over the hill Upgrades and Equipment: What To Buy First With Your Pebbles

Judge every upgrade by the terrain it unlocks, not by the stat it raises:

None of the three is a trap purchase; the order is about which wall you hit first. For most players that wall is a climb (engine), then a surface (tyres), then a river (protection).

Your recovery kit — winch aside, the planks, jack, portable anchor and bell — lives in inventory slots, and slots are themselves purchasable capacity. An extra slot is not glamorous, but it converts directly into options: the portable anchor you no longer leave behind, the second plank that turns a washout into a road. Recovery failures in this game are usually option failures — the right item was at camp — so slot purchases quietly delete whole categories of stuck. Rank them just behind your first performance purchase, and ahead of any cosmetic spending.

The five-piece rescue system (detailed in this collection's winch guide) works as a set, so acquisition order is simple: complete the set before deepening it. Planks for gaps and soft ground, the jack for rolls, the portable anchor for bare rock, the bell for weather — each covers a failure mode the others cannot. Duplicates and spares matter later, when hard trails chain failure modes together; in your first region, coverage beats depth. Remember too that carried items replenish at campsites — equipment spending and campsite planning are the same system viewed from two ends (the cabins guide covers the network side).

Upgrades and equipment are bought from merchants and mechanics out in the world (Emerald Lake's Mechanic and Crazy Gunther are your first examples), paid in Pebbles earned from discoveries and objectives. But shopping is only half the supply chain: per the official description, upgrades and equipment are also found in the world — which quietly changes the economics of the early game. A player who explores thoroughly is subsidised twice, once in Pebbles and once in found gear, so the "correct" first purchase is often simply whatever your exploration has not already handed you.

This is also where the honest note from the beginner guide bears repeating: because exact prices are undocumented, any spending framework — including this one — should be judged on its terrain logic, not on arithmetic. If a verified price list emerges later, the order here may shuffle by value; the terrain reasoning will not change.

For a first region, in order:

In Algeria the order mutates predictably: tyres and engine stay on top (sand and mesas), water protection slides down (rivers become oases — precious, not threatening), and slots stay exactly where they were, because the desert spends kit faster than Canada does.

One refinement keeps the framework honest across a whole campaign: re-sort the order every time the world hands you something. Found equipment — the second supply chain from section 4 — is not a bonus on top of the plan; it changes the plan. Find a tyre upgrade in a valley crate run and the next purchase becomes the engine without debate; find protection before your first flood and the lake-country urgency drains out of the list, leaving the slot to buy itself sooner. Players who re-sort spend less overall, because they never buy what the map was about to give them. The framework is a priority queue, not a shopping list — treat every discovery as a reason to re-read it.

What is the very first thing I should buy? For most players: the engine, because the first wall most routes hit is a gradient. If your early failures are surfaces instead — spinning on wet rock, bogging in sand — buy tyres first. The order flexes; the logic (terrain first, cosmetics last) does not.

Can upgrades be found for free? Yes — the official description states that upgrades and equipment are found out in the world as well as bought. Exploration is a genuine second supply chain, which is why thorough discoverers feel richer than their Pebbles balance suggests.

Do I ever need exact prices to plan? Not at launch. No reliably verified price list exists yet, and the priority framework in this guide is built to work without one. Treat any precise price table published in launch week as unverified.

Does water protection matter in Algeria? Less — oases and desert rivers are anchors rather than threats — but it does not become useless, and it stays bought once purchased. Just let tyres and engine lead the desert order.

Should I save Pebbles instead of spending? Spend on capability; save only against a known target (a slot, the next performance line). Pebbles sitting in the wallet unlock nothing, and the game's earn loops — discoveries, objectives, meteorites — keep refilling it as you travel.