Last Updated on 25 February, 2026
This incredibly realistic climbing simulator tests your patience and punishes your ego by forcing you to carefully manage your stamina, inventory, and grip on a perilous mountain. To help you conquer this grueling ascent, our comprehensive guide solves the game’s most frustrating mechanics by teaching you how to secure perfect holds, optimize your backpack space, and brew the exact infusions you need to survive.
Table of Contents
- Understanding the Mountain’s Challenge
- Securing Good Holds on the Rock
- Mastering Your Body Positioning
- Managing Crucial Situational Modifiers
- Advanced Backpacking and Storage Techniques
- Cooking Essential Recipes for Survival
- Hunting for Optional Key Items
- Fixing Linux HD Rumble for DualSense
Understanding the Mountain’s Challenge
Every single action you take carries immense consequences. Every grip matters, every movement requires focus, every decision impacts your survival.
These consequences remain hidden from immediate view sometimes. However, the mountain always rewards patience.
The game never demands absolute perfection from you. It does, however, severely punish any carelessness.
Battling Your Inner Demons
The real opponent waiting on the rock face is not the mountain itself. Your true enemies lie within.
- You must battle your own impatience.
- You must conquer your ego.
- You must suppress the dangerous thought that a risky move should still work out.
The mechanics heavily reward players who actively choose to pause. You must learn to read the rock surface carefully and assess your physical condition honestly. You must accept that retreating often represents real progress.
Failure never acts as a flaw here. Failure serves as your greatest teacher. Playing requires you to play consciously and stay completely present in the moment. You constantly battle against your own impulsive nature. This internal struggle represents the true strength of the experience.
Securing Good Holds on the Rock
Good holds form the absolute foundation of staying securely attached to the wall. Identifying a secure grip presents a significant challenge throughout your climb.
The game uses specific cues to indicate a successful grip.
- You will hear distinct grab sounds.
- You will see specific visual hand positions.
Overcoming Visual Limitations
Identifying these cues remains difficult even when Aava is not physically blocking your view. Securing good footholds presents an even greater challenge.
Aava cannot directly see many of the holds she reaches for. She must blindly feel the rock surface.
- Her first grab attempt might come out completely flat.
- This happens even if her hand rests right on top of a deep crevice.
- You must command her to grab the rock a second time to actually secure the grip.
Even when you activate your light to cast helpful shadows across the smallest ledges, visibility remains low. You will only discover certain holds by directly testing the wall with your hands.
Utilizing Gameplay Settings
Professional climbers instantly know when a hold feels secure. You need to simulate this instinct to survive.
I highly recommend utilizing the gameplay settings to your advantage.
- Open your gameplay settings menu.
- Turn on the specific Holds feedback option.
- Look for the square visual feedback indicator to confirm a good hold.
- Build a strong habit of immediately undoing a bad hold.
- Only maintain a bad hold if you are actively repositioning your body.
Mastering Your Body Positioning
Securing good holds does not solve every problem on the mountain. You will encounter many positions featuring four perfectly good holds where Aava absolutely cannot rest.
The gear she carries often prevents her from resting in these seemingly secure spots. Conversely, you can find positions where she balances comfortably on a single good hold.
You can divide your body positioning into three distinct categories.
1. Leaning Against the Wall
The easier climbs offer plenty of flat walls for leaning.
- You only need to balance above a single good foot hold.
- Securing a second foot hold makes maneuvering much safer.
- You only need a good hand hold if you plan to push or pull yourself.
- Pushing up from a single leg often provides enough momentum.
2. Clinging to an Overhang
The more challenging climbs frequently feature grueling overhangs. When the wall arches over your head, you must secure your position carefully.
- You need three good holds to maintain stability.
- You typically need two holds above you.
- You need one hold below you.
3. Surviving Unstable Positions
Unstable positions trigger severe physical warnings. Aava’s overstrained limbs will begin shaking. You will also hear an ever increasing breath frequency.
The game introduces a slight delay before this feedback begins. A similar delay occurs before the feedback subsides after you reach safety. Keep calm when reacting to these physical warnings.
If you prefer immediate feedback without any delay, you can adjust your interface.
- Change your HUD settings to remain on permanently.
- Watch for the pounding heart icon.
- This icon warns you the exact moment you start losing stamina.
Obvious unstable situations include leaning too far away from your holds or having absolutely no holds available. Wall 7 presents a perfect example. It forces you to quickly press yourself up a flat chimney.
Less obvious unstable situations require strategic retreats.
- Move back to your last stable position.
- Attempt a completely different approach.
- Identify a clearly stable position further ahead and quickly push toward it.
Difficult climbs feature numerous sections lacking stable approaches. You must utilize chalk, food, or drinks for assistance in these areas. Smooth vertical crevices exemplify these difficult sections because they provide zero support against slipping downwards.
Managing Crucial Situational Modifiers
Various situational modifiers heavily impact your climbing efficiency. Running low on stamina directly reduces your ability to maintain difficult positions.
Other ailments produce the exact same negative effect on your stability.
- Hunger
- Thirst
- Pain
- Cold
Recovering Your Stamina
You must look after yourself constantly to maintain your strength.
- You slowly recover stamina by resting in good positions.
- Activating the focus buff drastically speeds up this recovery rate.
- You can recover a small amount of stamina using the dedicated input button.
- The game enforces a strict rate limit on how frequently you can press this button.
- Going off belay completely restores your stamina to maximum capacity.
- Returning to solid ground also provides a full stamina restoration.
The dedicated input serves as your best option when you risk running out of stamina before reaching a stable resting point.
Utilizing Buffs and Chalk
Consumable items transform unstable positions into comfortable resting spots. Food and drinks provide a highly useful grip buff. Chalk also provides a massive climbing advantage.
You must understand how these bonuses interact.
- Chalk delivers twice as much grip bonus compared to the timed grip buff.
- These two grip bonuses do not stack together.
- Applying chalk while a grip buff remains active will help you.
- Drinking a grip buff will not improve limbs that you have already chalked up.
Advanced Backpacking and Storage Techniques
Managing your limited carrying capacity requires strategic thinking. The general rule dictates that you must use your items or lose them.
However, mastering the right packing technique allows you to easily pack your bag well beyond its normal capacity limit. This technique does not involve carefully stacking items. It does not involve randomly shaking the bag around. You must deliberately compress your inventory.
Standard Compression Steps
Follow these exact steps to create artificial space in your bag.
- Hold the largest item in your bag.
- Move this large item all the way over your other packed items.
- Release the item.
- Immediately grab it again before the surrounding items can automatically rearrange themselves.
- Close the bag while maintaining this newly created gap.
- Use this new gap of free space to pick up more items.
You can repeat this compression process every time your bag reaches its limit. Eventually, the items will expand slightly as you close the bag. This expansion will eventually stop you from fitting anything else inside.
Maximum Squeeze Technique
You can even squeeze an object into your bag that is larger than your currently packed biggest item.
- Rapidly shake your bag to forcefully press all the items down.
- Hold an item to confirm that the current compression state leaves a good amount of empty room at the top.
- Close the bag immediately.
The expansion limit still applies here. However, this advanced method effectively doubles your normal relaxed packing capacity. You can carry approximately 50 items instead of the standard 25.
Cooking Essential Recipes for Survival
The game features plenty of complex recipe lists. Fortunately, you only need to focus on a few essential cooking rules to survive the ascent.
Container Management Rules
Always cook your liquid recipes inside your absolute largest container. The largest containers hold between four and six portions. Maximizing your portions ensures you extract the most value out of your gathered ingredients.
You might find your largest container already filled with a liquid you want to save.
- Open your backpack menu.
- Temporarily transfer the saved liquid into your smaller bottles.
- Cook your new recipe in the newly emptied large container.
- Use up the new meal.
- Transfer the original liquid back into the large container.
Crafting the Ultimate Infusion
The Ultimate infusion dominates the cooking system. It represents the only recipe you truly need for this ascent.
You can easily craft this drink using nearly any herbs you find on the mountain. Every single sip grants you five full minutes of the three most powerful buffs in the game. Drinking a whole bottle provides twenty to thirty minutes of continuous buffs depending on your container size.
The buffs provide massive advantages.
- The Focus buff accelerates your stamina recovery.
- The Grip buff allows you to hold difficult positions without draining stamina.
- The Grit buff completely protects you from damage, hunger, thirst, and cold.
Brewing and drinking enough Ultimate infusion eliminates the need for any other consumable items.
Follow this specific process to brew the Ultimate infusion.
- Cook Clear water with either Gentian, Nettle, or Juniper to create a base infusion.
- Add any available herb to this base mixture to create a Strong infusion.
- Add one more herb to the Strong infusion to produce the Ultimate infusion.
You can use Gentian, Nettle, or Juniper as your additive herbs. However, you should save those three specific plants to create new base infusions later. Use Thistle, Dandelion, Garlic, or Plantain as your additive herbs instead. Cooking those four plants by themselves only creates basic meals rather than powerful infusions.
Reheating and Refilling Strategies
You can easily heat and reheat your drinks and meals. If you carry cold drinks or meals and possess the capacity to warm them up, you can reheat them without wasting any additional ingredients. Drinking hot water warms your body up just as effectively as any complex meal.
You can also refill your water containers directly from within your bivouac. You do not have to pack up your entire camp to fetch water if a source flows nearby.
- Open the cooking menu.
- Look for the refill option on your empty or partially filled water containers.
- Utilize this option before you unnecessarily tear down and rebuild your camp.
Hunting for Optional Key Items
The mountain hides a whole range of incredibly useful optional key items. You should actively hunt for these upgrades to improve your survival chances.
You can discover several powerful tools.
- A special puppet that completely disables the rain.
- Indestructible pitons that never break under pressure.
- Bigger containers for cooking and storage.
- A self heating bottle.
- A warm blanket.
The tips provided above will give you the confidence and the necessary breathing room to go on exciting exploration detours. Follow the more difficult paths whenever possible. Taking these risks pays off handsomely when you secure these powerful tools.
Fixing Linux HD Rumble for DualSense
Players utilizing Linux might encounter issues with the PlayStation DualSense HD Rumble feature. The game struggles to send its audio data in the correct format for HD rumble under Linux operating systems.
The system generally finds the DualSense Audio device and connects using four channels. Unfortunately, the rumble still fails to activate. Keep in mind that HD rumble exclusively requires a wired USB connection and will never function wirelessly.
Configuration Steps for CachyOS
The following fix specifically applies to the CachyOS distribution. It requires absolutely no game modding. You might need to adjust these steps if your specific Linux distribution utilizes a different audio architecture.
Follow these steps to fix the rumble issue.
- Navigate to your configuration folder.
- Create this specific directory structure:
~/.config/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.d/ - Move inside that newly created directory.
- Create a brand new file named
90-dualsense.conf. - Open this new file using any text editor of your choosing.
- Paste the following configuration code block into the file:
monitor.alsa.rules = [
{
matches = [
{
device.name = "~alsa_card.usb-Sony_Interactive_Entertainment_DualSense.*"
}
]
actions = {
update-props = {
"api.alsa.use-ucm" = false,
"device.profile-set" = "analog-surround-40.conf"
}
}
},
{
matches = [
{
node.name = "~alsa_output.usb-Sony_Interactive_Entertainment_DualSense.*.analog-surround-40"
}
]
actions = {
update-props = {
"node.description" = "Wireless Controller",
"node.nick" = "Wireless Controller",
"audio.format" = "S16LE",
"audio.rate" = 48000,
"node.force-rate" = 48000,
"channelmix.disable" = true,
"priority.driver" = 1500,
"priority.session" = 1500
}
}
}]
After you successfully paste the code and save the file, you must activate the new rule.
- Open your terminal.
- Execute the exact command
systemctl --user restart wireplumber pipewire pipewire-pulse. - Reconnect your DualSense controller to your PC via the USB port.
- Restart the game.
The HD rumble will now function perfectly.
Conclusion
The mountain demands your utmost respect, endless patience, and a constant willingness to learn from every single misstep. Mastering the intricate hold mechanics, optimizing your backpack space, and utilizing the powerful Ultimate infusion will transform your grueling ascent into a calculated triumph. Take your time, read the rock face carefully, and remember that retreating to a safe position always beats falling. Have fun and take care of yourself out there on the wall.