Basics Guide

This page will serve as a basic **how to play guide for *Fractured Online***.

**NOTE**: For any questions regarding the game you are welcome to join the game's official discord https://discord.gg/Bmz4WsHD2Q

## Basic gameplay

While combat is a core feature, Fractured revolves around traveling and exploration specifically. This means you will have to prepare accordingly for your journey because the environment can and will kill you if you aren’t ready. For example, traveling over the mountains will require food, water, proper gear(for temperature/weather) and shelter(Note: Weather effects are currently not implemented.); without one of these elements, you will die. Fractured wishes to cater to both the hardcore PvP players, more casual PvE players, and any playstyle in between. Thus, they have created 3 planets where different combat systems exist.

These planets are Arboreus, Syndesia and Tartaros. Arboreus is meant to be a mostly collaborative environment tiered toward PvE players, with minimal presence of PvP. Tartaros is the opposite, with a constant PvP activity and cutthroat competition as its theme. Syndesia is halfway between those.

In the current beta, the only planet available is the last one, Syndesia, the world of humans.

## Playing on Syndesia

Syndesia's gameplay is based on trading, guild quarrels, city level politics and a minor presence of murderers.

PvP on Syndesia is allowed but regulated. Everything revolves around the concept of Alignment. Your character will be created as a Good character, with its name in blue color. If it is your first character you will also enjoy 40 hours (game time) of young player protection, which means that you can't be attacked by other players, even evil ones.

At a certain point you may decide to switch your alignment to one of the other 2 possibilities, Neutral and Evil. You can do so at a shrine in a city, and it comes with perks and consequences. Note that changing alignment will remove the young player protection, even if you become good again.

You alignment will define who you can attack, what happens if you get killed and what affects your Karma.

Good: You can be attacked only by Evil players. If you get killed you lose your inventory and no equipped items. You can attack evil players, and doing so rewards you with karma.

Neutral: You can be attacked by evil and neutral players. If you get killed you lose your inventory and no equipped items. You can attack evil and neutral players without consequences. You can hunt Legends.

Evil: You can be attacked by anyone and can attack anyone. Attacking good players will make you lose karma, and if you are below 0 karma you cannot change alignment from Evil. If you get killed, you lose all your inventory and an amount of equipment depending on your karma. At -10.000 karma you lose your full equipment. Red players cannot interact with city structures, unless they are citiziens of that city, or that city has been declared as lawless.

Karma can go from 10.000 to -10.000. On Syndesia a character with 10.000 karma can apply to become a Bounty Hunter, which allows him to hunt Evil players for a profit.

## Playing on Arboreus

Details unknown, Arboreus is still not implemented in the beta test. You can check what is known about it from Developer's journals in the Arboreus page.

## Playing on Tartaros

Details unknown, Tartaros is still not implemented in the beta test. You can check what is known about it from Developer's journals in the Tartaros page.

## Character Creation

Character creation consists of choosing a race, assigning attributes, and defining your character background.

### Step 1 - Race

The choice of race is the most impactful you’re going to make in your Fractured experience. It determines on which planet you start your journey and the ruleset you’ll be subject to – something far greater than what you’ve likely experienced in other MMOs.
Other than that, different race – and families – come with a set of advantages and disadvantages such as unique abilities and backgrounds, basic statistic modifiers and attribute variations.

Note: At this point of the beta testing, you can only select the Human race. Wildfolk and Demons will be added later.

### Step 2 - Attributes

Once you’ve selected your race, it’s time you decide how to set your main character attributes: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Perception, and Charisma.

Every character in the game has 6 attributes that determine their statistics and performance in various tasks. These attributes are: Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Constitution, Perception and Charisma. You can find the effects that these have on a character on their individual pages ***or click here to see the information about all the attributes at once***.

You’re given a pool of **Creation Points** that can be distributed among the six attributes – 80 if your new hero is a Wildfolk or a Demon, 100 if Human. Creation Points can be spent to increase your attributes from their minimum value of 6 up to their soft cap, which is normally 18 but can change according to the character’s race and family (as shown in the table below, which lists cap variations by race). If the value of an attribute is below 10, you’ll suffer maluses to all the statistics related to it – that’s why it’s convenient to raise each up to 10, particularly for inexperienced players.

The selection of the attributes is a really important part of character creation. In Fractured you can change your skills and talents as many times as you want, but the attributes are carved in stone, with few and limited exceptions. What in other MMOs goes by the concept of "Class", here is represented by attributes. Be sure to check the effects of Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Perception and Charisma.

What follows are a few possible archetypes you may want to build initially. Those archetypes are by no definition, "meta", "Best" or anything similar. The game is changing too fast for these concepts to matter right now. They are just intended to offer a starting point in case you are completely lost or don't want to study what the attributes do for now.

### Step 3 - Background

The selection of the background gives you your first set of learned abilities. Since all characters can learn all abilities without restrictions, the background will matter for your first hours of gaming and then be quickly forgotten. Just make sure to select one that synergizes with your attribute selection, or your first steps will be rough.

### Step 4 - Tutorial

Tutorial will teach you about basic mechanics in Fractured and its advised to follow it unless you know what you are doing. Also, the monsters that you fight there will be found only there, and they have a very fast respawn, so even if they are not worth a lot of KP (3000 kp if you max everything), getting them to 100% before leaving is advised. Every KP helps at the start.

### Step 5 - Catching an horse

So, what to do after you are done with the tutorial? A good idea would be to catch yourself an horse. It will be incredibly useful to travel, since in Fractured the distances between places tend to matter. If you want to know how to catch an horse, you can check this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uzeW8M6IhI.

### Step 6 - Your first mobs

Next, you will probably have to fight some mobs. Don't get the wrong idea from the very easy mobs of the tutorial, as soon as you try to fight real mobs, the difficulty spikes **hard**, There will be 3 kind of enemies that you are likely to fight as your first challenges: bandits, goblins and animals.

Goblins: There are 3 types of common goblins. Out of those, the archers are the easiest. They will throw a Net Trap at you and immobilize you, but their damage is not so high, and they die reasonably fast. Be wary though that they are often guarded by wolves, and being entrapped in the net with a wolf on you can be very dangerous. Kill the wolves first. They give you the Net Trap skill, which is very useful for archers and mages. The second kind of common goblin is the enforcer, easily recognizable by the shield. These guys are really hard to kill and keep healing. Honestly it is much better to just ignore them, or you will waste all your mana trying to kill them. Finally there are the cutthroat . They are the most dangerous and are responsible for a lot of player kills. They will blind you, making you miss most of your attacks or reducing a lot the damage of your arrows, then poison you. If you ever get low on HP, they will use the Assassinate skill, which will do more damage the more HP% you lack, which usually means that you die. Never approach them if you are not at full health, and if possible kill them from range, they are quite frail.

Bandits: Bandits are in general harder fights than goblins, and it is highly suggested to not go there alone. They come in a lot of different shapes, but in general they are more straightforward and less tricky than goblins, so you can fight them with regular means. Just beware of the chain mail guys, those are spell slingers and will apply a Confusion status on you. This will make your spells fail 30% of the times. In general though, if you have one friend with you, killing bandits is a nice way to get gold and a huge amount of useful skills.

Animals: While walking on the road, you may find wolves, dire wolves and grizzly bears. Bears are easy to run from and are mostly just big piles of HP that want to smash your face stun after stun. Don't face them for now. Dire wolves are a bit easier, but still maybe a bit too much at the start if you are alone. Wolves instead come in packs and can be fought, but do so while being extremely wary of their tactics. They have incredibly high accuracy and a skill (Bleeding Strike) that inflicts extra damage and applies bleeding. After that, they will activate Vicious Attacks, which is a self buff that allows them to inflict bonus damage on bleeding targets. It is very easy to notice it, since it gives them a red aura. Don't fight the pack head on while bleeding and they are buffed, they will shred you. The buff lasts only a few seconds, wait for it to expire and then engage. They have very low HP.

If you have difficulties facing them, check the Mobs keep killing me! section toward the end of this guide.

## Things to know

### Death vs. Unconscious

As with many games of its kind, Fractured used an HP system. In this game though, you don't die if that bar reaches 0. You get knocked down and become unconscious for 30 sec.

When this happens, 15% of your HP bar will change color and become purple. You cannot recover those HP through normal means, the only way is to rest at a fire pit (campfires are not good), which usually means stopping what you are doing and going back to an house or a city.

If your bar becomes completely purple (which means getting knocked down 7 times), or if an enemy player executes you while you are unconscious, you die.

Apart from this, getting knocked down has no other consequences.

A rule of thumb when going pve is to retreat after being knocked down 3 times. Since your maximum HP decreases every time you get knocked down, it also becomes progressively easier for it to happen. You don't want to be left in the middle of a pve hot spot with 25% of your max hp left, it will result in being chain knocked down and in the end killed. That's the reason why the usual hint is to stay in the fight only if you have at least 70% of your max hp left. The PvE in this game can be brutal.

### Hunger and Energy

Your character needs to be kept fed and rested. On the left of your HP bar you have 2 gauges, which are respectively hunger (left) and energy (right). Hunger depletes over time and can be restored by eating. If the gauge reaches zero, you become starving and your hp bar becomes progressively purple until you die. Energy also depletes over time, but depletes at a rate which depends on your Constitution and on how much weight you care carrying. Some skills may also deplete your Energy faster. If the energy bar reaches zero your character will be exhausted. It will be slowed down and start taking damage over time. To restore the energy you need to rest at a firepit or a campfire. Firepits are built inside houses or inns, so they are rarely available out in the wild. If you don't want to come back, your best bet is to build a campfire. You can do so by opening the crafting tab (Default key: B) and going into the blueprint section, where you will find the campfire.

To build the campfire you need branches and small stones. Branches are rarely an issue, you can them from any tree. Small stones instead are a little harder to gather, especially for new players who have difficulties spotting them on the ground.

### Trade

To trade with someone, simply drag any item from your inventory onto player you want to trade with.
When you do this, a pop-up window will show up.

### Building a house

Building a house **does not** require being a citizen. You simply need to find a house plot which is not taken and claim it by stepping inside the borders and pressing a house icon. It requires 4000 gold to claim and further on 2000 gold every week for the rent. The rent must be on the house deposit, otherwise the house and everything inside **will be deleted**. For more details, click here.

## Common Issues

There are a few common issues that all players experience when starting to play this game, namely;

### I'm always out of mana!

Yes, mana management is hard in this game. There is no quick way to regenerate mana and it doesn't last as long as one would like. But there are a few tips which can greatly help you with this.

#### Check your toggles

Many toggle effects will eat part of your mana regeneration, making it a lot slower. The prime culprit here being the Mage Armor spell, which all mages will have from their background selection. While this spell offers a good deal of protection, it will kill your mana. Try to learn playing without it until you have enough mana regeneration.

#### Talents

One quick way to boost your mana regeneration are the "Focused I" talents. Put 4 points in this talent as soon as possible, it will truly make a difference. You can check the talent list here Talent.

#### Enchantments

The absolute best way to increase your mana regeneration will be the enchantments. For this, you will need to somehow get access to an enchanting table, so it will be the last of these 3 solutions that you can apply. How enchanting works is explained here Enchanting (Items). Tier 1 mana regeneration is a simple enchant which can be applied to all your armor pieces. These 4 enchants alone will give you 10 more mana regeneration.

### I need gold!

Yes, you need gold. Getting your first house requires those pesky 4000 gold, and crafting anything non primitive also comes with a gold cost. Gold can also be quite handy to buy that juicy stuff from a player's city marketplace. So, since you start with none and the tutorial does not talk about gold, how do you get yourself a bit of shiny currency? There are mainly 2 ways to achieve this.

#### Kill humanoid mobs

Killing is always the solution! In this case though, be warned that killing boars will not get you far (joke, we don't actually have boars) since no gold coin has magically found a way into their stomachs, and this is true for all beasts on the planets. Also, there are no NPCs to sell your trash loot in exchange of some easy coin. If you want coins you have to get them from the cold body of intelligent creatures. This means goblins, bandits, trolls, giants, undeads and even elementals.

#### Buy orders

One much easier and less bloody way to get gold, is by checking the buy orders that players place at the market places. Many times you will find orders for stuff which can be easily gathered, like local minerals (coal or stone for example), plants, mushrooms and so on. One very requested item are rabbit foots, so kill all the rabbits you find around (hard if you didn't start as an archer or mage, those pesky critters always try to flee). If you happen to find a rabbit foot (10% chance) you can sell it for a really good price.

### Mobs keep killing me!

Yes, PvE in Fractured can be brutal. As previously explained, after the tutorial the difficulty of the game spikes a lot. Your first steps out of it may be a bit hard, especially if you started as a melee. Here are a few tips on things you can improve.

#### Equipment... or not

Equipment is not the solution. This is a very common mistake done by new players. Getting a short bow will not make all that difference over your primitive bow. Even less for mages. Warriors will want to grab a metal weapon as soon as possible though, that will make a decent difference. In general though, if you want your character to become stronger, equipment is not your first aim. You want skills.

#### Skills

Having a good set of skills will completely change your PvE experience. A character skill set is made by 15 memory points, and out of the tutorial you don't even have half that in your preset, so you are fighting at half strenght. You want to grab those skills which make your build shine. There is no guide around for which skills pair well with which build, but if you ask around in Discord or in the game general chat you will get what you need in a matter of seconds. That said, don't go around learning all the skills you discover, because....

#### Talents

... because talents are a huge help. Every KP you spend on skills is a KP not spent in talents. In the end you will have more than enough KP for all 60 talents and a wide selection of skills, but for now you have to prioritize. Take only the skills that you really need and invest everything else in talents.

#### If it isn't nailed down

You grab it. Plants, mushrooms, branches, stones... whatever. You receive 250KP every time you collect a new type of resource, so grab everything in sight, this will provide a nice KP boost at the start of your career, which will afford you your first talents and skills. To "grab" a new type of tree you just need to collect its branches, no need to cut it down.

#### Friends

Yeah, sometimes you can also decide that 2 (or 3, or 4...) heads are better than one. In this game, the KP split is extremely generous with groups. Having another player in your group will not halve the KP you gain, but only reduce it by a small amount (around 10-20%). This means that the more the merrier. It is a lot more efficient to go around in groups. Groups between 2 and 4 players are the best.

#### Are you really going to fight that?

If you keep getting smashed by something despite all this, chances are that you are biting more than you can chew. Check this list here. It will tell you the challenge rating of what you are fighting. If it is 3 or lower then you are fine, if it is 4 you better have friends. If you are reading this guide and you are trying to fight something of rating 5 or higher you are way over your league (Notable exception for sea trolls, which are quite easy despite being rating 5).

## See also

* Bestiary
* Gods
* Schools of Fighting
* Schools of Magic
* System requirements