PEAK Beginner's Guide: How to Survive Your First Climb

PEAK drops you on an island after a plane crash and asks you to climb your way out. It's a co-op climbing game from Aggro Crab and Landfall, playable solo or with up to four scouts, and the whole goal is getting from the beach at the bottom to the rescue helicopter at the top. That sounds simple enough. It isn't. Most first runs end somewhere in the second or third biome with a long fall and a lot of yelling on voice chat.

One quirk worth knowing up front: the island rebuilds itself every 24 hours for everyone playing, so you can't memorize a route tonight and reuse it next week. What you can learn is the stuff underneath the terrain. How stamina works, what the weather is doing, which items earn their weight. That part never changes. Here's the short version of all of it.

Starting the Climb and Basic Controls

Pick your difficulty at the airport

Before the run begins you hang out in an airport lobby where you can customize your scout and practice on a small climbing wall. The boarding pass UI is where the real choice happens. Hit the up and down arrows to set the difficulty, and while you're learning, set it all the way down to Tenderfoot.

Tenderfoot's biggest gift is that it turns the fog off entirely (more on the fog later). It also slows hunger down by about 30 percent. You lose nothing by learning the game there first, and every biome looks the same as it does on the harder settings.

Loot the crash site before you climb anything

The plane wreck on the Shore always spawns the same pile of useful stuff next to it: one Backpack, one Lantern, and one Flare, plus one-off items like the Compass, the Guidebook, Binoculars, a Bugle, a Flying Disc, and a Bing Bong plush. A Regular Luggage and a Big Luggage sit there too.

The Backpack is the prize. It fills a fourth equipment slot and carries four extra items, so whoever grabs it basically doubles what the team can haul in the opening stretch. The Flare matters later, at the very end of the run. Grab both before you walk away from the wreck.

The burning wreckage also gives off a small flame, and it cooks food exactly like a campfire does. Crack a couple of coconuts, toast the pieces, and start the climb with your bonus stamina bar topped off. It's free, and it takes about ten seconds.

The default controls

| Input | What it does | | --- | --- | | WASD | Move | | Space | Jump | | Left Shift | Sprint on flat ground, lunge while climbing | | Ctrl | Crouch | | Left Click (hold) | Climb a surface, or use your held item | | Right Click | Helping hand with empty hands, grab things, alt-use | | E | Interact | | Q | Drop item, hold it to throw | | O | Ping a location for your team | | R | Emote |

You can rebind all of this as of patch 1.30.a, and the pause screen shows the full list if you forget something mid-run.

Climbing itself is one motion. Walk up to a wall, hold Left Click, and move with WASD. Almost every surface in the game is climbable, so the question is rarely whether you can get up it and usually whether you should. While you're on a wall, tapping Shift does a lunge, which is a small upward boost that costs a bit of stamina. It's the move for when the ledge is right there and your bar is almost gone.

The habit that separates new climbers from good ones is looking around before committing. Down and sideways, not just up. Moving down or across costs way less than going up, and the intimidating direct route usually has an easier cousin a little to the left or below you. Backtracking ten meters to find a kinder angle is cheap. Falling is not.

Managing Stamina While Scaling Terrain

Stamina is the whole game. The bar holds 100 points, and climbing, sprinting, and jumping all pull from it. Hit zero while you're on a wall and you let go, and letting go halfway up a cliff usually means a long slide to the bottom.

The other half of the system is status effects. Hunger, Injury, Poison, Cold, and Weight all stack onto the same bar and shrink the space your stamina has to refill into. Pile up enough of them and there's no room left, at which point you pass out. Managing the bar really means managing both ends of it.

Here's what actions actually cost, straight from the wiki:

| Action | Stamina cost | | --- | --- | | Sprinting | 5 per second | | Jump | 5 | | Jump while sprinting | 15 |

That last row is the one people miss. A sprint-jump costs three times a plain jump, and it's rarely three times as useful. On flat ground between cliffs, walking is boring but it's free.

Regeneration runs at 20 points per second once you're standing on ground and have paused for about a second. If you fully bottomed out, the wait is closer to two seconds. You also regen while hanging on a piton or a pickaxe, which is why those little metal knobs in walls are worth planning around.

The practical loop is simple. Climb a stretch, find a flat spot, let the bar refill, keep going. A ledge every so often is worth more than any single item you'll find on the mountain.

Bonus stamina, the reserve tank

Cooked food fills a second bar underneath the main one. That reserve only burns when your main stamina hits empty, it doesn't refill on its own, and you can't sprint on it. Think of it as a spare tank. Starting a climb with a full yellow bar is the difference between making a ledge and not making it.

Hunger never stops

Hunger ticks in at 2.5 points every 50 seconds, forever, whether you're climbing or standing around arguing about which way to go. Eat before it stacks up rather than after. Berries and mushrooms are everywhere in the first three biomes, so there's no reason to run hungry.

Alongside that, everything you carry adds Weight to the bar. Dropping or eating an item removes its weight instantly, which is a genuinely useful trick when you're one number short of finishing a climb. Toss the umbrella.

How falls are measured

Fall damage runs on fall time, not distance. Anything under 1.5 seconds of falling is free. At 1.5 seconds you take a minimum of 5 Injury, and at 3 seconds or more you're looking at up to 100. Jumping right before you drop actually shaves half a second off the count, which can turn a lethal fall into a survivable one.

Injury doesn't heal on its own, ever. You need a campfire, bandages, a First Aid Kit, or healing foods like Medicinal Root. So one bad fall doesn't just cost you health, it costs you a chunk of your stamina bar until you find a fix.

Reading Weather and Environmental Hazards

Every biome has its own way of ruining your day. Knowing what's coming is half of surviving it.

The fog

On every difficulty above Tenderfoot, a wall of fog rises behind you and acts as the timer for each biome. It starts closing in once the whole group has climbed high enough, or after 16 minutes and 40 seconds, whichever comes first. Anyone caught inside takes 2.5 Cold roughly every 2.4 seconds, plus the screen goes almost white, so you can't see the wall you're clinging to.

The fog stops shrinking once it reaches the campfire at the top of a biome. Light that campfire and the path to the next zone opens. Until then, it's chasing you.

The Shore

Three things want to hurt you here and none of them are very good at it. Jellyfish sit scattered across the beach and inflict 5 Poison plus a two-second ragdoll on contact, and the ragdoll is honestly the dangerous part. Getting flopped around near a ledge is how people throw away a run on biome one.

Giant Urchins deal 10 Poison per second while you're touching them, so a brief brush is survivable and parking yourself on one is not. Bridges connect parts of the biome and each has a hidden weight limit between 1 and 5. If that many scouts stand on it, it snaps after a few seconds. Cross one at a time and nobody has to find out the limit the hard way.

The Tropics

Rain is the biome-wide hazard here. When it pours, every unsheltered surface gets wet and slippery. Climbing gets slower, costs more stamina, and you slide downward while holding still, so you can pump away at a wall and go nowhere. Waiting it out under cover is usually cheaper than fighting through it, unless the fog is breathing down your neck.

The rest is plants. Explosive Spore Bombs are yellow with green splotches and launch you flying when touched, often off the mountain. Poison Spore Bombs are green with tiny magenta dots and pop a purple gas cloud. Poison Ivy has purple spots and costs 2.5 Poison per brush. Monstera looks nearly identical without the spots and is harmless, except for a 1 percent chance of picking up a Tick, which slowly converts your stamina bar into Poison up to a max of 50 until someone pulls it off. The upside is that a removed Tick becomes food worth 20 hunger, so it's not a total scam.

Beehives occasionally hang on the thin willow trees. The swarm stings for 2.5 Poison per second while you're close. Throw the hive at a rock to crack it open and you get four Honeycombs, which hand out a big chunk of bonus stamina. Worth the stings, more or less, if you've got someone to pull ticks and poison off you after.

The Alpine

Blizzards are the headline. They roll through at random, last several seconds, and hit anyone unsheltered with heavy Cold while the wind shoves you around and visibility drops to nothing.

Here's the part that trips people up: shelter is calculated from light level, not from what's physically between you and the sky. Darker spots protect you. Caves work great, and the deeper the better. Standing behind a pine tree does pretty much nothing, because the game sees you standing in daylight.

Two more tools help. Gripping any climbable surface anchors you against the wind. And huddling close to other scouts softens the Cold you take. Beyond the storms, Ice Rocks inflict Cold while you stand on them and more while you climb them, geysers erupt and launch whoever's nearby, and Flash Bulbs in the caves blind everyone around them when touched. The Hot Spring higher up the cliff melts Cold off over time and fully protects you from blizzards, plus three capybaras live there. Worth the detour.

The hot zones, briefly

If your first climb goes far enough to reach the Caldera or the Kiln, the short version is that the fog gets replaced or joined by lava. In the Kiln it starts rising three minutes after you light the campfire, and standing in it costs 25 Injury plus about 30 Heat every second. Chains stretched across the lava are the safe path. Stay on them.

Using Items and Sharing Resources with Your Team

What's worth the weight

You get three item slots, plus a fourth equipment slot that holds a Backpack (four more items) or a Fanny Pack (two). Space is tight, so be picky.

The rope family earns its spot every run. A Rope Spool carries 12.5 meters of climbable rope you can anchor to any surface, which is how you get the whole team up a tall wall for the price of one person's climb. The Rope Cannon fires a harpoon that drops 7.5 meters of rope where it hits, good for gaining height fast. The Chain Launcher connects where you're standing to wherever you aim, building a chain bridge across a gap. It can't fire upward, so it's a horizontal tool.

A Piton is a one-time-use metal knob you slam into a wall that anyone can hang on to regen stamina, one scout at a time. On long featureless stretches, it's a lifesaver.

For healing, Bandages remove 30 Injury over a four-second use, and a First Aid Kit clears a full 100 each of Poison, Spores, and Injury in five seconds. An Antidote strips 35 Poison and 35 Spores plus 10 Heat. Against the cold, a Heat Pack removes 360 Cold over 60 seconds, and a Lantern warms everyone nearby for 150 Cold over the same minute, which makes it a group purchase rather than a personal one.

Balloons are the weird one. Each one removes 5 Weight just by being carried and cuts gravity by 18 percent for two minutes or 160 meters of climbing. Carrying junk that makes you lighter is a funny deal and it works.

Cook everything, once

Every campfire cooks, and so does the Portable Stove if you find one. Cooked food restores more and usually adds bonus stamina, and that applies to berries, mushrooms, trail mix, all of it. One pass over the flame is the whole benefit. Cooking a second time does nothing good.

Do not cook your tools. Heat wrecks them. A cooked rope spool stops extending, and a cooked flare or lantern is done for. Keep the food pile and the gear pile on opposite sides of the fire and you'll be fine.

The teamwork moves

The helping hand is the best free action in the game. Stand above a teammate with empty hands and hold Right Click. When they climb within reach, they get pulled up to you without spending any of their own stamina. Send your freshest climber up first, have them turn around, and suddenly a wall that would drain three people only drains one. Just know it tugs you slightly toward them, so plant yourself first.

The crouch boost is the other one. Crouch, let a teammate climb onto your back, then stand up at the same instant they jump. You'll hear a sproingy sound and they launch a short distance upward for free. It's the answer to ledges that are juuust out of reach.

Ping with O to flag loot, hazards, or a route without stopping to type. And spread the heavy items around the group rather than letting one person play pack mule. Four people carrying a little weight each beats one person whose stamina bar starts the biome half empty.

Deaths, ghosts, and the statue

A downed scout can be brought back on the spot with a First Aid Kit or whatever cures the status that dropped them. If they stay down too long they die and become a ghost. The fix is the Ancient Statue near the end-of-biome campfire. Break it open and every dead teammate falls out of the sky, alive again, carrying a stamina-limiting debuff as the price. If nobody's dead, interact with it instead and you get a guaranteed high-rarity item. Check it either way.

Don't leave people behind

This one has teeth. Every 30 seconds the game checks the group's positions, and if the highest player is more than 160 meters above the second highest, the Scoutmaster spawns and starts hunting the leader. When he catches you he grabs you for 25 Injury and throws you in the direction with the longest possible fall below it. He does not stop after one throw.

The fix is embarrassingly easy. Wait for your friends. The 30 seconds you spend standing on a ledge waving people up is cheap insurance compared to getting yeeted into a ravine by a skeleton scoutmaster.

Common Mistakes That Get New Climbers Killed

Most first-run deaths come from the same short list. Read it once and you'll dodge most of them.

Climbing until the bar is empty. Running out of stamina on a wall means letting go, and any fall past three seconds deals up to 100 Injury. Turn around or find a ledge when you're down to a third. Nine times out of ten the wall isn't going anywhere.

Tasting mystery food on a slope. Poison and the drowsy effect both knock you out cold, and an unconscious body on anything other than flat ground slides right down the mountain. Test berries and mushrooms on flat terrain or in a ditch, never on a cliff edge.

Cooking gear by accident. Same fire, opposite outcome. Food gets better, tools get ruined. Cooked rope won't extend to help teammates up.

Piling onto a bridge. The weight limit is hidden and the collapse is instant. One scout at a time, every time, even when you're in a hurry.

Sprint-jumping everywhere. It costs 15 stamina against 5 for a regular jump. Save it for when you actually need the distance.

Forgetting to eat. Hunger never pauses, and every 2.5 points of it is stamina you don't get back until you snack. Graze as you climb.

Hiding behind a tree in a blizzard. Shelter runs on light level. Get somewhere dark, like a cave or deep under an overhang, and the Cold mostly stops.

Racing ahead of the group. Beyond being rude, a 160 meter gap summons the Scoutmaster onto whoever's winning. The mountain punishes abandoning your friends.

Walking past the crash site. The Backpack, Lantern, and Flare are guaranteed spawns sitting next to where you wake up, plus a free fire to cook on. Thirty seconds of looting sets up the entire run.

Grab that Flare even if it sits in your pack all game. It's one of the few guaranteed items on the island, and it's the thing you light on the final Peak to summon the rescue helicopter. Everything between the wreck and that moment is just not falling.