Far Far West Beginner Guide: Surviving The Frontier
Learning to survive this cursed desert requires more than just a quick trigger finger and a shiny robot hat.
The initial hours of Far Far West can be incredibly disorienting. You are dropped into a haunted desert, handed a six shooter, and told to go collect bounties. The game does not hold your hand, and the community forums are already filling up with players confused about the progression loop and completely starved for cash.
The first thing you need to understand is that this is not a pure roguelike. You are not losing all your progression when you die. The structure is much closer to a game like Deep Rock Galactic. You pick a mission in town, drop into the map, complete random objectives, shoot a boss, and extract. Your character and weapon experience persist whether you survive the run or get dismantled by a reanimated skeleton. Understanding that core loop takes the pressure off, but it does not make the actual gameplay any easier. Here is my advice for surviving the frontier and keeping your wallet full.
Mastering Mechanical Movement
Your survivability in this game is entirely dependent on your mobility. If you stand still to shoot, you are going to die. The dodge mechanics are simple on paper but highly exploitable in practice.
The Art of Bunnyhopping
You have a dash tied to your shift key and a standard jump on your spacebar. Using them in isolation is fine, but combining them changes everything. If you dash and immediately jump, you gain a massive amount of horizontal momentum.
To maximize your speed, you need to chain these movements. Dash, jump, and the exact second your mechanical boots touch the dirt, dash and jump again. This is classic bunnyhopping, and it completely trivializes the pathing of slower melee enemies. Once you start picking up movement speed Jokers during a run, you can literally run circles around bosses like the Necromancer, dodging almost all incoming damage just by strafing in the air.
The Roach Triple Jump
Early in the game, you get access to a robotic horse named Roach. Riding is great for covering flat ground, but Roach is actually your best vertical traversal tool before you unlock the late game flying mechanics.
When you dismount Roach, the game pops your character slightly into the air. The physics engine registers this as your starting point, meaning you still have your standard jump and dash available while airborne. You can essentially dismount, jump, and dash upward to secure a massive triple jump. I use this constantly to scale cliffs and bypass entirely blocked off sections of the map without having to search for a ramp.
Maximizing Experience and Fragments
You need to actively manage how you unlock your gear. The game will not do it for you, and ignoring the menus will leave you severely underpowered for higher difficulties.
Weapon Targeting
To unlock new guns and utilities, you need fragments. Bosses drop these when they die, but the catch is you have to manually select which specific fragment you want to farm in your loadout menu. Trust me, I learned this the hard way. I ran five consecutive missions before realizing I had already maxed out my current weapon fragment, and the overflow does not automatically roll over to the next gun. You have to go into the menu, swap your target to the next blueprint, and then drop back into the desert. Even after you unlock everything, you still need fragments to buy cosmetic skins, so always make sure you have a target selected.
The Element of Surprise
Your secondary weapon utilizes elemental damage, and you need to pick the right tool for the job. Pyro applies two points of damage per tick. Acid applies one point of damage but slows the target. Electric applies one point of damage but has a high chance to chain to nearby enemies.
You also need to level up your actual spell lines to unlock stronger magic. Spell experience is tied directly to the damage you output. However, the game gives you a massive one time XP bonus just for trying a spell. I highly recommend equipping every level one spell at least once, casting it, and taking that free chunk of experience. Once you have a decent arsenal unlocked, you can start combining them for massive damage, which I detailed extensively in my Far Far West spell combos guide to save you some trial and error.
Fixing The Gold Economy
This is the biggest pain point in the game right now. The upgrade costs in town are staggering, and the natural gold generation feels incredibly unbalanced.
Stop Mining For Pennies
If you spend twenty minutes running around a map on Hard difficulty cracking open every single gold ore vein you see, you will likely walk away with 400 gold. That is an insulting payout for a full map clear. The risk to reward ratio for manual mining is just not worth your time. If you want to actually afford your upgrades, you need to target specific objectives and exploit the Joker card system.
Secrets Versus Standard Quests
If you are going to farm the Medallion secret or the hidden Bells, you need to understand how the game tracks progress. Standard side quests will track across multiple missions. If an NPC asks you to find ten graves, you can find five, extract, and find the other five on your next drop.
Secret objectives do not work this way. Items like the medallions and bells must be fully collected and deposited within a single instance. If you grab two out of three medallions and extract, your progress resets to zero. You have to commit to finishing the secret before you call the dropship.
Knowing When To Leave
My final piece of advice is learning when to walk away. When you defeat the primary boss of a map, the game does not just end. Instead, it triggers an infinite, escalating wave of enemies.
This is fantastic if you are running a fully upgraded build and just want to grind raw weapon experience until your fingers bleed. It is an absolute nightmare if you still have three side quests to turn in and low health. Before you pull the trigger on the boss, make sure your map is clear, your secrets are secured, and your pockets are full. Once that boss drops, you are on a very strict survival timer to reach the extraction zone.
