Aska Guide | Tips and Tricks for Beginners

This Aska Guide will explain the HUD, tell you about the game's mechanics, and walk you through your first few days of starting a new Viking settlement.

As a hybrid survival game and colony sim, Aska can be especially challenging for veterans of either genre. Poor choices in the beginning can make long-term survival extremely difficult when invasions start coming. Read on for an explanation of the HUD — after that, we'll get to our Starter Guide walkthrough!

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Aska HUD Explanation

1. Settlement Issues: Pressing Tab will bring up the "Settlement Issues" interface that will detail any major problems with your villagers or buildings.
2. Compass: The compass shows you the direction you're facing along with any buildings or map markers in that direction.
3. Event Warning: Any major events (such as invasions) will pop up on the center of the screen.
4. Calendar and Counters: This section of the UI has the following information:
   • Season: The season of the year is listed at the top.
   • Time of Day: The time of the day is the second item on the list.
   • Temperature: The current Temperature is shown here. Negative temperatures will cause your Warmth stat to deplete.
   • Villagers Count: The current number of living villagers is listed here.
5. Minimap: The minimap is shown at the top right of the UI. It also lists the number of days you've survived at the bottom of it.
6. Current Event/Weather: Any current event will be indicated by an icon here. Otherwise, the current weather is shown here. Importantly, an ongoing invasion will be represented by a creature's claw.
7. Countdowns: Countdowns to any upcoming events such as an arriving villager or the next Winter Invasion will be shown here.
8. Announcements: Announcements of weather changes or events are detailed with a text message here.
9. Controls: Controls are shown on the bottom-left and bottom-right of the screen. These UI elements can be disabled via the menu.
10. Food: Your current level of hunger is represented here. If Food drops to 0, you will start losing health and your stamina will be restore slower.
11. Water: Your current level of hydration is shown here. If Water drops to 0, you will start losing health and your stamina will restore slower.
12. Warmth: Your current Warmth is shown here. Warmth is reduced slowly over time by negative temperatures or by being submerged in the ocean. If Warmth drops too low, you can get a cold as a debuff. Furthermore, your Warmth dropping to 0 will result in you losing health over time and your stamina will restore slower.
13. Hotbar: The Hotbar shows the ten items you can actively use at any one time. These do not count as separate inventory slots.
14. Health and Stamina: Your Health (represented by the red bar) and your Stamina (represented by the light yellow bar) are shown here. If your Health drops to 0, you die. If your Stamina is low, you won't be able to attack, use tools, or run. Certain negative debuffs (or being at 0 for core survival stats such as Food or Water) can reduce or altogether halt Stamina regeneration.
15. Buffs/Debuffs: Buffs and Debuffs are shown above the Health and Stamina bars. You can get more details on active Status Effects in your inventory.
16. Equipped Tool/Weapon: Whichever weapon or tool you're currently holding will be shown here.

Aska Starter Guide Walkthrough 

Now that we've explained the HUD, let's get going with our Aska Starter Guide! We'll walk you through your first few days in the game and advise you on how to maximize your chances of long-term survival.

Creating Your Character

Before you generate a world, you'll want to create your character. You can choose between the male Ragnar or the female Aska. You can also change your cosmetic appearance via the menu screen.

There does not yet appear to be a way to change your character's sex or appearance for a particular world after you've created it, so make sure you're happy with how your character looks before moving forward!

Coming Ashore

You'll begin the game on a beach near a wrecked boat. A massive stone Jotun roars from the ocean and, thankfully, returns to the depths. You're free to roam the world, but you have literally nothing other than the clothes on your back and a Water Pouch.

The shipwreck serves as your respawn point until you build The Eye of Odin; you will also teleport here if you hit the "Unstuck" command. Should The Eye of Odin be destroyed, your respawn point will revert to this shipwreck.

There are five glowing blue crystals in boxes near your wrecked ship. This resource is Jotun Blood, an item that is used to summon villagers to your Settlement. Pick up all 5 pieces and carry them with you until later.

Gathering Supplies

It's time to gather some supplies! You're going to want to get some food, some water, and some resources for crafting your first few tools.

Choose a direction and run along the coast. Press Z to use your "Search Area" ability. You will find three distinct types of resources:

Mussels are a type of food that can be found clustered on large stones. I have never seen them respawn in one game that has gone on for 90 days, so treat these as a finite resource. Fortunately, they can be found on the entire beach surrounding the island.

Most food — Mussels included — will spoil over time unless stored properly. I recommend taking no more than 30 or so Mussels to sustain you for the first few days so as not to waste them.

You'll also want to get some Small Stones. I recommend collecting a minimum of 30 Small Stones and no more than 40 Small Stones to start.

Avoid taking any Thatch for the moment. You won't need it until you reach the second tier of buildings, so there's no reason to harvest any now.

You may also encounter floating enemies called "Wisps." They're fairly weak, but you can't effectively kill them without a melee weapon. Do your best to avoid them while you collect your 30–40 Small Stones and 30 Mussels.

Once you have these items, turn inland and look for Dwarf Spruce and Flax; these will give you Sticks and Fiber, respectively. Collect at least 2 Fiber and 2 Sticks; you can then use these to craft your first Stone Axe.

Crafting Your First Set of Tools

Press B to bring up the Build Menu; from here, you can craft tools and your first buildings. We're going to start by making 1 piece of Rope from the Fiber we've collected. Then, craft 1 Stone Blade from the Small Stone you've got. After that, you'll have everything you need to make a Stone Axe.

Find the nearest Young Fir and chop it down. (You won't be able to chop down any other trees until you get a better Axe.) Then, chop the fallen tree down and you'll get an assortment of Long Sticks, Sticks, Bark, and Resin.

Pick up the Bark and open your inventory, then hold shift and left-click on it; this will break down the Bark into Fiber which can then be crafted into more Rope. Next, pick up the Resin and Sticks; leave the Long Sticks on the ground where they are.

You're going to want to make the following tools and weapons:

• Wooden Hoe
• Stone Axe (which you should already have)
• Stone Pickaxe
• Wooden Hammer
• Stone Knife
• Simple Torch
• Flimsy Club
• Flimsy Shortbow

All of these items can be made from some combination of Sticks, Stone Blades, Resin, and Rope, all of which you now know how to get. All tools and weapons have durability and will break eventually. Make a full set of tools.

You'll need Arrows for your bow; you can get Feathers by finding Fallen Bird Nests in the wooden areas further inland. For now, though, a melee weapon will suffice. You can also use your Stone Axe, Stone Pickaxe, and Stone Knife as weapons in a pinch, but you'll want to save their durability for harvesting resources.

Finding a Settlement Site

Your next step is to find a place to build a Settlement. This will start as a simple base camp, but it can eventually evolve into a bustling village.

You may be tempted to simply walk a little further ashore and start building, but choosing a poor location at the start of the game can make it very difficult to defend your village or collect resources at a later time. I advise that you consider several factors before moving forward.

1. Cave Stone Location: First and foremost, I think it's a good idea to track down the island's Cave Stone. Based on my experience, I have only ever seen one Cave Stone on an island. This is the only place where you can reliably get Iron Ore, so building your Settlement near it is a smart move in the early game.
2. Avoid Enemy Spawners: If you see a monument or a weird-looking tree with monsters around it, that's an enemy spawner. Enemies will continue spawning there for many weeks (if not forever), and they can and will attack your villagers and your buildings if they get too close. As a rule of thumb, you don't want to be able to see any enemy spawners from the location where you're building your village.
3. Build Near the Beach: The Beach gives you access to easy-to-find Small Stones, Mussels for emergency food, and Reeds for Thatch (which is needed for mid-game and late-game buildings. This also allows you to set up places for villagers to fish.
4. Avoid Birch Trees and Oak Trees: You cannot cut down Birch Trees and Oak Trees until you get Iron Axes, and it will take several hours to get all of the necessary buildings for making them. That means that you won't be able to expand in those areas. Try to avoid building too near these trees so your Settlement has room to grow.
5. Find Mostly Flat Land: You can use the Wooden Hoe to flatten the land to some degree, but steep cliffs or tall hills can be difficult to adequately flatten. Try to find relatively flat land with little variation in terrain height for your Settlement location.
6. Find Natural Water Collectors: Natural Water Collectors are special stones that can collect water when it rains. More importantly, these can be turned into Wells which are the best source of regenerating water. You'll want to have at least two or three Natural Water Collectors near where you're building your Settlement; the Wells can get quite crowded once your Settlement population numbers in the dozens of villagers!

You can safely spend several days exploring the island with few ill consequences, so take your time and find a good place to build. Keep in mind that you can build anywhere on the island, so you can always dismantle old buildings and retrieve some (but not all) of the resources used to make them.

Ultimately, though, finding a good location for your Settlement is critical to your success. A poor defensive position or a lack of access to useful resources can make long-term survival very difficult!

Building Your Settlement

Once you've found a good location, it's time to actually build your Settlement. You'll want to construct the following buildings in this order:

1. Simple Fire
2. Upgrade Simple Fire to Campfire
3. Rain Collector
4. At least 1 Well
5. Shelter
6. Eye of Odin

The Shelter allows you to sleep and restore your health. It's also where your villagers will live, so you'll need to build another Shelter for yourself later.

Summoning Your First Villager

Now it's finally time to summon your first villager. Interact with the Eye of Odin and transfer all 5 pieces of Jotun Blood inside. Then, hit the "Activate" button and you'll be given a choice between two villagers.

Each villager has a total of 5 perks, but you're only able to see two of them for each villager. Some perks are positive, some are negative, and some are both positive and negative. Carefully consider which of the two villagers you would like to join your Settlement.

Unfortunately, there does not appear to be a way to reroll this choice; you must choose one of these two villagers. If they're both pretty bad, then you should try to pick the least bad villager.

It takes 10 real-world minutes for a villager to arrive, and you can only summon one villager at a time. Keep this in mind if you find yourself in a situation where you need more villagers.

When your villager arrives, you'll need to assign them a home and a job. Interact with a Shelter and you can assign a villager to it; alternatively, you can add a villager to a Shelter by pressing Tab, clicking on the Settlement tab, and selecting a specific Shelter on the right-hand side under "Housing."

As for a job, villagers must be assigned to work at a particular structure by interacting with that structure or by using the Settlement menu. Villagers may need tools to perform their jobs (such as cutting down trees at a Woodcutter's Pit), and their tools will lose durability over time. That means you'll need to ensure a constant supply of replacement tools for your villagers.

If you don't select a job for them, a villager will be a "Builder" by default; they will help with constructing buildings in your Settlement. Leave your first villager as a builder for now.

Villagers have all of the same needs you do: Health, Food, Water, and Warmth. They also have a "Rest" requirement (which you do not) and a "Morale" meter. If any of these stats are poor, your villagers could die or not work as efficiently as you'd like.

Your villagers will get water on their own (as long as a source of water is available, such as a Well), but you'll need to provide food. You can either collect it yourself or have someone else get it through farming or a Gatherer's Hut. For now, you can gather a few small pieces of food and trade with your one villager so they have it in their inventory.

Growing Your Village

Your first villager can help out with building, so now's a great time to expand. You're going to build three new buildings all at the same time:  a Gatherer's Pit, a Woodcutter's Pit, and a Stonecutter's Pit.

The Gatherer's Pit gives you storage for food, seeds, and plant materials (such as Fiber). The Woodcutter's Pit gives you storage for wood, and the Stonecutter's Pit gives you storage for stone.

Critically, these three buildings will allow you to assign villagers to them and allow them to collect these items in areas designated by their respective marker flags. For example, look at the areas covered by these three Food Foraging Markers:

Focus on constructing these three buildings. When they're done, you're going to want to head out and build at least 2 or 3 additional Food Foraging Markers to cover a wider area as shown in the image above.

Take note that wild food takes quite some time to regrow and it will run out eventually; you'll need to expand the area covered by Marker Flags as time goes on. Make sure to avoid putting any marker flags near enemy spawners so you lessen the chances of your villagers getting killed!

Next, assign your sole builder villager to the Gatherer's Hut. A Gatherer will collect food and plants in the designated area and requires no special tools, so this will get you a decent supply of early-game food while you're growing your population.

Getting a Second Villager

Next, we're going to need to get some more Jotun Blood. Look around for a glowing blue stone. Whack it with your Pickaxe and you'll get a fair amount of stone along with 1–4 pieces of Jotun Blood by the time you totally destroy it.

Remember, you need 5 pieces of Jotun Blood to summon a villager. You will probably have to mine at least two of these glowing blue Jotun Blood Shards to get enough. Leave the stone behind for now and just take the Jotun Blood back with you.

Begin the process of summoning your next villager at the Eye of Odin. Then, get to work on building a second and a third Shelter. You'll need one for your next villager and one for yourself. When the next villager arrives, leave them with the builder job and assign them to one of the Shelters.

Further Expansion

It's time to expand once again with some new structures! Constructing the Gatherer's Pit, Woodcutter's Pit, and Stonecutter's Pit opens up some new options on the tech tree.

First, we're going to build a Workshop Pit. This will allow you to craft superior tools such as the Large Stone Axe; this bigger axe allows you to fell full Fir Trees and get access to Logs.

Craft a Large Stone Axe and Large Stone Pickaxe and place your old tools in the tool rack behind the crafting table in the Workshop Pit. You should always craft superior tools when you can!

Next, we're going to do an "Add-On" for the Campfire. Add-ons are expansions or upgrades to existing buildings that add functionality. The Fire Cover will allow you to use the Campfire while it's raining, and the Barbecue will allow you to grill raw food into something a little better.

When the Barbecue is done, you'll want to cook some of the food your Gatherer has collected and store it in the attached storage area. You can also assign a worker here if you want; they'll automatically cook food based on the tasks you assign to this structure.

You should also build a Cooking House. This allows you to make even better recipes that give you a greater amount of Food restored per item, which means you're using less food overall. Not all food items restore the same amount of hunger!

You should build no more than 12 Shelters for your villagers. Once you have that many villagers, you should have enough people that you can build Cottages. While Cottages are more expensive, each Cottage can comfortably fit 6 villagers in it along with a fireplace and Firewood Storage.

Defending Your Village

You should now have around ten total buildings and two villagers. It's time to start thinking about defense. Invasion events can happen at any time and you're going to want some backup to fend them off.

It's important to note that villagers can die. Once they're dead, they're gone for good. You can supply them with food, water, and a Campfire to meet their basic needs, but you'll also need to protect them from enemies.

The first thing you should do is build a Barracks; to paraphrase the Spartans, a wall of men is better than a wall of stone. The Barracks has a radius around it, and buildings within this radius are considered "defended." Eventually, you'll want to have multiple Barracks spread out all over your village, ideally covering every single building.

Each Barracks can fit a total of 3 villagers in it at a time. Each villager will need either a two-handed club or a one-handed club and a shield. You can make these weapons at the Workshop Pit. I recommend that you dedicate 25%–30% of your villagers to the military. If you have 12 villagers total, at least 3–4 of them should be warriors.

Don't waste your time with the Archery Range. Archers burn through a ton of sticks by constantly breaking bows and losing arrows. I recommend that you don't even think about Archers until you have around 40 or 50 villagers and a stable income of all necessary resources and food.

Once you reach 12 villagers, you should also build a Hedge Wall around your village with several gates. These walls don't last very long, but they are strong enough that they can buy you some time to respond to attacking enemies.

Surviving Winter

With your defenses sorted, your next challenge will be surviving your first winter. You'll want to focus on building four structures, in particular.

First, you're going to want to upgrade your Workshop Pit to a Workshop Hut. This will require upgrading your Gatherer's Pit to a Gatherer's Hut, your Woodcutter's Pit to a Woodcutter's Hut, and your Stonecutter's Pit to a Stonecutter's Hut.

A Workshop Pit gives you access to more crafting recipes, but that's not the best part — you can add specialized add-ons that allow you to craft new items. One of these add-ons is the second of three structures we'll need: the Tailor.

Simply put, the Tailor will allow you to turn Fiber into Linen Cloth and Linen Thread. These two items can then be used to make clothing for yourself and your villagers.

You'll want to have a full set of clothing for yourself first and foremost. After that, you'll want to give every villager a cloak and a thick hood at the minimum, starting with your warriors. This will help reduce the loss of their Warmth stat.

Next, you'll want to build a second Campfire with a cover for redundancy. You'll need fire to stay warm, and so will your villagers. If your only Campfire is destroyed, you might have some people freeze to death while you're trying to rebuild it.

Finally, you're going to build a Warehouse. A Warehouse allows you to place specialized storage containers for particular items inside, such as Firewood. I recommend having at least two Firewood Storage units for your first winter — you don't want to run out when winter is at its coldest!

Construction aside, you're also going to want to stockpile as much cooked food as you can. You'll have a harder time running around and foraging in the winter, so prepare as much as you can before it gets too cold!

Preparing for the Battles Ahead

When winter is over, the cycle will begin anew. Spring has arrived and the air is warming, but new challenges are just over the horizon.

The end of your second year will bring with it your first Winter Invasion, a terrifying event where a dozen Skeletons, Draugr, and even a few Followers will assault your town. You'll need to combat both the cold and the forces of darkness at the same time, and it's not easy.

You'll want to build at least a few Stone Lanterns and some religious icons around the village. This will allow you to see at night and they'll increase villager morale.

You'll also want to start diversifying your food options by expanding into fishing and farming. Gatherers can only do so much, and farming is a sustainable source of food as long as you have enough workers on the job.

Finally, you'll want to consider upgrading your buildings and equipment to sturdier stuff. Finding the Cave Stone and building a Cave Entrance will give you access to a steady supply of Iron Ore, allowing you to toss away those shoddy wood and stone tools for something a little more robust.

There are plenty of challenges to face in Aska, but you should have a solid grasp of the basics thanks to this guide. Good luck, and have fun building the Viking village of your dreams. You can learn more about this challenging game by checking out our other guides below!

Aska Multiplayer Functionality

Aska supports online co-op for a total of four players, with one of the four players serving as the host.

Aska Save File Location

You can find the Aska Save File in:

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\LocalLow\Sand Sailor Studio\Aska\data

Where "USERNAME" is your Windows username.

Aska Death Consequences

If you die in Aska, you'll lose some of your accrued skill points. You may also lose some of the items you dropped.

There are no corpse markers for you, so it's also possible that you might not be able to find your body at all until you stumble upon it later.

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Thanks for checking out our Aska Guide! You can learn more about the game by reading our other guides below — check 'em out!