Welcome to
 

Welcome to the RPG Darkness Falls.  This is just a small attempt at a players guide, from the players, and, currently, it has no affiliation to the creators of Darkness Falls.  It is intended for the newbies that have just downloaded the game and never played before.  It is not, however, full of hints and cheats that will take away from game play, so lets just get started with the basics.

The Online Players Guide <OPG> is just the raw basics, very raw...  I still suggest you read it before game play.  You can find it in your Darkness Falls directory under Dark.hlp.  Also, while you're there, you might want to check out the Dfmanual.txt and the Faq.txt file.  And, if you want to find out who that Arnak guy is that everyone's been talking about, check out the game's history at Tamia's Downfall.  One last thing you might want to read before you start playing is the Rules of Conduct.


Now that all that's out of the way, lets get down to what this page has to offer.

Creating Your First Character
Moving Around In The Game
Learning How to Attack
Chatting
Leveling Up Your Character
What's a Smithy and Why Should I Care?
Macros
Useful Commands and Fun Commands

 

Creating Your First Character

Okay, ready?  Here comes the fun part.  Creating your first character.  Just click on that cute little create button, enter a name, and choose male or female.
Easy right?
Now it's time to pick your character's race.  This is a hard choice, and if you need a little bit more information, just check out the Character Class's and Guild's page.  Another good thing to do is take a test run of all the different races, level them a couple of levels to familiarize yourself with them, then choose who you want to portray in the city of Tamia.
After you choose a race, it's time to roll your character's stats.  Right now, don't worry about getting a great roll, just find one that looks good and go with it.  Later, when you're ready to make your permanent character, you'll be spending HOURS in front of this screen, possibly days.  You'll learn more about the importance of the stats as you play.
After clicking accept, you'll see your character's information and abilities, based on your roll and race.
When you get back to the main menu, the character you've just created should already be selected, so just click play to enter the game.  Now is a good time to type help.
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Moving Around In The Game

There are a couple of ways you can use to move around in the game.  If you want to look around, type look, hit enter, or you can use you're mouse to click on the center of the compass.  The easiest way though, is to make sure you're Num Lock is turned off, and hit 0 on the key pad.
This is also how you move from room to room in the game.  Type direction, (i.e. north, south, up, down, etc.) hit enter.  Click the direction on the compass or use the key pad.
8 = North
2 = South
4 = West
6 = East
etc.
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Learning How To Attack

Now, on to battle.  What to attack?  Not much when you're level one.  Keep in mind that a squirrel can kill you easily right now, and yes, the higher level players do giggle when they see
Canon was just killed by a squirrel!
Stick with the wondering merchants and poor peasants right now, and remember to bandage if you're low on hit points.
Also, keep in mind that you don't have to type out the full word.
att pea
is the same as
attack peasant
If fact, you'll probably find out that typing 'att p' accomplishes the same feat, but isn't a great idea.  One day you might find yourself hitting enter right as the poor peasant walks out of the room and a fellow player walks in by the name of Passie.  Passie might not be to happy that you just attacked him.
What's worse?  You being a magic user by the name of Passie and casting right as that dern peasant walks out of the room.
Just try and get in the habit of typing 3 letters, what ever you're fighting.
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Chatting

Now you know how to move and fight.  Let's move on to the communication in the world of DF.  First, make sure that you have your chat window open.  That is, click on your window menu and make sure that chat is selected.  Now here are your basic chat commands.
say "
send <player>"
gsend "
psend "
If you haven't joined a guild yet, you can gsend right now to all the other neophytes in the game.  What's a neophyte?  Just someone who hasn't joined a guild yet, most commonly a level one character.  After you've joined a guild, you will probably see a lot more chat going on, most likely everyone will have just welcomed you to the guild.  Here's a great tip for gsend etiquette.  If you ask a question, or ask if anyone has an item and you get no response, don't get mad and DON'T SCROLL.  Most likely, no one knew the answer, no one has the item you requested, or everyone's to busy hunting and just isn't paying attention to the text buffer.  They aren't being rude.
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Leveling Up Your Character

Now some tips on leveling up your character.  When you first start out, your little info box will say
1500 exp to lvl 2
At this point, ya might be thinking, no problem, I'll just kill me a couple hundred wondering merchants and I'll be in business.  Well, once you make level 2 and you're able to join a guild, hopefully one of you're new guild members will give you a better weapon and some good equipment.  Now your little info box says
4500 exp to lvl 3
So, off ya go to battle some more peasants and travelers and you might find it's an easier fight.  You also might notice that you're not getting as much experience for them as you were when you were level one.  You might want to wander off into the oak grove and try and take on some caltrops and effigys.  Pretty soon, you'll be level 3 and going into some form of shock when you look down at your info box.
14000 exp to lvl 4
I remember back to the first time I made level 3, I was thinking the game was cruel and completely unfair and that I would never make level 4.  Heheh, hang in there.  As you learn the in's and out's of the game, it will get easier and pretty soon you'll find out how to get a new character to level 4 within an hour.

Now some tips on getting a high level character.  About the best advice I can give you is BE NICE!  Keep in mind that this is a PK game, and if you decide to start a fight with another player before you're level 11, it's pretty much a guarantee that you'll end up ded.  So, for you men out there, remember to bow, and you ladies, remember to curtsy.  And if you know for a fact that you're right and that they are wrong, just nod and bite you're tongue.  If you spent hours rolling an awesome character with unbelievable stats, then bite your tongue HARD, and go on about your business.  It's a long hard journey to make it to level 16 anyway, and it will only make it that much more harder if you become a KOS, (kill on sight.)
Another fast way to get a KOS out on a character is by looting.  Looting is a big NO NO.  So if you walk into a room with a lot of great items on the ground, leave them on the ground.  It belongs to someone that was just killed and is in the process of getting resurrected and on his way back to claim his stuff.  Your duty at this point is to stand guard and kill any monsters that may come into the room to pick up the stuff and wonder off with it.
Also, you don't want to become an experience thief.  That is, you don't want to come in and start attacking a monster that someone else is already engaged with.  This normally doesn't result in a KOS, unless you continue to do it repeatedly.  If ya just get trigger happy and bash a monster before you notice the other guy, just say you're sorry and go on.  We've all done it before, it's forgivable.  :-)
So, just remember to make a lot of friends.  It'll pay off someday if ever you happen to find that you've become lunch meat for a horde of giant snow worms.  Someone might just drag your lifeless corpse to the nearest hospital and have you resurrected, or replace some of your equipment if you had to release.
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What's a Smithy and Why Should I Care?

Releasing is not the only way to loose good equipment.
Just think how much your weapon goes through, hacking into endless monsters, over and over again.
And that armor?  Yeah, it's taking it's abuse while saving you from some hard hits from those higher level monsters.  Eventually, your sword's not gonna be able to slice a banana, and the rest of your equipment isn't gonna be in the greatest of shape, either.  So, your armor is taking care of you, you better learn to take care of it, too.  That's where the Smithy comes in.  After about 10 or 15 fights, check the condition of your armor.  When it gets down to normal condition, it's time to make a trip to the Smithy and fix it up.  If you find or buy any equipment, it always comes in normal condition, so it's best to take it to the Smithy right away.  If you never repair an item, eventually it's gonna break.  Now what do ya do with it?  Well, you could sell it, if it's an easy to find item, but if it's rare and valuable, find a demon who can repair items, and remember to give him a generous tip.
Getting things repaired, either by Smithy or Demon, it's gonna cost you money, and as a general rule, the more valuable the item, the more it's gonna cost to get it fixed.  Here's where the bank comes in.  Start depositing money as soon as you can, because if you end up getting kilt and having to release, not only are you gonna have to pay to have your constitution cured, you'll find that you dropped all your silver with the rest of your items when you died.  Always try and keep enuff money in the bank to cover repairs and cure constitution.
The Smithy and the Bank that I have marked for you are in the Tamia Deeps.  There is also another Smithy in the Reilyn Village, which only works on certain kinds of items, but can get them to a better condition then the crypt smithy, and another Bank in Eastern Tamia, which is much easier, not to mention safer, to get to for low level characters.
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Macros

Macros are a great help in the game and they do tend to speed up game play quite a bit.  Take for instance, the spider caves.  As a low level player, you'll be spending a lot of time down there, and it does take a lot of time just to type all those commands to get down there.  Wouldn't it just be so much easier to hit one button that zips you through 20 rooms in a few seconds, getting you down to the action in an instance?  Or even better, when you've got about 5 hit points left, you're bleeding, you're poisoned, you've got to get to the hole FAST.  A macro at this point could save your character a brutal death at the fangs of a blood thirsty rock spider.  Convinced you want to try this macro thing yet?
Okay, hit F1.  There's you're mini macro screen.  I use this one for attack, so just to test it out, type 'attack ' <remember to put the space in after attack> and hit save.  There ya go!  You now have your first macro.
Now, there's gonna come a time when you'll need to edit and delete macros.  You can't use the mini macro screen for this, so you're gonna have to click on your options menu and click macro.  This brings up the full macro screen.  When you do this, make sure that you are in a safe place, because you wont be able to type in any commands while the screen is up.  You'll also find that not only can you use F1-F12 for macros, but also Shift+F1-F12, Ctrl+F1-F12, and Ctrl+char.
Okay, now, lets make a macro that will actually get you somewhere.  Choose the key that you want to trigger the macro, then cut and paste this line of text into it.

w&w&s&go gate&e&e&e&e&e&e&e&e&

Now, you'll need to be standing outside of the Hole when you trigger the macro if you want this to get you to the right place.  It will take you from Tamia Local, through Western Tamia to the edge of Town Center.  This is what you should see on your screen once you've stopped moving.



Now, just type 'go house' and you're off to explore.  Don't worry about the description, it does sound a bit foreboding, doesn't it?  This house was designed for low level characters and new players.  Remember to look, and search, and try out different commands, like push and move.  Once you're done exploring through the house, you'll be pretty familiar with how all the commands work in the game.  Just remember though, that anywhere you go in this house, you'll be relatively safe.  If you search here and find a hidden trap door and go through it, chances are, you'll be fine.  It doesn't always work this way out in the lands of Tamia, though.  So if you find something that was hidden, you might want to ask your guild before you slip on through and find yourself face to face with a cave bear who thinks you look kinda yummy.
Well, I got you to the house, I guess I should get you back to the Hole, eh?

w&w&w&w&w&w&w&w&go gate&n&e&e&go hole&

You have to be standing outside of the house when you trigger this macro, and this one will actually end you in the Hole, not standing outside of it.  Type 'cure all' and you're ready to go off again!
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Useful Commands and Fun Commands

Some commands that you need to know for game play:

get <item> or take <item> - allows you to get something off the ground
drop <item> - drops the item on the ground
att <monster> - this is your basic attack command, but remember that each
race has it's own special attack command, (i.e. berserk, pummel)
assess <monster> - always assess a new monster.  If you get a message like
'You're lucky he hasn't killed you yet!'
you should probably leave it alone.
info - lists your character information
skills - lists your characters skills
abil - lists your characters abilities
exp - lists experience to next level and total experience gained
wealth - lets ya know how much silver you have on you
health - tells you how many hit and fat points that you have left and
tells you how bad you are bleeding or poisoned for
bandage - if successful, replenishes one hit point, remember to do this if ever you see the message,
"You are almost dead!"
eat <item> - you'll find some items in the game the will replenish hit and fat points
drink <item> - same as above.  You must be holding the item.
equip - lists all the equipment that you are currently wearing and holding
inv - lists everything that you are carrying
search - searches the area for hidden things
look <item> me - this tells you the condition of one of your items
hold <item> - you can hold two things.  If you want to hold a weapon and a shield,
always hold the weapon first, making sure that it's in your right hand.
ret <item> - returns the item that you are holding
wear <item> - I'll let you figure this one out for yourself...
rem <item> - removes an item that you are wearing
fix <item> - repairs the item if you're in a smithy
read - lets you read signs, books, boards, messages, etc..
shop - if you don't have your pop ups turned on, use this when you're in a store
drag <dead players name> - now you have a corpse with you.  You have 2 minutes
to get him to a hospital and get him resurrected.
resu <ded player> - rezzes a player, but it costs silver
release - this is if you're dead.  It will put you back in your training area,
and you'll lose some exp and some constitution.  You'll auto release 2 minutes
after you died.
cure - type this when you're in a hospital.  If you don't cure your constitution
before you raise a level, it's lost for good.
suicide - deletes your character
bye or quit - quits the game and gets you back to the menu screen

Now, here is a list of some fun commands that you don't need to know for actual game play:

bow     curtsy     salute     wave     nod
hug     tickle     smile     grin     laugh
giggle     chuckle     flex     moon     groan
grumble     sigh     bah     woo     dance
jig     sit     stand     poke     cry
pout     spit     howl    growl    arch
shake    gulp    gasp    pat    roll
worship    kiss    french    moan

There are more, some I can't remember, some I don't know about, and some that I refuse to list.  :-)
Those I'll let you figure out by yourself.


Well, that should be enuff to get you started in the game.
Happy Adventuring!
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 This page was created by Snow Kitten.
Any changes or adjustments should be sent to
snowkitten@bigfoot.com