Necesse Beginner Guide: Difficulty, Settlers, Raids, and Enchants

Necesse combines settlement planning, exploration, crafting, boss fights, and survival pressure inside a 2D sandbox world. New players can get moving quickly, but several systems are easy to miss early on. This beginner guide focuses on difficulty, world settings, hunger, settlers, raids, enchantments, wiring, exploration, and multiplayer.

Getting Started in Necesse

This guide does not cover every basic survival mechanic, such as simple crafting or early combat. Instead, it highlights the systems that make Necesse different from many other pixel-art adventure sandboxes.

Difficulty Modes

Necesse includes five difficulty settings. Pick one based on how much combat pressure and punishment you want.

Casual

• Description: A relaxed option with minimal combat challenge.
• Effects: Greatly reduces damage taken, boss health, enemy spawn rate, and raider damage.

Adventure

• Description: A calmer adventure with less combat, while still offering challenge at times.
• Effects: Reduces damage taken and boss health, with slightly lower enemy spawn rate and raider damage.

Classic

• Description: A standard challenge where preparation and strategy matter during tougher fights.
• Effects: N/A

Hard

• Description: A tougher mode where strategy, movement, and preparation are often needed.
• Effects: Increases damage taken and boss health, slightly increases enemy spawn rate and raider damage, and reduces knockback given.

Brutal

• Description: A mode for experienced players where strong strategy, dodging, and preparation are necessary.
• Effects: Greatly increases damage taken, boss health, and knockback given, while also increasing enemy spawn rate and raider damage.

World Settings

Before creating a world seed, you can adjust several world settings:

• Death penalty: No penalty, drop materials, drop main inventory, drop full inventory, or hardcore with permadeath
• Raid frequency: Often, occasionally, rarely, or never
• Toggle Survival Mode: When enabled, food spoils, players can die of hunger, and settlers leave if they stay hungry too long
• Spawn settings: Enable custom spawn seeds and choose whether the guide house spawns
• Advanced settings: Change day and night time

These choices shape how forgiving the world feels, so set them before committing to a long settlement run.

Hunger

After world creation, you usually spawn near Glenn the Elder's house. From there, survival begins, and hunger is one of the first systems to watch.

Hunger decreases over time and drops faster while performing actions such as moving, fighting, or working. At 5% hunger, the Hungry debuff appears and natural health regeneration stops. At 0% hunger, the Starving debuff begins and applies a 25% movement speed reduction.

Starving also causes health to decrease gradually. Ignore it long enough and your character can die, which is a very dramatic way to learn meal planning.

Inviting NPC Settlers

As you explore, you can find NPCs to invite into your settlement. Some settlers provide trade options for useful items and equipment, while others help with tasks such as crafting, farming, and hunting.

Most NPCs require coins and specific items before they can be hired. Some can only be invited after completing certain conditions, such as defeating bosses.

Protect your settlers once they join. NPCs killed by hostile enemies, especially during raids, do not respawn. You can improve their survival chances by giving them armor and weapons.

Raids

Settlements are not always safe. Raiders can attack during Raid Events, arriving with gear that changes based on progress in the Elder's quest. Raid difficulty is influenced by previous raid success, and raid frequency depends on settler count. Settlement boss quests can reduce raid cooldown times.

If raiders kill settlers, they continue attacking more settlers. Defeating raiders can reward coins, weapons, or armor, so defending the settlement can be dangerous but worthwhile.

Enchantments

Early weapons and tools will not carry you forever. Enchantments improve items, including gear and tools, with effects such as attack speed, critical hit chance, resilience, and mana regen.

To enchant items, invite the Mage to your settlement. Once the Mage is available, you can start improving equipment instead of trusting a Wooden Sword to solve every problem.

Wiring

Wiring lets players connect objects such as traps, doors, and lights into automated circuits. Tools like the Wrench and Cutter are used to place and remove wires and logic gates. Switches, including Pressure Plates and Rock Levers, activate circuits, while logic gates control the signal path.

Good wiring can power useful settlement systems and support defenses. With careful planning, traps and doors can help stop raiders before they reach your settlers.

Exploration

Necesse's world map is generally split across several islands, so exploration often requires a boat. The first boat you can craft is the Wood Boat, made from 8x Any Log in your inventory.

Boats open access to more biomes and mini-biomes, making them important once your early settlement is stable.

Multiplayer

Multiplayer can help with dungeons, settlement work, combat, and resource gathering. Hosting a Necesse dedicated server lets online friends join and contribute to the same world.

Each server can support about 250 players, though limiting the group to five players is recommended for the best experience.