Beginner's Guide

So, you've made the decision to dive into the Lifeweb, have you? Bad call, many would say as playing this game will be nothing but suffering an overwhelming majority of the time (especially for beginners) but the more you learn, the more of a chance you got to stay alive longer and as everyone knows, having a pulse translates to more fun... Most of the time.

I will not guide you through the process on just HOW you begin playing Lifeweb as a courtesy to the community, Hydrated and "Randy Sandy", the creator of the game as one of the multiple rows of excuses they've made to being absolute dickheads & closet faggots about sharing information to new people is to enforce a meta circlejerk while trying to keep the population "under control".

First up is the mandatory explanation to you that this game is NOT fair in any way, shape or form. You will die, you will get fucked over by one or more people that have much more experience & tools & skills than you, you will be confused a grand majority of the time, you will be incredibly frustrated and you're most likely going to be raped and/or dissected into a thousand pieces by an asshole Serpent at some point. But fret not, the rounds reset into a clean slate every so often and there are typically 2-3 servers running at any given time which can translate into nigh infinite lives for you at any given time presuming that you're not gonna take more than 5-10 minutes to die. I will structure this guide in such a manner that you will need to click certain text links in order to get the full grasp of what I'm saying but generally, I'm gonna try and keep as much as possible of it here.

## Starting Out

When you first join a server, you will be prompted with a character creation screen. Here, you will be more or less forced to choose a variety of things for your character, varying from hair color to religion. Most of them don't matter too much except the "Vice" of your character, and the religion. Vices are universally all bad in their own way but some are worse than others such as drug addictions, necrophilia or even pyrophobia, an irrational fear of fire in a universe where fire is pretty much the only light source you'll ever have. As such, some can really harshly cripple your ability to play the game so think long, logically and hard about what you want to start out with as failing to indulge your vice will cause your character to become sad and weak, suffering severe stat losses and more. As for religion, it's better to start out as a Post Christian, until you've learned the game's mechanics better. Once you're more comfortable with the game then you can dive into being a Thanati or Old Ways follower.

Next task will be choosing your role. AKA class, AKA "Fate". This choice will dictate on what your 'official' profession/job will be during that round. There are currently a total of 34 of them in Lifeweb (excluding special antagonist roles) and they all have their important task & roles to fulfill, that require you to tackle different challenges while also having a wide variety of baseline information.

For a more fleshed-out listing of them, I recommend going here as it will take ages before I can gather enough knowledge and time to create a proper dedicated page & associated guides for every fate on this wiki. For now, I would recommend this roster for you to start out with:

* Squire
* Apprentice
* Bum

They all fly pretty low under the radar with little to no given tasks at any time which allows you to explore and learn the game at your own pace with only the occasional bloody beating / random murder. Evidently, you will not have the chance to play these that I've mentioned or even any other class if the match/server has been going on for a certain period of time. In this case, your only choice will be to play a Migrant.

While vaguely more possible in a group, don't expect to survive for more than a few minutes as being a Migrant means that you're gonna have to make your way (usually alone) to Ravenheart, far to the north through a nightmarish cave system with monsters, sheer cliffs, poison clouds, freezing cold and carnivorous/poisonous plants everywhere. At the very least, this baptism by fire *(and sometimes lava)* will make surviving within Ravenheart feel much, much easier. Good luck.

## Into the game

Once you have chosen your Fate, you will be thrown into the game in three different ways.

* If you're an outsider, such as a Migrant, you will spawn far south of the fort in the caves on your back completely nude and defenseless. To be able to move, you must choose a "class" (much like a Fate in the fort) in the top right to dictate what kind of migrant you are before you're given the bare essentials and allowed to move through the tunnels leading north, most definitely to your death.

* If you join a server by readying up as the round starts, you will spawn as your chosen Fate inside of the fort.

* However, if you join an ongoing round as an official role/job in the fort and the round has already started, you will spawn at a train station that will require you to take a train-ride over into the fort.

No power means that the train station gates won't be able to be opened and you'll be stuck inside accordingly. In this case where there is no power, all you can do is spam the radio using "say ;" asking for help, hoping someone is kind/annoyed at you enough to come and help. If they don't care or are all otherwise unable/unwilling.. Well.

## The Basics

The moment you are first given control of your character, you should focus on learning the UI (User Interface) inside and out. The arguably most important bits of it can be found on the right, which includes your health status (Shown as a skull/head). Click on it and you will get a status report on every single part of your body from feet to head. The other important symbol is the hangman below the body paperdoll. This shows your mood and any needs you might have. You should FREQUENTLY check and keep an eye on these if you want to have any chance of staying alive for more than 5 minutes. To see a picture explaining every detail of the UI, click here

Chances are that you will spawn in a building that have locked doors limited to you and others who work there. To unlock doors, you need to stand in range of them and press the right mouse button. For a list of more controls & hotkeys explained, click here

Along with all of that, you're also gonna have to keep in mind the 4 basic needs of humans. And these are:

* Drinking
* Eating
* Urination
* Defecation

Failure to eat and drink will mean that your character will quite quickly begin to starve while also becoming dangerously dehydrated. You will constantly fall unconscious, not have any stamina to do anything and eventually, you'll start to take considerable amounts of damage to your liver until your character will suffer a heart-attack from acute dehydration and be at Death's Door/subsequently die. If your character does any kind of physically straining activities and/or gets overheated, he/she will need to chug water like no tomorrow (whilst preferably having small periods of rest) or suffer constant heart-attacks that will render you unconscious & helpless. All of these functions will be explained and elaborated on below in their own sections.

## Water

You get water from sinks. They are scattered around here and there inside of the fort but the most convenient one is the one in the feeding hall (house with a giant table & stools inside, located pretty centrally in the fort, although a bit north) To drink directly from sinks, you need to press the middle mouse button (scroller) on them. To wash items or yourself, use M1. To gather water in a container, like a mug, you hold the mug in your desired hand and press M1. It's impossible to drink too much water in the Lifeweb so you should chug as much as you can whenever possible while also having some on you. Besides sinks, there are rivers outside the fort that can also be drunk from and you should do so whenever you can If you are an outsider, AKA a migrant.

In a pinch because It's really gross, you can resort to drinking your own piss with no real consequence. The challenge to doing this however is that you have to pee in a container first which requires it to be in-between your legs/on the ground at the time of you peeing. Drinking excess water can help stave off starvation for a short duration.

## Food

Getting food is almost always a challenge and will arguably be your first serious stepping-stone as a newcomer with no knowledge or experience. Even veteran players often struggle to find sufficient amounts of food depending on what state the fort is in (and the overall economy) but generally, the fort's inn usually provides food-related services in exchange for Obols, the in-game currency. To buy/get food in the inn, you need to go upstairs to the small bar. Ring the buzzer and hope that there is an alive innkeeper that's manning the kitchen. Generally, they will give you food for free if you are in a really bad spot, otherwise they usually ask for 5 copper obols for one food item such as a bun, fried meat or some other monstrosity.

If you have no money and the innkeeper(s) is(are) dead/won't give you food however, you're gonna have to resort to one out of two desperate measures. And these are:

* Cannibalism
* Traveling outside the safe walls of the fort to find Plump Helmets (Mushrooms you can eat right away for nutrition) and Meatshrooms (Mushrooms that have to be cooked over a fire to not be poisonous when digested.)

To effectively "become a cannibal", you need relatively fresh dead bodies.. Or body parts from newly mutilated people. All organs can be eaten as well but you should avoid livers and guts as they are toxic to consumption, even when cooked. It goes without saying that trying to eat/cook rotten/necrosis bodyparts will not end well for you. Limbs are generally considered "the best improv food" as they can be butchered into "normal" slabs of meat which you can cook or give to the innkeeper's chef to cook for you. To "Butcher" things, you need something with a sharp edge that can "Slash". A butcher knife, shard, scalpel and potentially even swords (but often they will have to be hand-sharpened with a nearby rock to reliably let you cut off limbs without gibbing them). Before you can butcher a limb, you need to separate it from the torso of someone. To do that, you grab your sharp-edged object of choice for example, a sharpened sabre (or similar), aim for the limb and click M3 (Middle mouse button/scroller) to cut it off. It may require repeated slashing first depending on how sharp the object you're using is and how good your stats are, AKA your DX (Dexterity), surgery skill and if the person you're doing it to is dead or not.

Once you got the limb, you need to hold a slashing weapon in your hand and click on it to change It's "attack/use" mode from for example, stabbing to slashing with a knife and then click the limb in question repeatedly, preferably on a table as It has a higher success rate.

Then once you FINALLY have slab(s) of meat or meatshroom, you can either risk it and take it to the inn and have the chef/innkeeper cook it for you (he might not give it back cooked for free or at all) or you could cook it yourself over any fire. To do so, hold a stab-capable weapon (wooden spears will work surprisingly and even things like screwdrivers) in one hand, put it in "stab" mode then grab the meat and slap it against the fire to improv-cook it. Certain foods may require you to target the mouth and then click on yourself to eat them. HOWEVER, since you will almost certainly not be a character with exceptional cooking skills, I recommend taking your sharp slashing instrument and M1'ing the slabs of meat to turn them into Cutlets. They are a subsequent meat food item that cannot be "badly" cooked and make for an excellent staple food-source for the on-the-go cannibal with only sharp objects, a fire and bodies around.

## Urination and Defecation

To survive for more than 5 minutes, you need to drink water. And when you drink water, you're gonna have to take a piss later. If you're someone who works very hard physically in a hot environment such as the blacksmith, you are gonna have to drink a LOT of water to not have constant heart-attacks and that means you need to urinate equally as much. Failure to pee properly/by yourself will result in your character pissing his/her pants which will turn both your character and his/her clothes dirty. The worse your hygiene is, the more susceptible you are to getting sick. It also affects your overall health and partially, your stamina itself.

The same goes for eating. The more you eat, the more you are gonna have to shit and if you shit your pants, you're gonna be very bad off on both scenes of dating and hygiene.

To avoid being a stinking asshole, you're gonna have to learn on how to make your character pee/poo on demand. And doing so requires you to learn about the "Emote" menu, that can be found at the top right of your Lifeweb UI information window, here

Usually, you want to try and do your dirty business in a nearby toilet but It's perfectly fine doing it on the streets/somewhere with little to no traffic. Just remember that you (rather obviously) have to take your clothes off BEFORE doing your deed(s) and pay attention that by "stripping down", you are left very vulnerable so watch your back or you'll be getting as much fluids into you as you were trying to expel. Your character will also give you small text-prompts on how badly he needs to visit the bathroom but generally, you should go and do it whenever you have the free-time & safety to do so.

Poo itself is (surprisingly) an useful resource that can be used in a number of ways, ranging from a fertilizer, an improvised missile weapon to a potent poison to coat your blade with for nigh guaranteed serious infections whenever you injure someone.

## Hygiene

As briefly explained above, hygiene is another element of your character that you're gonna have to keep track of if you want to stay healthy, avoid diseases and have no stamina penalties, although there is usually much less consequence for failing to do so. If you for whatever reason fail to stay clean by shitting/pissing your clothes, getting dragged through mud etc, you can manually clean your clothes by holding them in your hand and pressing a nearby sink with M1. To properly have your body cleaned, you need to visit a shower. They can be located in the church which can be found west in the fort. If you do not have ready access to a shower, strip down, walk into some still (preferably clean) water and hit Clean in your menu. It would not do to get flushed downstream while naked.

If you're REALLY dirty, you're gonna have to shower several times before becoming clean yet again and the same goes for your clothes, you filthy ape.

## Terrain

Now that you know your basic needs, knowing the finer points of moving about the environment to get them would help.

Basic movement is done through the arrow keys, and speed is adjusted by clicking Walk/Jog on your UI. If you have fallen down, you can still crawl by clicking on adjacent tiles.

The largest danger for beginners is the concept of Z levels and falling down them. They can be safely traversed by stair tiles, but there will still be sheer drops to watch out for. A telltale sign of a drop is a darker color of the tile, or a sometimes visible wavy border. While walking off the edge is a viable option for going down, you're most likely going to break a leg, a rib, or your head and most likely die.

If you hold Shift and click M1, you can investigate a suspect tile. If it shows 'This is an open space.', walking onto it will make you fall. While standing next to an open space with ground underneath, you can click with M1 on the space with your hands free to try and climb down. If you think there may be an open space above you, click 'Look ^' on your UI. If the view shifts to another level, then there is space above you, where ground or monsters may be hiding.

Falling down a level can be resolved by having your hands free and clicking a rock wall that has ground above it to try and climb up.

Not all terrain is safe to walk over, of course. Water can drown you, clouds of gas can poison you and contaminate your clothes, and it's never a good idea to walk over anything with teeth or spikes. Shroom Trees can block your way North and South, and boulders or stalagmites obstruct all around.

## Becoming a Useful Member of Society

After you've gotten used to basic motor functions, figured out how to keep yourself fed and watered, learned to survive the "dangerous" caverns, and can walk two steps without breaking both your legs and shitting yourself, your next step is learning the ins and outs of Ravenheart's society so you can someday RP with the big boys.

Any fate listed under The Dirt is a good starting point - after all, before you can learn to command you must learn to obey. Being the lowest of the low, your jobs will be semi- to non-vital, and won't completely ruin the round should you fuck up your extremely simple tasks.

Some time spent working as a Docker will *(depending on the merchant)* give you plenty of ~~wild, beuraeucratic goose-chases~~ errands to run around the fortress, helping you familiarise yourself with the damp, dark, basements you'll be living your life in. Also, you'll get a decent amount of practice manipulating objects and containers, as well as valuable knowledge of the greedy, cut-throat economy that keeps the fortresses' gears turning.

Life as a Servant will help you familiarise with the corrupt, inbred, upper echelon of Ravenheart's society, while training valuable skills such as cooking, subserviance, and kissing noble's rings *(either kind)*.

Working as a Mortus will let you practice the combat mechanics on players almost as inexperienced as you are, as you knock your fellow low-lifes out with your trusty shovel and drag them into the Lifeweb. You'll also pick up basic knowledge of healthcare as you gingerly bandage their skulls closed, and feed and water them to extract the most amount of pain possible (or just leave them to rot and wither as you search for another breathing corpse.) Should you manage to accrue enough power to stop people screaming at you over the radio, feel free to wander around and bury any of the corpses that should be piling up in the streets at this point, because **you are the respawn timer.**

If you're feeling particularly masochistic, you can always work as a Maid or a Whore, trying keep the fortress clean or happy *(in vain.)* You'll receive plenty of knowledge and experience with the more *"specialised"* game mechanics, along with plenty of resentment and frustration that will someday be funneled directly into another new player just like youself.

Feel free to branch out into any fate that takes your fancy. Once you're familiar with daily life and social norms in the fortress you should start throwing yourself into the more useful and difficult-looking roles. After all, Losing is Fun™.