Cairn Beginners Guide

You're about to attempt something no climber has achieved: reaching the summit of Kami. This isn't your typical mountain. Every handhold matters, every resource counts, and one wrong move sends you tumbling down thousands of feet of progress. Cairn throws you into a brutal mountaineering simulator where Aava, your climber, faces nature's harshest challenges without safety nets or second chances.

Here's the thing: the game teaches you basic climbing during the training zone, but survival requires knowledge that only comes from hard-earned experience. What most players miss are the subtle mechanics that separate successful climbers from those who plummet into failure. You'll want to master resource optimization, understand when to push forward versus when to retreat, and learn the survival tricks that keep Aava alive when supplies run thin.

This guide transforms beginners into confident climbers through battle-tested strategies. Whether you're struggling with stamina management or wondering how to navigate in darkness, these tips come straight from successful summit attempts.

Chalk Matters

Chalk multiplies your grip strength by 12x when grasping surfaces. That sounds modest until you're dangling from a cliff face with trembling hands and depleting stamina. The difference between holding on and falling often comes down to whether you chalked up.

Your climbot companion recycles trash into fresh chalk supplies. Feed it every piece of garbage you find. The key here is treating chalk like the lifeline it truly is, not a luxury item you save for emergencies.

Pro Tip: Apply chalk whenever your hands start quivering from low stamina. Those shaking animations signal your grip is failing fast.

How to Control Individual Limbs

Aava automatically selects which limb moves next during standard climbing. This works fine on simple rock faces, but technical sections demand precision control. Press R1 (PlayStation) while climbing to manually highlight and control specific limbs.

Manual limb control lets you:

• Plan complex sequences across challenging surfaces
• Reach distant handholds the auto-system ignores
• Maintain better weight distribution on unstable sections
• Execute precise movements during critical moments

The difference between auto-climb and manual control becomes obvious when you're navigating overhangs or searching for the optimal path upward.

Manual limb selection system

Effective Infusions

Mixing herbs with liquids creates powerful infusions that boost your performance. Here's what beginners get wrong: infusions consume the entire container, not just a portion. Mix nettle with a 3/4 full water flask, and you get a 3/4 full nettle infusion.

Always fill containers completely before creating infusions. This maximizes efficiency, especially crucial at higher altitudes where herbs become scarce. The Ultimate Infusion combines multiple herb types for maximum benefits, but you'll waste precious resources if you're mixing into half-empty bottles.

Cook Everything

Raw food fills your stomach. Cooked food transforms survival. Every cooked item provides enhanced nutrition, additional buffs like Grip and Grit, and temperature regulation through warmth. The difference between eating raw berries and a cooked meal can mean the difference between maintaining your climbing strength or struggling with depleted stats.

Cook everything in your backpack whenever you reach a bivouac. Food doesn't spoil in Cairn, so stockpile cooked meals for the long stretches between camps. You'll encounter sections where bivouacs become sparse or you might miss one entirely depending on your route.

Cooking benefits:

• Enhanced nutritional value compared to raw ingredients
• Performance buffs that improve climbing ability
• Warmth that helps regulate body temperature
• Reheating capability for liquids in bivouacs

Bivouac cooking system

When Should You Rappel Instead Of Climb?

Going up reaches the summit. Going down discovers secrets. The smart approach: rappel down to explore, then zip back up without wasting time or energy. Climbing downward burns stamina and risks falls. Rappelling lets you descend safely, investigate lower areas, and return to your previous position instantly.

Long climbing sessions drain your water supplies faster than you expect. Before ascending too high, rappel down to the last water source and refill every container. You won't always find water at higher elevations, and dehydration kills climbers as surely as falls do.

How Much Should You Sleep?

Aava doesn't get tired. Sleep only serves one purpose: recovering health at the cost of time, hunger, and thirst. Most situations favor eating food instead, since meals restore HP while also satisfying hunger and thirst simultaneously.

Sleep becomes valuable only after major falls when your health drops dramatically. Otherwise, you're sacrificing three resources (time, food, water) to restore just one (health). Food handles the job more efficiently.

Don't sleep to avoid darkness. That's wasting precious resources for no benefit.

Can You Climb In The Dark?

Darkness seems intimidating, but you've got tools to handle it. Your lamp provides basic illumination, but the real trick is Photo Mode. This feature lets you:

• Pan across great distances to scout your route
• Change time of day to see clearly despite actual darkness
• Adjust weather conditions for better visibility
• Take screenshots to reference later

Press Photo Mode, adjust the lighting to daytime, plan your next moves, and take screenshots if needed. You can keep climbing through the night without burning resources on unnecessary sleep.

The Look Function 

The Look function gives you superhuman vision across the entire mountain. While climbing, you can scan above and around yourself to plan routes, spot resources, and identify interesting locations that normal vision would miss.

Use Look to:

• Plan optimal paths based on your current needs
• Locate herb patches when supplies run low
• Discover hidden areas and secrets
• Evaluate route difficulty before committing

This feature separates efficient climbers from those who waste time on dead-end paths. You can see whether a challenging section leads to valuable resources or just empty rock faces.

Resources to Prioritize?

Chalk keeps you alive moment-to-moment. Water determines how far you can push before retreating. Cooked food maintains your performance stats. Everything else supports these three pillars.

Your climbot recycles trash into chalk, so collect every piece of garbage. Water sources become sparse at altitude, making every bottle precious. Food can be foraged, but cooking requires bivouacs, so prepare meals in bulk whenever possible.

Handling Bivouac Scarcity

Higher altitudes mean fewer bivouacs. Your chosen route might skip camps entirely. This makes preparation critical before leaving each bivouac:

1. Cook everything in your inventory
2. Fill all water containers completely
3. Create infusions with full bottles only
4. Rest if needed (but prefer eating for HP recovery)
5. Plan your next section using Look function

The gap between bivouacs can span hours of climbing. Running out of resources mid-section forces dangerous retreats or risky pushes forward with depleted stats.

The Hard Climb

Success means reaching Kami's summit with Aava intact. That requires balancing aggression with caution, resource management with forward progress, and preparation with adaptability. The mountain doesn't care about your plans. Weather changes, routes prove harder than expected, and resources run out faster than anticipated.

The climbers who succeed treat every decision as meaningful. They chalk before critical sections, cook proactively instead of reactively, and rappel to investigate rather than climbing down. They use Photo Mode and Look function to make informed choices, not blind gambles.

Most Anticipated Video Games Releasing In 2026 features Cairn among the year's most exciting releases, and for good reason. This mountaineering simulator demands respect, rewards preparation, and punishes carelessness with brutal efficiency.

Your journey to Kami's peak starts with understanding these fundamentals. Master chalk application, resource optimization, and smart navigation. The summit awaits those who climb with both skill and intelligence. Now get out there and prove no mountain stands unconquered forever.