First Steps

Your first hour: getting kitted out, finding the Training Grounds, learning to fight, and reaching level 10.

You arrive by sea, on the deck of the ship that carried you to Aurin. You are met at the drydock, walked up to the city, and handed over to the Explorer's Guild, which is the whole of your first hour.

You do not have to work out where to go. A run of short chapters leads you from the dock to the door of whichever guild you eventually choose, and one command always tells you what to do next:

Type quest. It shows the chapter you are on, what is still outstanding, and the exact commands to type. If you are ever lost, that is the answer.

You are given a Tideglass Compass on the way in. compass destinations lists everywhere it knows, compass set bank picks one, and compass names the direction to walk. It is the single most useful thing you own.

Getting kitted out#

Two rooms west of the entrance is the Explorer's Guild Armory, where Orla Wavering keeps the stores. Type ask orla about equipment and she will fit you out with a weapon and armour at no cost. Ask her about free if you want to know why, and about help if you want the short version.

One room further west is the Outfitters Nook, where Sella Threadtide does the same for clothing. She hands out a shirt, trousers, boots and a cloak cut for your race.

Take what they give you and put it on. wear all and wield <weapon> will do it, or equip <item> works out for itself whether something is worn or wielded. gear shows what you have equipped and in which slot; inventory shows everything you are carrying, numbered, and those numbers work as arguments, so wear 3 is valid.

Every room with a service has a sign. look sign reads it and tells you what that room's NPC can do for you.

Down to the Training Grounds#

West again from the Outfitters Nook brings you to the Proving Antechamber. The exit you want is down.

Below it are fifty-six rooms of Explorer's Training Grounds, and this is the important part: you cannot die down here. If something kills you, the guild's protection catches you before the Underworld does. You are healed to half your health, put back in the Main Hall, and Master Toren tells you how close that was. You lose nothing, and the protection has no level limit.

Everywhere else in the world, death sends you to the Gates of the Underworld and you have to walk back. Learn your class's rhythm here, where the mistake is free.

The Main Hall is the room you arrive in. The grounds run south and east from it through a grid of practice rooms: archery ranges, climbing walls, lockpicking benches, a swimming pool, a darkened room for fighting blind, and a graduation challenge in the far corner. The layout is a loop, and you cannot get lost badly enough to matter. up from the Main Hall returns you to the guild.

Master Toren#

Master Toren stands in the Main Hall and is the only NPC down here. He will not attack you, and nothing you do will make him.

He does two things. The first is levelling. When you have earned enough experience, come back to him and type advance. You can check how close you are at any time with level, from anywhere. He is the Explorer trainer, so he is your trainer for the whole of your Explorer career, and only that. Once you join a guild you advance at your new guild's trainer instead.

The second is the story. Toren hands you a chapter at a time, and each one is given to you automatically as you finish the last, so there is nothing to go looking for. The very first chapter, Finding Your Feet, is not his: Marek Halloway gives it to you at the drydock the moment you arrive, and Toren is who you hand it in to when you find him. After that the chain is his:

quest on its own shows the chapter you are carrying and the commands still outstanding. quest complete, standing in front of whoever set the task, turns it in and pays you.

The last chapter is claimed from your new guild's trainer rather than from Toren, and that trainer then begins a story of their own.

Your first fights#

Five kinds of creature roam the training rooms: phantom rats, practice goblins, animated training dummies, shadow wolves and sparring constructs. None of them will attack you first. You choose when a fight starts, which means you can walk through the whole area reading descriptions before you swing at anything.

To fight, type attack <target>, or kill <target> if that comes more naturally. Combat then runs on its own in rounds, and you will see hits, misses and damage scroll past. attack stop stops you swinging, but only you; anything still fighting you keeps going until it stops too, so it is not an escape. hp at any point gives you your health, spell points and endurance in one line, and consider <target> tells you how a fight is likely to go before you start one.

If a fight is going badly, flee breaks off and runs you through an open exit. Nothing runs for you automatically, so bind it somewhere you can reach in a hurry, and expect whoever you were fighting to give chase.

skills and powers are the same display under two names: your class abilities laid out by level, from 1 all the way to 100, with the ones you have not reached yet greyed out. Explorers have no class abilities, because the guild grants none. What you do have is your racial ability, which race will name for you, and the point of the Training Grounds is to get used to the loop of engage, use it, watch the resource bars, and disengage.

Each training kill is worth a flat one hundred experience, plus a little silver. Bodies leave corpses, and get all from corpse empties one. The loot and lootall commands do the same thing and take the coins as well, whether or not you are in a group; in a group the result is announced to everyone.

Reaching level 10#

Explorer runs to level 10 and no further. Every level costs a flat 500 experience, which makes the whole path 4,500 from start to finish. At a hundred experience per training kill that is forty-five creatures, and the chapters pay about as much again on top, so it goes faster than it sounds.

Every time you cross a threshold, walk back to the Main Hall and type advance. The game reminds you when you are due.

Along the way, worth knowing:

• ooc <item> inspects a piece of gear properly and shows you its real stats. Use it on anything that drops, because world gear is generated with random quality and can easily beat what Orla gave you. See World Drops.
• compass set training points you back here from anywhere in Aurin, and compass destinations lists everywhere else it knows: the bank, the inn, the shops, the post office and the guild halls.
• rest sits you down and restores two per cent of your health, spell points and endurance every second until you are full. It stops on its own when you are healed, or if a fight starts.
• tips says whether tips are on and how many you have seen, tips now gives you one straight away, and tips off stops them. They stop arriving on their own once you pass level fifteen, though tips now still works after that.

Choosing a class#

At Explorer level 10 you are told you are ready to join a guild. Four take walk-in members: warrior, healer, rogue and mage. Every other guild in the game needs a guildmaster to grant you admittance or to invite you directly, which means finding one and giving them a reason. For some of them that is enough. Ranger, Paladin, Templar, Necromancer, Bard and the hidden paths are promoted classes: they also require level 100 in a class that leads to them, so at level 10 neither admittance nor an invitation will open them.

To join an open guild, go to its hall and type join <class> inside it. Your compass will take you to the warrior, mage, healer, merchant and rogue guilds. The rogue trail is out in Northmere Woods, and the compass is the only thing that will find it. The Thieves Guild is not on the list, because Aurin expects you to find your own way in.

Two things happen when you join. Your class changes, along with your trainer and the abilities that unlock as you level. And your level and experience reset to 1. That is not a punishment; Explorer levels are a separate, shorter track, and level 1 in a real guild is a much stronger character than level 10 as an Explorer.

help joining guild walks through it in game, and Classes covers what each path actually plays like.

That is the end of the tutorial and the start of everything else. The Areas page lists where to go next by level, and Combat explains what has been happening under the messages all along.