Getting started

Everything opens on the main menu. From there you either host a game or join one -- and which of the two this copy of the game is, is decided right there and can be changed as often as you like.

Hosting

Host Game picks a mode and starts a world.

• ADVENTURE goes through character creation and drops you in the forest. This is the game.
• TEST names a room off the map list and drops you straight into it. See The world for what is on each map.

A browser cannot host: a web page has no UDP of its own, so its Host Game instead asks the playtest box to spawn a dedicated game on the map you picked and joins it when it comes up. Either way you get a game of your own, listed for everybody else.

Joining

Join Game takes an address -- a friend's machine, a box on the LAN, with or without a port -- and dials it. Or Browse Playtest Box lists the games running on the public box, one row per game with what it is and how full it is. Click a row to join.

The pause screen

Esc closes any open window, and otherwise brings up the pause screen: Resume, Settings, View Controls, Leave Game, and Quit.

Whether the world actually stops under it is a question about the room, not the button. Alone in a game of your own, it stops. With anybody else in it, it cannot -- a host with company keeps serving, and a client never pauses somebody else's game.

Settings

Settings is the window for this machine alone, kept in settings.cfg beside the game (a browser keeps it in the page's own storage). The left column is the sound -- overall, effects, music, and the voice chat, each its own slider -- and the mouse's sensitivity. The right is the picture: the display mode and the window's size, and then the graphics, each of which can be turned down or off on a machine that struggles.

• Raytracing, where the GPU has it: traced shadows from the sun and the torches, then occlusion in the corners, then bounced light. The row says so if the GPU cannot.
• Occlusion darkens the corners and the ground under things on any GPU; the raytracer's own replaces it wherever that runs.
• Bloom spreads the torches', the fireballs', and the sun's light into a glow.
• Sharpen crisps the picture.
• Volumetric clouds and god rays are the sky's, on the dunes and in the forest, and the dearest of the lot.

Nothing in it is on the wire: what you see is yours, and everybody else's game is their own.

Controls

F1 in game shows all of this in a window.

Your two buttons

This is the one idea the whole game runs on. Every item names a click and a hold, and putting it in a mitten puts those two things on that mitten's button. Nothing else decides what a button does.

So a sword clicks to swipe and holds to charge a bash. A spellbook holds to charge and releases to cast. A bow holds to draw. A potion clicks to drink and holds to aim a throw. A shield holds to guard and clicks to bash. A bare mitten punches on a click and grabs on a hold.

The card in the equipment window always says which is which.

The HUD

• Bottom left: your lifebar. Health from the left in green, your afflictions from the right in their own colors, and your stamina in what is left between them. It is one bar -- see Status effects.
• Bottom center: the belt hotbar, with a mitten slot either side marked by a mouse glyph.
• At your shoulder: the stamina ring, chased to your own body.
• Top right: the compass minimap, turned so your facing is up, with fog of war over ground you have actually walked.
• Center: the crosshair. Yellow over anything a press would use; green while you are carrying something.

What to do first

1. Look around the camp. Sit on a log. Someone will fall in the fire.
2. Open E and find out what your class gave you.
3. Follow a dirt path. Paths always go somewhere and are always walkable.
4. Loot a chest, pick some mushrooms, and be careful which ones you eat.
5. Find a stone arch, stand on the pad, and go down together.
6. When somebody goes down, go and pick them up. The clock is shorter every time.