Combat Guide

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Basics

If you've played anything like Skyrim or Minecraft, Salt's combat will be pretty easy to pick up. Left click to perform a basic swing, hold left click for a more powerful attack that consumes stamina, and right click to block. This applies to most melee weapons, while mining picks and daggers have their heavy attack assigned to right click, with no block function. While shields are not yet in the game, dodging can be performed by holding a directional button and hitting jump.

Melee

So far in the game there are clubs, swords, daggers, and axes for melee combat. Though almost any right hand equip can be used as a weapon, these four seem to be designed for combat.

Clubs

Currently only two clubs have been found so far in the game, and these are very simple weapons crafted from logs or hardwood logs. Not much more than a log itself, the club, besides a basic attack and power attack, also has the ability to break weak boulders and collect those materials. As such it is an extremely versatile weapon for those who missed the pickaxe on the first island.

Daggers

There are two daggers in the game so far: the normal Dagger, and the Ancient Ceremonial Dagger. The normal Dagger can be looted from dead pirates or crafted, while the Ancient Ceremonial Dagger is only found by killing and looting Ancient Guardians. The daggers' special attack does a decent amount of damage on its own, but if attacking an enemy from behind who hasn't seen you, it does massive damage.

Swords

Easily craftable, short swords and scimitars are staples of melee combat, with decent damage and a slightly more damaging special attack.

Currently known types:

Axes

Found from drops, or by picking up axe parts from pirate battlemasters and crafting salvage axes, these weapons are similar to the swords in combat, but with a tooltip suggesting a .1 critical hit ratio, which sounds like a 10% greater chance for landing a critical hit. Though not confirmed through testing, this would makes sense since a blue hefty axe has slightly lower attack values than a comparable blue scimitar.

Currently known types:

(Basic) Pirate Axe
Strong Pirate Axe

Ranged

Bows are currently the only Ranged weapons in Salt, besides throwing bombs.

Bow

This weapon uses arrows to shoot at targets at a distance. Arrows are crafted from logs (of either type) and flintstones. They have variable damage and chance for retrieval (as in the real world, you can go to where you shot an arrow and most of the time retrieve it). Clicking and holding left click will draw an arrow back, and releasing fires the arrow at the intended target. For distant targets you must account for projectile drop and aim above the target. Combined with added damage for headshots, this adds a signficant amount of skill to this style of combat. Right click raises the bow into a defensive posture for blocking incoming attacks, though it has not been tested how well this works. Right-clicking also un-nocks an arrow, allowing you to not fire an arrow after drawing the bow.

Currently known bows:

Currently known arrows:

Crude Arrows
Hardstone Arrows
Poison Arrows
Hunter Arrows(article not written yet)

Bombs

Little black bomb, looks like a cannon ball. You can buy them from merchants, or obtain them by right-clicking Flotsam in your inventory. Bombs are craftable, the requirements for a bomb is 1 hardstone, 1 volatile ore. You throw them a short ways and they roll around for a couple seconds and then go off. Usually you get hurt from the blast so I assume you should throw them downhill or something. There is also a fused bomb which to be made needs 1 hardstone, 1 volatile ore, cloth swatch and plant fibers. Once thrown it will start 'cooking' and after a few seconds it will explode and this has a much higher blast damage and radius so make sure you get a good running start after you've thrown it.

It should be noted that Bombs are capable of damaging Ancient Statues. Bombs are rather difficult to come by. Crafting them is also expensive, as for the term- expensive because the player would need hard-to-come-by materials, such as volatile ore.

Other

While not a direct combat option, tripwire and Thorn Tripwire can be deployed and enemies can be lured into them. While this has not been tested against enemies yet by the playerbase, it appears to give a signficant debuff to movement speed when the player triggers it.

Dodging

This dodging system is inspired at least in part by Dark Souls, and the timing is absolutely critical as the number of invincible frames are quite short. If you wait until the target is just about to attack (lifting their axe for example) and jump to the side away from their weapon (right in most cases), the damage can be completely avoided. The most difficult part of dodging is actually keeping your weapon trained on your attacker. Jumping a consistent direction when dodging allows you to more easily train the muscle memory needed to keep doing damage while jumping around.

Tips for Beginners

Although being good at dodging and blocking attacks can be useful, the easiest ways to kill enemies would be by using a bow. Getting 2-3 headshots with the shortbow and crude arrows will kill a common pirate but obviously that's hard to do. If you give yourself enough distance however you will easily be able to get one shot in doing enough damage to take out a quarter of their health meaning finishing them off will be easy business.

If you're on an island with pirates, there will most likely be campfires around the island. There can be sometimes 1-3 pirates assigned to each one so after you kill them both, rest at the campfire for 4 hours to get all your health back and continue with clearing the rest of the island instead of using health potions and bandages when it just isn't necessary.