PUBG Tips: 15 Things We Wish We Knew Before Playing

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is a game that throws you into the deep end with almost no explanation of its mechanics and other elements. While learning the ins and outs of the game can be part of the fun as you become better, there are a lot of ways you can improve your play to make your PUBG experience more enjoyable.

We’ve got 15 tips detailing aspects of PUBG that aren’t immediately apparent upon your first time playing. These are things that experienced players know that'll help you get that much closer to enjoying a delicious chicken dinner.

Playerunknown's Battlegrounds launched in Early Access this year and has been extraordinarily successful. Battlegrounds Creator Brendan Greene said there are no plans to raise the game's price when it leaves Early Access and officially launches. An Xbox One version, which is being published by Microsoft, is slated to arrive in the Game Preview program later this year, but it may not be exclusive to the console permanently.

The first thing you should do when you boot up PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is jam CTRL and T. That’ll mute the in-game voice chat for the entire lobby; trust us when we say that that’s an essential step. First, 100 people waiting for a game to start invites all manner of indiscernible nonsense that the game will pipe straight into your ears--just from an avoiding loud noises standpoint, this is a good idea. And that’s to say nothing of the weird or hateful stuff that often comes across the game's voice channels. You’re not missing anything by muting the random people you’re playing with, so go ahead and save your ears and sanity.

Finding an assault rifle or a sniper rifle will often make you feel like you’re ready for anything in a match, but most guns are greatly improved by the attachments you add to them. For instance, the AK-47 or SCAR can present some tough-to-handle recoil in their initial state. But throw on some stocks and extended magazines, and suddenly they’re much more manageable. Having the right attachments for your guns can make them more effective, and make you more likely to win a firefight.

Pay attention to how some of the less obvious attachments--like foregrips and stocks--affect your guns when you use them, so you know what items you want. If you know you’re hunting a particular gun, it can pay to grab the attachments before you actually find the weapon you want. Sometimes you’ll find attachments that you can’t use yet, and it can be useful to sacrifice a little backpack space for a cheek pad in hopes that you’ll find the gun you want to slap it on. This is particularly true of scopes--2x, 4x and 8x scopes are tougher to come by than any other sights, but the range they offer you on rifles can be the difference between taking someone out from a hidden position, or having to risk fighting them up close.

Just about every gun you pick up will have more than one firing mode--usually, single-shot and automatic. This is something you really want to keep an eye on, and it’s easy to forget about. Even assault rifles default to single-shot when you pick them up, and if you forget to change it, you might be wondering why you can’t seem to get bullets to come out of your rifle as someone charges you.

Hit the B key to toggle firing modes on guns that have them, and pay attention to their settings. Some guns include single, "burst," and automatic modes, and some only have one. Guns that you might think should always be set to automatic can be very useful as single-firing weapons as well--for example, a scoped AK-47 can be used more or less like a sniper rifle if you set it to single-action, and that’ll keep the recoil down and ensure you don’t accidentally waste a bunch of extra shots.

Make sure you know before you switch off a gun or stow your weapons what firing mode you left it on (and generally, switch everything to automatic before you put it away). When you pull out a gun in the heat of the moment, you want it to act exactly as you expect--there are plenty of times when players die thinking they were about to spray an enemy with lead but only wind up firing one shot, because they forgot to reset their firing mode.

Like real life, grenades are pretty deadly and more than a little dangerous. But something that’s not immediately apparent is that you can accidentally put away a live grenade and then blow yourself up with it. It’s very easy to do, in fact. When you switch to a grenade, you "pull the pin" by pushing the Left Mouse Button, which brings up a trajectory marker that shows where you’ll throw it. Once you do that, the grenade becomes live, meaning you have only seconds to get rid of it. Holding a grenade allows you to "cook" it so that it’ll explode more immediately when it lands. But you can also accidentally stow it during this period, too.

If you ready a grenade and then switch to another gun, you basically put the live grenade back in your bag (as opposed to other games like Call of Duty, where you can’t switch off your grenade without throwing it). So the lesson: Never do this. Treat your grenades like the bombs that they are. If you intend to throw a grenade, make sure you get rid of it even if you change your mind, or else you’ll end your chicken dinner aspirations sooner than expected.

Cars are a calculated risk in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. They make a ton of noise, which alerts anyone across a huge radius of your exact position. But they’re often essential for survival, and even for winning. Jumping in a car is the most effective way of outrunning the killing blue forcefield that narrows the map down periodically, giving you a better chance to find gear without having to spend a big chunk of the match running for your life.

Finding a car in a pinch can be really, really tough, however. They only spawn at certain points around the map, usually near towns, so you’re unlikely to stumble across one most of the time. So take the time to mentally note where you see cars, or to keep a map on hand that’ll show you where to expect cars to spawn. That can inform your decisions about where to land when you first start on the island and where you run when you’re in trouble.

Driving might seem like a great way to get out of a tough situation, and there will be times when a car might get you out of a bad situation. But don’t expect to be invincible when driving--in fact, you’re anything but.

Lots of players will spot your car driving by and take potshots at you, and you’re actually pretty vulnerable in most vehicles. Cars are easily destroyed, and you can render them undrivable by taking out their tires. And behind the wheel, you can be a fairly easy target for high-level players. Some like to set up at choke points like bridges and wait for people to cross, and even in a car, you’re often easy pickings for experienced opponents. Don’t get in a car expecting to be safe.

You also want to be careful when driving: If you try to hop out of a moving car, there’s a very high chance you’ll run yourself over. Beyond that, cars are extremely easy to flip, which leaves you vulnerable to other players.

When driving a vehicle, you’re somewhat defenseless, insofar as you can’t fire a gun to shoot at anyone who might be shooting at you. If you’re good, though, you can circumvent this limitation by switching seats in your car on the fly. Any seat other than the driver seat lets you fire out the windows, so you can open fire on opponents so long as you don’t mind careening out of control in the meantime.

To switch seats, hit CTRL plus a number key for the seat you want: CTRL and 1 will put you in the driver’s seat, CTRL 2 in the passenger seat, and so on. You might also try this to get yourself out of the line of fire as a player takes shots at you while you’re behind the wheel. It’ll take practice to be any use in a moving car that you just abandoned the wheel of, but PUBG is constantly full of crazy moments where players pull off unexpected maneuvers to save their own lives. Hey, it’s worth a try.

Something else that’s easy to miss about cars are their special features. Cars have e-brakes, tied to the Space bar by default, that you can use for tight maneuvers or to come to a stop quickly when you need to get out and start shooting. They also have boosters that might get you out of trouble quickly.

The boost for a car is tied to the Shift key by default, and it increases a car’s speed pretty significantly. Use the boost to get away from someone shooting at you when you can’t see them, or when you really need to outrun the circle. Note that boosting eats up your vehicle’s gas much more quickly than regular driving, though. You can find gas cans out in the world that you can use to refill a car if you need to, but this is something that almost never comes up for most players. Your life is more important than your car, so use that boost liberally.

It’s easy to get used to playing PUBG as an extremely cautious player who sneaks around and closes all doors behind them, but sometimes, you just have to run to stay alive. When you need to cover a lot of ground fast, tap the X key to stow your weapons. Running without carrying anything moves you a little quicker than normal, and it can be the difference between outrunning the blue forcefield to survive and getting caught and killed. You can further boost your run speed with energy drinks and pain killers. By increasing your boost a couple levels, you can get as much as around six percent more speed out of your character. It doesn’t sound like much, but in a tough spot, that little extra oomph can be the difference between life and death.

The island in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is full of foliage, and especially as you get to the later parts of the game, you might find yourself hiding in the outdoors, hoping to take down players or avoid their gaze. You may often see foliage that looks like it’ll provide cover from enemies. Be careful what you trust, though. There's actually a certain distance where grass doesn't appear from another player's perspective. What might look like a pretty dense spot to you could be pretty sparse for someone else. In general, don’t expect to appear invisible when hiding prone among nature. Depending on the viewing distance, you might be tough to spot, but you’re probably more visible than you think.

Players in PUBG like to set up ambushes. Because so many players are often stuck running across open fields to get to better positions, there are lots of opportunities to hide out, wait for someone to happen along, and take them out. Open interior doors in buildings with closed outer ones are a good indication someone is hoping you’ll wander inside, as are rooms that have clearly been looted of their best gear with the weaker stuff left behind.

One particularly devious ambush involves abandoning cars where they'd be handy for a player to grab, and then waiting for someone to make a run for the vehicle. If you see a car in the open, you should immediately be cautious. There are a few hints that can give away a trap, though. First, newly spawned cars have their brake lights turned off — if you see a car with red lights on the back, it means someone drove and parked it.

Of course, smart players can dupe you into thinking a parked car is fresh (and you can do the same to others). Tapping the forward key as you get out of a car turns off its lights, and it’s easy to park a car so it looks fresh, so even safe-seeming vehicles might be ambush attempts. Smart players will also park the cars they’ve drive out of sight behind buildings so that approaching players don’t realize they’re waiting. So as always, it pays to be as careful as possible, but paying attention to clues from your surroundings can tell you whether you’re more likely to be safe or not.

You have three different methods of aiming your guns in a fight in PUBG. The first is the unassisted “from the hip” style where you just unload without pushing any additional buttons. Holding the Right Mouse Button gives you a tighter over-the-shoulder aim that lets you be more accurate without sacrificing much situational awareness. And finally, clicking the RMB lets you aim down the sights or look through a scope, for the most accuracy but also the most vulnerability.

When in ADS (aim down sights) view, you have a little bonus ability that can make you a touch more accurate: You can hold your breath. Holding the Shift key lets you suck in a breath, which makes your aim a bit more accurate and gives you a touch of additional zoom down your sights. Holding your breath is essential when sniping, but it’s useful in any situation in which you’ve got a chance to line up a shot on a player who doesn’t know you’re there.

For newer players, it can feel like you should always be armed to the teeth when playing PUBG. That means constantly looking for better guns to fill your two main rifle slots, plus attachments for both of them and ammo, and keeping a good pistol on-hand for that third sidearm slot. But the more you play PUBG, the more you’ll realize that pistols are plentiful and not particularly useful, and you can basically ignore them.

Unless you’re just starting out in a match and you’re desperate for a gun, you don’t really need to bother with pistols. While the gun itself doesn’t cost you anything to carry, there’s a good chance the pistol you pick up will require ammo incompatible with your other guns. So if you grab up a pistol you want to keep loaded, you’ll probably be carrying extra ammo. The same goes for weapon attachments — pistols and their attachments are plentiful, and honestly, kind of distracting.

The thing is, you’ll rarely, if ever, need to fire a pistol. Battles in PUBG don’t usually last long enough for a lot of weapon-switching, and between two rifle slots, you’re likely to have the ammo you need for at least one of your guns. The idea that in a tense moment, you’ll switch to your pistol is pretty unlikely. Save the space in your backpack for gear you’ll actually use.

It goes without saying that having your gun suppressed can give you a serious edge, but it’s actually kind of hard to overestimate just how great it can be to have one. Gunshots ring out loud and clear for a vast distance when you fire a weapon unsuppressed — which is why you should only ever fire your gun when you’re confident you can win a fight and get a kill, and when you’re prepared for whoever might come looking to investigate after you’re done.

But with a suppressor, you reduce the noise of your gun significantly, making it much, much harder for other players to get a bead on your position. If you can get suppressors for your weapons, especially for your favorite assault rifles, you should do so. They’re much harder to come by, so don’t expect to find them often. But if you do, they’re absolutely worth grabbing.

Periodically in a PUBG game, you’ll hear the roar of an overhead airplane engine. Every so often, the cargo plane that dropped you on the island will fly overhead before dropping a big red care package that slowly flutters to the ground. These crates are then marked with smoke when they hit the ground.

Supply drops are randomized, but they’re where you’ll find some of the game’s best guns, like sniper rifles, med kits, high-quality attachments, and ghillie suits that can make you much harder to spot among the brush. Trouble is, supply drops almost always attract a bunch of players. If you think you want to make a play for a crate, expect a big fight. If you can approach carefully and wait out other players, you might be able to pick off a few or let them take each other out before you go for the big guns.