First Steps

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

You arrive at the Explorer's Guild Entrance in Aurin. The guild is the whole of your first hour: gear on the ground floor, training below it, and a trainer who takes you from level 1 to level 10 without you ever needing to leave.

Type look if the description has scrolled away. Then head west, and keep heading west.

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 trains every class, so he remains your trainer for the whole of your Explorer career.

The second is quests. He offers five, all repeatable, and all of them are straightforward kill tasks in the rooms around you:

Standing in front of him, quest list shows what is on offer, quest info <id> explains one, quest accept <id> takes it, and quest accept all takes the lot. Away from him, quest on its own shows what you are still carrying. quest complete turns in everything that is ready.

The Gauntlet pays several times what the individual tasks do, and it counts the same kills, so accept it alongside the others rather than instead of them.

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 disengages, provided your enemy is not still swinging at you. 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 gets you out. Every character starts with this set to trigger automatically at low health, so you may find yourself running before you decide to.

skills lists what your character can actually do, and powers lists the abilities behind them. Explorers have a modest set; the point of the Training Grounds is to get used to the loop of engage, use an ability, 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 but only work in a group.

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 Toren's quests pay several times that 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.
• tip prints short pointers, and tip categories shows what it covers. tip off stops them when you have had enough.

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.

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 and merchant halls; the Thieves Guild and the rest are not signposted, 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.