
Somewhere in your randomly generated world will be an aircraft that you need to fix. You can build walls, doors, stairs and more if you want to give the island life a try, but for those wanting to escape, deeper waters will need to be tread. Once you have gotten the basic hang of survival and maybe built water collectors and fishing nets, you can start to think about turning your island into a home from home using the crafting system. Sadly, Cartographer isn’t available in the pause menu, you need to exit your game before you can view it in the main menu.Īs a survival game, the definition of gameplay is usually left open-ended: do you survive by completing the objective and getting back to civilisation, or is survival making a life for yourself on the islands? Fortunately, Stranded Deep offers both as viable solutions. By using this and your compass when in the main game, you can begin to understand the layout, which island you are on exactly, and where is still to be explored.


From the main menu, choose Cartographer and you can see on a 5×5 grid the layout of your world, and it highlights in red which islands in the world are potentially more dangerous and where they are in relation to your current island. Stranded Deep allows four saves per Xbox profile, but this is important because each save file will have a different island layout that you can play around with. Elsewhere, the graphical fidelity is good for the most part the world being procedurally generated does however occasionally mean we find trees sprouting out of rocks and other such anomalies.

Stranded Deep has some very good lighting and shading it really makes a difference to what part of the island you are stood on for how good your visibility is. Make it to the end of your first day and you are greeted with a beautiful sunset and rising of the moon.
