PUBG Mobile Guide: Beginner’s Tips to Getting Chicken Dinner on the Go

Taking into account that Chinese mega mobile publisher NetEase Games has four different PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds clones already on the mobile market (most popularly Rules of Survival and Knives Out), and both Fortnite and its Chinese mobile clone, FortCraft, were just recently released for closed beta last week … it really was just a matter of time until PUBG finally made the jump to phones and tablets. 

Tencent Games recently came out with the pretty comprehensive PUBG Mobile — and unlike Fortnite Battle Royale, it doesn’t have its players scrambling for invite codes. 

So what do you need to know about getting winner, winner, chicken dinner in PUBG Mobile as often as you do on PC or console?

Know how to stay alive!

It sounds like common sense, but keep in mind — you’re controlling a character that, in some ways, moves like a tank. Strafing, moving, aiming, firing, and trying to do all of these things at once is not easy on a mobile device, and it gets significantly harder when most of the zones have closed and you’re down to the last dozen or so players.

• Run away and heal up whenever you can. This is fairly good advice at almost any stage in the game, but it becomes absolutely imperative to maintain an edge near the end because it’s not a mere possibility but a high probability that there are other players close by that can hear your firefight. Try to disengage as quickly as possible if you can’t get a quick 1v1 kill, because whoever’s watching you will have the upper hand at aiming if they’re standing still (and/or sniping!).

  Keep yourself healed and your energy high. This will help you with health regeneration and speed in those last-ditch fights!

• Only use your vehicles in the beginning. They’re not too difficult to handle, and if you landed in some of the far-off areas, you’re going to want something to help you hoof it when zones start closing and you’re stuck in areas with a lot of bridges. End game, though, the engine noise just isn’t worth the extra speed, especially with a smaller map space to navigate through. Be a sneaky ninja.
• Shoot to kill. While spray and pray generally works better in mobile firefights, only shoot when you have to. Gunfire draws attention to you just as much as engine noise does, and someone else is going to want to take advantage of your distraction.
• Be careful about when you’re looting. In the end game, moving around and looting should be done as sparingly as possible — and only if you’re running low. If you get too greedy and try to loot the body of someone you killed right away, chances are anybody who’s been watching will know exactly where you are and can pick you off while you’re distracted.
• Only move when you have to. Again, this is specifically for endgame only. Early game you should explore, loot, customize your guns, do whatever you need to do. But as the area starts to get smaller, you should be watching the zone carefully and moving to accommodate for that, not to simply run around looking for a fight. It will come to you soon enough without giving the upper hand to someone else! This will also make it easier for you to aim and kill when you don’t have to concentrate so much on movement in your first few shots.

Learn the controls before you play for real

At this point, there are quite a few similarities to all the different kinds of available Battle Royale shooters — and luckily for me, all of them have control setting configurations that are geared for left-handed players. You don’t need to be left-handed to benefit from them, though — having an extra fire button on the left side comes in handy even if you’re not a southpaw, especially when you’re in the middle of moving and aiming. 

PUBG Mobile has streamlined some of the controls for ease of use, e.g., automatically sprinting when you hold forward on your movement “joystick.” It has also made picking up weapons, switching between them, and loading them especially easy to do, although it does get trickier when it comes to adding on attachments; if you’ve got a big inventory, you might find it a little fiddly on a small screen to select the item you want right away. A larger iPad or tablet device might be recommended if you’re having trouble with inventory control on the small screen. 

With the above in mind, I highly recommend playing around with the control settings to find the aim/move/fire combination that works for you. PUBG Mobile has an impressive number of settings and sliders that you can customize, and even as someone who rarely likes to mess with vanilla, I have been known to fiddle around with these a bit to get the game playing the way I want it to. 

Playing on mobile with a controller

This is particularly important because as of right now, there isn’t really very good controller support for PUBG Mobile. Players that enjoy using a controller will find that you can connect the movement controls but not much of anything else. There are some available workarounds for rooted Android phones, but you’ll probably want to hold off until Tencent comes out with official controller support. 

Keep the limitations of playing on mobile in mind

• Have a phone or tablet charger handy. Pretty common sense, but it’s always surprising how quickly you can drain your battery down to nothing while you’re playing a game, particularly if you’re playing on medium to high settings, and also if you’re on an older device.

  Besides, in a game as big as this one and with so many starting players (100), any PUBG veteran knows that if you don’t get picked off right away, these games can run loooonnngg.

• Personal space and comfortable surroundings are important. When it comes down to the 1v1 fights, they can be unexpected and fast-paced. You’re going to want to aim the very best that you can — and it’s doubtful you’re going to have that ability if you’re trying to play while elbowing your way from the train to the subway car. 
• Use headphones! Same as when playing on any other platform, it highly benefits you to have headphones on so you can listen for enemy footsteps and gunfire. Headphones will also come in handy when you’re trying to communicate with your teammates in squads and in duos (remember to go through your microphone settings), but try to keep the chatter to a minimum while you’re hunting down others!

A note on bots in PUBG Mobile and difficulty level

There have been a bunch of players and a number of different news outlets that have reported that they’ve had better luck winning their chicken dinners on PUBG Mobile than they have ever had playing on either console or PC. 

The question has arisen as to whether or not the game really plants 100 different players into the instance at the same time or whether they incorporate bots into the game as well in order to ease new players into the game.

So far, there hasn’t been any official word on that front from Tencent or PUBG Corp, but it’s definitely worth keeping an eye out for during your own games. 

You can find PUBG Mobile on the Apple App Store and Android’s Google Play. 

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With these beginner’s tips, you should have no problem getting started in PUBG Mobile. As always, stay tuned to GameSkinny for all your PUBG Mobile guides and info. Good luck, and happy hunting!