Far Far West Guide: Essential Beginner Tips for Frontier Survival

Quick Answer: Far Far West is an extraction shooter, not a roguelike. You keep your progression even if you die. To survive and get rich, master dash-jumping for mobility, manually track your weapon fragment unlocks in the menu, stop blowing up gold veins with explosives, and always finish your side quests before taking down the main boss.

Your first few hours as a robotic bounty hunter are going to be rough. You drop into a creepy desert with a garbage revolver and zero money. The game explains absolutely nothing. It is easy to get frustrated and think you are losing all your progress every time a skeleton tears you apart.

Take a breath. This is not a hardcore roguelike. Think of it as a cooperative extraction game. You load in, shoot some monsters, grab loot, fight a boss, and leave. Your character levels and weapon experience stay with you regardless of how the run ends. Once you grasp that, the pressure drops. Now you just need to learn how to move, how to manage your menus, and how to actually make some money.

Movement is Your Best Armor

If you plant your feet to aim down sights, you are already dead. Survival entirely depends on abusing the physics engine to stay airborne and out of reach.

Chaining the Bunnyhop

You have a basic jump and a dash. Using them one at a time is incredibly slow. The trick is combining them to build ridiculous horizontal speed.

Dash forward and instantly hit your jump button. The exact millisecond your boots hit the ground, dash and jump again. This creates a continuous bunnyhop that breaks the pathing of standard melee enemies. Once you equip a few speed-boosting Joker cards, you can literally run circles around massive threats like the Necromancer.

The Mechanical Horse Triple Jump

Your starting robot horse, Roach, is great for crossing the map, but it is actually your best tool for scaling vertical cliffs.

When you hop off your mount, the game pops your character slightly into the air. The physics engine considers this your neutral jump state. That means you still have your double jump and dash ready to go while you are hovering. Dismount, jump, and dash straight up to scale massive walls without looking for the intended ramp. If you want to upgrade your robotic steed to something flashier, read our Far Far West Guide: How to Unlock Every Mount to expand your garage.

Managing Your Progression Menus

The game will never hold your hand when it comes to upgrading your gear. If you ignore your menus, you will hit a massive damage wall on Hard difficulty.

Manually Targeting Weapon Fragments

Bosses drop weapon fragments when they die, but you have to tell the game exactly which gun you want to build.

You must manually select your target blueprint in the loadout menu. If you cap out a fragment, the overflow does not magically roll over to the next gun. You will just waste drops. Always check your tracker before boarding the train. Even after your arsenal is fully unlocked, you still need to farm these fragments to purchase cosmetic skins.

Exploiting Free Spell Experience

Magic levels up based on the raw damage you deal, but the game hands out a massive one-time XP bonus the very first time you cast a new spell. Equip every single level-one spell in your inventory, cast it at a cactus, and take the free experience chunk before swapping back to your main build.

When picking your elemental secondary, match the tool to the target:

• Pyro: Burns for two damage per tick.
• Acid: Deals one damage per tick but heavily slows the target.
• Electric: Deals one damage but chains lightning to crowd-control groups.

Fixing Your Broken Gold Economy

Everything in town is expensive, and casual looting barely pays for your ammo. You have to optimize your income streams if you want to afford those top-tier upgrades.

Navigation, Secrets, and Extraction

Do not let the extraction mechanics trick you out of your hard-earned loot. You need to know the difference between standard progression and instance-locked secrets.

Standard Quests vs. Single-Run Secrets

If an NPC tells you to inspect ten graves, you can inspect four, extract, and find the other six tomorrow. Standard quests track across multiple runs.

Secrets do not work like this. If you are hunting the hidden Bells or farming the Medallion secret, you must complete the entire sequence in one single match. If you grab two out of three Medallions and leave on the train, your progress instantly resets to zero. Commit to the secret or ignore it entirely.

Don’t Kill the Boss Too Early

Killing the primary boss is not the end of the mission. It is the start of an endless, escalating horde mode.

If you have a maxed-out build and want to grind weapon XP, this is great. If you are low on health and still have side quests to finish, it is a death sentence. Always clear your map, secure your secrets, and mine your gold before you pull the boss. If you forget who you are supposed to be fighting, look for the themed Boss Sanctuaries scattered around the map for a visual hint. Once the boss dies, a very strict survival timer starts ticking down until the train leaves.

Level up your gameplay with more of our expert tips and tricks here