Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey Craft Weapons | How to make weapons and counterattack enemies

The prehistoric world is harsh, and you’ll want to learn how to craft a weapon in Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey so you can defend yourself from the predator animals that seek to eat you. Learning how to make a weapon and how to counterattack is one of the first things you need to do in the game if you want to survive, and is an essential task you’ll be performing for the entirety of Ancestors.

Below we’ll give you a list of what you can use to defend yourself in Ancestors, and how to craft the best weapon in the game. We’ll also show you how to use the counterattack system to kill animals properly.

How do I get a weapon in Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey?

The good news is that pretty much any hard object in Ancestors can be used as a weapon. The most basic form of defense for your tribe can be as simple as a rock picked up off the ground. While you’ll have a hard time killing predators with just a piece of granite, obsidian, or basalt, you can smash it over an enemies head and scare them off for a while.

If you find yourself under attack in Ancestors and don’t have any weapons prepared, just grab whatever you can. Dodging animals will keep you from taking damage, but the only thing that will make an enemy leave you alone is striking it with a weapon or successfully intimidating it. Early on in the game, you’re not very likely to pull off a successful intimidation, especially if you’re attacked without the support of your tribe, so fighting is your only choice if you want to be left alone.

What’s the best weapon in Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey?

So far, the best weapon we’ve found is the sharpened branch. You can make a sharpened branch as follows:

Take a dead branch from a tree.
Strip the limbs from it by using Alter.
Use a rock, obsidian scraper, or basalt chopper and use Alter to sharpen the point of the branch.

The sharpened branch seems to do the most damage of any other weapon in the game. However, it does have a drawback in that it shatters when you use it. As you level up your attack neuronals, you’ll have more of a chance to pierce an enemy when you counterattack with a sharpened branch. This does the most damage, and you can usually kill a tiger or warthog with two or three strikes.

Sharpened branches are stackable, so I suggest after reaching a new settlement for the first time, make a basalt chopper and build a few piles of them around your camp. With the basalt chopper, you don’t have to strip the limbs from dead branches first, you can just chop them off. This allows you to mass-produce sharpened branches quickly.

It’s also a good idea to distribute sharpened branches to all the elders and adults of your tribe. Once you have the right neuronal, they can defend themselves as long as they have a weapon. The AI is pretty terrible at this, but it has a chance of working, and it also gives you a walking supply of arms that you can call over to you whenever you need it.

How do you attack enemies in Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey?

Combat in Ancestors is really stacked against you. Not only is pretty much everything faster and stronger than you, but you don’t actually have the ability to attack pre-emptively.

Instead, you can only counterattack animals. You must wait for an animal to attack you, at which point a prompt will come up to hold A (Xbox)/X (PS4). To counterattack, you’ll need to hold the left analog stick towards the animal attacking and release A/X when you hear the prompt. You should then attack the animal as long as you have a weapon equipped, which will either drive them off or, if they’re wounded, kill them.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to ambush an animal or do something cool like drop out of a tree for an instant kill. Instead, your hominid tribe is exceptionally civil, and can only defend themselves if attacked first.

Fortunately, your ability to counterattack becomes more and more potent as your unlock neuronals. Eventually, your tribe will be unstoppable, yet still very civil, killing machines.

More Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is a third-person open world survival game where you Explore, Expand, and Evolve to advance your clan to the next generation in this exhilarating new adventure from the creator of Assassin’s Creed.

Embark on the most incredible odyssey known to humankind: human evolution. Spanning from 10 million to 2 million years ago, begin your journey, before us, in Neogene period Africa. Explore a beautiful yet ruthless world, from swinging through tree branches in the jungle to stalking prey across the golden savannah grasslands. Decide what attributes to learn and hone in order to pass down knowledge to future generations, from crafting tools to enhancing evasive tactics against predators. Just like real life, make sure to eat, drink, and sleep to stay alive and have the energy to face any danger that may come your way.

Grow your clan and find strength in numbers as you progress through critical evolutionary stages of human evolution. Your choices will write your clan’s story and determine if you can survive your evolution.