Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey: How To Make Weapons

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is not the kind of game that you can go around and destroy elephants in with a laser sword. Set long before we started killing each other, Ancestors pits you as a hominid who must make weapons themselves with whatever their shrunken brains can comprehend.

Making weapons in Ancestors is rather limited, you not having many options. You must also first have upgraded your neural tree to have the below skill before you can craft a weapon of your own.

Until you have Motor Skill, which you get from inspecting items regularly in the early parts of the game, we wouldn’t recommend that you try and take on any enemies. Instead, just try to dodge attackers by holding horizontally on the left stick and holding A, letting go of A once you hear the jingle.

When you have enough brain to make weapons in Ancestors, here’s how you do it.

First, you must find a dead branch, which looks like this below.

These trees are very abundant in Ancestors, them never being too far away, especially in the early parts of the game where you begin. It’s worth mentioning that you can use stones and bones as weapons also, but nothing is quite as effective as a sharpened stick.

To make said sharpened stick, you must first take the dead branch you have acquired and then press LB to switch hands. From there, you must alter it by holding down B and then pressing RB when you hear the sound cue. If done right, the branch should lose all its twigs.

You can use this basic stick to repel attackers, but it is a blunt object and therefore not quite as effective at finishing them off for good.

To make a sharpened stick, you must find a rock. It can be any kind of rock, which includes basalt and obsidian to name just two. You may even use a precious stone.

Here’s what they look like when you use intelligence with Y. Be sure to pick them up with A and swap hands with LB.

Once you have both a stick and a rock in your hands, you need to hold down LB to alter it and then hold down RB to start the altering process. You must release RB after every sound cue to start sharpening the stick.

This process takes quite a while, about five or so successive hits of the stick with the rock. It also eats up your stamina something fierce, so we would not recommend that you do this with elders unless you can help it.

Once you’ve hit it enough times, you will have a sharpened stick.

With your sharpened stick, you can attack predators by holding forward on the left stick while holding A, releasing A when you hear the sound cue.

You can also use the weapon for fishing and to poke into holes. The sharpened stick: the prehistoric man’s Swiss Army Knife.

READ NEXT: Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey Tips: Evolution, Combat, Crafting & More

From our Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey review:

For a game about the beginning of us all, there’s a bit of irony in Ancestors being at its best in its own beginning before losing its way. The marvel of evolution gives way to a gameplay loop that quickly irritates without enough variety to spice it up, which, when combined with poor combat, fiddly controls, and repetitive crafting, all add up to an experience that might drive you bananas.