How to play Nile’s End

A short guide to surviving Egypt in 1985, in the order you will meet things. It has no story spoilers beyond what the home page says. New to the game? Jump to the first-day tips.

The basics

You are one survivor on a real map of Egypt. Tap any piece of land and a pin drops, with a line from you to it and the distance; a panel then offers to take you there. Time passes when you act: travelling, searching, crafting and sleeping.

The speed buttons fast-forward a trip. Stop drops the route, and if you stop to rest, Continue picks it up again.
The bar along the bottom has the Map, your Pack, Craft, Explore (search where you stand), Survivor (your health and what ails you) and the Journal (the day’s contracts, quests, your family and the map).
Travel finds its own way: it follows roads where it can and steers round water, closed borders and fallout.

Your five bars

Health, food, water, energy and body temperature. Walking and fighting drain them fastest, resting slowest, and sleep fills your energy back up. Two rules to live by:

Water comes first. Thirst kills much faster than hunger, so never set out without a full bottle.
Health only returns when you are fed, watered and warm, and most wounds and illnesses stop it altogether until they are treated.

Finding clean water

Wells in towns and oases give clean water. Fill your empty bottles there.
Canals and the Nile give dirty water. Boil it at a lit campfire with a pot, or risk dysentery.
Rehydration salts, stirred into water, put back what heat and sickness take out of you.
At camp, a solar still draws a little clean water out of the ground and the night air.

Heat and cold

Egypt is hot by day, and the desert is cold at night. The midday sun in the open heats you; shade, a straw hat or a headscarf cool you down. Warm layers only help when it is cold, and the cold won’t let you sleep until you have warmed up.

In summer, walk at dawn and dusk and rest in the shade at noon. Heat exhaustion turns into heatstroke if you ignore it.
In spring, a khamsin sandstorm slows you right down; a face scarf or a mask softens it.
On the coast, winter brings rain, and the Delta gets fog.

Searching

Open Explore where you stand. Towns are made of places worth a search: houses and apartment blocks, the co-op store and the souq, the pharmacy, the police station, an army depot, a factory, a petrol station, wrecked cars. A search takes time and can bring trouble, and each place runs dry, then slowly fills up again. Out in the open you can search the area once, and gather, forage, fish or hunt. Whatever lies on the ground is listed in Explore.

As you travel, points of interest appear on the map: farmsteads, Bedouin camps, army checkpoints, desert wells, monasteries and more. The game also hides stashes for you to find.

Wounds and sickness

Every condition has stages, and most get worse if you leave them. You can see yours on the Survivor screen. What treats each one:

Bleeding: A bandage stops it. A rag works in a pinch but can infect the wound. Left alone it turns into heavy bleeding.
Broken bone: A splint, then about ten days to heal. Until then you move slowly and aim worse.
Infection: Iodine or araq stops it early; antibiotics cure it at any stage. Untreated it goes from an infected wound to fever to sepsis.
Heat exhaustion: Shade and water; rehydration salts work fastest. Left alone it becomes heatstroke.
Venom: Antivenom. A first aid kit helps with a fresh sting; later it can kill.
Dysentery: It comes from dirty water. Antibiotics or activated charcoal, and plenty of clean water.
Food poisoning: Activated charcoal, water and rest.
Cold: Stay warm. Cold medicine for a cold or the flu; pneumonia needs antibiotics.
Radiation sickness: Leave the contaminated area. A radioprotector flushes the dose, and rest lets the rest clear.
Pain: Painkillers or araq. It also wears off by itself.

A bandage is made from two pieces of cloth, and cloth from two rags: keep every rag you find.

Fallout

The strikes hit targets such as Cairo, Alexandria, the canal cities and Aswan. Each left a hot core and a plume of fallout that the north wind carries south. A dosimeter shows how hot the ground is, a gas mask protects you, and distance protects you best: walk around the plume, not through it. Radiation sickness builds up with the dose you collect.

Fights

On the road and in towns you will meet jackals, feral dogs, striped hyenas, scorpions, cobras, raiders, armed raiders and mutants, and, far in the south, Nile crocodiles. The battle screen lets you shoot, reload, close the distance, bandage yourself or run, and a pack often breaks when one of its members falls. Fighting is the most tiring thing you can do, and it drains water fastest. Hunt gazelles, ibexes and stray buffalo for meat, and cook it at a campfire.

Camp and crafting

You can set up a camp anywhere, one at a time: a new camp replaces the old one. What you can build there:

Campfire: warmth, light and cooking. It needs firewood.
Mudbrick shelter: keeps out the night cold (+6 °C) and the midday sun, and makes sleep safer.
Plank bed: sleep restores more energy.
Brick stove: firewood burns twice as long.
Workbench: advanced crafting and repairs.
Storage chest and solar still.

There are 67 recipes. Cooking (meat, fish, bread, lentil soup, boiled water, tea) needs a lit campfire at your camp, or a primus stove with kerosene, which cooks anywhere; there are bandages, splints and first aid kits; cloth, rope, planks, charcoal, glue and tanned leather; clothes, from a face scarf and a headscarf to a galabeya, boots and a greatcoat; repair kits; and hand-loaded ammunition at a workbench. Some need a tool (a pot, a knife, a saw, a sewing kit), and tools wear with use. The tools themselves can be made: a hammer from scrap, wood and rope, then with it a knife, an axe and a spear, and at a workbench a saw, a hacksaw, a wrench and a crowbar. Work gloves, trousers, a raincoat, rubber boots, a steel helmet and a leather jacket can be made too, from cloth, rubber, sheet metal and tanned leather.

Traps. A snare and a fish trap, both made from wire and rope, feed you while you do something else. Set one from Explore where you stand (a snare anywhere but the dunes, a fish trap on a river, a canal or a lake), go about your business and come back: within a kilometre and a half of it you can check it. Each gets a chance of a catch every six hours, up to a day's worth, and what sits longer is lost. A snare gives raw meat and now and then a hide and bones; a fish trap gives fish. You can have four out at once, every catch wears one a little, and they are marked on the map.

Getting around

On foot you are slow, and slowest on sand. Roads are faster. A bicycle is about three times quicker than walking on a road or a field track, and needs no fuel. A hand cart carries a lot but is slower than walking. A Jawa motorcycle is quick and light on fuel. A restored Nasr 128 is fast, shady and roomy, but thirsty and hopeless in soft sand (you need a wreck and petrol). Build them from the parts you find, in the Garage, which you open from your Pack. Vehicles wear, and their parts wear on their own: a bicycle has tyres, brakes and a chain; a motorcycle those and an engine that needs oil and plugs; a car has tyres, brakes, oil, a battery and plugs. Rough ground eats tyres and chains fastest. A part at zero can stop you (a flat, a snapped chain, a seized engine, a dead battery), and worn brakes mean a crash sooner or later. In the Garage you fit each part new from its spares, patch the tyres with a puncture repair kit, and service the frame and engine with metal and bolts. The Jawa and the Nasr can only be put together once you know how (see plans, below). A vehicle that is past mending can be taken apart for its parts.

Taking things apart and mending them

Almost everything you find can be taken apart for what is in it. Tap a thing in the Pack: if it comes apart, a block shows the tool it needs (a knife, a wrench, a hammer, a hacksaw) and, as pictures, what comes out. Clothes come apart into cloth and leather, guns into parts, ammunition into brass and powder, wheels into tyres and scrap, and the odd things the houses leave behind (a fan, a clock, a cassette player) into springs, wire and metal. The tool loses a use each time; what comes out is partly chance and always a little less than went in.

Things wear. Weapons wear when you fight, shoes as you walk, tools as you use them and vehicles as they carry you. A damaged thing in the Pack shows a small red wrench and a Repair block: clothes and bags are mended with a sewing kit and cloth, shoes with glue, blades with a whetstone, guns with a weapon repair kit and the spare parts of their own kind (pistol, shotgun or rifle parts), armour with sheet metal and a hammer. At a camp with a workbench, weapons and tools can also be mended with scrap, with no kit. Matches, lighters, torches, kits and kerosene are used up rather than worn, so they can’t be mended.

Plans. The advanced things (hand-loading ammunition, a first aid kit, boots and rucksacks, a primus stove, a sawed-off shotgun, a homemade pistol, a crossbow, a plate vest, brake pads, and the Jawa and the Nasr) can only be made once you know how. A plan is a sheet of drawings you find where it would be kept (army depots, factories, hospitals, farms), or learn from someone on the road, a gunsmith or a mechanic or a nurse, for a small gift. Study it in the Pack and the recipes are yours for good. Until then they show a padlock in Craft, with a hint of where to look.

The radio and the world

The country does not wait for you. A great khamsin front can sweep the valley for days and slow every step under it; flash floods run down the wadis after rain in the hills; raiders hit a town and the roads round it fill with their friends; the wind shifts and carries a fresh patch of fallout somewhere it was not; and when the quail cross, every snare fills. What happens is fixed by the seed and the day, like the weather, so it is the same wherever you go.

A radio in the pack tells you. The first thing you do each day brings the news, and for the events that can be seen coming (a khamsin, floods, fallout, quail) it comes a day or two ahead. The Radio tab of the Journal keeps the broadcast, with the distance, the direction and the days left, and tomorrow's weather where you are. What you have heard is drawn on the map, and fallout you have not heard of stays off it until you are close. The radio also has jobs: drive raiders off a town while the raid lasts, bring a stuck convoy what it ran short of, or barter with survivors.

A survivor's tale and the daily challenge

When a survivor dies, the death screen can paint their tale on a card: how many days they lasted, what ended it, how far they walked, how much they searched and made, the fights they won and the places they saw. Share it from your phone to any app, or save it as a picture, and dare a friend to last longer.

The title screen also has the daily challenge: one world for everyone who plays that day, in survival mode, with a single life. It changes at midnight UTC, and the game keeps your best for the day. Same world, same weather, same events: whoever lasts longest has played better, not luckier.

Story mode and Survival mode

Story mode follows your family across 10 chapters, and if you die you go back to the last time you slept or finished part of the story. Survival mode has no story, and death is final: the saved game is erased. The game saves itself.

First-day tips

Before you leave your first town, fill every empty bottle at a well.
Search every house you can: rags, cloth, food and a pot are the start of everything.
Make bandages before you need them.
Never drink canal water raw. Boil it.
When it is hot, travel at dawn, dusk and night, and rest in the shade at midday.
Sleep indoors when you can: sleeping out in the open can bring trouble.
Check the Journal for the day’s contracts: they pay in supplies.
When a fight turns against you, run. Running is a move too.

Something this guide doesn’t cover? See the questions on the home page, or write to support@nilesend.com. Writing about the game? There is a press kit.