Fundamentals: What is Black Survival?

It’s a 2D Battle Royale where you want to be last survivor by killing >1 player. It is a fast turned-based decision making game with a roughly ~21 minutes duration (upcoming 10 minutes game potentially in February 2022). Let’s unpack it.

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Fast turned-based. Turn-based means the faster you use your hotkeys, the more turns you can take. So every dragon roughly has the same speed here. It’s hotkey on the PC, fingers on the Mobile. It doesn’t matters which one you pick. Both Hotkeys or Fingers can touch the button before it appears on the screen. They also removed the hotkey use for the rest-in between moving location. So the difference between the two is minimal. I feel it's easier to learn hotkeys, but both works.

• If you are looking at benchmarks for speed, check out these players on mobile: Christian Keiger, Ptarmigan6. Otherwise, for PC, any Dragon is fine.

So your training here is set your Hotkeys when you’re playing on PC (Settings --> PC Settings). Then practice on PC or Mobile against an AI in a Private game to be able to do every action fast enough.

• Keyboard

  • Search: you barely see what you’re searching in the middle

  • Drop zone: how fast you are able to get an item back from the drop zone, you barely see what you pick

  • Rest: Stamina, HP, First Aid

  • Move: how fast you open the Mini-map and select your area

    • On mobile & PC, you can still rest-in between moving areas, but it's very demanding for little rewards.

  • Using items

  • Crafting items

  • Switching between Stance

  • Dodge Stance when multiple crafts, when First Aid.

  • Attacking

  • Using Aptitude

  • Using Combat skills

  • Using Field skills

  • Inventory

  • Player List

• Mouse

  • Bag item selection

  • Mini-map area selection

  • Quick-slot activation

  • Emotes selection

 

Then decision making. It’s the difference between the top guys and the rest. Best decision does the most at the same time. That’s efficiency in a nutshell. You’ll have to juggle multiple crafts & HP status & Stamina & Animal spawns. When do you move? When do I fight? When do I run?... You get better by playing & testing different things.

You move when you find the item you only get in this area. You are also more efficient when you fully use your 6 inventory slot along your 6 bag slots.

• That's why starting at School is so popular. You can get a piece for every body part (except Legs) at no cost for your bag. So you can salvage more in your starting area than a no armor start like Hotel. Then you also get the extra ATK/DEF from having already equip stuff. Why is this important? Because you're alone on Lumia Island, there's 9 others. So when you are playing, you are always trying to take the right action at the very moment.

There's also a priority-check here as well within your decision making with "Events":

• How is my food right now? How is my Stamina right now?

  • You fight when you have too much food. That's how you build most of your Mastery. Early trades when players do no damage is worth gold if you get that opportunity.

• You do good fighting trades with opponent: you run when you're either low food or the damage difference between you two is high (~10 damage).

  • Even though mentally, you would want to continue fighting!

• Is there animal spawns right now? They are more efficient as they give ingredients + mastery. But you might need food to fight for it though!

 

Then, there's a mental component. In this game, you’ll be tested on how well you can keep your cool/zen to make efficient decision with every events that can happen in this game. The more emotional you are about game events, the worst will be your decision making & the slower it will be, the less efficient it will be. You get better at this over time and getting used to opponent contests.

• Be warned though that for most people it’s hard to handle for a long period of time. Playing the game for too long is tough.

• PvE mode is a way to remove the mental pressure from the game for now and focus on your decision making.

 

Then finally magic/flexing happens when you mastered your route, and alternate crafts. Answers will come magically to you.

• I also added a video on YouTube about The Art of Flexing.

• This How Search Works is also very good video to watch to understand how searching works in this game.

 

That's it, check out our Guide tab for more.