Kong Island: Farm & Survival is the latest island adventure sim title from CSCMobi Studios, that offers a mix of camp-building, farming, crafting, and exploration for players who yearn for a casually fun and relaxing gaming experience. Although it is a survival game in the sense that the setting is an uninhabited island, there are no antagonists or any sort of threat or danger to watch out for.
As an adventurer out to discover new islands via an airplane, fate and bad weather have left you stranded on a deserted island all on your own. Without food, shelter, or any basic needs left from the plane crash, you have to rely on whatever you can gather from the island to survive. Having a basic shelter and some food is just the start of your adventure in Kong Island: Farm & Survival as every discovery leads to the creation of new facilities to improve your way of living.
Your adventures and travels are not limited to Kong Island, which is the initial island you set foot on, as you are bound to discover different islands as you make progress in your journey. Every bit of item to discover has a purpose and some materials can even be utilized for a variety of uses. If you are the type of gamer who is into relaxing scenes and gameplay devoid of violence and skirmishes, then Kong Island: Farm & Survival is certainly right up your alley.
Kong Island: Farm & Survival makes it very easy for even completely inexperienced players to pick it up and enjoy it. The 1-finger controls and the simplistic interface makes it practically effortless to find your way around the map as well as the facility menus. Progress can be made regardless of how you go about things and the energy system, while restrictive, makes for a few minutes of the adventure in-between some long offline breaks.
If you have just jumped into Kong Island: Farm & Survival’s world and are raring to uncover every inch of every island you can explore, then we have you covered. Our Kong Island: Farm & Survival Beginner’s Guide comes with tips, tricks, and strategies to help you progress faster in the game!
1. Always Refer To The Objectives
Kong Island: Farm & Survival starts you off with a very straightforward tutorial, taking you through all the basics of grabbing resources, building structures, and crafting other items. One of the basic elements of the game that will surely stick with you is the series of bubbles on the left side of your screen. These icons are the objectives you need to accomplish to move forward in your journey and while the first ones will only appear one at a time, you will soon have multiple objectives in your hands.
As can be expected, Kong Island: Farm & Survival provides you with a lot of freedom to do as you please. You can continue to gather resources and clear more space on the island so long as you have the energy to do so. You can also upgrade facilities if you have the needed materials. Every 5 energy you spend earns you an EXP point as well, which contributes to taking you closer to the next survivor level.
Your survivor level, which can be seen at the upper left side of your screen where your avatar is, is not just a number that signifies your level of experience. Kong Island: Farm & Survival is designed in that some raw materials, structures, locations, and even items you can craft will only become available after reaching a certain level. As accomplishing objectives earns you EXP more than what you can get off of farming resources, your best bet when it comes to reaching new levels is accomplishing them as fast and efficiently as possible.
Activities you engage in, despite some being what future objectives will require of you, will never be counted towards the completion of that objective. This is one of the reasons it is best to adhere to the current objectives as some of this can be as simple as picking up X amount of wood or crafting X amount of knives. In some cases, 2 separate objectives may even have roughly the same requirements.
If you are the type who gets a bit overwhelmed when objectives seem to be piling up, keep in mind that it is only natural to take on them one at a time. Some objectives, like taking a structure to the next level, almost always serve as a requisite for one or a couple of the other objectives, like crafting X amounts of a new item available only after finishing a certain upgrade.
Farming or crafting items outside of what is needed relative to the current objectives is never a waste of time and effort. Surely enough, there will always be some need for any of the resources you have at some point in your adventure later on. However, aligning activities you engage in towards the fulfillment of one or several objectives will yield you EXP in a much faster way and will likewise be an efficient means of balancing available energy with the inventory of raw materials you have.
At some points in your adventure, moving forward can become challenging relative to the objectives in line and that should be your cue to have a reason to deviate away from the objectives. There will certainly be no moments where Kong Island: Farm & Survival leaves you without anything to do. The sources of items and materials around will surely be a lot more than what your energy can gather.
2. Strategize Around Energy Usage
In the absence of coins or any basic currencies in Kong Island: Farm & Survival, your energy will serve as the most basic resource you depend on to be able to continue gathering the basic materials you need for much of what you need to accomplish. You will always have a cap of 100 energy even after reaching new levels and while you can exceed the cap in some instances, the best approach is to keep it below 100. This is because your energy replenishes over time whenever it is less than the cap so keeping it maxed out or even beyond 100 is like an opportunity cost for the energy you could have gained for that period.
Prioritizing one objective over another can be based on which one from among the choices is the easiest to accomplish. On a slightly more advanced note, you can also consider prioritizing objectives based on the energy you have relative to the amount of energy it will take to finish the entire objective. Sometimes, an objective can be very simple and easy in that you will only need to gather X amount of resources. However, targets that involve crafting like building upgrades can take more energy than what you have.
Energy should be considered the most important resource in Kong Island: Farm & Survival. Despite it being rather too easy to deplete a supply of 100 energy, there are plenty of free and practically instant ways to replenish energy. Like energy replenishment over time, these extra sources of energy will consistently be available as well and while some give you energy outright, some may have you go through a short video ad first.
As you roam and explore the island, every source of materials you can interact with will display the amount of energy it would take for you to farm from them. Some resource spots may display a lock icon along with the level requirement to unlock them. Most importantly, some objects will instead display a gift box. These objects that exhibit the gift box icon will not consume energy and will instead reward you with some energy from securing them. These will often be fruits hanging from a bush or special boxes that have energy icons practically overflowing on top of them.
With each new level reached, your energy will be replenished to its max amount, which is 100. Unfortunately, no energy beyond that will be provided so reaching a new level with 70 energy works the same as doing so with only a sliver of energy left. It can require some serious planning and attention to detail to maximize your energy gains from reaching new levels but keeping a lookout on your current energy levels relative to the amount of EXP needed to reach the next level can help you get the most out of it.
For a more specific application of this concept, suppose you only have 15 energy left and require 30 to clear an existing objective to earn some EXP from it. You may opt to log out of Kong Island: Farm & Survival and take a break until you have more energy for later but, again, there are plenty of ways to get even small amounts of energy. Be sure to exhaust all possible means to acquire the needed amount of energy first and push for the next level up as full energy afterward take you farther in your adventure.
No island survival adventure is complete without your ability to provide for your own basic needs and cooked food is among the necessities you can provide yourself in Kong Island: Farm & Survival. For starters, you will be able to place 4 plots of farming soil very early in your adventure, and seeds to put and grow in them are free. You can plant corn, wheat, tomatoes, and other food types as you make progress and you can also harvest them in just a few minutes.
Planting seeds and harvesting crops do not require energy and since the seeds themselves are also infinite, corn and other crops are something you have an unlimited supply of. Crops cannot be eaten immediately after you reap them, though, so you will have to cook them in your makeshift grill. Cooking food will also require additional resources like salt but the energy cost to obtain them relative to the amount of energy you can get from cooked food makes the effort well worth it.
Kong Island: Farm & Survival also provides different structures that give you huge energy boosts every once in a while. The mini pool on the first island, Kong Island, will give you a lot of energy once every 6 hours. There is a magical temple in Temple Island as well that you can activate once every 6 hours. Although it does not give you outright energy when you activate it, it generates fruits in random locations that can give you energy if you click on them.
Speaking of video ads, whenever your energy in Kong Island: Farm & Survival goes critically low, an ad boost icon will appear on the right side of your energy bar above the screen. If you click on it, you will be able to earn 20 energy after viewing a video ad that lasts between 15 to 30 seconds. Note that this ad option will only present itself for a limited period although if your energy stays low or become low again soon, these ad boosts will normally reappear.
Another common ad boost comes in little blue boxes randomly scattered across the islands. Clicking on these boxes and choosing to play a short video ad will net you 15 energy. In truth, 15 energy may not be that much but it can often be more than what you need to get to the next level. Likewise, with the abundance of these blue boxes lying about, you will most likely have more opportunities to earn extra energy than you need.
3. Travel Across The Islands
Although the titular island is Kong Island, Kong Island: Farm & Survival does not limit your adventures to just one island. As you make progress through the objectives and reach higher adventurer levels, you will soon be able to travel to different islands as well. You may think that you need to completely explore Kong Island first before you can visit the other islands but both Temple Island and Guardian Temple will become available to you in a relatively short time. Beyond these 3 islands, Kong Island: Farm & Survival also promises to open even more islands in future game updates.
We already discussed earlier that despite having a multitude of objectives to accomplish, it can still happen that the current roster of goals you need to reach can be pended because of production waiting times or even pended building upgrades needed to start production. With the existence of additional islands to explore comes an extra set of objectives to clear, ultimately leading to an additional source of EXP to further boost your explorer level.
While Kong Island stands as the main island in your adventure as well as your residence, the rest of the islands do not just offer one-time adventures for you to conquer. Even after successfully clearing all relevant quests for each island, there will be important reasons for you to revisit each one regularly, just like the Magical Temple in Temple Island. Beyond that, all islands also house resources much like the first one, with some even housing unique elements that add more variety to the growing list of raw materials you can gather.
With fruits and those blue energy boxes randomly spawning around the island, unlocking more islands and clearing sufficient open spaces within them leaves you with more potential areas where these goodies will appear. Even if you do manage to harvest all potential sources of extra energy within Kong Island, you should make a habit of revisiting the other islands to pick up some extra energy.
4. Keep Your Home Tidy
Kong Island: Farm & Survival is not as limited to merely farming and surviving on a deserted island. Part of what makes the entire adventure an exciting and engaging one rests on the idea that your life on the uninhabited island can only get better. Being able to put up new structures near your shelter is just the start of the road toward a better life. Your home, storage, and a multitude of production buildings and structures can each be upgraded, leading to more complex varieties of the products you can create with them.
This aspect of Kong Island: Farm & Survival is much like the camp-building part of other survival games that center around camp management. As you reach higher levels and build more structures as well as add other facilities, you will naturally require more open spaces to ensure that each new addition to your growing camp will have a plot you can put them down on. Beyond merely having ample open space, a more efficient production line and shelter should be organized enough to ensure that you will have the easiest time possible to locate what you are trying to find, for starters.
We recommend tidying up your camp regularly to ensure that it will remain convenient for you to go about production and harvesting as well as moving around within the immediate vicinity. One of Kong Island: Farm & Survival’s core mechanics is that resources will continue to regenerate randomly over time within the island so open spaces within your base camp may spawn new resource spots if left vacant for a long time.
For one, continuous replenishment of sources for raw materials will always be appreciated. However, you can lay out your structures and facilities in such a way that it makes it easy for you to set borders between your actual home and resource spots. For a more concrete example, placing structures used for crafting close to one another makes it easy to craft what you need, even if just a little bit. Plots of soil that you unlock more of as you reach level milestones are best-placed side by side as placing seeds and reaping crops can be made faster by doing so.
5. Strive To Complete Trade Boat Requests
Initially, the exclusive needs for specific resources and crafted products are constructions and structure upgrades in your camp. Within Kong Island and even on the other islands, materials will also be needed to build bridges or clear pathways toward opening certain areas. One important feature as well that will require you to provide resources is the Trade Boat that will soon be docked southwest of your home.
Once the Trade Boat arrives, it will present you with 4 sets of items you would want to trade, and satisfying trades at certain milestones will net you gift boxes as rewards. You will receive a gift box after completing trade requests on the 4th, 6th, 8th, and 10th time. The rewards are 20 energy, 30 energy, 40 energy, and a key, and 50 energy plus 2 keys, respectively. Although this counts as yet another excellent source of free energy, the keys you receive on the 8th and 10th trade completions are more important.
Even before the Trade Boat appears in your adventure, you will already encounter treasure chests in your exploration. As enticing and attractive as treasure chests are, you will need to have keys to unlock them. One of the earliest objectives you will have pended at the left side of your screen involves finding and opening 3 treasure chests. With some treasure chests requiring 2 keys to open, though, it will certainly take some time for you to clear the quest.
Keep in mind as well that these treasure chests are not limited to the first island alone. You will chance upon plenty of treasure chests on the other islands and, chances are, that you will never have enough keys to open all of them since new ones are bound to appear over time as well.
Kong Island: Farm & Survival certainly has plenty more surprises in the upcoming updates but for now, this is where we wrap up our Kong Island: Farm & Survival Beginner’s Guide. We hope that the few simple tips and strategies we discussed will be instrumental to you finally conquering all islands and enjoying a quality virtual life that gets better and better. If you happen to come across some more cool tricks and strategies during your explorations, feel free to drop us a line in the comment area!
Dave
Saturday 14th of October 2023
I keep getting "ancient coins", but I have no idea how to see them in my inventory or what I am supposed to do with them.