GETTING STARTED =============== So, you've just created a character in BatMUD, or are about to do that .. what now? You start in the city of Dortlewall, on the continent of Laenor. The very first thing you encounter is a specialized tutorial section, which you are recommended to go through at least once. It will teach you the basics of the game - most of the things mentioned in this document are in the tutorial and vice versa. More about this later. In any case, you might want to read through this while doing the tutorial, or use it later as a reference in case you forget something. Remember that you can also view the tutorial parts you've done via 'tutorial' command. ============================================================================= NOTE: You can view this help file and other information also on the BatMUD's website - https://www.bat.org/ ============================================================================= Newbie channel -------------- The newbie channel is a great place to ask questions that you may have. Older players and/or fellow newbies may already have the answer to your question. You can talk on the newbie channel by typing 'newbie '. There are also many other channels for various purposes. See 'help channels'. Dragonfly [newbie]: How do I see my skills/spells? Shardik the Helper : 'show skills' and 'show spells' BatMUD also has people designated as newbie helpers. They are players who have volunteered to take the status and are (somewhat) obliged to answer the questions newcomers have. However, newbie helpers are NOT there to give you money, items or direct help with gaining experience. For more details, see 'help newbie helpers'. Backgrounds, races and guilds ----------------------------- The first thing you do (or did) when creating a character, is to pick a "background". This defines what guilds you can join, what races will suit you and generally what will you be good at. There are five backgrounds. Beginning with a certain background might be easier or more difficult than with others. The next step is choosing a race (as described in section below). Again, the combination of your background and race are of importance for when it comes time for you to join a guild. You won't be joining a "real" guild (e.g. "profession" as it is called in some other games) immediately with a new character, you will first need to finish your background training (first 10 levels) and your race guild (5 levels). At level 16 you can then join your first "real" guild, more about that in section 'Joining a guild' further down in this document. Alas, the point is that whatever guild (such as Rangers, Tarmalen, etc), you desire to join in the future, you need to have the correct background and choose a somewhat suitable race. More information about backgrounds and the guilds they offer can be found in 'help background'. Races ----- There are 45 different races in BatMUD, with very varied abilities. Some are more suitable for casters, some for fighters .. if the combination of your background, guild and race is a bad one, your gameplay experience can suffer greatly - or at least it can be more tedious that it could be with something else. Thus picking a race from "Best Suited" or at least "Recommended" list for the background in question is a good idea. The list of races suitable you will see in player creation with "races" command. With experience, you might even find combinations worth trying that are not "best suited". How to get started? ------------------- As mentioned in the beginning, if you are new to BatMUD, it is recommended that you follow the tutorial system in Dortlewall. It will teach you much about important game concepts, commands and teach you how to play. It is also advisable that you wander around Dortlewall learning what services the town has for you to offer. These services include different types of shops, adventurers' guild and portals to race shrine or to Damogran's warehouse in Arelium. In Dortlewall you can also find a crystite mine within the town which is a small area designed particularly for new players. At some point you will probably want to start gathering experience to get your character to advance levels. The main two ways of gaining experience are either killing monsters or by exploring. (Some other things can also grant experience, but these two are the significant ones.) In the beginning, exploring is probably the quickest way to gain experience. Here in BatMUD you get experience for most of the new rooms you visit. The amount granted grows by every room you have visited, and is called "explore experience". (As of writing this there are 18300 rooms that give explore in the game, but the number goes up steadily as new areas are opened.) As you might remember, when you first enter the game you will be in the town of Dortlewall at the beginning of the first tutorial. While Dortlewall offers a relatively safe starting place to get familiar with the gameplay, its rooms do not not give the coveted "explore exp". There are also other rooms and places in the game that give no explore, including most "outworld" / "mapped" areas, certain mazes, etc. so don't be surprised if you don't get it from everywhere. You may wish to "set inform_explore on" which is a setting that will inform you when you encounter new rooms. Now, here are few suggestions for places to explore when you feel comfortable: Pleasantville: Another newbie oriented town, is quite well mapped and contains a nice amount of rooms for you to visit. Visiting all those rooms will put you to at least level 10, and then you can try and kill something to gain more experience. Tyr Farwyn: The capital city of the Dwarves, is also a good place to visit and it is located down by the road south from Dortlewall. Arelium: A longer distance from Dortlewall (or Tyr Farwyn) to west is Arelium, the largest city on the continent of Laenor. It is not as safe as Dortlewall or Pleasantville, but it has services not offered by those places. Arelium is another good place to explore, with plenty of rooms to visit. Laenor is just one of the five major continents - the others can be reached via several different methods. One of the quickest to use are the continent portals ('help portals'), but direct continent-to-continent travel does not allow you to have any items on you. You can also travel through the ethereal city of E'siris. Read 'help portals' and 'help esiris' for the details. As another alternative you can use the intercontinental ferries that sail regularly between all continents. Ferries are slower, and ferry travel costs some money, but you can take your items with you. TIP: You can use the portal in Dortlewall or Damogran's Pleasantville office for easy transport to Damogran's Newbie Help Warehouse which is located in the Arelium Church. Go '2 south, 1 west' to the altar, the directions in the next chapter are from here. Easy stuff to kill ------------------ Well.. nothing in BatMUD is exactly "easy" to kill, and the difficulty will greatly depend on your character's build. But here are few pointers to get started with. The closest place you can find is the crystite mine in Dortlewall. It is designed for newbies and you can get crystite there which you can use to purchase different kinds of crystite items. Easiest way to find areas suitable for low level players is to leave Dortlewall through the west gate, where you can find a granite post (aka a newbie transport post). Type "touch post" to use it. These posts provide magical transportation to some areas. The posts will eventually stop functioning when you grow in power - after that you will need to walk, or use other means of moving about. Another newbie-oriented town in BatMUD in addition to Dortlewall is Pleasantville which is located west from Dortlewall near Arelium. You can get there using the granite post, or by following the road from Dortlewall to south and then travelling along the road to west until you reach Arelium and Pleasantville. The Arelium clock tower: Seek Arelium's Central Square, in the middle you'll find a 'clock' exit. There are some orphan processes and messenger bats inside for you to kill. Newberry park: Little bit east from Pleasantville, across the river. From Arelium it is located south by the road. You might not see much to kill at the first look, but that only means you have to look harder. Newbie petting zoo: Follow the road northeast from Pleasantville. It is maybe halfway from Pleasantville and Arelium. Gates to enter. A nice little petting zoo, which in BatMUD naturally means small furry caged animals to kill. Digga's forest: Quite a bit west from Arelium. Probably the easiest way to get there is to go through the hills or by first going to crossing south from Arelium, then following the road west, then northwest/west along the road. When you reach a crossing with road continuing northwest and a trail leading southwest. Follow the trail to Circus, and head straight southwest to the mountain, and head west until you find the '?'. Bunnies are the easiest prey here, ants, frogs and ducks pretty easy as well. Those bears and deers can be nasty so upsetting them might not be a good idea. City of Raven is deadly for newbies, and if you see a troll (or a sign warning about them), you better run. Wane's newbie mountain: Close to Digga's, a bit southwest from there. At mountain the higher you go, the bigger the monsters get. Don't get greedy. Others: There are plenty more areas around, even suitable for newbies, but those you have to find yourself. Many player-hosted websites with useful information also exist, so ask around and search the Internet. Areas and Outerworld -------------------- Outworld (or outerworld) is the wilderness encompassing the areas (scenic locations) of BatMUD. It consists of five major continents and the sea surrounding them. The outworld has a coloured ASCII map, with different characters depicting terrain types or structures of note. You can use 'describe map' to view what the different characters mean. Outerworld also has monsters wandering around, many specific to certain terrains. Fish and seamonsters will dwell in rivers and sea, scorpions in the desert, for example. Aggressive monsters are, by default, shown with a red character on the outworld map, so be mindful of those. As stated, the outerworld is divided into five continents, which each have their own terrain compositions, climates, seasons, flora and fauna. The starting continent, Laenor, is a relatively safe place, with no ancient dragons wandering around, thus making it best suited for starting your adventuring. This does not mean that you can't run into trouble in Laenor, of course! When you want to explore the other continents, you can reach them by using a portal in the main city of the continent (Arelium in Laenor), or by taking a ferry (Laenor's ferries are at the end of the road leading northwest from Arelium). Most areas in outerworld are marked with question marks ('?'). Some, such as race shrines are marked with percentage signs ('%'). These you can usually enter easily via an entrance/exit visible in 'look' and 'exits' command, but that is not always the case - some areas have hidden entrances, and sometimes they are guarded by fierce monsters. Players are able to build their own cities into the outerworld (marked as 'C' in the map). These cities can be large complexes, hosting housing for residents, variety of shops and other services. Many, if not most of the conveniences available in Arelium may be found in some player cities. Some areas are easy and even targeted at lower level players, some are extremely difficult and many of them are somewhere in between. It pays to always be careful when you enter a new place, however harmless it might seem. If you run in without paying attention to descriptions of rooms, you may never know what hit you before you find yourself dead. While the outerworld and some other areas, such as major cities have ASCII maps showing your position, most areas do not. For those, you might consider keeping a mental map, or drawing your own on paper. There also exist MUD client-based mapping solutions. Players have also published maps for a number of areas. Death or dying -------------- You will die sooner or later, probably sooner. When you die, you will find yourself in either Heaven or Hell, depending on your alignment. You can use the 'ghost' channel to ask for a friendly healer to get you back to living. There are three options you can choose from: 'raise dead', 'resurrection' and 'new body'. Each of those have different benefits and drawbacks. Read 'help death' for more information. Equipment and money ------------------- When you start the game you are given a newbie crystal which is very useful for several purposes. Look at it to see what features it offers. Weapons are important for a newbie. Buy as good weapons as you can afford, or get lucky and find good ones from Damogran. If you are adventuring solo, using 2 weapons may be beneficial. If you are a tank partying with a mage (or such) behind you doing damage, you might consider using a shield. When it comes to armour, one item, or even three items that cover only one slot each wont do much good - armour coverage is a thing here. A battlesuit that covers multiple slots would be a better investment with the protection it offers. A o-yoroi ('help armour o-yoroi') is a popular and good armour for many starting players. Spending all your hard earned money to buy those "granite boots" or "diggalite belt" from armourer is not a good idea. Unlike in some other games, in BatMUD generic shops typically do not sell any particularly good armour or weapons. (Specialist shops do sell other useful items, though.) In BatMUD, better equipment is generally gained through killing NPCs, sometimes through quests, or via purchasing/trade from other players. As a newbie one other good way to get usable items at the beginning is to acquire crystite and use it to buy crystite items in Dortlewall. These items are quite powerful at this level, and you can use them as long as you are level 60 or below. Crystite items are bound to your character, so only you can use them. In order to gain money, try to find monsters that carry equipment with them. Collect items until you can't carry more, then sell them and deposit the money into bank. Bank takes small service charge when you withdraw or transfer money, but if you keep your fortune with you as coins it soon will weigh you down. Note that different shops accept different types of things, and some shops may offer better value than others. Joining a guild --------------- When you advance to level 11, you will automatically become a member of your race guild. Race guilds are like regular guilds and they offer some specific skills or spells for your race. In BatMUD, you may use experience not only to advance levels, but also to train skills or study spells. Each race has its own shrine and race guild is located at the shrine. These shrines are located all over the world, but Dortlewall, Pleasantville and Arelium all have special race shrine portals which can take you to your race shrine. However, these portals only work as long as you have not yet joined a real guild. If you have joined a real guild, you will have to walk or use other means to get there. At level 16 you will have maxed your racial guild and from that point on you gain "free levels" which you can spend in real guilds. See 'help free levels'. This is the point when you can join your first "real" guild (e.g. "profession"). In guilds you get a possibility to train skills or study spells. Training / studying a percentage of a skill/spell costs experience points, and the cost will rise with the %'s. Advancing guild levels will at first be free, but the higher you go the more the levels will cost money. Therefore gaining money along with experience is of some importance. You can see the members of a certain guild currently online via command 'gwho ', ie. 'gwho crimson', 'gwho mage', 'gwho tarmalen'. Ask them about details of their guild. Forming a group, a party ------------------------ "Grouping" in BatMUD is more commonly referred to as partying. Parties are formed and managed with 'party' command. People looking for a party to join or people to join their party commonly use 'wanted' channel - for example 'wanted tank and tarma for exp' or 'wanted exp for tiny barbarian'. Few more examples: Foobar [wanted]: 2h exp for tarma -- Player Foobar seeks 2 hours worth of exp party and they are a healer (tarmalen). He/she probably does not expect to lead. Zoinks (wanted): offu + mage for exp -- Zoinks wants an offensive tank ("offu" is a Finglishm) and a mage for an exp party. We may presume that Zoinks him/herself are going to lead it and provide healing capabilities. Birk {wanted}: members for twiddle -- Slow/easygoing activity is often referred as "twiddle". This is usually exp, but could be something else too, such as guild related tasks, with experience being secondary to that. Conversely "hardgoing exp" is referred as "rate". A classic party consists of a "tank" (or several) in the front, taking (and possibly also dealing) damage, a healer and damage dealing caster aka "blaster", usually a mage or similar. While this combination is one of the most common, different configurations work as well. So-called "offtank" parties may have 3 tanks and a healer, possibly with additional backrow blaster. The maximum amount of party members is nine. Learning to work together as a unit takes effort, concentration of all members and some time getting used to the general flow of things, so don't expect everything to go well from the start. Shi.. erm .. stuff happens even to experienced players of the game. Leading a party is an artform in itself, you will have to gather knowledge of areas and monsters you are facing and how to fight them. A good leader knows their stuff and how to utilize each member efficiently. Read 'help leading' for insights and advanced topics related to leading. Recreate and Reincarnation -------------------------- Reincarnation lets you create your character again. If you are a new player, you may be able to use 'recreate' which is basically a money and exp-tax free version of reincarnation. Read 'help recreate' to see if you are eligible. See 'help reincarnation' for detailed information! Mortals and Wizards ------------------- Mortals are players of the game, and wizards are the developers. Wizards do not play the game, nor are they normally involved in player interactions. (See 'help when to ask a wizard') Mortal levels go from 1 to 100 (and can extend via Sentinels of Infizinity to above that). Wizard levels range from 20 to 1000 with few exceptions. Archwizards are wizards at level 200 or above, and are basically the ultimate authority in the game ('help archwizards', 'archwizards are always right'). Mortals are often divided into newbies, midbies and highbies. What exactly are the definitions of those categories is debatable and can depend on one's viewpoint. The game itself has few different definitions that limit certain functions available only to "newbies", such as access to 'recreate' command, newbie crystal, transport poles and such. However, in general sense the definitions, as stated above, tend to be flexible. Character levels and game age ('help finger') might give some indication, at least. Hierarchy, player killing and asking questions ---------------------------------------------- Be polite, be careful. Annoying other players may be hazardous. While BatMUD is nowadays, for most part, a very welcoming community, acting obnoxiously can, and often will, have consequences. That level 50 healer might seem to be helpless against a strong tank like you, but she could have 20 friends willing to make thinly spread paste out of you. Then again, some people have been known to kill weaker players accidentally, or in some cases, for their amusement. If a level 100 player walks over you, accidentally or not, angrily yelling at them might not be the best of ideas. It should be noted that killing newbies for no reason (or "bad" reason) is generally disapproved of by the game administration, and may be a cause for investigation into any such incidents. However, it is recommended that you first at least attempt to reconcile your differences without involving wizards. (Wizards and archwizards do often monitor situations even without prompting, assuming they happen to be around.) In case the other party is not listening to your pleas, talking to other players might help (for example on 'newbie' channel). Usually there are people who dislike newbies being killed just for fun. Ask politely for advice and you might get it. If all else fails, and harassment is continuous, you should then contact an (arch)wizard. Politeness is the key to asking questions of any kind, on channels or via tells. For example: Dragonfly [newbie]: GIVE ME MY MOTHERFUCKIN MONNNEYYY??!?!?! ... is not going to work. Spamming any channel with oft-repeated requests is likely to annoy other people, which may result in unwanted consequences. NOTE: Intentional and sometimes even unintentional spamming of the channels may result in a channelban, or even termination of your character. NOTE: As you might have noticed above, we don't really have a language policy. Often you may swear all you want .. but do take into account the general current mood and atmosphere. Sometimes it just isn't appropriate. Staying informed (news and channels) ------------------------------------ To stay up to date about changes to the game, important events, and other such things, the game has several methods for communicating those: 'inform' messages, 'tunes' channel and several 'news' groups. Many smaller game changes and updates are announced through 'tunes' channel (see 'tunes last'). There are also informs ('inform last') which the administration uses for informative notices about things like upcoming maintenance downtime. News system is also essential for getting information about the game and of other players. 'news help' shows you the commands. Newsgroups that wizards use to inform about changes in the game and other things of various importance are named 'inform' and 'updates'. See also 'help newsgroups'. Therefore, if you happen to log in and notice that something seems to be "wrong", the first thing to do is to check if there are new news in inform or general or aforementioned 'tunes' or 'inform' channels. Note that you can read the inform messages and news via BatMUD's website: https://www.bat.org/help/inform , https://www.bat.org/forums Useful help files ----------------- Most help files available are useful, at least to someone in some situation. But there are hundreds of help files and wading through all of them would take ages, so here is a list of some important ones to get started with: help help battle help channels help handling help levels help lite, help style, help ansi, help term help spellcasting help builtin help open guilds help newbie helpers help saving items

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