PEAK Tips and Tricks
Each entry below is one mechanic, what it costs you, and the patch it was last checked against. Filter by category or difficulty to narrow the list, and use the anchor beside any heading to link straight to a single tip.
Climbing
#You hang from a piton, you never stand on one
Only one scout can hang on a given piton, and they are scarce enough that spacing them at a fixed interval wastes them. Save them for the top of a long climb, when your stamina is nearly gone and there is nothing else within reach to grab.
Checked against 1.65.a
Movement Tech
#PEAK has no dash, so dash-jump conservation cannot exist
There is no last-second leap window at zero stamina either. At zero you simply cannot climb or sprint until it regenerates. The real exploit people are half-remembering is rope storage, which lets you stash normally unstorable items while on a rope, vine, or chain.
Checked against 1.65.a
Stamina
#Stamina regenerates while walking and while hanging on a piton
You do not have to stand still. It refills at 20 per second once you have been grounded about 0.2 seconds and have not spent any for a full second, or two seconds if you emptied the bar completely. Emptying it costs you the grip and drops you, unless an Infinite Stamina buff is running, which since patch 2.01.a lets you keep climbing on a visibly empty bar.
Checked against 2.01.a
Caldera
#The Caldera lava starts three minutes after you light the fire
It is a timer, not a trigger, and it takes about twenty minutes to reach the top whether you climb or stand still. Standing in it costs roughly 25 Injury and 30 Heat per second. Every difficulty except Tenderfoot runs it, so lighting that campfire starts your clock.
Checked against 1.65.a
Campfires
#A lit campfire halts hunger growth entirely while it burns
Invincibility effects such as Fortified Milk and the Ancient Idol pause the timer too. Difficulty moves it in both directions: Tenderfoot slows hunger by 30 percent, while Ascent 2 and above speed it up by 60. Waiting at a fire genuinely costs you nothing.
Checked against 1.65.a
Food
#Cooking decontaminates berries only, never mushrooms
PEAK has exactly three poisonous mushrooms. The Bugle, Button, and Cluster Shrooms inflict 20, 30, and 40 Poison on a ten second delay, and no amount of fire changes that. The Chubby Shroom has no poisonous variant at all. Toxic variants give themselves away by a rougher, ridged stalk.
Checked against 1.65.a
#The second cook is free and the fourth poisons you
Cooking doubles a food's hunger reduction and multiplies bonus stamina by 1.5, with a guaranteed minimum of +10 even from a raw item that gave none. A second cook produces an identical Well-Done result, a third only loses 5 hunger value, and a fourth incinerates it for 10 Poison.
Checked against 1.65.a
Hunger
#Hunger and stamina share one 100-point bar, point for point
Fifty Hunger costs you half your climbing bar, and 100 leaves you with nothing and knocks you out. It accrues at 0.05 per second, which is roughly 33 minutes from full to unconscious, so the bar shrinking under you is not fatigue, it is the clock.
Checked against 1.65.a
Items
#The Yellow Winterberry has no downside, only a spawn rate
It restores 30 Hunger, grants 35 bonus stamina, removes 50 Heat, and heals 20 Injury. The reason people treat it as a trap is that it only has a 0.5 percent chance on Alpine trees. The reliable route is capybaras, since one always sits on a head at the Alpine Hot Spring or Mesa Oasis.
Checked against 1.65.a
Inventory
#A whole Coconut weighs 12.5, the heaviest food in the game
Break it open into two Half-Coconuts and eat or share those instead. The food is excellent, but hauling the intact shell up a mountain costs you carry weight you will want for rope and cures long before you reach the Alpine.
Checked against 1.65.a
The Kiln
#Revive everyone before you enter the Kiln
It has no campfire and no Ancient Statue at its end, so anyone dead when you walk in stays dead for the rest of the run. The Caldera fire you light on the way in is one of only two campfires with no guaranteed Backpack beside it, the other being the one at the end of GLOOM.
Checked against 2.0.a
Caldera
#The Caldera statue and its campfire are in different places
The Mesa update quietly moved that campfire forward into the volcano just before the Kiln, while the Ancient Statue and the cluster of Luggage stayed behind at the top of the Caldera temple, separated by a bridge and a tunnel. Revive and loot before you walk to the fire.
Checked against 1.65.a
Co-op
#The hand pull only reaches a climber below you
With empty hands, right click extends a hand and pulls them up once they are close. It works only while they are climbing and you are above them, and it drags you slightly toward them as well. It frees teammates off cacti and out of webs, but never lifts an unconscious scout.
Checked against 1.65.a
Cold
#Standing near a teammate clears Cold faster than any item
Get within about three meters and it strips 1.5 Cold per second at no cost. Cold also decays on its own once you are out of it, so you do not need to burn an item every time the meter ticks up. Shelter in darker ground during blizzards, which last only seconds.
Checked against 1.65.a
Revives
#Only the Book of Bones brings a scout back as a skeleton
The Book of Bones revives its target as a living skeleton with +5 Curse. Skeletons shrug off most statuses but take roughly 8x injury and die outright instead of passing out. Use it on yourself and you become the skeleton. An Ancient Statue returns a normal scout at Hunger 30 with +5 Curse. Patch 2.01.a ended the skeleton's status immunity, so spiders, flytraps and arrow traps now affect them.
Checked against 2.01.a
Alpine
#Blizzards inflict Cold and nothing else, grip included
The rate is 2.5 Cold per 1.75 seconds standing and 2.5 per 0.525 seconds climbing, so climbing through one is more than three times as expensive as waiting it out. They do not reduce your grip at all, which is the misconception that gets people to stop climbing at the wrong moment.
Checked against 1.65.a
Caldera
#PEAK has no thermal updrafts and the Caldera has no steam vents
Any advice about riding rising hot air for free height describes a mechanic this game does not contain. Geysers are an Alpine feature, not a Caldera one. Patch 2.04.a did add Condors that fly around the Caldera and carry you off, and being carried by one is a hazard, not a lift.
Checked against 2.4.C
Daily Maps
#The daily map is picked from a shipped pool, not generated for you
Making one requires lightmap baking that cannot run on your machine, so the developers generate them, bake them, and ship them in the build. Patch 1.65.a raised that pool from 21 to 42. The rotation changes at 17:00 UTC, and fixed geometry is why community location trackers work at all.
Checked against 1.65.a
Hunger
#Above 70 percent Hunger your teammates look like roast chickens
That is not a hallucination, it is the prompt. Eating one clears your Hunger, adds 10 Curse, and kills the scout you ate. If cannibalism is switched off in the lobby, a Cooked Bird fills the same slot without ending anyone's run.
Checked against 1.65.a
Status Effects
#Frostbite, Sunburn, and Slippery are not PEAK status effects
Cold and Heat cover the first two. Slippery is a separate mechanic entirely, caused by Berrynana peels and jellyfish and never by rain or ice. Chasing a cure for a status the game does not have is a good way to waste an item you needed later.
Checked against 1.65.a
What to Read Next
- Climbing and Survival Mechanics. Stamina, hunger, status effects, and what the movement tech really does.
- Biome Walkthrough. All ten zones, the daily map pool, and each biome's defining hazard.
- Co-op and Ascent Guide. Hand pulls, statues, skeleton revives, and every Ascent tier.
- 100% Badge Guide. All 64 badges, including the ones gated by difficulty or by other players.
- Lore and Secrets. The Scoutmaster, the scrolls, and what the mountain is hiding.
- Getting Started. Cooking, difficulty options, and your first run up from the Shore.