Start With Relaxed or Paradise for Practice
Choose Relaxed for a slower descent or Paradise for more loot and fewer hazards while learning. Prioritize starting supplies, layer time, lighting and hazard settings so you can practise the systems that are giving you trouble.
This preset guidance describes the Steam demo 7.0.1 menu. The full release explicitly supports adjustable loot and danger, but use its own menu descriptions for exact values instead of transferring the demo's settings or older itch prototype advice unchanged.
Choose the Preset That Fits Your Practice Goal
| Preset | Practical Difference |
|---|---|
| Normal as a baseline run | Use the baseline preset when you want a reference point for comparing your custom practice settings. |
| Relaxed for a slower descent | Provides more time, making it a useful choice when you need room to learn inventory, medical and crafting routines. |
| Paradise for gentler early practice | Provides more loot and fewer hazards, reducing the pressure of gathering supplies while learning. |
| Desolate for scarcer resources | Requires tighter route planning because resources are scarcer and hazards are more frequent. |
| Unchipped for reduced information | Removes the health panel and layer time limit, restricts vision to line of sight and starts you without supplies. |
| Endless in the documented demo menu | Listed but marked unavailable in demo 7.0.1, so choose an available preset for practice. |
Set Up a Run Around the Skill You Want to Learn
- Select Relaxed or Paradise before starting a new demo run to establish a forgiving practice setup.
- Choose Flashlight or Full kit under starting supplies if searching for light and emergency equipment keeps interrupting your practice.
- Increase the layer time limit if you need more time to assemble medical and crafting equipment.
- Review ambient light before starting, using the lighting option to address difficulty seeing the cave.
- Lower trap density for a practice run focused on menus and supplies, reducing how many traps spawn.
- Start the run and inspect your starting inventory and cave lighting to check that the setup matches the practice session you intended.
Give each practice run a clear purpose, such as learning a crafting chain or becoming comfortable reading injuries. Change only the settings that get in the way of that purpose, so you can tell which adjustment helped.
Supplies and Time Change Your Opening Route
Starting with a Flashlight or Full kit reduces the immediate need to search for light and emergency supplies. A longer layer limit gives you more time to assemble equipment, so your opening route can focus on preparing a useful kit before pushing onward.
Paradise suits a session where gathering enough materials is the main obstacle. Relaxed suits a session where you understand what to do but need more time to do it, while Desolate asks you to plan around scarce resources and more frequent hazards.
Do not choose Unchipped solely to remove time pressure while learning the medical interface. Its missing health panel changes the information available to you, so it adds a different learning challenge alongside the removed layer limit.
Adjust the Modifier Behind the Problem
| Option | Relevant Setting |
|---|---|
| Too much searching for basic supplies | Starting supplies changes your opening equipment; loot density changes how much loot spawns. |
| Wounds leave too little time to respond | Bleeding rate controls blood loss from wounds, making it the relevant modifier for practising a slower response. |
| Infection interrupts every learning attempt | Infection chance affects whether wounds become infected; infection speed affects how quickly infection progresses. |
| Temperature dominates the practice run | Ambient temperature offset shifts layers hotter or colder. Check this alongside the preset you selected. |
| Fatigue or recovery complicates the session | The demo options include forced sleep and infinite Last Stands; inspect these when deciding what your practice run should allow. |
Use these controls to isolate a problem before combining harder conditions. If you change supplies, infection and hazards together, it becomes harder to judge whether you improved at the task or simply changed the run around it.
Separate Demo Settings From Full-Release Features
The developer's demo 7.0 announcement confirms a reworked run-settings menu, added presets, a full settings menu and an actual pause menu. The demo 7.0.1 menu supplies the individual options and preset descriptions used for the demo advice here.
For the full release, the publisher explicitly describes adjustable loot and danger, and the developer promises balance changes. Use those broad controls as your starting point, then read the release menu before choosing exact modifiers.
When moving from the Steam demo or older itch prototype to the full release, rebuild your preferred practice setup from the options shown in that version. Keep the same goal—enough supplies, time and visibility to learn—without relying on remembered demo values.