Ich habe diesen Guide auch auf Deutsch verfasst.
Teil 1: https://gtm.you1.cn/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2780381814

For all beginners and those who have always struggled with "Flotsam", here is my guide which I hope will help you. There are also many videos of the gameplay on YouTube where you can certainly understand one or two things better than through words alone.
Apparently, there is limited character count here, so I'll just do the rest of this as a separate part 2 .


General information in brief:
As far as one can speak of a goal in this game, that would be that you build plastic walkways around your ship (the Town Heart), build workshops and other things and you thereby build a floating city. So you collect rubbish from the sea and salvage everything from islands or other places to get resources to build everything. You start with 3 drifters and at the very beginning, you can choose the ones that seem favourable or useful to you based on their abilities. So it is best to choose as many different skills as possible at the highest possible starting level. On the map (see symbol below) you can rescue more drifters who are then added which gradually gives you more people. Advantage: you can do several things because everything is divided among several people. Disadvantage: each drifter needs 1x water and 1x food per day (in the morning after waking up), so the more people you have, the more difficult it is to obtain the necessary amounts. If drifters get nothing to eat or drink too often, they die. At the top left, there is also a number, showing how many days you have survived already.

- Pause game with space bar.
- Best is to leave the build mode visible so that you can always see which resources are still missing or how many you still need.


Details:

Buoys
- The general rule for collecting stuff at buoys is: click on the desired buoy in the menu at the bottom left (for swimmers or for the salvage boat), place it in the plastic or wood and use the X key to increase the radius or the Z key to decrease it. If the buoy is already set, you can click on it and then press a button to enlarge or reduce it. You can also see how many pieces are still to be collected. When everything has been collected, the buoy disappears automatically.


Get the following first, if possible
- First of all, build a plastic recycler, a woodworking shed, a rope maker and a scrapsmith as early as possible, especially the first two ones. They produce the so often needed floaters (plastic canisters that you need for walkways and other things), wooden planks, firewood, rope and metal plates. You have to make sure that you click on the right symbol there and then click on the left button with +1. Everything that appears in colour can be produced directly, if it is grey, something is missing in the required resource. Later it is also worth it to have a second woodworking shed where you then always order only the wooden planks in one and the firewood in the other shed. This way you don't always have to switch back and forth. Two plastic recyclers can also make it easier. For a long time, no one came to my first one but when I finally built a second one and clicked the row of desired floaters full, someone immediately came to the newly built one. The research station should also be built as early as possible to unlock new workshops, boats and other useful objects. In the middle of the top screen, you can click on the icon to show the resources you have in your inventory (previously, this inventory info was at the bottom right of the screen).

- At the beginning, you only have the storage in the Town Heart (ship), so you should build more storages in time. The small one holds 20 items, the medium one 45 and the large one 120. You can name storages and assign the resource(s) to them by clicking on them but this makes little sense because then other things have to go somewhere else which means you need even more storages than you already do. And if you forget to allow all resources again and there is only space in these allocated storages, the drifters won't get anything done and just stand there until new space is available for storage somewhere else. That's why I just let them store random things all the time. For example, once you've researched and built the medium-sized storage, you can dismantle a small one to make room at the walkway. The drifters then carry everything from it to the other one, so there is no loss of resources.

- As already mentioned, you need one portion of water and food per drifter every morning. Therefore, you should definitely build several solar stills (but they take a long time to fill up and make a portion) and at the beginning, as early as possible, preferably 2 fishing chairs as well as several drying racks for wood and fish sticks for fish (which should ideally be built near the fishing chairs so that the transport from the crate with the fish to there is not so far). The drying racks can also be upgraded twice, first to 3 wooden planks and then to 5. If you hold the mouse pointer over the upgrade button, you can see which materials are needed. As early as possible, you should research the desalinator as it produces drinking water but you need 3x firewood per portion, so always make sure you have enough dried wood, either dry wet wood on the drying rack (it also takes a long time but wet wood is otherwise useless, so it can only be dried) or find already dried wood on islands. It's just stupid if noone goes there for a very long time to make firewood or if you don't find any dried wood for a long time (this happened to me). Then the water supply becomes less and less so that the risk increases that they die of thirst if not enough water can be produced quickly or found on islands or water towers so that they have nothing to drink for several days.

- Also important are the small water containers (10 portions) where the drifters can store the water from the solar stills or from the desalinator. Later, you can explore the large water storage (30 portions).

Beds and houses
- Also as early as possible you should build a bed for each drifter and ideally research the two houses where the small house is for 2 drifters and the big one for 3 . Unfortunately, houses are the only research objects that are not available in the building menu afterwards like everything else, so you always have to upgrade a bed to a house first and then to the big house.

Watch Tower
- It's a good idea to research the watch tower as early as possible because if you build it, the next morning you'll get a message that the compass of the map (around the ship) shows in which direction you can rescue a survivor = get a new drifter. Water supplies are also shown there at the edge of the compass and the number underneath means the fuel consumption required from the current location to the destination you want to go next, if I have observed this correctly. If you have rescued a drifter before the next morning, there is another message for a new one to be rescued. Otherwise, only on the morning when you have rescued one before. The watch tower is therefore an enormous help when you are looking for new drifters or water supplies because otherwise, you just search around haphazardly and lose your orientation on the map. That's what happened to me for a very long time (I’ve been playing Flotsam since it launched in Early Access but until today still have problems with the game) because it took me ages to find a new drifter until I finally found out about the watch tower and after that, I was able to expand the amount of my people quite quickly.



To be continued in part 2 =
https://gtm.you1.cn/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2780427448