On the surface, Windrose might not look like an overly challenging survival game. You’re a pirate who crash-lands on an unknown island, and all you have to deal with for the first several hours are dodo birds, boars, and some drowned zombie-type enemies. However, as you’ll quickly learn, combat in Windrose can be extremely difficult, as enemies can deal massive amounts of damage to you in just a couple of hits.
To avoid seeing the death screen and having to run miles to retrieve your lost items, you want to ensure you’re stocked up with as many healing items as possible. You can see a full breakdown of every way to heal in Windrose in the guide below.
Best ways to heal in Windrose
Unfortunately, at the start of Windrose, your options for healing items are pretty limited. In fact, the game doesn’t give you any way to heal yourself for free off the bat, as you need to craft and loot ways to restore your HP for the most part.
Still, you’re not totally up the creek without a paddle, so let’s go over all the ways you can heal yourself in Windrose.
Bandages
The first healing item you’ll have access to on your small island is Bandages. These are the bare essentials when it comes to restoring your HP, as they only heal a small amount of health and take several seconds to use. However, when you have nothing else, a Bandage or two comes in handy after fending off a hungry boar.
To make a Bandage, you need to set up a basic Workbench and then find some Plant Fiber. Plant Fiber is looted from swinging your sword at bushes and ferns all over the jungle, so you should be able to loot hundreds of the resource within a few minutes of exploring. Once you have your Plant Fiber, bring it to the Workbench and create Coarse Fabric from it. You can then use Coarse Fabric to craft Bandages.
Bandages heal 900 health over 30 seconds, but taking damage during this time interrupts the effect, so you want to use Bandages when you know enemies aren’t around.
Minor and Major Healing Potions
Once you get some exploring under your belt, you’ll come across Minor and Major Healing Potions. These are your traditional healing items that instantly heal a specific amount of HP.
You can eventually craft your own Healing Potions using alchemy in Windrose, but in the early game, you’re limited to looting them from chests. Most of the time, you’ll find chests in Ancient Ruins that are spread out across the map, but you can also find chests near shipwrecks on the beach or through side quests.
When you use a Healing Potion, you’ll see that it has a cooldown in the quick bar, meaning you can’t use another one until the cooldown is complete. This can complicate things during the heat of combat, as you need to survive until you can consume another potion if your HP is nearly out.
Returning to your base
The easiest and cheapest way to restore your HP in Windrose is to simply head back to your base. Once you enter your base’s building limits, you’ll see that your HP will start slowly filling back up until it’s completely full. Entering your base also makes your stamina drain slower and gives you the “Comfort” buff, which determines how fast your stamina returns. A higher Comfort level means your stamina regenerates much faster.
Basically, entering your base fully heals your character and restores your important stats. While this won’t help you when you’re far away exploring, it can save you some healing items if you’re close enough to its location. You can also make use of the fast-travel system, letting you immediately return to your base so you can heal up. Building a Fast Travel station at your base using the Fast Travel Bell item is the easiest way to do this, but you can only fast-travel to it when you’re standing at another dedicated fast-travel spot on the map.
If you do end up dying in Windrose due to a lack of healing items or a tough enemy, there’s not a massive penalty. You’ll lose all of the items you had in your inventory that weren’t equipped on your hot bar, but you’ll leave behind a grave in the spot where you died. You can return to that grave to retrieve all of the items you lost. You’ll just want to make sure you set a respawn point at your base so you return to a safe place after you die. You can set a respawn point by clicking on a bed or tent.
And those are the best ways to heal in Windrose. You’ll unlock more advanced methods down the road, but these early game methods will still hold strong for a majority of your playthrough.
