This guide will teach you basics of playing on a Garry's Mod Stranded server. I will try to go thorough every single game mechanic and explain how it works.

If you do not know what Garry's Mod Stranded is, it is a reboot of Garry's Mod 12 gamemode called GMStranded. This is ported version with numerous improvements since GMod 12 version.

The original authors of this gamemode, the Stranded Team:

• jA_cOp
  
• prop_dynamic
  
• Chewgum
  
• Wokkel

Without their work, I wouldn't be able to bring this gamemode to you.

If you don't have it already, you can download it here:
http://cs2bus.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=133364818

The first thing you want to know about this gamemode is the basic survival: How not to die, how and where to get water and food, how to sleep.

The first thing you will notice upon joining a sever running Garry's Mod Stranded is the Needs HUD:



It consists out of 6 ( 1 is not present of screenshot ) bars, 4 of which you need to keep above 0 in order not to lose health and eventually die.

All of them are pretty much self-explanatory, but anyways:

• Health - Your health. If it falls to zero - you are dead.
  
• Hunger - Your hunger. The smaller the bar is, the more your need for food is.
  
• Thirst - Your thirst. The smaller the bar is, the more your need for water is.
  
• Fatigue - Your fatigue. The smaller the bar is, the more your need for sleep is.
  
• Oxygen - Your oxygen. The smaller the bar is the less you can spend underwater before you start losing health.
  
• Power - This is not present on the screenshot, but once you craft yourself a flashlight, it will represent how much of flashlight power you have. Craft more batteries to hold more power.

If Hunger, Thirst, Fatigue or Oxygen falls to 0, you will start losing health.

Okay, now that we know what we need to survive, let's talk about getting those needs taken care of.

The hardest bar to fulfill. Hardest, because in order to fulfill it you need food cooked on Stove or to craft Medicine.

The hardest bar to fulfill after Health. Hardest, because in order to fulfill it you need actual food. It is reducing at 0.001% per second. You can fulfill it by eating one of the following: Oranges, Watermelons, Bananas, Berries, Bread or any food cooked on Stove. See Starting surviving section for tutorial on how to get those.

The easiest one to fulfill is Thirst. It is also the fastest to reduce at 0.002% per second. The simplest solution would be jumping into water and pressing your use key ( E by default ). But take note that at earlier levels you lose Oxygen extremely fast. Also you get fulfill your thirst by drinking Bottled Water or eating Berries. See Starting surviving section.

It will reduce underwater based on your Swimming level. The higher you Swimming is, The slower it will reduce. It will increase if you are not fully underwater.

This bar will only show if you have a Flashlight in your inventory. It will increase and decrease depending if your flashlight is enabled or not. The more Batteries you have, the slower it will decrease.

In-game you would need a lot of different resources to build.
To get Wood you need to punch a tree anywhere on the map with your fists or a hatchet.
To get Stone you need to punch a rock anywhere on the map with your fists or a pickaxe.
To get Copper or Iron Ore you need to punch a rock anywhere on the map with a pickaxe.
To get Water Bottles you need to stand near water and press E on it.
To get Herbs, Berries or Seeds you need to press E on the ground.

The first thing you want to do after you have spawned is to get some food to survive, but you will need to get seeds first.

In order to do so, aim at ground ( And dirt/gravel surface ), and press your use key. This will start Harvesting process. Once finished you will be given some items, some of which can be seeds. If you failed to get anything just keep trying.

Once you got some seeds you will need to plant them. There are 4 ways to do so:

• Chat commands - open chat and type one of these commands depending on what you want to plant: !orange !melon !banana !berrybush
  
• Console commands - open console and type one of these commands depending on what you want to plant: gms_plantorange gms_plantmelon gms_plantbanana gms_plantbush
  
• Q Menu - Hold Q, open Commands tab, and press on desired Plant command.
  
• F2 Menu - Press F2, Hold C or Q, and press on desired seeds to plant them.

Just remember to aim at ground to plant them.

Now that you have planted some seeds you will have to wait until they grow up. It takes some time, so you better go and build yourself a shelter.

In Garry's Mod Stranded shelter means something above your head. It can be anything as long as it is above your head. If you have tried spawning anything you probably noticed that it will spawn a blue wire frame of wanted object, instead of actual prop. This is because you need resources to build something. Usually you want to build out of wood because it is easy to get. So, with that being said, get yourself to a tree and start hitting it with your fists. You will fail sometimes to get anything but once you of you keep trying you will get enough wood to build yourself a shelter. It is recommended to get 16 wood and build yourself a 4x4 PHX wood plate and place it above your head. Once done, you should move on to building yourself some proper tools.

Why do I need a shelter?
Shelter is needed so you don't lose Health while you are sleeping.

It is also a good idea to get yourself a sleeping furniture from "Mixed - Sleeping Furniture" as it speeds up your sleep by the factor of 2.

In order to create yourself some tools, you will need to build yourself a workbench. There are 3 tiers of tools: Stone, Copper and Iron.
At first you want to build a Stone Workbench. In order to do so you need to hold Q, open Commands tab and press Structures button. You can also press F3 and click on Structures button. Once there, click on Stone Workbench and click Build. It will create familiar blueish build site. Note: You can't have more then one build site at once. Structures will require quite a lot of resources, so don't rush to build them. Once you have build it, press use key on it. It will open you a weapon crafting window. For there you want to craft Stone Pickaxe and Stone Hatchet. Next you want to build Stone Furnace to smelt Copper Ore gained by using Stone Pickaxe and so on.

If the server have DayNight script enabled, it may prove difficult to do anything at night due to the fact that you have to craft a Flashlight to use it. So, what you can do is make yourself a campfire! To make one, you need a few pieces of wood. One you have them, you need to spawn a wooden prop. Usually you want to spawn a small wooden prop because it costs less wood. Then you need to aim at that prop and start making the campfire. Fastest way is to press F3 and click on Make Campfire button. But you can also type !campfire to chat or use gms_makefire console command.

You can also cook on your campfire. You can open Cooking menu by pressing your use key ( E by default ) on it. For a permanent cooking ability you should build yourself a Stove.

You can drop your resources if you have too much. You can do this either using F2 menu or !drop <Resource Type> [Amount] chat command. But there is a problem with that. Too many resource boxes lying around can cause the server to lag really badly. So, if server owner have enabled Zombies at night, some of your resources drops will disappear at midnight. In order to prevent this you should create yourself a Resource Pack from Structures menu. Resource Packs don't disappear at night.

To store resources into a Resource Pack or a Resource Drop you simply stand close to it and drop resources from your inventory. Dropped resources are automatically stored into closest Resource Pack or Resource Drop.

Another way to store resources into Resource Pack or to put them into a Buildsite is to simply pickup a Resource Drop and push it into Resource Pack or Buildsite.

In Garry's Mod Stranded, almost every your action is tied to a skill.
The higher you skill is, the faster and more efficient you are at doing that action.
The global level cap is 200 for every skill except for Survival.
Survival Level increases by 20% with each other skill leveled up.
With each Survival Level you gain +5 backpack size.

Some skill levels will be required to craft higher tier items. For example Weapon Crafting and Cooking.

Some specific skill levels will grant you Unlocks. For more info on that see Unlocks section.

If you don't want to play alone or you are having difficulties doing so, you can create your own Tribe with other players or join an existing one. This makes playing with your friends actually fun.

In order to create your own tribe you need to press F3 and there click on Tribe: Create. This will bring up a menu for creating tribes. There you must enter your tribes name, specify it's color and optionally set a password for it.

NOTE: Only passworded tribes share props with all tribe members without need to change Prop Protection Buddies.

You can also join a tribe. Press F3, click Join. A list of tribes will be shown to you. If a tribe you wanted to join has a password, you will be prompted to enter it.

To leave a tribe you can either type !leave in chat or gms_leave into console or press F3 and click Leave.

If you want to invite a player to your tribe, you can type !invite <player> to do so. This will not prompt that player to enter a password, so you don't need to share it.

If you do not want someone in your tribe, or if you want to make a quick resource trade with someone else, you can give access to your props/stuff using Prop Protection Buddies.

You can control who can touch your items and who can't in the Prop Protection tab of Q menu. Simply check boxes near those players you want to give access to and click Apply settings. You can quickly clear all your buddies by clicking Clear all buddies/

This section will tell you everything you need to know about commands in this gamemode.

The F2 Menu shows you your resources, but it can do more than that. It is a shortcut for using these resources. For example by aiming into the ground and pressing on Melon Seeds you will start planting them. So, how do you use it? When it's open, you can hold C or Q to show your mouse and click on the resource you want to use. It will help you planting seeds, eating berries, drinking water bottles and taking medicine.
Also this menu have a right click action: it will show up all possible actions for selected item. You can easily drop 1, 10 or All of selected resource by just right clicking on it.

The F3 Menu is a shortcut to all of your most common commands. Simply press F3 once and click on desired command to run it.

Well, chat and console commands are pretty self-explanatory. You can see a full list of chat commands by typing !commands into chat. All possible chat commands will be printed into console. The default key to open console is "~".

Garry's Mod Stranded provides some features for server owners.

First of all, please refer to this page to learn how to use Workshop mods on your dedicated server:
http://wiki.garrysmod.com/page/Workshop_for_Dedicated_Servers

Once you have downloaded the mod ( It should appear in your servers addons/ folder as .gma file ), you only need to add a few command line parameters to your server start up config:

You can use admin menu to quickly spawn plants, trees, rocks and antlion barrows to populate maps not made for this gamemode. The menu can be accessed from Q > Commands > Admin menu. You can also save or load the map from there.

Modding currently is only possible by extracting the gamemode. I DO NOT support extracted version of this gamemode.

In future, a friendly API will be added for basic things, for example adding craftable items/sweps/structures, spawnlists, custom tree/rocks models, etc.

If there's anything you want to know that isn't covered in this guide yet, write about it in the comments. I will improve this tutorial over time, just wanted to get you basic info about the gamemode.