Card Survival: Tropical Island: Beating Hard Mode

There are many ways to play Card Survival, and with the use of custom characters, the options only grow greater. For players who feel they’ve grown confident enough to consistently beat the game under normal conditions, custom characters provide many new challenges or unexpected scenarios. Among Card Survival’s most challenging achievements is Hard Mode, namely, beating the game while taking 10000 points worth of penalties.

At first, such a huge disadvantage seems insurmountable, but with proper selection of starting conditions, and some strict time and resource management in the early game, Hard Mode is absolutely survivable.

It should be noted that much of the fun of Card Survival lies in figuring out through trial and error how to succeed, so if you’ve never tried Hard Mode, I highly recommend pausing here and giving it some solid effort before reading further; in other words, gameplay spoilers ahead! But for those who just want to check off another achievement or those who have tried but are still struggling, here’s my best advice for accomplishing this elusive objective. Note that this guide assumes players are already well familiar with the game’s mechanics and the layout and resources of the island; essential knowledge to succeed at this challenge.

Getting the character created correctly is probably 90% of the challenge in Hard Mode. There are many potential strategies that might be viable, and I’ll discuss a few of the options to some degree, but ultimately I’ll provide the custom setup that I found to be most tenable for success. Your mileage may vary. Depending on how much you’ve already played, a number of these options might still be too expensive to unlock.

Where your character starts their adventure has a huge impact on the overall difficulty and specific challenges they’ll face. This can be further affected by other start conditions you may or may not select. Consequently, starting location can be a significant source of points, with some options providing as many as 2,500. That’s 1/4th of your required 10,000! But you get those points for a good reason. Areas far from potential water supplies and useful resources have a high chance of making a start nearly if not completely impossible, depending on how many other penalties you’ve selected. For this reason, I recommend a location that isn’t too punishing, preferring to get my needed points elsewhere.

Specifically, I recommend the Abandoned Farm start. Beginning with a mud hut (damaged), a kiln, and a reservoir already built saves an enormous amount of time in the mid-game and unlocks access to technology that would normally not be accessible so early. Added to that, the farm is considered a challenge and actually grants 500 points. The main reason I believe this to be the case is the scarcity of water, but that can be overcome.

What the specific characteristics of the island itself are can vary widely. Most significant are the frequency of rain, and the presence of hostile creatures. Similar to the farm, wise choices here can actually make some aspects of your start a bit easier while still netting you some points, when combined with other options.

Most importantly, Extreme Rain is an option that solves more problems than it creates, while also netting a nice 750 points. If you start at the farm, you’ll have a reservoir ready to go, meaning the main challenge of the farm, scarcity of water, is addressed almost immediately. With increased rainfall, climbing becomes much less viable, and hypothermia can possibly be a problem, but neither are a significant hinderance; especially in the early game when survival will be the most difficult. The only other significant impact of Extreme Rain is the ability to use a drying rack, which will effectively be restricted to the dry season; the only time rain will actually be uncommon. I recommend building two racks when there’s time in order to maximize drying capacity in that limited window.

One of the biggest sources of potential points, and one I highly recommend, is hostile enemies. Killer Drones, Seahounds, and the Macaque Curse combined will get you 4,250 points. That’s a huge chunk of your 10,000, and all you have to do is not get yourself killed. Normally, accomplishing this would be quite the obstacle, but later on we’ll discuss how to make surviving all these threats manageable. A minor but useful positive of these threats is that meat, leather, bone, and scrap metal will be readily accessible, if you’re willing to fight for it.

The last major source of points is the combination of traits, equipment, skills, and health of your character. Here more than anywhere, a careful selection of options that synergize well or otherwise cancel other penalties is key to success. Here too are the only options with negative point values that I recommend taking, being useful enough to warrant even larger penalties to offset their cost on the way to 10,000 points. Two of these that I generally recommend are Pain Tolerance, and Optimist. With Pain Tolerance, your character can generally handle minor injuries like blisters, sunburn, bruises, and others without a significant impact on stress. It’s not essential, but it makes things easier for only -500 points. Optimist is just a solid all-around benefit under all circumstances. Pretty much everything going wrong with your character will impact you mood, and a rock-bottom mood adds time to all of your activities; a serious penalty. Optimist will help to keep your mood from getting dire and applies to almost every setback you might encounter along the way.

Assuming you’ve selected Extreme Rain, there are two traits that can be fairly easily included; Bug Attractant, and Pale Skin. Both of these can be annoyances or downright problems under normal circumstances, but with so much rainfall and cloud-cover, neither will significantly affect you until the dry season, by which time you should be equipped to handle them. They aren’t worth a ton of points, only 1250 together, but their contribution will eventually be just enough to get us to the 10,000 goal.

Because sunburn and bug bites can be a vector for disease, we need to examine traits related to this common Card Survival threat. There are several disease related options in a custom start, but the best combination I have found is to take both Weak Immune System, and Immunized. Because of some upcoming selections, Immunized will be almost essential to survival, and since we then can’t get too seriously ill, the points from Weak Immune System are a good way to offset the Immunized bonus. Minor illnesses won’t kill us (probably).

Next, let’s talk about food. Water won’t be a big problem with rain and a reservoir to start, but how do we eat? Well, here, the focus will be on getting points to reach 10,000 and although your character won’t like it, food is actually just not that important in the early game. With this reasoning in mind, I recommend the following traits: Vegetarian, Shellfish Allergy, Nut Allergy, Obese, and Slow Metabolism. All together, these options yield a solid 2,500 points. Starting at the farm, you won’t have access to shellfish or coconuts for a while anyway, and because the farm starts with numerous rice fields, a vegetarian diet should be pretty manageable. It always feels bad to not use meat when you have it, but there are other ways to benefit from it eventually (mostly feeding enclosure animals or composting). Obese is a double-edged sword. It will make movement harder early on, which will be a big challenge; but it also provides some hefty fat reserves, making early-game food pretty much unnecessary. Combined with Slow Metabolism, your character can literally go weeks without eating at the start of the game, assuming they can handle the extreme stress of severe hunger.

There are several options for what equipment and supplies your character begins with, and many of them are viable. Some have a bit of overlap, and others offer unique tools. The key is deciding which give the best bang for their buck so to speak, and in this regard, I find the Military option to be a clear outlier. Although -1500 points is expensive, the benefits of this option are phenomenally useful. A full set of clothing, and most importantly boots which will last you at least 90 days are a simple way to minimize discomfort, keep mental structure up, and crucially, provide some early cloth. The belt and its components though, are where this option truly shines. The gun, although limited in ammunition, is very powerful, allowing even an unskilled character to take down more threatening enemies (though I don’t recommend doing so unless you’re ready to handle some injuries; seahounds, drones, and other large enemies won’t typically go down in one shot). The canteen is a two-bowl liquid storage that prevents evaporation and takes up minimal encumbrance; perfect for exploring without the fear of dehydration if things go south on you while away from camp. Finally, the combat knife. This is the real hero of Military. Starting the game with a sharp, reusable knife makes countless tasks easier to achieve and critically allows the player to immediately begin training woodworking; providing quicker access to flutes and shovels, two important tools. It also serves as a reasonable weapon, though I still recommend crafting a spear early on.

For the last big source of points to reach 10,000, we turn to two intimidating options, Leg Fracture and Bleeding. Either one makes for a difficult start, and both simultaneously can make many starting scenarios simply impossible. Your character will be absolutely miserable for the beginning of their adventure, and every task will be arduous and must be carefully selected. That said, if you can survive the first two weeks, those injuries will be mostly a distant memory and the whopping 5,000 points they provide are yours to keep.

If you’ve been doing the math, you’ll see that we’re now at 11,500 points. No, I’m not making things more difficult than they need to be. I’ve simply saved the most impactful choice for last. You might be wondering how a bleeding, bone-fractured, obese survivor will be able to defeat the inevitable combat drones that will be hovering about. Or the eventual fearsome sea hounds that can stop a successful run in its tracks. Or the countless raiding macaques that will pilfer all your precious possessions until you can manage to get the door built on your hut. You have a gun, but only so many bullets. The answer, is the single most unbalanced starting option in the whole game, Stealth Master. For 1,500 points, you now have enough stealth skill to avoid every drone, every sea hound, every boar, every cobra, every monitor lizard. See a pigeon or a seagull? How about a 100% chance to kill it? Anytime a macaque shows up, hit it with a 100% spear strike and watch it run as your belongings remain safe, even without storage. And that’s with zero spear training! This one skill renders pretty much all creature threats on the island irrelevant and I think strongly needs a re-balance since they introduced the combat system. But for now, it’s our key to victory.

In summary, my recommended options for a Hard Mode play-through are:

• Abandoned Farm
• Extreme Rain
• Military
• Leg Fracture
• Bleeding
• Pale Skin
• Slow Metabolism
• Obese
• Vegetarian
• Shellfish Allergy
• Nut Allergy
• Optimist
• Immunized
• Weak Immune System
• Bug Attractant
• Pain Tolerance
• Seahounds
• Macaque Curse
• Killer Drones
• Stealth Master

Now that you have your character, how do they survive with so many penalties? The first couple of days are absolutely critical, and action efficiency must be strict. Even then, you’ll probably die several times until you get a sense of your priorities, but with some practice, the early game can be survived consistently.

At the very beginning, you can step outside and back into the hut to immediately unlock research options without spending any time. Might as well pick one to get started on. I recommend the stove, but it’s not that important. The glaring priority ultimately, are your injuries. Your first real task is to use some clothing (I recommend your underwear) to make a cloth bandage for your laceration. This will staunch the bleeding long enough to find what you need for a tourniquet. Next, start clearing the debris pile inside the hut. You’re looking for two things here. As soon as you get sticks, you’ll want to recover the bandage for cloth and make a proper tourniquet. When you find a large stick, immediately switch your research to the splint. Once you’ve acquired both the regular and large sticks, you can ignore any remaining debris for now. It’s time to head outside.

This is where a bit of multitasking will be important. First, you need to keep an eye on your laceration. As soon as it reaches 100% on clotting, you want to remove the tourniquet to avoid nerve damage. Your character is already in enough pain as it is. Once removed, you can dismantle the tourniquet to get your cloth back and remake the bandage. Although not perfect, it will help keep your wound from getting too infected. Remember you have a canteen of water in your belt to clean out the wound when necessary. Second, you need to carefully monitor your stamina. With a broken leg and obesity, it will be very easy to over-exert yourself. Collapsing to sleep for an hour will be unavoidable sometimes, but is a costly penalty for trying to do things too quickly. Progress will be slow at first. Unfortunately, you’re also trying to move quickly. Your starting mood will immediately plummet, and as soon as it reaches zero, tasks will take even more time. This will be most noticeable with exploring, where the time it will take will make avoiding exhaustion very challenging indeed.

As soon as you are out of the hut, begin exploring the Secret Valley. Between each trek, you’ll need to rest once or twice for 15 minutes to recover stamina. You have three goals while exploring. The first is to find stones. You’ll need them to make clay, a campfire, and an axe. The second goal is to find two wood. One will be your source of wood shavings for starting the fire as well as for training the woodworking skill, the other will be for the axe. The third goal is to discover the Deep Jungle. Remember to remove your tourniquet when the time comes and try not to collapse from exhaustion. The moment you finish researching the splint, get one crafted and on your broken leg to aid in healing. If you need fiber cords or long sticks, clear more debris, starting with the pile inside your hut. If you’ve found dry leaves, start researching the leaf bed. Otherwise return to whatever backup research you’re working on (recommend stove). With a splint equipped, continue to focus on exploring the valley. You want to do as much of this as you can before your mood bottoms out. Once your mood reaches 0 and exploring takes a full hour, you can switch to improving your living conditions a bit with some of the following tasks.

Using your knife and a large stick from the debris, make yourself a spear. Store things inside your hut. If a macaque shows up, spear it to protect your belongings. If you secure a kill, you can skin it for leather, but the meat will be useless for now. If you’re lucky, you can get an injured macaque and begin nursing it to health, but this early on, it will be difficult to feed. You can use cannibalism and feed it macaque meat, or kill pigeons, but ideally you’ll just catch one later when you’re better prepared. If you encounter drones while exploring, use your stealth to avoid them. Save your gun for later. You don’t need additional injuries right now. I also tend to leave pigeons alone early on. You won’t need their meat or feathers for a while and it’s nice to keep the population high until you can capture some for your enclosure. Killing at least one will unlock enclosure research for you though, so that’s useful.

Once you’ve found a stone, use it on some of the dirt you got from the debris pile and combine that with rain to make clay. This will allow you to research clay bowls. After that, get four stones together to build a campfire. Use your combat knife on sticks to make a hand drill and on wood to make wood shavings. Always keep a piece of wood in reserve. With fire now possible, you can make the clay bowls on the campfire, no need to use the kiln yet. Make yourself two of them when you have a chance. The main purpose of the campfire though is to acquire ash. This will allow you to research and make an ash bandage. Once you can, either rip up your bigger bandage into to small cloths, or say goodbye to your socks, and make the ash bandage. Now you won’t have to constantly monitor your wound for infection. I usually make a second ash bandage to be ready for when the first one wears out.

NOTE: There’s a trick to acquiring lots of ash and charcoal that is pretty gamey, but available if you want. With a bunch of wood shavings available, use your hand drill to light a piece of tinder. Place that tinder into your fuelless kiln, and then use another wood shaving on the kiln to make another lit tinder. Do some task that takes 15 minutes. Only being at 1% fuel, the kiln will go out, producing an ash and a chance of a charcoal. Add your lit tinder back to the kiln and again use a wood shaving on the re-lit kiln to acquire yet another lit tinder. Do another 15 minute task and collect your ash and charcoal. Repeat this task as much as you please to convert wood shavings into ash and charcoal. This trick also works on campfires, stoves, and forges.

Your goals in full for the first week in order of priority should be:

• Stop your bleeding.
• Splint your fracture.
• Explore the valley until you are depressed.
• Make and equip a spear.
• Build a campfire in your hut, make a wood drill, and keep a reserve wood for shavings.
• Apply ash bandages and keep your wound clean.
• Build a leaf bed in your hut.
• Make two clay bowls.
• Make an axe.
• Discover the Deep Jungle.

Depending on how efficient you are, and what resources you discover when, the order of these task might vary a bit, and you may finish them all easily in week one, or need a little more time. Whatever the case, here are some general rules to help accomplish them.

• Sleep as little as you can. Some task can be done in the dark (wood shavings to train woodworking), and using a campfire can let you stretch out your day. Try to sleep four hours most nights and only sleep the full eight when you’re properly tired (every third night or so).
• DO NOT EAT. I know those rice fields are just sitting there but trust me, don’t eat. Yes, you’ll be stressed, but remember, you’re obese. You have plenty of fat reserves and all that weight is actually making it harder to move. You want to get down to overweight as soon as possible to make travelling and exploring easier. Also, with your injuries, even being fully fed won’t improve your mood. Food just isn’t helpful yet.
• After your immediate injuries are bandaged and splinted, make exploring a priority. The Deep Jungle will be very important.
• You may notice you’re suffering from nausea, this is because of the debris piles and the filthiness of the hut. Feel free to clear some of the debris outside to help with this, but the key will be cleaning the hut, which is why you need the Deep Jungle.

By now, you have the beginnings of a camp and your wounds, though painful, are healing. You’re certainly miserable, hungry, and your mental structure is declining quickly. Meditate when you can afford to to mitigate stress. As your injuries heal, things will get better. The goal in the second week is to address any immediate issues that you can until the pain goes away. With the discovery of the Deep Jungle, you have access to new resources, but a slight danger. Remember how tiring travel is. Be careful about getting trapped in the Deep Jungle at night time and keep a spare ash bandage on you when you travel. You don’t wanna start bleeding out there. Also ensure you keep your canteen full.

Once you have access to the Deep Jungle, begin exploring it for palm fronds. You’ll need quite a few of them. Your three goals involving them, in order of importance, are repairing the hut’s roof, building a broom, and making a basket. Once you have a basket, make some rope and build yourself a backpack. Encumbrance is a big issue right now. You may find kava. Depending on how bad your wounds still are, kava might be able to help with the pain, but I recommend saving it a little longer. Once you’ve got your home repaired, a bed and campfire built, and your wounds are about halfway healed, you’ve survived the worst of things. If you haven’t cleared the rest of the debris yet, do so now. Turn the dirt you get into mud and use your knife to cut some rice stalks. Thresh the rice (a good low-light activity) to get straw. Combine the straw and mud to make mud bricks for a stove (don’t cook the rice quite yet). Make two more clay bowls so you can have four ready in the stove at all times. By now, your mental structure is probably in bad shape and we’re quickly approaching the void. As long as you’ve dropped from obese to overweight, the fast can finally end. Time to eat.

Collect some kava from the jungle if you’ve found it, and use your knife to cut some rice stalks. Head inside and start preparing/cooking the rice. Drink kava to address the pain, and chow down on rice to stem the hunger. With down time, train woodworking until you unlock wood figurines. Any time your entertainment is empty, do a bit of figurine carving, only one or two steps at a time. Throw any ruined figurines into the stove. Save the others. As soon as you can carve a flute, get to making one. This will be your main entertainment source. Hopefully, you’ll have begun to improve your mood before you face the void. There are still challenges, but it’s all uphill from here.

Continue to explore the Deep Jungle until you find the Wetlands. It’s very likely you’ve caught a fever by now from the hunger and exhaustion. In the Wetlands you can find the spider lily and ginger you need to make plenty of medicinal tea. Use them to try and stay healthy. With your fever under control, rice (and bananas) in your belly, and your wounds mostly healed at the end of week two, your mental structure should begin to recover, and your character might even gradually become, gasp, content with life. If you’re still not quite there yet, keep at it, you’re almost past the hard part.

Once your wounds fully heal, exploring will feel like you’re absolutely flying along compared to the snail’s pace it once took. From here, you have a lot more flexibility. I’ll simply mention some appropriate goals and other things to consider and leave it to you to figure out the rest.

Your overarching goals as you continue to improve your situation and prepare for the eventual dry season should probably be some combination of the following:

• Use any heavy stones you find to start building deadfall traps. You don’t actually care about catching anything, you just want to train your trapping. Use palm or snakegrass seeds from the Deep Jungle as bait for starters, and reset them whenever they trigger. The real purpose of all this is getting several snare traps set up to capture pigeons for an enclosure. This is an important long-term goal. Vegetarians have a hard time maintaining body weight. Jungle Salad, Sago Slime, Yam Curry, and especially Fried Puffballs and Egg Fried Rice will be important for staying nourished.
• Explore more to gain access to more resources. Pieces of flint and flint slabs in the highlands will be useful to train knapping and make sharp axes. The Wetlands cave can make bugs to bait traps and feed pigeons and a macaque friend. Before too long, you’ll need a coconut to make Weston. Make your way to the Bay and hide from any seahounds. Extra coconuts can be used to make coconut milk which can be cooked into oil for recipes (first jungle salad, and later egg fried rice). A seashell necklace is easy happiness. You’ll also need a lot of sand, eventually.
• Continue to train woodworking to get access to the shovel. Build one as soon as you can to unlock the cistern recipe.
• Fire up the kiln and make a couple of cooking pots, three clay jars (for oil storage), and three clay vases (for general water transportation and eventually banana tree water if needed). While your kiln’s still hot, also throw in about 4 heavy stones (if you’ve discovered snare traps, you can dismantle your deadfall traps to reclaim them). Grind them up and use some of the quicklime to whitewash your hut for a nice improvement. Save the rest of the quicklime for your cistern.
• Try to research the clay pot cooler while your kiln is still hot.
• Building a cistern will need sand and a lot of stones. If you’re having trouble finding stones, head to the Eastern Highlands and start clearing the blocked cave. You’ll get plenty.
• Try and get a rice patty made while it’s still rainy. Rice will be your main food source for a while.
• When you can make planks, also try and plant a puffball crop. You’ll need fertilizer. You get the planks back when they finish growing.
• You can’t eat almonds, but combined with bugs they make great pigeon feed.
• A copper axe and/or shovel would be incredible but probably too hard to acquire for a while. Instead, if you’re uninjured and have some bandages and kava ready, shooting down some drones with your gun isn’t too dangerous and will yield scrap metal.
• Build yourself a cistern before the dry season. If things have gone reasonably well, it’s actually possible to build two of them and never worry about water ever again.
• You’ll be moving in and out of the Secret Valley and the Deep Jungle a lot. Paths might be worth the effort.

Wet season shouldn’t impact you too much. With an inland base, you’re only real task is maintaining your hut when it gets damaged. Also, watch out for hypothermia.

Dry season is the main challenge at this point. Not so much for water as you should probably be able to get at least one cistern made, if not two. Combined with the reservoir and in extreme circumstances, some banana trees and/or a water filter, you should be fine. The trickiest part of dry season is staying cool, and avoiding bug bites and sunburn. Getting the windcatcher improvement on your hut will help. Try to focus on indoor tasks when the sun is out strong. Cut down trees in the morning and process the wood inside during the day. Cloudy weather is a real gift. Use the opportunity to equip a rope and train climbing either on the cliff face to the Jungle Highlands found in the Wetlands (use the puddles to cool off) or on palm trees at the beach/bay (cool off in the ocean). If you want to train climbing in the sun, use the palm trees and apply aloe gel. Always hide from seahounds, their infection can be game-ending. You’ll also want a couple of drying racks to dry peppers, kava, spiderlily, ginger, etc. You won’t be able to dry things outside of the dry season. There’s just too much rain.

With climbing well-trained, you can explore the cave system for copper. Just be careful. Bring light and water. This is the most likely place to get yourself killed at this point. With the copper, you can make a proper axe and shovel. From this point forward, continue to improve your hut and food supply. Explore the island and avoid unnecessary risks. Before too long, you’ll be ready to call this island home, and beat Hard Mode.