Getting Started
Your knife, your bucket, your mountain. A clean first session without guessed numbers or invented upgrade prices.
01Your starting kit
The game strips the premise down to four things. There is no tutorial sprawl, no inventory screen to memorise and no combat.
A knife
Your only peeling tool at the start. Later tools and machines replace or augment it.
A bucket
Peeled potatoes go into the water. Delivery is part of the loop, not just the cutting.
A mountain of potatoes
The pile is the objective, the progress bar and the source of every efficiency decision.
An order
Keep the army fed. Posters in Russian push you to peel faster and waste less.
02How peeling actually works
Physics, not a progress bar
The peel is simulated rather than triggered. You pick a potato up, choose where to start the cut, and rotate it as you work. Blade angle and cutting rhythm affect whether you get one long ribbon of skin or a pile of uneven chunks. The store page's instruction is explicit: "Cut thin, waste nothing."
Why thin matters
Removing skin while preserving flesh is the skill the game rewards. A careless deep cut costs yield; a clean continuous peel is both the visual payoff and, according to press previews of the trailer, the basis of the efficiency loop.
Deliver, then repeat
Every potato has to end up in the water. That short travel step is what later upgrades attack — first with sacks and bulk collection, then with machines that remove the walking entirely.
Peeling checklist
- Find a comfortable starting point before committing to a long cut.
- Rotate the potato steadily instead of re-aiming for every strip.
- Aim for a thin, continuous peel rather than speed alone.
- Confirm the peeled potato reaches the water before grabbing the next one.
- Once a machine is introduced, decide whether hand peeling is still your bottleneck.
These are technique principles derived from the official description and trailer analysis, not frame-perfect frame data.
03Your first 30 minutes
A practical route for a first session. It follows the structure the store page describes and avoids assuming any unpublished numbers.
Learn one potato properly
Peel a few slowly. Get a feel for how the blade bites and how much flesh a shallow cut leaves behind. Unlock the early milestone achievements as you go.
Establish a repeatable motion
Settle on a fixed hand position and rotation direction. Consistency beats bursts of speed in a loop this long.
Watch where the time goes
Notice whether you are limited by cutting, by carrying, or by walking to the water. The bottleneck you identify determines the first upgrade worth buying.
Buy into the bottleneck
The game introduces better tools and bulk collection as the pile shrinks. Spend on whatever removes the slowest step, and keep enough currency to upgrade a new machine once it is online.
Let the system take over
Once automation appears, your role shifts from peeling to routing. Keep feeding the line and watch for potatoes that fail to enter a machine.
Keep an eye on the story
The reveal trailer shows a key concealed inside a potato. Do not discard unusual objects; hidden achievements and endings are tied to the narrative layer.
04Controls and accessibility
| Feature | What the Steam page confirms |
|---|---|
| Full controller support | Xbox controllers and the Steam Input API are supported. |
| Playable at your own pace | No time pressure is imposed on the core loop. |
| No quick time events | The game can be completed without QTE input. |
| Save anytime | Progress can be saved at any point; Steam Cloud is enabled. |
| Camera comfort | A visual comfort option is listed among the accessibility features. |
| Audio | Custom volume controls and stereo sound are available. |
Six accessibility features are listed on the store page. Exact key bindings are not published there and may vary by input device; check the in-game control screen.
05Early mistakes worth avoiding
- Optimising speed before consistency. Sloppy deep cuts cost yield; a stable thin peel is the baseline everything else builds on.
- Buying a machine with nothing left to upgrade it. Community discussion around the Auto Peel Machine suggests an unupgraded machine can feel worse than hand peeling.
- Ignoring the delivery step. Peeling faster does not help if trips to the water remain the slowest part of the loop.
- Skipping unusual potatoes. Hidden objects and narrative beats are easy to miss in a pile this large.
- Assuming the opening loop lasts forever. The game changes genre roughly halfway through. Go in expecting a shift to automation rather than three hours of hand peeling.