Polylithic Guides Hub

Polylithic dropped 1.0 on 25 August 2026, and the first wave of players did not ask for lore essays. They asked why the opening dream dumped them in a one-hut camp, why flint refused to spawn on the dirt, and why a follower who looked heroic on the plains froze the moment a bear turned around. This hub is the map for those questions.

The game is a third-person Stone Age survival title from polyperfect and indie.io. You start as a Paleolithic forager, unlock tools one small step at a time, and try to drag a handful of people toward a Neolithic village that can plant, cook, and defend itself. Online co-op lets you bring up to nine friends. Sandbox skips the campaign and generates more world. None of that helps if you cannot light a fire or save after a hunt.

What these guides assume

They assume you are on the Windows Steam build after 1.0, not the 2023 Early Access drop. Enemy tribes, generated cooking recipes, dogs and hyenas, and a much larger changelog all arrived with the full release. Older forum posts still help for basic keys and the flint trick, but they will lie about missing animals and missing enemies. When a mechanic is still janky in launch-week reviews, the page says so instead of pretending the tribe AI is a finished butler.

If you have not even left the hut, start with getting started in Polylithic. If you already have a fire and keep dying to bison, jump to how to hunt. If the problem is string, blades, or a grindstone that will not place, use how to craft.

How to use the hub

Read one guide, then bounce to the matching system page. Crafting how-tos pair with the tech tree and items list. Tribe how-tos pair with villagers and settlement building. Co-op how-tos pair with multiplayer setup. The guides answer “what do I do next.” The system pages answer “why did that break.”

A typical first evening looks like this. Wake from the dream. Learn the controls. Craft flint in the pack, not on the ground. Build a fire, roast whatever you can steal from the opening, and place a bed inside a hut so a crash does not wipe forty minutes. Then pick a lane: hunt caribou, raise a second hut, or invite a friend into sandbox. The survival checklist exists so you do not forget the save point while you chase a rabbit.

Story versus sandbox

Story mode wants you to feel the jump from hungry forager to village elder. Quests can stall. Launch-week reports mention objectives that refuse to tick, mammoth carcasses that will not harvest, and outpost assignments that hide in the wrong campfire menu. When that happens, do not grind the same prompt for an hour. Save, restart once, then check how to complete the story for the intended beat and the known stuck points.

Sandbox is the better teacher for some people. There is almost no tutorial, which is either immersive or rude depending on your mood. Use the same first-hour loop, then ignore the campaign and push tech. Co-op groups almost always land here. Read how to play co-op before you host, because desync and missing quests are the two ways a four-person night dies.

What we will not pretend

This is a fan wiki. We will not invent drop tables the studio has not published, and we will not hide that Mixed reviews exist. The review and 1.0 patch notes sit next to these guides on purpose. If a hunt strategy depends on followers actually swinging weapons, the hunting page tells you they often do not while they are set to follow.

When you finish a guide, leave through a sibling link, not the browser back button. The next useful page is usually one click away in the same dropdown.