic first death.
Follow the tutorial quests toward Horizon, the main survivor camp. Robyn and the local trader kick off the early questline, the camp has a free repair bench, and the early quest rewards include the survivor's backpack upgrade.
Rescue the dog in the bone cave (the quest "Dog Days") as soon as you hold a bandage and a piece of raw meat. Bring both — a bear guards the cave. Details in our dog companion guide.
Build a starter base: workbench, four walls, a door, a roof and a claimed bed. Claiming the bed sets your respawn point, and a roof turns a campfire into real shelter.

Inventory is slot-based, not weight-based

There is no weight limit in Permafrost — your backpack simply has a fixed number of slots, and most items stack within a slot. The casual backpack starts at 15 slots; an early quest reward upgrades you to the survivor's backpack with 20 slots, and later questlines add more (the Skinwalker's reward backpack adds a further five slots, for example). Your rescued dog also carries supplies in its saddle bags. So loot freely — you manage slots, not kilograms.

Two inventory habits pay off immediately: repair tools at a repair bench before they hit zero durability (a tool that reaches zero is destroyed outright), and strip every abandoned car you pass — wrecks reliably yield scrap, cloth, plastic and sometimes ammunition, the staples of early crafting.

Blueprint points and skills

New crafting and building recipes are unlocked with blueprint points in the blueprint tree. You earn points by leveling the crafting and building skills — that is, by crafting and building anything at all (players report roughly 10 XP per crafted item, so batch-crafting cheap recipes is a legitimate leveling strategy).

Early quests quietly expect you to spend two points on tribal clothes and two on the scrap tool set, so resist the urge to dump every point into decorative base pieces. Warm clothing is progression, not fashion: each tier raises the temperature at which you can operate comfortably.

Surviving the cold and the dark

Watch the body warmth meter. Clothing has a cold-resistance rating; when the air is colder than your gear, warmth drains, and at zero you gain hypothermia and start losing health. Our cold survival guide explains the whole system.
Do not travel at night early on. Temperatures plunge, visibility collapses and predators roam. Plan trips around daylight and sleep through the night in a claimed bed or a tent.
The music changes when danger is near — human or animal. Treat a sudden shift in the soundtrack as a warning siren.
Falls cause internal bleeding with little warning beyond a status effect. Check your effects panel after any drop and carry bandages.
Animal fat is worth keeping: it renders into candles and feeds the tanning rack for treated hide.
Save manually from the pause menu before anything risky. The autosave exists, but players report it can be over an hour old when you actually need it — see how saving works.

Getting around

Fast travel uses sled posts at major locations: interact with a post to unlock it, and travel between unlocked posts is free. Travel is blocked while you are in combat and during severe storms, so it is an escape plan only before things go wrong. Early on, repairing the collapsed bridge on the road toward Horizon shortens your daily loop considerably.

Common beginner mistakes

Rushing out at night or into storms instead of sleeping until morning.
Letting a favorite tool break. Zero durability means gone forever, not merely blunt.
Ignoring raw materials like fat, cloth and plastic because they are not immediately edible or buildable.
Spending blueprint points randomly, then lacking the two points the story asks for next.
Trusting the autosave before entering a cold zone or a cave.

FAQ

Is there a weight limit in Permafrost? No. Inventory is slot-based: the casual backpack has 15 slots and early quest rewards upgrade it. Manage slots and stacks, not kilograms.

Which specialization is best for beginners? None is mandatory — skills level by use. Tracker (skinning/bows/knives) is a popular first pick because hunting feeds you and supplies hide.

What should I do first? Hand-craft stone tools, stockpile wood and stone for campfires, follow the tutorial quests to Horizon, and rescue the dog from the bone cave as soon as you have a bandage and raw meat.

Can I explore beyond the starting region? Not in the current Early Access build — the map is limited to the starting region by an invisible wall. The City Mall endgame lies beyond it.

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