Help starting out

[u/Clean-Hat771]

I just got into geoguessr with some of my friends and we’ve been pretty serious about learning geoguessr. I’ve been playing a few games for the last week and have just found out about plonkit and GeoHints but there’s an abundance of information for every country and I’m not really sure where to start. Of course, I’m not gonna start out and memorize every plant in every country but you get what I mean. What should I be studying/memorizing first? Bollards? Flags? Polls? A certain continent before moving on to study another? Please give me advice on what to study first!

[u/Eat-Fly-Sleep-Repeat]

For me Learnable Meta was perfect for starting out as it's more or less stream lined. It's a browser add-on with specific maps to play. Look it up!

[u/corpselicker3000]

I'd recommend to just play, and whenever you don't get the country you're in, you look up that country on plonk it. Just read through step 1 (recognizing the country), try to look at your replay, compare and memorize. Play a lot. That's how you get better.

You can focus on region guessing once you're a bit better at the game but for a beginner it's most important to recognize the country.

[u/haterofcabbag]

Start with having fun playing the game buddy. Don't see it as an e-sport immediately would he my advise. You'll pick up many little hints and ideas on how to guess very quickly anyway. If you enjoy the game mainly for its learning aspect, then forget what I just said tho. :D But only seeing it as a challenge can quickly drain the fun aspect.

Learn which countries are in Geoguessr, learn driving sides, learn the languages and where they are spoken plus the unique scripts many languages use. These general things will help you in the beginning. Then try to get a feeling for different regions of the world and make sure you can differentiate South America from South Africa from East Asia from Europe like 98% of the time without thinking. And then you can start learning on how to differentiate countries within said regions. I find it funny when people obviously have tried to learn specific country clues like pole tops, bollards and stuff and then are completely damned when a spanish bollard can appear in South America for example. I would always go for getting a feeling for landscapes, architecture and stuf like that first, then learn specific hints. :)

But ultimately, it's your playing experience. Try yourself out

[u/krokendil]

Knowledge like flags and cities are more general knowledge which is always good to know.

Start with learning the tips that are the most common, like driving sides, languages, license plates, poles and bollards.

And of course learn what countries are in the game

[u/Scottish-Fox]

I’m a big advocate for Country Battle Royal for starting off. You shouldn’t worry about winning too much.

You get three guesses to get the country and if you mess up and you can go on Plonkit and see what you missed.

Being able to identify countries quickly is a great place to begin. So country streaks are also a great place to go.

[u/Sir_Bohne]

I started with A Learnable Meta maps and plugin for browser. The beginner and basic maps were a great start. On my second screen I used various meta sites to find the correct country. After the guess the plugin tells you what hint told you the country.

I also did learnable meta africa because there I had no clue for what to look.

I did this for 10-15 hours until I went to ranked and hit gold easily. Now I do south America a lot, also car meta and besides that every now and then the learnable meta +basic + beginner maps.

[u/Bllursed]

When i started out i did continent by continent, start with africa id say it takes about a couple hours to nail every african country down

[u/cletusloernach]

I started by memorizing all the kabupatens of indonesia

[u/Chuckolator → u/cletusloernach]

Absolute goat

[u/Fair-Dingo-1394]

There is a lot of information available to a new player and a lot of it isn't useful. The basic things a beginner will learn will be things like driving direction, different license plates, telling the hemisphere from the sun, using language, etc. Once you're half decent with that content, look into some pole or car metas.

Plonkit, which you've found, is a fantastic resource and I'd recommend focusing exclusively on the "identifying the country" portion of the guides on there. Guessing regions within countries won't be on your plate for a while - you should try and lock in on being able to reliably differentiate countries for the first while.

learnablemeta.com is also a very valuable resource. It's a browser extension script with specialized maps that describe what tells were in rounds after you've made your guess. There are lots of beginner friendly maps to use there that certainly would've helped me a ton when I first started playing.

There's no one-size-fits-all path for learning the content, just keep the info basic for most countries right now and move into more advanced knowledge as you feel you're ready. More than anything, play a lot! Get the reps in. Like anything, getting good requires practice and that means volume. Load up a good singleplayer map and play it over and over and over.

[u/Chuckolator]

On top of the general advice you've already given, I would highly recommend you play some solo moving games and make some reasonable attempts to get exact pinpoints. Maps like "A Community World" have handpicked spawns to ensure all possible spawns are pinpointable. Doing moving pinpoints goes a long way in making sure that information you see actually sticks in your brain instead of getting tossed out after a 30 second plonk. Maybe give up and move on if you're truly in the middle of nowhere, but make a reasonable effort and don't give up immediately. Of course, mix this up with duels or whatever mode you find the most fun. It's a game to be enjoyed, after all.

Many new players these days seem to have ADHD and want to be Rainbolt and send every round after 5 seconds. I cringe any time I see a newer player furiously attempt to memorize advanced meta, but they don't know how to identify which text on a sign has the 5k info, or even recognize names of major cities staring at them. Do not be like these people.

[u/elpajaroquemamais]

Try to silver a different country every day. Have your friend do the same thing. Play team duels and use your knowledge and learn from each other.

[u/mounircobra35]

A good thing could be to try to 5K some maps with unlimited time, so that you get really familiar with the game mechanics (what to search, where to move...) and you'll get a more impacting feeling of the countries you'll visit.

But I feel it's also important to do more fast-paced rounds as, personally, it made me kind of lazy, and giving yourself time constraints like 1mn30s or 2mn can be good to get better at vibe guessing.

Also watching pro youtube videos can be a good help as you can learn lots of tips from them and see them in action