Climbing and Survival Mechanics
PEAK runs on a single 100-point bar. Stamina sits on it, and every status effect you pick up eats into it from the other end, so hunger, cold, heat and even the weight of what you carry all shrink the same resource. Stamina refills at 20 per second once you have been grounded for a moment and stopped spending, and filling the bar with status effects entirely makes you pass out.
PEAK looks like it runs on two resources, stamina and hunger. It actually runs on one. Stamina, hunger, injury, cold, heat and the weight of your pack all share a single 100-point bar, and everything that goes wrong on the mountain is some version of that bar filling up. Once you understand that, the survival loop stops feeling arbitrary.
The Stamina Bar
Stamina is what is left of the bar after every status effect has taken its cut. When it reaches zero you lose your grip and fall. When status effects fill the bar entirely, you pass out.
Actions that drain stamina:
| Action | Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Hanging on a wall | Low, continuous | You drain just by holding on. |
| Climbing | Medium, continuous | Standard drain while moving on a wall. |
| Neutral jump | 5 | Press jump on its own. |
| Sprint jump | 15 | Press sprint first, then jump. Three times the cost. |
| Sprinting | Continuous | Only on the ground. |
| Lunge | Burst | Shift while climbing. Your long-distance move on a wall. |
Recovery
Stamina refills at a flat 20 per second. No item changes that rate.
The delay before it starts is the part worth knowing:
- You must be grounded for about 0.2 seconds.
- Then one second must pass without spending stamina, or two seconds if you emptied the bar completely.
You do not have to stand still. Stamina regenerates while walking, and it also regenerates while you hang on a piton, and even while you are stuck on something like a cactus. Walking between handholds is free recovery that most players never use.
There is no green tint marking safe ledges. PEAK gives no color-coded rest indicator at all. You read walkable ground from the material itself, sand on the Shore, grass in the Tropics. The blue highlight you may have noticed is the valid placement preview for pitons and rope anchors, which is a different thing entirely.
Hunger
Hunger is a status effect on the same bar and it subtracts one for one. Fifty hunger means fifty percent of your bar is gone. One hundred hunger means zero stamina and you pass out, so hunger alone will eventually kill you.
It accrues at 0.05 per second, which works out to roughly 33 minutes from full to unconscious if you never eat.
Two things stop the clock. A lit campfire halts hunger growth entirely while it burns, and invincibility effects such as Fortified Milk or the Ancient Idol pause the timer too. Difficulty also matters: Tenderfoot slows hunger by 30 percent, and Ascent 2 and above speed it up by 60 percent.
Weight
Weight is the status effect players most often overlook, and it is the reason inventory management matters at all. Everything you carry subtracts from your stamina bar. A whole coconut weighs 12.5, the Ancient Idol weighs 40, and a Backpack weighs nothing. From Ascent 3 upward every item gains a flat +2.5 weight, with the Backpack exempt.
Climbing Techniques
The neutral jump. Jump first, then press sprint if you need the extra distance in the air. A neutral jump costs 5 stamina and a sprint jump costs 15. Pressing sprint before you jump is the single most common way players waste stamina.
Sprint in the air for free. Sprinting while airborne costs nothing, and that is what makes the jump-then-sprint order work.
Double grab lunge. Let go of the wall when you are nearly out of stamina, immediately re-grab, then press Shift. This produces a longer lunge than lunging directly.
Jump off a rope for height. Jumping off a rope or chain gives you a vertical boost. Patch 2.01.a made that boost work properly and added a small stamina penalty for magnet-ing to a rope or chain from far away, so close the distance before you grab one.
Pitons are handholds, not platforms. You hang from a piton, you do not stand on it. Only one scout can hang on a given piton. They are also scarce, so instead of spacing them on a fixed interval, save them for the top of a long climb, when your stamina is nearly gone and there is nothing else to grab.
Huddle for warmth. Standing within about 3 meters of another scout removes 1.5 Cold per second. In the Alpine this is a free cure that costs you no items.
You will hear players recommend two techniques that do not exist. There is no dash in PEAK, so "dash-jump conservation" cannot be performed. And there is no last-second leap window when your bar hits zero. At zero stamina you simply cannot climb or sprint until it regenerates.
There is also a real exploit called rope storage, but it is not a movement tech. It lets you stash normally unstorable items such as Mandrakes while you are on a rope, vine or chain. Patch 1.48.a restored it. The separate trick of starting a rope placement and falling mid-animation is called a rope boost, and it gives a small vertical nudge and not an anchor at your jump apex.
Food and Cooking
Cooking Sources
Interact with a heat source while holding an item. Campfires, the crash-site fire and the Portable Stove all work, and patch 2.01.a restored the Portable Stove's cooking time to 60 seconds. Explosions advance nearby items one stage, and that makes Dynamite a portable cooker. In the Caldera and Kiln, heated ground and lava cook items you have dropped, or items in a backpack you are not wearing, though since patch 1.44.a lava no longer cooks anything held in your hands.
Alpine geysers do not cook. They inflict Heat and remove Cold, which is useful, but not for cooking.
The Four Stages
| Stage | Effect |
|---|---|
| Cooked | Hunger restored is doubled. Bonus stamina is multiplied by 1.5, or set to +10 if the item gave none. For berries, including Shroomberries, it also removes all Thorns and Poison and reduces Spores by 5. |
| Well-Done | Identical to Cooked. Effects do not stack. This is your warning stage, not a penalty. |
| Burnt | Restores 5 less Hunger than the previous stage. A small loss. |
| Incinerated | +10 Poison per incineration, up to 90. Equipment items break permanently. |
So the safe advice is simple: cook everything at least once, and do not worry if you cook twice. A third cook costs you a little hunger value, and only the fourth ruins the item.
You can never cook the poison out of a mushroom. Cooking decontaminates berries only. PEAK has exactly three poisonous mushrooms, the Bugle Shroom, Button Shroom and Cluster Shroom, inflicting 20, 30 and 40 Poison respectively on a ten second delay. The fourth type, the Chubby Shroom, has no poisonous variant at all.
Tell the poisonous variants apart by the stalk: the toxic ones have a rougher, ridged stalk.
Cooking Non-Food
Since the Roots update overhauled cooking, setting things on fire is a tool and not a mistake. Roughly 35 non-food items now have deliberate cooked effects.
Genuinely useful: Cure-All, Antidote and the Faerie Lantern shatter into a healing cloud with no knockback. Sunscreen bursts into a large protective cloud. A Mandrake stops screaming and grants -25 Curse. Medicinal Root removes an extra 20 Poison. The Book of Bones removes Curse instead of inflicting it. Fortified Milk gains 10 extra seconds of invincibility. Big Lollipop loses its Drowsy crash entirely. Energy Drink lasts 4 seconds longer with no Drowsy.
Weaponized: Lantern, Flare, Heat Pack, Portable Stove, Scout Cannon and Cursed Skull all explode.
Destroyed: Rope Spool, Rope Cannon, Anti-Rope items, Piton, Rescue Claw, Chain Launcher and the Guidebook.
Food Sources
| Food | Where to Find It | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Coconut | Shore and Tropics | Breaks into two Half-Coconuts, each restoring 10 Hunger (20 cooked) and removing 30 Heat. Weighs 12.5 whole, the heaviest food in the game. |
| Berries | Bushes in all biomes | Many varieties, some poisonous raw. Cooking makes any poisonous berry safe. |
| Mushrooms | Shaded areas | Three of the four types have poisonous variants. Cooking does not help. |
| Honeycomb | Break a Beehive in the Tropics for four, or find them in Redwood Stumps in the Roots | Only 10 Hunger, but 50 Bonus stamina (75 cooked), the highest in the game. Take it for the stamina, not the meal. |
| Packaged snacks | Luggage and wreckage | Airline Food is the strongest at 40 Hunger (80 cooked). Trail Mix and Granola Bars are smaller. All three cook normally. |
| Shroomberries | Roots only | Five colors with effects that re-roll daily. Red and Yellow are always good, Green and Blue always bad, Purple either way. |
There is no fish in PEAK, and nothing to catch in the Shore waters.
Big Lollipop. Grants Infinite Stamina for 11 seconds, dropping to about 8 once you start climbing. Since patch 2.01.a the buff no longer fills your bar when it lands. Afterwards it applies 32.5 Drowsy over ten seconds. Cooking it removes the Drowsy crash completely, so there is no reason to eat one raw.
Status Effects
Every status sits on the same 100-point bar as your stamina, and every one of them shrinks what you have left to climb with. Fill the bar and you pass out.
| Effect | Cause | Cure |
|---|---|---|
| Weight | Everything you carry | Drop things. Never decays on its own. |
| Hunger | Time | Food. Halted by campfires and invincibility. |
| Injury | Falls, hazards, Ancient Luggage | Bandages, First Aid Kit, Cure-All. Never decays on its own. |
| Poison | Toxic mushrooms, urchins, jellyfish, incinerated food | Cure-All, Antidote, First Aid Kit, Medicinal Root, Remedy Fungus, Faerie Lantern, Pandora's Lunchbox. Also decays at 0.4/s after 30 seconds. |
| Cold | Alpine blizzards, ice, cold nights on Ascent 5+ | Huddling within 3m of a teammate (1.5/s), Lantern, Portable Stove, Heat Pack, campfire, Faerie Lantern, geysers, the Alpine Hot Spring. Also decays once you are out of the cold. |
| Heat | Mesa sun, Caldera hot rock, lava | Shade, Sunscreen, Aloe Vera, Sports Drink, Fortified Milk, Half-Coconut, Winterberries, the Mesa Oasis. |
| Thorns | Cacti, thorny plants | Cooking removes it from berries. Decays over time. |
| Drowsy | Big Lollipop, raw Energy Drink, a screaming Mandrake | Wait it out. |
| Curse | Being revived, the Book of Bones, cannibalism | Cooked Book of Bones, cooked Mandrake. Never decays on its own. |
| Spores | Roots fungi, zombie bites | Cure-All, Antidote, First Aid Kit, Medicinal Root, Remedy Fungus, Faerie Lantern. |
| Web | Roots spiders | Mash jump. Each press removes 5 Web. |
Three special effects also exist and are not statuses: Infinite Stamina, Numbness (hides the bar), and Invincibility (blocks new statuses except Weight and Curse, and pauses hunger).
Infinite Stamina changed in patch 2.01.a. Gaining the buff no longer sets your stamina to max the moment it lands. It still stops stamina from reducing and still lets the bar regenerate normally while you climb or take other stamina-using actions, and it lets you take those actions while the bar reads empty. The developers nerfed it across the board and named the Bugle of Friendship as the target.
Cold and Heat are mutually exclusive. Inflicting one removes the other.
Cold is not a constant ambient drain in the Alpine and it does not need an item to clear. It comes from episodic blizzards lasting a few seconds at random, plus contact with ice, and it decays on its own once you are no longer exposed. Sheltering in darker or covered areas reduces blizzard intensity. Standing next to a teammate clears it faster than any item.
Note also that "Frostbite", "Sunburn" and "Slippery" are not PEAK status effects. Cold and Heat cover the first two. Slippery is a separate mechanic caused by Berrynana peels and jellyfish, not by rain or ice.
Tools and Gear
Traversal
Rope Spool. Anchors a rope others can climb using less stamina than a bare wall, though not zero. Holds 12.5m. Patch 2.01.a raised the stamina cost of climbing a rope slightly.
Rope Cannon. Fires a hook up to 48m away and drops 7.5m of rope from it.
Anti-Rope Spool and Anti-Rope Cannon. Rope that floats upward instead of hanging down. Carries negative weight.
Piton. A handhold hammered into a wall that you hang from. One scout per piton.
Chain Launcher. Deploys a chain up to 80m to a wall, climbed like a vine. Since patch 1.7 it is lateral only and cannot fire upward or steeply downward. It is for crossing gaps, not gaining height. As of patch 2.01.a the chain you are currently climbing no longer shows an interact prompt while you are on it.
Scout Cannon. A placeable cannon that launches a scout, with about 5 seconds of fall-damage immunity on landing.
Rescue Claw. A three-use grapple reaching 48m upward or 64m down. It also yanks unconscious teammates to you.
Magic Bean. Drop or throw it, wait about 3 seconds, and a beanstalk grows roughly 12m. You climb it at double speed for no extra stamina. Single use, and you can pick it back up before it starts growing.
Balloon and Balloon Bunch. Each balloon cuts gravity by 18% and removes 5 Weight while carried. A Bunch counts as three. Six enable flight.
Cloud Fungus, Bounce Fungus, Shelf Fungus. Throwable Roots fungi that respectively make a floating platform, a bouncy pad that restores stamina when you bounce, and a solid shelf.
Healing and Curing
Bandages and the First Aid Kit restore Injury, the kit more so.
Cure-All. Clears status effects and heals 35 Injury, with three uses. It is far more valuable than a single-use cleanse.
Antidote. Three uses, each removing 35 Poison and 35 Spores.
Faerie Lantern. Thirty seconds of curing Heat, Cold, Poison, Drowsy and Injury, plus immunity to the fog.
Pandora's Lunchbox. Clears every status then re-rolls them. Famously the one item that can save you from otherwise fatal fall damage.
Fortified Milk. Fifteen seconds of invincibility, 25 if cooked once. Counts as packaged food, so it breaks a Naturalist run.
Utility
Lantern. Removes 2.5 Cold per second within about 7m and has 60 seconds of fuel. Critically, it goes out when you put it away. It only stays lit while dropped, so you cannot simply carry a burning lantern in your pack through the Alpine.
Compass. Points toward the Peak, not the next campfire. Weighs nothing.
Binoculars. Zoom in on distant terrain. Free, no charges. Also earns you the Astronomy badge if you look at the sun in the Mesa.
Bugle of Friendship. Grants all other players within 56m half a second of Infinite Stamina for each moment you play it, with 7.5 seconds of total use across the item's life. It is designed to be tapped to top up a struggling climber, not held down. It cannot spawn in solo play, so it is a co-op tool only. Patch 2.01.a nerfed Infinite Stamina specifically to target this item, so the burst no longer sets a teammate's bar to max. A plain Bugle and the Scoutmaster's Bugle are separate items.
Checkpoint Flag. A personal single-use respawn that restores your saved statuses and dropped items.
Dynamite. A five second fuse, and the portable cooking source.
Inventory Management
Every scout has exactly three inventory slots, and you cannot increase that number. What you can do is find a Backpack, which occupies a dedicated fourth slot and adds four more. One spawns at the crash site and one at every campfire except the Kiln. It weighs nothing and is the only item exempt from the Ascent 3 weight penalty.
Weight eats your stamina bar directly, so a full pack is a real cost and not a free convenience. Carrying a whole coconut at 12.5 weight is a meaningful chunk of your climbing capacity.
General priorities by biome:
| Biome | Must-Have | Worth Bringing |
|---|---|---|
| Shore | Food, Backpack | Rope, Piton |
| Tropics | Food, Antidote | Piton, Rope |
| Roots | Antidote, Cure-All | Bounce Fungus, food |
| Alpine | Food, a heat source | Piton, Cure-All |
| Mesa | Sunscreen or Parasol, Aloe Vera | Food, Rope |
| Caldera | Food, Bandages, Cure-All | Chain Launcher |
| The Kiln | Food, Piton | Bandages |
GLOOM and THE CITADEL are absent from that table. Both cycle out with the Caldera and the Kiln as of August 11, 2026, and neither has a documented hazard to pack against yet.
Frequently Asked Questions
What happens when your stamina runs out in PEAK?
You lose your grip and fall. Stamina refills at 20 per second once you have been grounded for about 0.2 seconds and have not spent stamina for a second, or two seconds if you emptied the bar. You do not have to stand still, since it regenerates while walking and while hanging on a piton.
How much does hunger reduce your stamina in PEAK?
One for one. Hunger sits on the same 100-point bar as your stamina, so 50 hunger costs you half your bar and 100 hunger leaves you with nothing and knocks you out. It accrues at 0.05 per second, which is roughly 33 minutes from full to unconscious.
Is it bad to cook food twice in PEAK?
No. Well-Done is identical to Cooked, so a second cook is a free safety buffer. A third cook makes it Burnt, which only costs 5 Hunger value. It is the fourth cook that incinerates the item and inflicts 10 Poison per incineration.
Can you cook the poison out of mushrooms?
Never. Cooking decontaminates berries only. PEAK has exactly three poisonous mushrooms, the Bugle, Button and Cluster Shrooms, and you can spot the toxic variants by their rougher, ridged stalks.
What does the Bugle of Friendship do?
It grants all other players within 56 meters half a second of Infinite Stamina per moment played, with 7.5 seconds of total use in the item. Tap it to top up a struggling climber instead of holding it down. It cannot spawn in solo play, so it is purely a co-op tool. Patch 2.01.a nerfed Infinite Stamina to target this item, so the burst no longer sets a teammate's bar to max when it lands.
What to Read Next
- Biome Walkthrough. Where each technique gets tested.
- Co-op and Ascent Guide. Team roles and Ascent difficulty tiers.
- 100% Badge Guide. Climbing and survival badge conditions.
- Lore and Secrets. Discoveries hidden along the routes.
- Tips and Tricks. Piton limits, the cooking thresholds, and statuses PEAK does not have.