Follow These Handy Tips To Get Started With SCUM (Beginners Guide)

Our SCUM Beginners Guide will help you get started with SCUM. In this guide, we have covered all the basic aspects of the game alongside some general tips.

Starting out in the multiplayer survival game, SCUM, but confused about what steps to take? HUD elements or some gameplay concepts not being quite explanatory for you? Well, worry not, because with our SCUM Beginners Guide, you can get an early footing in the form of basic familiarity with the core concepts of SCUM.

SCUM Beginners Guide

Now before you even start the game, there’s a lot of thinking that should be given to how you create your character. There’s an age that you can choose which contributes about two points to all four or some of the attributes. Your body type will be the other factor which determines how many attribute points you can gather up.

Within each attribute tree, you’ve got skills that alter the gameplay drastically and depending on how you utilize and upgrade those skills, the whole experience changes.

When you’re done making your character and start your journey for the first time, you’ll need to be familiar with the information that you have on screen. The HUD elements are divided into three sections: the left bottom corner which shows you your current health, stamina, energy, and hydration.

The second section is a quick access bar in the middle which acts as a shortcut to the inventory. Lastly, you have the ‘fame’ status in the top right corner of the screen. The more activities you carry out and the higher your skill points, the more functions it serves including the revival of your character.

Holding down the tab button brings up a spin wheel which has functions like a toilet, medical aid, actions, speech, and taunts. Basically, for survival, you would need to answer the call of nature and it is through this wheel menu that you’re able to do so. Diagnosing diseases and treating wounds are also carried out by this menu.

Pressing Tab will lead you to the other, main game menu. Here you can find different sections to go through.

Going into the inventory menu, you can see the items you’ve picked up including your apparel. In order to use certain items like weapons, consumables while you’re roaming, you can drag these items to the quick access section to save time.

You also have an indicator near every item in your inventory which tells you how warm or wet the item may be, red and green color coding respectively for the aforementioned states of the item.

The amount of slots that you get in the Inventory directly depends on your apparel. So say if wish to wear a jacket rather than a half-sleeve T-shirt, well, you’ve got additional pockets and that reflects in the Inventory tab as additional slots. Same goes for trousers.

If you’re not finding any luck with the fancy dresses, pick up a bag as it also increases your capacity to carry items and equipment.

Here you can also use the Vicinity tab to get to know of any useful item that may be around you within your surroundings. You can also press tab and go to this section to make sure that you’re not missing on anything vital for survival.

This also saves time because, otherwise, you may have to look for items very cautiously and even search areas thoroughly to get the tools lying around.

Going to the Crafting Menu, you have different items with different shades of color highlighting them. A red shade indicates that you do not meet the requirement for the materials needed to craft that item. A yellow shade means some items are available while a grey shade indicates that you don’t have a high enough skill level to craft the desired item.

Lastly, items without any shades of color behind them indicate that you can craft that item. Items can be dragged from the Inventory tab to crafting to ensure that you’ll be able to create the desired item.

You can monitor and check the nutrition requirements, physical performance of your character including heartbeat, bowel movement, and basic metabolism in the Metabolism tab. All the health reports and analysis of your character’s physical being is present in this section.

Lastly, you’ve got the Events tab where you can check out if any new PVP events are live or will be soon. There is also leaderboards and fame points chart available on this tab.

Tools for Survival

There are two threats in the world you roam: one forms your fellow prisoners and the other for zombie-like creatures known as puppets. Now you may want to spend some decent ammunition on dealing with the former, human threat but why not find a way to go with as little of ammo, if not any, for the puppets. We’ve got a way!

It involves picking up 2 pieces of rock and then uses the Crafting Menu to produce a Stone Knife. This will help you cut off the trees’ branches which will ultimately allow you to make a wooden spear useful in dealing with any puppets.

Remember, the crafted spears will be in the vicinity column and you have to double click on them to enter the quick access menu and drag them into the hand carry section manually. This will help you deal with puppets, especially if you’re aiming for the head as it will kill them instantly. Otherwise, keep moving backward until you find the right opportunity to hit them with the spear.

You can use the Stone Knife in cutting down pieces of cloth and apparel into rags which can later be used in crafting bags for increased carrying capacity. Be sure you’ll also need ropes for the bag. Go forward with dirty rags if you have them because the clean ones can be used as bandages to heal wounds. Otherwise, you risk getting an infection!

When it comes to sustenance, make sure you’re drinking at least 300 ml of water each hour. Otherwise, you’ll first go into the Thirst state and soon after into the Dehydrated state affecting your stamina and health. For this purpose, also make sure you sweat less.

You can ensure this by not wearing too many layers of clothing. Try to stay away from drinking unclean water as that will give you diarrhea.

Some alcoholic drinks can poison you, while the others, the fine ones, may cause alcohol addiction that will fare badly on your character’s health. Lastly, if you belong to the fat body type, then your chances of surviving without food are more than that of a slim or a muscular person. With that said, don’t eat too much either, that will affect your health in a bad manner as well!

SCUM Wiki

Crafting Tips
How to Cook
How to Start a Fire
Opening Canned Food

How to Pee, Poo, and Vomit

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Ali is a passionate RPG gamer. He believes that western RPGs still have a lot to learn from JRPGs. He is editor-in-chief at SegmentNext.com but that doesn't stop him from writing about his favorite video ...