From LSWiki

This is an outline for a new player guide as I envision it.

I'm writing this partly as an attempt to coalesce and update the combined wisdom of Vet's Newbie Help, First Steps, Newbie Ramblings, Boggotin's Guide, Agun's Corner, The Neophyte Handbook and my own personal experience into a format that's more appealing to strangers on the internet, and more extensible by the community. And partly because I have the arrogance to think that despite my limited expertise, I can teach lost souls better than those existing guides. This resource is not meant to replace any of those existing guides (actually it 100% is intended to replace The_New_Neophyte_Handbook) but it is intended to take a priority spot as a first stop for prospective and brand-new players.

This guide is aimed at being a first impression, linked from the front page, visible to randos who know nothing about LS. As such it should answer the most immediate questions at the very top. As such, Section 1 should boldly and briefly answer the following: What is Lost Souls, Is it free, Will it try to fuck me with anti-consumer dark patterns, is it primarily PvP or PvE, why play a mud, why this mud in particular?

After the Immediately Pertinent Questions, we go into game mechanics in decreasing order of importance.

The first will be bare essential must reads, the information should be inline and immediate. This section is the most like our existing newbie guides, but substantially shorter. How to move, How to ask other players for help, How to look at things. Should be ~3 minutes to read, and should make sense to total strangers to muds. This is a game about typing commands into a terminal window and reading colourful text scroll by.

The second section is something a little different from what most of our newbie guides do. I want to make a series of annotated chargen command blocks that make thematically bland, but immediately useful characters that can tackle low tier content with as minimal input as possible. I'd like to do more experiments with this but I believe it should be possible to go from atman menu to proficiently murdering a hmb denizen in less than half an hour, with minimal player input. As an aside, once I develop a template for this I'd like to make a community challenge out of creating these. We talk big game about creating a tutorial area, but I don't have any influence over that, this is a solution that's within my power and will be be practical for brand new players to figure out.

The next three sections should act as bulleted lists of brief help articles topped by a recommended aliases list, ideally with good wiki interconnectivity. Will experiment with wiki formatting, each of them could potentially be a category. A lot of the entries in this list will already have in game help files, which will definitely be included in these docs, upping the interconnectivity of the help files themselves would be awesome as well, but it's critical that these sections will be accessible to people who haven't yet logged in.

The third section is a bare essentials guide to murder, basically covering all the incarnoi settings that affect combat and what to expect when you type the kill command. Strangers can skim this to get an idea of what combat looks like, new players can read it in depth to figure out how to stop sucking at it, and players not interested in murder can skip this section

The fourth section should cover every other game mechanic a player is likely to encounter in their first week. A stranger should get an impression like "wow this game's got a lotta stuff", but it should be brief enough for a first-day player to consult it whenever some relevant thing happens to them in game.

The fifth section will be a more freeform collection of advice, more advanced guides, stuff that post-hero players might be interested in. Basically what do I do now? what's the point? what are my goals type stuff, perhaps some intros to CMUD or tintin++ scripting, effecient murderhoboing for xp and profit, all the good staticload items.

Basically I want this guide to hit three major audiences.

• I want total strangers who've never played LS, with little or no MUD experience to think "wow looks interesting, lots of mechanics and interesting suff that modern/graphical games don't/can't do. perhaps I'll give it a shot".
• Brand new players should have the choice of either reading the links sequentially and learning/inputting commands as they go, or of using one of the chargen blocks to immediately have a guilded/specced/slightly trained character with several QoL aliases that can at least kick bill in the nuts without dying/being exhausted/stunned from pleasure/other hilarious but unintuitive emergent behaviours of intersecting systems of simulationist wankery.
• New players in their first few weeks should use this guide as a launching page into many more topic-specific pages that help them figure out wtf they are doing and hero their first character.

What is lost souls?

It's a MUD from like, the early 90s or something?

How much does it cost?

It is absolutely free to play.

There are lux options to make characters stronger which makes us theoretically p2w but only for certain definitions of winning.

-link to lux benefice section blahblah

How much time does it cost to play?

As much or as little as you want. There are a couple character builds/mechanics that time-gate character advancement. And a one or two affiliations that require real-time maintenance (on the order of an hour per week). But theese are optional. There are no FOMO exploiting dailies or other egregious demands on your time.

Is there permadeath?

Yes but incarnoi have a generous number of lives which are easily replenishable. Additionally, new players are exempt from life-loss on death. There is an opt-in perdition trait which sets a maximum life count to 0 for those who desire a more hardcore style of play. There are also two playable races that have this trait intrinsically (Balrog and Aesir). Finally, there are exactly three means of attacking your lives directly, all of which are easily avoided.

-link to section about death, lives, etc.

What kind of game is lost souls?

It's mostly a murderhobo simulator set in a high fantasy world with a bit more emphasis on the simulator than most other games of its type. Character building is complicate, satisfy, and varied. There are many different flavour of murderhobo and a couple different flavours of pacifist. There is a big emphasis on exploration and individual (or community) discovery with many as-yet undiscovered secrets and hidden mechanics.

I hear you guys have playable Shoggothim/Bezhuldaar! that's so cool!

They are indeed cool, it is not recommended that you jump into them however. Playing them successfully requires mastery of many of the game's systems.

Why play a MUD in 2021?

Because development is easier on a game with no graphics, and you can do much more interesting stuff that would be prohibitively expensive to ever animate.

Also maybe you like automation, scripting, etc. Or are blind, have a good imagination, or otherwise don't care about pictures.

Why is LS the best game that never gets old?

Because the developers put out great content. Lots of lore stuff or whatever. The game systems are deep, engaging, and crunchy af. The prioritization of simulationist wankery and emergent gameplay over more polished gameplay experiences. Old-ass wiki tech that's easy to edit! The small but engaged community who are more than happy to help you on your way.

How do I Start Playing?

mushclient, tintin++, cmud, terminal. Whatever you like.

connect on lostsouls.org:23

Things you absolutely must know to begin playing

• neophyte/newbie, ooc, say, tell, players are helpful, ask them questions
• Don't kill stuff yet, you're not ready
• look, info, help
• movement, repetition, go
• determine location, and survey
• cartesian areas/non cartesian areas, and transitioning between them.
• Xailor's speedwalks, locomotion (flight, swim, climb), Zak's Area Speedruns
• score
• super brief starting guidance (join a guild -> set up your specs -> get some training and then? do quests? kill things? do challenges? whatever)

This guide is already too long, I want to kill something

I want to deviate from the typical newbie guide stuff here and make some pages with some copy/paste blocks that start from the atman menu, and end with a guilded/specced/equipped starter character with starter aliases and some quickwalks to murderhobo areas they can conceivably fight in, as well as some trainers to spend money at. Literally the only decisions they should make is which page they choose, and their name.

guilds with built in weapons/armour/summoned tanks are huge plus here but I hope there can be multiple viable options including fighters and casters.

todo: experiment with human warbreaker, llelimin aedarene or OVG with staff/shillelagh, unarmed aisenshi(srazh for easy flight?) or frog VV(I dunno, slaan?), maybe Ringwielder, or aligned. If not enough of these work out, or they turn out better than expected, possibly expand into setups that rely on staticload gear like carbonite hand crossbow, Arldond axe, or vorp blade.

Things that you probably need to know before you type kill

Combat is automatic and realtime, it consists of you trading blows with your opponent(s) using each of your configured attacks, defenses, and other personal combat settings. Guilds/associations/items and artifacts grant you access to more interesting activated powers, maneuvers, and even new combat modes.

• wield/hold/wear
• attacks/defenses and ratings
• skills and skill trainers
• specialty access
• combat settings (mode, effort, scatter, aim, strike, chase, hunting, resolve, flee)
• hp, show limbs and health, treat me/rest/meditate (what's my hp?)

Things players will absolutely encounter within the first couple days of playing

• character creation (race, size, homeland, attribute ranges)
• elude/stealth/holding weapons/flight/endurance (why am I so slow?)
• going places/getting unlost
• trainers/teachers and essential skills, tick training!
• exploration (why did I just randomly level up?)
• term/depiction/filtering
• advancement attribute development, planning out your specs
• money (flesh out the how 2 money article that already exists)
• items and keeping
• quests
• death and dismemberment (I got killed by a fucking cat)
• lives and permadeath
• languages (why wont this npc respond to me?)
• aliases (every section will have recommended aliases, but will also redirect to this, which is a whole ass other guide)
• hunger food/drink (why are my max hp/end going down and my max sp going up?)
• traveler challenges, and incarnoi bots
• traits/effects
• mental illness/afflictions
• identifying things and memory
• alignment/ethics
• show/help/report
• scrying
• psychic wild talents
• terrain following/safe movement
• set/show
• inspect/compare armours

Okay what now? More advanced stuff, setting goals, enjoying the game

• using and contributing to this wiki
• kill log management and efficient murderhoboing (lol not anymore)
• Murder isn't nice and I don't like it, what is there to do? (arbitrage, challenges, healing? we should put healing xp back in)
• guilds/associations stuff
• Item availability (the good items) and artifact accessibility
• session/caption/description/personal lore
• empathic bonds
• character optimization for being real good at murderhobo
• lux stuff
• follower management, particularly guildable ones