Beginner's Guide

Beginners Guide
You have come to the lands of the Gelod. Now What??? The world is a very dangerous place. For now you should be content to stay in town. For the Gealdor you start in the village of Stone Bridge, and the Thular start in Brygga. For the new Thular stay to the west side of town and for the Gealdor stay in town or you can venture a little ways to the south and you should be safe. This guide will walk you through the basics of the game so that you will learn how to survive and thrive in the lands. Thorns of War is a skill based game. This means that you do not level up just by killing creatures, you gain skills by practicing them. If you want to become a legendary swordsman, you must use a weapon that is in the swords category (i.e. knife, short sword) and use it often. Actually the more you miss with the weapon the faster you will increase in the skill. If you want to learn a craft like leather working, you will start out with a limited number of items that you can make and those at poor quality. But the more you make the more of a variety of items you can make and the higher their quality will be. Enough talk lets get started. Here is a Diary of a new player

Fighting
Let's start with fighting, it's the easiest way for you to obtain the things you need in the land. First make sure you have a weapon in your right hand. You start the game with a caudal (or a club) this is either in your hand or on your belt. To find out what is on your person mouse your cursor to the EQ tab that will open a sliding screen that will show you what is on your character. All characters are right handed in ToW so check to see if your weapon is in your right hand. If it is on your belt move the cursor to the location of the weapon and it will change to DRAW, click on it and it will place your weapon in your right hand. If you happen to find another weapon you can weld it in your left hand. To close this screen just move your cursor to the EQ tab again. Now that you have your weapon in your hand it is time to start fighting. Look around the map and you should see several blue dots, these are non hostile NPCs. Click on these til you find a giant rat. To move to rat you can shift + click on the location and you will move there or you can use the key pad to move around the screen map. You are the white dot in the screen and you can only see a 7x7 area of the map. Once at the rat click on it in the lower left screen and you will see a menu click ATTACK and the battle will begin. The battle will continue till either one of you die or one of you flees. The bar next to YOU in the lower left screen is your health bar, keep an eye on this. You loose health every time you are hit, plus if you are hit with a weapon (or claws, teeth, etc) you will start to bleed and loose health depending on how hard the hit was. Once you win the battle you may be injured. Type /sit to sit and allow your wounds to close. You will heal over time, but if you eat while you are sitting you will heal much faster. Open the EQ tab and look til you find your pouch. Click on the location of the pouch and it will show it's contents. If you are just starting out there should be a few hunks of cooked meat in there. Click on the meat and choose TAKE. Then click on the meat in your hand and choose EAT. If you are very low on health continue doing this til the hunk of meat is gone. One full hunk of meat (5 bites) should be enough to recover from even the most dire of wounds. You CANNOT eat while you are in combat. While you are waiting for your wounds to heal you can butcher the carcass of the dead rat. The first attempt will be to see if you can get the pelt. The next attempt well be for meat. Rat meat is poisonous do not eat it. If you don't get something with the first try you can try again with the next rat and the more you fail the more chance of getting better for the next time. If you get a pelt go to the trading section to learn how to sell the pelt. This completes you first combat, repeat this with rats til you are skilled enough not to get injured at all from the rats. Leggings will help if you can find these for sale as most of the damage from rats is confined to the lower body. Go to Combat for more a more in depth description of combat.

Trading
When you get a rat pelt you can now sell it to the rat catcher. There are 2 of them in each of the beginning villages. Walk to the rat catcher and put the rat pelt in your right hand. Click on the rat catcher and click on GIVE. The rat catcher will take the pelt and give you a silver ruk (the coin of the realm). You can then PUT the ruk in your pouch and then go to kill another rat. If you give the rat catcher something he does not buy he will give it back to you. Later on you can sell items to the Trader. The trader will buy a wider range of items. He will buy any finished metal items (i.e. weapons, armor), skins, furs, and gems. Be careful the trader will by anything you give him that he buys. More than once a player has sold their best weapon to the trader by accident. If you have several items to sell at one time you can put them all in a container like a pouch and give the container to the rat catcher or trader and they will buy everything that they buy and put the ruks in the container before handing it back to you.

Crafting
In order to craft items you need 2 things, tools and ingredients (or materials). The tools range from carving knives to armorer's hammers and can be used multiple times. The ingredients however are depleted to make the new item. The first tool that you should be able to get is the knife. A knife can be used to make some of the other tools. The easiest way to get the knife is to get one from a boarkin. They are one of the easiest