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Help: Getting started

============================================================== NOTE: Visit "http://www.bat.org" for a lot of information about our beloved game. ============================================================== Newbie helpers -------------- BatMUD has newbie helpers. They are mortals who have chosen the status and are (somewhat) obliged to answer to the questions newcomers have. See 'help newbie helpers'. To see a list of helpers currently online, See: 'who helper'. Or to see unidle helpers online, See: 'who helper unidle'. Newbie channel -------------- The newbie channel is a great place to ask questions that you may have. Older players or fellow newbies who might already have the answer to your question may respond. You may chat on the newbie channel by typing 'newbie '. There are also many other channels to choose from. See 'help channels'. Dragonfly [newbie]: How do I see my skills/spells?? Shardik the Helper : 'show skills' and 'show spells' News ---- News system is essential for getting information about the mud and of other players. "news help" shows you the commands. The newsgroup that immortals use to inform about changes in the mud and other things of various importance is named... "inform" and "updates". 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 explaining what has happened. Note that you can also read the news through Bat's website. Backgrounds and guilds ---------------------- Useful: 'help open guilds'. First you need to pick your 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. Nomad background is for warriors. Currently nomad characters have six guilds to choose from. The main ones are Crimson Brigade, rangers and barbarians. In these guilds you can train offensive and defensive abilities in physical combat. Nomads can also join squires, and maxed squires can join both cavaliers and beastmasters, which can use mounts. There is also disciples of chaos and the guild of Kharim, but they are heavily recommended to have evil alignment. Magical background has four guilds: mages, psionicists, riftwalkers and channellers. Channellers major in manipulating mana, conjurers are masters of defensive magic, psionicists and mages use offensive magic. Riftwalkers summon entities from other plane to fight their battles. Good_religious background has several guilds. Healers (Tarmalen), druids, templars, knights, liberators, animists, nuns and monks. Monks are martial artists and thus warriors, healers use the various healing and curing spells and druids are a blend of offensive, defensive and miscellanous magic with some healing abilities. Nuns and Templars seek the evil in the world to slay it, nuns by using spells and templars with raw strength. Also in the evil-slaying business are the Ghost Liberator Paladins, who try and liberate the souls enslaved by evil with big swords. Another soul-themed guild, the Animists, continues on the path of monks, templars and liberators. Knights are offensive fighters who follow their own honour code. Evil_religious offers you different branches of the lords of chaos with each cult dedicated to their own masters Kharim, Tzarakk and Aelena. Other choices are evil priests and the cult of reavers. Evil priests have some offensive magic and miscellanous stuff. Reavers focus their energy into destructive forces. There are also couple of secretive guilds with the names of Tiger and Spider. Tiger is an assassin-type martial artist while Spiders serve their Spider Queen and dabble with the arts of demonology. Civilized background includes merchants, civilized mages, civilized fighters, folklorists, alchemists, shadow sabres, bards, runemages, squires, cavaliers and knights. Again people talk about thieves, but finding one will be difficult - and you would probably end up having a dagger buried in your back if you go around asking questions. The merchant and alchemist guilds concentrate on leeching money off other players and not so much in slaying monsters. Shadow Sabres are fighters with style; imagine D'Artagnan and the three musketeers. This guild might be worth trying even for a newcomer. Civilized mages are geared towards adventuring, but they are not as good at it as their pure counterpart in the magical background. Runemages are spellcasters that need to research every spell they wish to cast it, propably not the best first guild to choose from. Squires is a small, mount oriented fighting guild, which you need to max before joining Cavaliers or Knights. And then there are the bards, often called taletellers, song weavers, troubadours or traveling minstrels. These singers of legends bring happiness and sometimes even sorrow to the realms with their songs and deeds. Folklorists on the other hand are scholars of mythical knowledge and folklore and are no stranger to zoology either. Races ----- There are 44 different races in BatMUD, with very varied abilities. If your background/race combo is a bad one, you will be in trouble. Thus picking a race from "Best Suited" or at least "Recommended" list for the background in question is clever. 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? ------------------- If you are new to BatMUD, it's recommended that you will follow the tutorial system in Dortlewall. It will give you information about the important game concepts, commands and teach you how to play. It is also advisable that you will walk around Dortlewall learning what services the town has for you to offer. At some point you probably want to start gathering experience to get your character to advance levels. You can get experience either by killing monsters or by exploring. In the beginning, exploring is probably the quicker way to gain experience. Here in BatMUD you get experience for most new rooms you visit. This amount grows by every room you have visited, and is called explore experience. As I write this there are 17021 rooms that give explore in the mud, but the number goes up steadily as new areas are opened. When you enter the game you will be in Dortlewall at the beginning of the first tutorial. Dortlewall offers a lot of tutorials which are designed to teach you how to play the game. The village is a safe place so you can easily wander around the town to have a look. There's also a crystite mine within the town which is a small area designed particularly for new players. Dortlewall also offers a lot of basic services, such as adventurers' guild and portals to race shrine or to Damogran's warehouse in Arelium. Explore experience is your best bet to make the first levels. Your starting location, Dortlewall, does not grant you explore experience but there are other places you can visit. Pleasantville, another newbie oriented town, is quite well mapped and contains nice amount of rooms for you to visit. Visiting them all 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. A longer distance from Dortlewall (or Tyr Farwyn) to west is Arelium, the largest city in the continent of Laenor. It is not as safe as Dortlewall or Pleasantville, but it has services not offered by the village. Arelium is another good place to explore, with plenty of rooms to visit. Laenor is just one of the five continents. Other continents can be reached by portals, but you can't take any items with you. You can also use ferries to travel to another continents, they charge you some for the trip, but you can take items with you. Tip: You can use the portal in Dortlewall or Damogran's Pleasantville office for an 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, except players if you know how. But here is something to begin 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. The easiest way to find areas suitable for low levellers is to leave Dortlewall through the west gate, you'll find a granite post. Type "touch post". The posts provide magical transportation to some areas. The posts will eventually stop functioning when you grow in power. Then you need to walk. Another newbie-oriented town in BatMUD in addition to Dortlewall is Pleasantville which is located west from Dortlewall. 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 clock: 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 northwest from Pleasantville. 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 of 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. There are good player-made maps to search from, do ask around. Areas and Outerworld -------------------- Outerworld is the large area of wilderness surrounding the areas (scenic areas) of BatMUD. It is made of different terrain types, you will see these in "describe map". Outerworld has monsters wandering around, certain terrain type has certain monsters. Fish in the waters and scorpions in the deserts, for example. BatMUD outerworld is divided into five continents, which each have their own climates and monsters. The starting continent, Laenor, is relatively safe continent, with no ancient dragons wandering around, so it's the safest continent to wander around. 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). Areas are marked in outerworld with question marks, these you can usually enter easily thou not always.. some areas have hidden entrances, and often monsters block the entry. Players can build their own cities into the outerworld, with almost all the conveniences found from Arelium. Some areas are easy, some are extremely difficult and most of them are something between those two. Always be careful when you enter a new place, however harmless it might seem. If you run in without paying attention to long descriptions of rooms, you will probably never know what hit you before you find yourself dead. Graphical maps of BatMUD's worlds may be found at http://www.bat.org Dying ----- You will die sooner or later, probably sooner. You will be transported into Heaven or Hell, depending on your alignment. You can use ghost channel to ask for a friendly healer to get you out, there are three possibilities: 'raise dead' and you will lose 75% of your carried exp, 'ress' and you end up with 50% and 'new body' which will lower your stats drastically for six hours but you'll have 75% of exp left, this is mostly considered a last restort option because during those six hours the game is nearly unplayable. If you are at level 24 or below you can 'accept ress from athalon', Athalon is not a player but an NPC that helps newcomers get out from Hell. However if this doesn't seem to work, you might have to 'pray'. You will lose all the experience on you and possibly have some other nasty side effects. Equipment and money ------------------- When you start the game you are given a newbie crystal which will prove useful for several instances. Look at it to see what features it holds. 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 killing alone, use 2 weapons. If you are a tank with a mage behind you doing damage, you might consider using a shield. Spending all your hard earned money to buy those "granite boots" or "diggalite belt" from armourer is not a good idea. One item, or even three items that cover only one slot each wont do much good. A battlesuit that covers multiple slots might be a good investment with the protection it offers. To get money, try to find monsters who carry equipment with them. Collect items until you can't carry more, then sell them and put 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. One good way to get usable items is to acquire crystite and use it to buy crystite items in Dortlewall. These items are somewhat powerful and they are personal and you can use them as long as you are level 60 or below. 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 could be located all over the world, but Dortlewall, Pleasantville and Arelium all have portals which can take you to the 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 need to walk or use other means to get there. At level 16 you have maxed your racial guild and you now gain new free levels which you can put into real guilds. See 'help free levels'. From level 16 onwards you can use your free levels into some of the guilds for your background. In guild you get a possibility to train skills or study spells, training/studying a % of a skill/spell costs experience, and the cost will rise with the %'s. Advancing guild levels will first be free, but the higher you go the more the levels will cost you. Therefore money is of importance. You see the members of a certain guild currently online by doing a "gwho ", ie. gwho crimson, gwho mage, gwho tarmalen. Ask them about details of their guild. Forming a party --------------- First of all, do a "help party" and find out how the commands work. After that find player(s) of about your own level and invite them into your party. A 'classic' party consists of a tank, healer and mage, but different combinations work as well. Max amount of members is nine. The book I mentioned at the beginning of this document includes lots of information about running a successful party. Some of it might be outdated, but it certainly is worth reading. Recreate and Reincarnation -------------------------- Reincarnation lets you create your character again. Druids have the spell 'reincarnation'. You will lose all the equipment you have on you, and and some of your total experience ("show experience"). The remainder of your exp you get back as 'safe exp', it is all on you but you wont lose it if you die. If you are a new player, you don't need to find a druid to cast reincarnation at you. If you are under level 40 and your actual game age is under 4 days, you may use 'recreate' command. Recreate is like reincarnation, but it is free and doesn't reduce your total experience. Ps. For undead races the equivalent of reincarnation is 'reanimation' which is a spell available to evil priests. See 'help reincarnation' for detailed information! Mortals and Wizards ------------------- Mortal levels go from 1 to 100, wizard levels from 20 to 1000 with few exceptions. Archwizard limit is level 200, these guys can do pretty much whatever they want. Mortals are often divided into newbies, midbies and highbies. There is no decided level limits for these, if someone is 30 levels higher than you, you can assume he thinks you are a newbie. And for you, he is probably a highbie. Again there is lots of exceptions, don't judge people by their levels too quickly. Hierarchy, player killing and asking questions ---------------------------------------------- Be polite, be careful. Don't upset higher level and older players. That level 70 healer might seem to be helpless against a strong tank like you, but she has about 70 friends who will take care of you. Then again, some people like to kill weaker players for fun. If a level 100 player killer walks over you, yelling at him isn't exactly a good idea. He will just do it again. Whining to wizards of player killing is pointless unless you have been killed 5+ times in a short period of time without an obvious reason. Whining to players might help, since there are people who dislike newbies being killed just for fun. Ask politely for help and you might get it. Politeness is the key to asking questions of any kind, on channels or via tells. For example... "Dragonfly [newbie]: GIVE ME MY MOTHERFUCKIN MONNNEYYY??!?!?!" ... wont work. Also spamming the ghost channel with too eagerly repeated requests for ress usually buys you a quick trip back to hell. NOTE: Intentional and sometimes even unintentional spamming of the channels will result in termination of your character or at least a banishment from the channel. NOTE: As you might have noticed 9 lines above, we don't really have a language policy. Swear all you want. Useful helps ------------ All helps are useful (well almost), but going thru all of them takes lots of time so here are few important ones: help help battle help channels help handling help levels help lite help spellcasting help term help builtin help open guilds help newbie helpers help saving items Feel free to ask me if there is something wrong with this help, or you'd like to know more. (I am known as Shardik now). by Shardik / Dragonfly Carthaigh


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