Best Early Game Knowledge Points in My Time at Sandrock

As you earn experience in My Time at Sandrock you’ll start to accumulate Knowledge Points that you can spend on skills in several useful talent trees. While pretty much all these skills can help boost your production, some of them will have a bigger impact than others, so here’s how to get the most out of your early Knowledge Points in My Time at Sandrock.

Gathering Skills

Early on in Sandrock, you’ll find your stamina to be your biggest limitation. Without it, you won’t be able to smack rocks, cut trees, or otherwise gather the resources you need to progress. Therefore, your highest priority skills in this tree should be the Stamina and Stamina Recovery Knowledge Skills. Stamina Knowledge gives you a +10% boost to your max stamina that’s really useful, and because it’s percentage based it should amplify any flat bonuses you get from relationship perks. While you can hold off on the 3rd level of the skill until later, the ability to stay up late without losing out on the buffs from being well rested will be really useful later.

Grabbing some of the bonus experience talents might seem tempting at first, after all more experience means more points to put in skills, but the rates are so low and tied to specific actions that you’ll be better served by more stamina

There are a few other useful, but slightly lower priority skills in this tree that might be worth investing in too. Picker-Upper Knowledge gives you a chance to get gold and diamonds from junk piles, as well as automatically grabbing the scorpions that sometimes pop out of resource nodes. Handy if you tend to zone out while gathering. Then you can drop a single point in Herbal Knowledge for some extra water as you gather plants, and Treasure Knowledge to get a handy map icon for hidden treasure chests.

Workshop Skills

The Workshop tree has two hot-ticket skills you’ll want to beeline for: Bag Knowledge and Water Conservation Knowledge. Bag Knowledge straight up gives you 40 extra bag slots for two points, while the third level gives you a 10% discount on buying new slots. While you can probably get buy with that first chunk of slots for a bit, eventually you’ll want to pick up more and that 10% discount really adds up.

It makes sense that water would be valuable in a desert, but it won’t be until you’ve got your workshop up and running that you realise just how critical it is. While you can always buy it from Burgess at the Water Tower, it can be expensive early on and you’ll need it for everything. That’s where Water Conservation comes in, not just reducing your machines’ hunger for the wet stuff but making your dew collectors more efficient and even letting you make water from fewer drops.

Honorable mentions include any other skills stemming off of Mass Production Knowledge for general efficiency boosts, as well as the farming skills if you plan ton growing lots of crops for materials and food.

Combat Skills

A lot of the Combat skills only focus on a single weapon type so, until you have a chance to try them all out and find which you want to focus on its best to only pick up skills that apply more generally. This includes pretty much anything stemming from Survival Knowledge on the top side of the tree, which focuses on boosting survivability but does include some bonuses to crit rate.

Early on you’ll be almost exclusively relying on melee weapons, but later on you’ll be able to unlock firearms that can be very useful, and definitely worth the 4-point investment into the accompanying skills.

Social Skills

The Social tree might not be the most immediately exciting at first glance, a lot of the bonuses are small extras that add up over a longer period. Others, like the dates and party skills, won’t become useful until you advance a relationship enough to unlock them. To start off with, then, it’s probably best to stick to the workshop-related skills on the right-hand side of the tree, so that when you’re more established materially you’ll be able to feel your way through the other options.

A good skill to bee-line for is the Commissions and Contracting skill that allows you to take on an extra commission, while the Quick Delivery and Quality Bonus skills will let you squeeze out better rewards for finishing those commissions on the same day you picked them up, or by submitting higher quality items than asked for. Commissions are a great way to make money, so it’s worth getting the hang of speedily completing them.

Remember, the clinic offers to reset your knowledge points for a sum of Gols. So if you do decide you’d rather your knowledge points were allocated differently, there’s always that option.

My Time at Sandrock is available for PC, Nintendo Switch, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X. A PS4 version is in development.