Getting Started & Survival
Health & Green Hearts
Your health meter shows how much life you have left. Use Green Hearts for healing and Strength when you need them, or save them to craft items that permanently increase your maximum health and extend your life meter.
Read your health meter
Your current health is the life you have left. Your maximum health is how much life you can hold when fully healed. Taking damage lowers your current health; healing fills it back up.
Health meterView full size Food with a health-restoration effect heals immediately when used. Hunger restoration is a separate effect, so check both values when choosing what to eat.
Recognise your shield meter
Shield can absorb incoming damage before you lose health. Some damage bypasses shield, so keep watching your health hearts as well as these grey shield symbols.
Shield meterView full size Green hearts in the health meter
Green hearts in the on-screen meter are the next layer of your current health above the first 12 hearts. As health rises past 12 hearts, the meter starts filling a green layer; later layers use other colours.
They are ordinary health, not a separate shield or a Strength timer. Taking damage reduces the same health total, and healing can refill the green layer if your current maximum allows it.
Maximum-health bonuses, including those on equipment, make room for more health. Raising your maximum and filling that extra space are different things: use healing to restore missing health.
The Green Heart item
The inventory item named Green Heart restores three hunger symbols and five health hearts, up to your current maximums. It also grants Strength.
Green Hearts have two useful roles: consume one for immediate healing and Strength, or keep it as an ingredient for permanent health upgrades. Eating a Green Heart itself does not raise your maximum health; the crafting path below turns saved hearts into items that do.
Turn Green Hearts into a longer life meter
Save spare Green Hearts and work through the heart recipes. Combine 25 Green Hearts to make one Pink Heart, then combine 20 Pink Hearts to make one Red Heart.
Combine one Red Heart with one Paper Envelope to make a Valentine. Eat the Valentine to permanently increase your maximum health by one heart. This adds room to your life meter instead of just refilling missing health.
For a larger upgrade, use Crush on two Valentines to make one Heart of Gold. Eating it permanently adds three hearts to your maximum health, compared with two hearts from eating the two Valentines separately. Maximum-health upgrades still respect the game’s health limit.
Keep some Green Hearts available for dangerous encounters and save the rest for these upgrades. Open the heart items below for their recipe cards and ingredient links; the quantities here follow those recipes.
What to do
Give yourself time to heal before another fight. Choose a food or healing item by its health-restoration value, and check the filled hearts after using it.
If you use a Green Heart before a stronger enemy, take advantage of the Strength it grants as well as the healing. Strength does not make you invulnerable.
Try this
Once you have crafted a Red Heart, combine it with one Paper Envelope to make a Valentine. Eat the Valentine to permanently add one heart to your maximum health. Taking damage afterwards reduces your current health, but does not undo that upgrade.
Items in this guide
Open an item for its description and available recipes. These images show inventory items.
