Everything Is Crab Beginner Guide: Your First Run, Step by Step

If you just bought Everything Is Crab and the first ten minutes felt like chaos, you’re not alone. The animal-evolution roguelite throws you into combat before it explains its systems, and the menus assume you’ve already figured out which evolutions matter. This guide is the run we wish we’d had on day one — what to do in your opening minutes, how to feed yourself reliably, and how to walk into the first boss with a build that actually works.

The Three-Minute Plan

Before getting into mechanics, here’s the run shape your first hour should follow:

Below is the long version with the why behind each step.

Pick Social Affinity for Your First Three Runs

Affinity is the broad theme of your evolutionary path: Predator chases kills, Prey runs and survives, and Social charms enemies into fighting for you. New players read “Social” and assume it’s the gimmicky option. It isn’t. Social is the strongest opener in the game right now, for one reason: charmed enemies don’t just deal damage, they soak it. While a charmed Blobfish takes the boss’s attention, you sit at half-screen distance and pick your evolutions in peace.

If you’ve played any auto-battler or summoner build in another roguelite, Social will feel familiar. Think of it as “let the army tank, you steer.”

The other affinities pay off later, but the floor is much higher with Social. We recommend it for your first ten clears, then experiment once you’ve seen the boss roster. The full breakdown lives in the build tier list.

Your First Five Minutes: Eat the Easy Targets

Once you spawn, ignore everything that’s actively hunting you and walk toward water. Blobfish are the answer to your first hunger bar. They don’t attack, they don’t flee, and they drop a clean stack of meat per kill. A run that opens with three or four Blobfish puts you at your first evolution choice with no damage taken — and that’s the run state you want.

A few pointers most new players miss:

• Alpha enemies have a faint outline. Don’t rush them in your first minute; you don’t have the kit. Mark where they are, evolve once or twice, then come back. Alphas drop mutagen — the rare resource that upgrades your run-permanent genetics.
• Sparkling food restores HP. Yellow shimmer = healing item. Don’t eat it at full health; the food vanishes and you’ve wasted a heal.
• Healing Ponds are limited per region. Treat them like checkpoints, not free heals. You typically get one or two per region.

Your First Evolution Choice Matters More Than You Think

When the food bar fills, the game offers you three evolutions from a pool weighted by your current affinity. Two rules to internalize before you click:

1. Stack the same category. Every evolution belongs to a group (Passive, Attack, Ultimate, Movement, or Branching). Picking two from the same group early sharply increases the odds of related upgrades appearing later. New players love variety; veterans pick narrow.
2. One Ultimate is enough. You can only equip one Ultimate at a time, so taking a second Ultimate evolution before you’ve leveled the first is wasted weight. Same logic for Attack — two slots, no more.

For a Social opener, the priority order we use is:

If none of those show up in the first offer, take the closest Passive and re-roll your strategy off the next offer. Forced bad picks are a worse trap than a generic pick.

The full breakdown of evolution mechanics — slot caps, offer weighting, why focusing matters — is on the evolutions explained page.

Walking Into Your First Boss

Each run is broken into four boss fights drawn from a pool of five. Crabtaur is almost always your first wall on early runs — he’s a melee bruiser with a wide horizontal swing, easy to read once you’ve seen it once. Two things matter:

• Bring at least three charmed allies into the arena. They’ll absorb the opening combo while you reposition.
• Stay perpendicular to his swing arc. Walking straight backward gets you clipped by his second hit. Strafe instead.

Whether your first boss is Crabtaur or one of the others, the Crabtaur boss guide covers spacing patterns that transfer to most melee bosses in the game.

When you beat (or sneak past) a boss, you get a Boss Fruit, which lets you pick a Branching evolution — the run-defining upgrades. With a Social build, look for branching options that increase ally count or grant allies their own evolutions; both compound the rest of the run.

After the First Boss

If you reach the second region with full HP, you’re already ahead of where most first-time players end up. From here:

• Hunt alphas before regular enemies. Their mutagen drops persist across runs as permanent unlocks.
• Don’t over-evolve. Each pick raises the difficulty curve of the surrounding spawns. If your run feels suddenly brutal, that’s why.
• Read the Genetics Codex between runs. It points to specific achievements that unlock new starting traits, and a few of them trivialize your next attempt.

Your first clear will probably take three to five runs. That’s normal — the game’s curve is designed around learning evolutions by losing to them. Once you’ve cleared with Social, try a different build path for a totally different rhythm, or read the boss strategies hub for fight-by-fight breakdowns.

Updates and corrections welcome at contact. Mechanics may shift across patches; we update this guide as community data stabilizes.