Cairn: In-Depth Climbing Mechanics

The purpose of this guide is to share knowledge accumulated across many hundreds of hours of gameplay and distill it down into digestible, actionable mechanics to help the community climb cleaner, faster, and harder. The path to get there is convoluted and in many cases filled with overly complicated and data-heavy explanations. The format of this document is designed for you to easily choose your level of depth. You can simply skim the core moves and concepts, or read further for the in depth ‘why’. My hope is this guide can give climbers of any level at least a small bit of mechanical knowledge they didn’t have before. That being said, this guide assumes a general familiarity with the gameplay. Whether you’re hoping to complete your first free solo run or unlock a hard route, the information within is here to help you achieve whatever goals inspire you to climb in Cairn.

What this document does not deal with is most of the survival mechanics. Food & drink recipes, foraging locations, gear & story items do not feature here. A few exceptions to this will be related to how they affect climbing mechanics where relevant. Additionally, I do not intend to go in depth with speed running the full game. There is a plethora of great speed runners with exhaustive YouTube videos for those interested in that discipline.

Finally- this guide was conceived as a living document and as such it’s designed to be constantly updated and amended. Updates will be thoroughly noted and erroneous information will either be removed or clearly formatted as historical reference.