Tips For Beginners

First and foremost, welcome to CLOK. We hope you enjoy your stay, however long it may be. Things may be a little confusing in the beginning, particularly if you've never played a text-based MUD/MUSH. We've tried to design CLOK to be as logical as possible and avoid over-complicating things. Below are some general tips to get you started.

The look and examine commands will be very useful for figuring out how things work. Looking at NPCs will tell you if they're a trainer, a guild recruiter, et cetera. Use examine to examine items and discover if they have any particular functionality, and to know which verbs to use for them (words that work as commands are generally highlighted in bright cyan).

Shadgard

You start in the town of Shadgard. Visit the Shadgard page to see a map of the town itself to help you navigate.

Highlights

All NPCs will be highlighted in a certain color, depending on their relationship with you. If an NPC is highlighted in yellow, it is neutral toward you, and poses no immediate threat to your safety. If an NPC is highlighted in green, the NPC is friendly toward you, and may offer aid, information or services to you that it wouldn't otherwise. If an NPC is highlighted in red, it is hostile to you, and will most likely attack on sight, so be careful!

GM character names will be highlighted in cyan, and they will also show up as GM [Name], for example GM Rias.

Player characters will be highlighted in blue.

Command words will be highlighted in cyan, hinting players toward which commands to use. This is particularly prevalent on the various informative signs around the game, but also often appears in command messaging, item descriptions and other messaging instances.

Items in room descriptions that can be interacted with in some way are highlighted in green. Note that this doesn't apply to items listed in the "You also notice ..." section, since all items there can be interacted with.

Starting Out

You start out with some basic supplies - clothes, a torch, some firestones, and a travel ration. Your pockets will be empty, however, so you'll need to find a way to make some money if you wish to do any shopping. A few ways to make money in the beginning:

• Forage up some medicinal herbs and sell them at the town market. Emberberries are rather plentiful in the forests just outside town and off the main road, so head out there and type forage emberberries to start foraging for some.
• Mine for ore in the mines. You'll need a mining pick for this, so you'll need to save some money from other activities and buy one at the blacksmith shop. Once you've got a mining pick in hand, head into the mine on the east side of town and type mine. When you get some ore, you can either sell it raw at the town market, or you can smelt it in the furnace at the blacksmith workyard first in order to make it worth a bit more. Simply put the ore in the furnace and pull the bellows, then wait for the furnace to cool and take out the smelted metal bars.
• Fell some logs. Like mining, this will require a tool - in this case, a logging axe, also from the blacksmith shop. Save up for one via other activities and take it out to any forested area in the wilderness, then type fell to start chopping trees. Once you've felled a tree, you'll need to chop off the branches. You can sell both the branches and fully-stripped logs at the town market.

Tip: If you can save up 200 riln, you can order a handcart at the General Store which can be pulled along into the mines or the forest to make gathering and carting the heavy raw materials much more easy and efficient!

Lastly, don't forget to look in the crate in the Town Commons for spare supplies. The crate is community storage and is often stocked by more experienced adventurers to help supply newer folk, so feel free to take things from it, as long as you plan to put them to use. Taking items from the crate just to pawn them at the pawnshop is generally frowned upon.

Exploring

If you plan on going exploring, you'll definitely want some torches or candles for exploring dark areas, and some firestones to light them with. While holding a torch in one hand and the firestones in the other, simply type light torch to light the torch. You don't want to put a burning torch in your backpack, so before stowing it, extinguish the torch by typing extinguish torch. You'll also want to pack some food so you don't end up starving out in the wilderness somewhere. Travel rations provide high nutrition and several bites, though they're a bit bland - you can order some at the General Store east of the Town Commons. If you end up without food out in the boonies, you can always try to forage for food in the wild.

Combat

If you plan on battling the various critters and monsters out there, you'll obviously need a weapon, as well. Though there's no dedicated town armory, you can find a few serviceable weapons in the general store east of the Commons or in the blacksmith shop just outside the mine on the east side of town. You can even club things with a torch in a pinch, and torches actually make fairly decent weapons if used while lit. To attack something, simply type attack [target], where "[target]" is the name of whatever it is you want to attack. Ranged weapons users would instead fire, and casters would cast instead of attacking.

If you wish to auto-attack any present hostiles until there are none left or you manually stop yourself from attacking, you can battle with a melee weapon, barrage with a ranged weapon, or trance while channeling elemancy (such as pyromancy).

You can adjust your tactics in various ways, such as focusing only on dodging (and therefore not trying to parry or block). This not only increases your chances to dodge by quite a bit, but is also handy for training up specific defensive skills.

You can also change which position you attempt to stay at. You can attempt to avoid combat, stay at ranged distance or attempt to engage any present hostiles. If you are running through dangerous territory, it's a good idea to switch your position to avoid encounters. Certain actions will automatically change your position, or at least attempt to - attacking with a melee weapon will automatically switch you to engage position. Firing with a ranged weapon will switch you to ranged if you were previously at avoid - if you were instead previously in the engage position and are currently under attack, you will attempt to break the engagement and retreat to a ranged position automatically in order to fire.

For more information, check the combat wiki page.