The early game in Duskside is by far the most tedious, with players needing to find basic materials like Wood, Stone, and the infamous Metal fragments to work their way up the tech tree.
Metal Fragments are an important resource for crafting many basic items you need for your base, including a Workbench Lv. 1, Stone housing, and more items down the way. Eventually, you’ll move on to better materials, but for new players learning the ropes for the first time, finding Metal fragments is a learning process.
You can find Metal Fragments in Duckside; there are many ways to find the resources you seek. The first and primary one is to look for Scrap Metal Barrels, which are usually found in human settlements on the backs of cars or at the roadside. You can break these barrels by holding down the left-click button on your mouse.
When you break the barrels, items like feathers and metal scrap fall out. Collect everything, as most of it is pretty useful. These barrels can also sometimes hide weapons and additional resource bonuses, which you might not need early on but become vital much later. You will need a bunch of these scrap items to get the Metal Fragments you need for basic items, so be sure to circle the map and take as much as you can find.
Be cautious, as plenty of NPC enemies and other players are likely out hunting for other players to take their resources. It’s easy to suddenly get shot in the back by a Duck you didn’t see coming and make your run for materials come to an end. Once you die, you lose everything in your inventory, so you’ll need to go on another hunt and pray you don’t get killed again.
Equally, you can find players who might also have scrap and even Metal Fragments that you could try to kill—if you want to be devious like that.
Once you have enough scrap, open up your map with the M key and look for a Merchant. These are safe zones within the game where other players can’t kill each other. These safe zones also house a green machine known as a Recycler, a public tool anyone can use. You can also find these Recyclers in the overworld, but you’ll need to be defensive if you want to use one, as another player could kill you while you’re working on them.
Place any metal scrap on your person with a yellow symbol in the top right corner into the Recycler, then click the Turn On button. The Recycler then turns any metal scrap you have into useable Metal Fragments. You get around four to six Metal Fragments at a time, depending on what you are recycling, and you need 250 of them to craft a basic level one Workbench. So, as you can imagine, you’ll need to find bunches of metal scrap to get the resources you need.
