I know some Goons who played in beta have strong feelings about this game, if you want to read 100+ pages that result in a handful of people crying about how it ruined their life, or if you are one of those people who had their lives ruined, please conslut this thread and keep the threadshitting out of this topic.


IRC: #mortalgoons on synirc.net, ventrilo info is available there
Skill Planner: http://mortal.thamal.de/SkillPlanner.php
Questions I haven't covered in the thread yet about getting started, look here: http://www.mortalwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page

What is Mortal Online?
Mortal Online is what you get when a small group of Swedes attempts to take all the wonderful things about pre-Trammel UO and make it into a 3D MMORPG. MO was launched on June 9th, 2010. Featuring full world open PvP, sandbox gameplay, and a fairly sophisticated crafting system somewhat reminiscent of SWG, it offers a lot of what most MMOs have failed to since World of Warcraft was released and dominated the market.

Where can I buy Mortal Online? What do I need to run it?[/b
http://www.shatteredcrystal.com/index.php/mortal_online - Officially affiliated with Mortal Online, $29.99 USD for game and 1 month of game time.

I'm running decently (but not necessarily pretty) on a 4 year old rig with a 7900GT. If you can do better than that you'll be fine.

What are Mortal Online's features?

• 9 races with a blood mixing/age system to customize statistics
  
• Full PvP with full looting, you can die in the "safe" zones, similar to high-sec in EvE
  
• Flag system for PvP similar to UO, stat loss as punishment for dying while red
  
• Skill-based system
  
• FPS-style combat
  
• Mounts and mounted combat
  
• Crafting system broken into resource extraction, armorsmithing, weaponsmithing, bowyery, and engineering, with future crafts to come.
  
• Player housing and keeps with planned territory control coming in the next couple weeks
  

And more!

Some German guild made a decent video that showcases current graphics and combat:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBDN2bAU0qE

Trees are placeholders, they're working on implementing Speedtree.






How many Goons are currently playing?
None. Well, about 8-10 + some RL friends of Goons. Most players think that the Goons were chased out of the game because it was "too hard" and laughed at us because we couldn't ruin "their game," but we merely went underground, building up a small stockpile of gold and materials and leveling up crafters to prepare for the day when we'd make this post instead of slaughtering everyone who wandered off from their groups that we came across. We've got a house built and some other plans in the work, the politics in this game are starting to take off and a war seems likely in the near future. We've got the materials and weapons to outfit an army, we're just lacking the numbers.

Alright I'm in. How do I get started?


World map

Characters in Mortal Online are either crafters or combatants. Crafter/combatant hybrids are an awful idea and the skill system discourages them in order to prevent players from becoming self-sufficient. The easiest way to get acquainted with the game is with a basic melee character, as you can max them out quickly.

• Clades are your larger race groupings. Oghmir are basically dwarves, Alvar are essentially elves, Humans are self-explanatory, and Thursar are Half-Orcs. For now, select Thursar.
  
• You should see your character on screen completely naked complete with penis staring you in the face. Here you can select your character's age, gender, and heritage. Your character's heritage will affect his maximum statistics. On the right side of the family tree, select Khurite, and make sure your character's age is set to 25. Continue on to the next screen.
  
• On this screen you should be able to determine your character's starting statistics. Put all your points into size, you should cap out at 190. Size cannot be currently changed after character creation although it will be possible to do so eventually. Mortal Online does the opposite of encouraging tiny female characters with small hitboxes, larger size will grant you bonuses to speed, carrying capacity, and damage.
  
• The next screen lets you screw around with your character's appearance, do whatever you want.
  
• The following screen asks you to pick a background. Choose Recruit, as this starts you with useful combat skills as well as the fastest way to max your physical stats.
  
• The last screen asks you for a name and where to start. Choose Fabernum, DO NOT CHOOSE GAUL'KOR IT IS AN UNGUARDED TOWN YOU WILL DIE Enter the game.
  

You start off with a pickaxe that you can harvest wood with, a worn shortsword, and some rags as clothing. The first thing you will want to do is press L to bring up the skill menu. Go to technique and choose resting. Drag the rest button up to one of your spaces in the hotbar.


The skill screen of a maxed character

You have 1000 skillpoints. Skillpoints are consumed by primary skills. Secondary skills do not require skillpoints so if you have the parent skill and the money then learn them. Your stat bonus to a skill is represented as the yellow segment of the skillbar. Max stat bonus to a skill is 11, so make sure you lock skills at 89+11 (or whatever it may be) in order to save skill points. There is no bonus for going over 100.

You should be on a road next to a tower and some extracting equipment. This is not a safe zone and it may be dark out. Follow the road west into Fabernum if you can see it, inside the walls is a safe zone. If you are attacked, type guard, and an NPC will drop out of the sky to one hit kill your attacker (this is temporary while patrolling NPC guards are worked out). Sometimes it doesn't work, if not just keep calling for the guard and hope you don't die. Anyway, check out Fabernum, look at the NPCs such as the vendors, the librarians, and the storage keepers. When you're ready, head south from Fabernum along the road along the stream and across the bridge. When you come to a fork in the road, bear to your right. You can stop here and practice killing pigs for a bit if you like, there is a priest nearby if you die.

If you bear to the right on the road you'll be headed west past a walled off city. That's Tindrem and is planned for an upcoming patch. When you pass the gate start heading south. You'll hit a desert area and eventually pass a ruined castle. Immediately south of the ruins is Meduli, which is where most of us are located and is an ideal location for raising your skills and stats. This is about a 15-20 minute walk on a starting character. You may die, but you won't lose anything as your starting gear stays with you unless you delete it or it breaks from durability loss.



Top, Meduli facing south, Bottom, Meduli facing north

The easiest way to max your stats for Strength, Constitution, and Dexterity is to make sure you have the Defensive Stance skill under Combat Techniques, and Blocking. Go find some pigs. Pull out your sword to block. Bring up a menu (press P or L) as you do this to stick the block. Once your Defensive Stance reaches 50 pigs will no longer be able to damage you. Go do something else while your stats increase. In about an hour and a half, if you have enough pigs on you, you should be capped or close to capped. Then set out to murder pigs or wisents (buffalo things) further outside of town in order to raise your weapon skill of choice and sell the loot for cash.

[b]Final thoughts
I am usually around on IRC (Ikarti) if you have any questions or need help in game. We need basically every kind of character, except bow crafters. Two of them is enough.

I didn't play Beta, I've been playing since launch and had a blast at first. However I'll admit their first patch was utter poo poo and nearly made me quit. I'm glad I stayed with it because they've been dramatically improving. Over the past couple days we've had a couple new Goons join us and we've thought it's a good time to post a recruitment, especially with the upcoming additions to the game they announce. Also, our group is in a pretty strong position right now so being able to project force will be a major plus. We look forward to seeing you in-game.

This is a work in progress

An Overview of Nave/Myrland/Whatever the gently caress the world is called

Your Statistics and You

Most skills receive a bonus from points in stats, which is a benefit aside from the ones I've listed.

Size: Affects how large you are, your damage, your movement speed, and your carrying capacity and encumbrance. Always max this.

Strength: Affects damage, carrying capacity and encumbrance, and HP

Dexterity: Affects movement speed, stamina, and weak spot chance with piercing weapons

Constitution: Affects carrying capacity and encumbrance, movement speed, and stamina

Intelligence: Affects Mana and other magic stuff. Directly influences the damage of the Mind Blast spell (which caps at 40 damage so not important). An intelligence of 112 will give a crafter a +11 stat bonus to their skills and end up saving them over 100 skill points, so it's necessary.

Psyche: Affects Mana, spell resistance, and archery draw speed(not sure if intended)

Races of the World

Oghmir - Best choice for crafting
Blainn: Dwarves that live in snowy mountains and have serious bodyhair issues

Huergar: Dwarves that were added last minute to meet the 9 race requirement and have no lore and have skin that could really use moisturizer. Slightly better than Blainn for crafting but it's negligible.

Alvar - Best for thieves and mages

Veela: Basic elf race with max 120 Dex, 120 being the absolute maximum a skill can reach and any other potential race or combination can only hit 116. They make obnoxious thieves, which really don't do much aside from poo poo up towns.

Sheevra: Some sort of dark elf race that have good Int and Psy for mages, though you can make good mages from Humans if you play around with the age attribute.

Humans - Generally balanced, except for the Tindremene and Kallard, who suck. You can mix races around to get better stat combinations, these are the results of making pure ones.

Khurite: Nomadic Mongolians who live far away in the mysterious Orient. Their limitation is, surprise surprise, small stature, purebred they can make balanced mounted archers who can take advantage of the Psyche bonus that seems to be in effect.

Kallard: Vikings. High strength and constitution. Miserable dexterity and intelligence. Don't use.

Tindremene: Romans. Lore-wise the dominant race of the game, coincidentally they have the shittiest stats in the game with not a single one breaking except Intelligence, and only then just barely. The only people who use these are roleplayers. Really don't use this one.

Sarduccans: Arabs. They can make decent mages if you up their intelligence by raising their age to around 60. Could make a viable crafter but with low carrying weight.

Sidoians: Africans who are the former slave race of an extinct civilization. Classy, Starvault. Good STR, CON, and INT, poor PSY and DEX. Good for crafting. Possible to mix with Sarduccans for a mage who can take an extra hit.

Halfbreeds - According to lore, the rare offspring of orcs and humans caused by surprise sex. Yeah they're also 90% of the game

Thursar/Khurite: The only mix you will ever need for archery and melee. Better, faster, stronger than other race. Hypothetically more vulnerable to magic but it's only a couple extra hitpoints you'll lose since resists just don't seem to work. The only thing they're vulnerable to is pickpocketing due to their low Intelligence, but a Thursar/Khurite should be out killing people instead of carrying poo poo around town to be pickpocketed.

Your Background

Your background only affects what you start with, you can always learn new skills later and forget ones you don't need. Start by reading this: http://www.mortalwiki.org/wiki/Character_Backgrounds

Even if you want to be an archer, you should probably start as recruit because the material lore you get as scout is a waste and survival isn't that useful. If you're really set on being an archer, horse herder is going to be more useful to you even if you don't want to keep the domestication skill.

Guttersnipe is good for pure pickpocket, but Acolyte is probably better because then you can actually do damage.

Ruffian is good if you want to do unarmed combat, which is being improved next patch (or maybe the one after I forget.), or if you want to make an alt that just harvests.

Weaponsmith and Armorsmith apprentices are self explanatory. You'll have to do some specialization, especially as a weaponcrafter.

Logger is best if you want to make bows, but we got two guys on that.

Slag Hauler is for mining and extracting ore and making them into metals and alloys. That's what I mostly do, but the more the merrier.

Acolyte is the choice for being a mage, then you end up with the choice of doing pure magic as more schools are added in, or focusing on thievery or creature taming and control.

Combat!

So if you're this far you've got a character made up and probably have an idea of what direction you want to take it. I'll start with archery and melee because mages take a lot of practice to raise skills.

Armor drastically decreases the amount of damage you take, if it's good. You can only equip so much before you take incremental penalties to movement and jumping. On a Thursar/Khurite this is 8kg, which at this time amounts to scale armor and a steel greatsword. Don't worry about having a good weapon until you max or near max your skills. For melee the weapon of choice is the "poke stick," a dagger or thrusting blade attached to a shaft that functions as a spear. It has insanely low stamina drain, fast attack speed, and the chance to weak spot hit. The reason spear heads aren't used is because of a balance issue that's being worked on. 2H greatswords are viable though, as well as 1H with shields. Blocking with a shield can break a poke stick before they drop you to 75% HP, and protects great against arrows. Blunt weapons are pretty wonky right now, avoid them.

For healing you'll need to buy the book active regeneration. Potions are available for merchants. The Anatomy skill and bandages are also possibilities but they require items for the skill to work. Stick to resting and active regen to begin with.

If you want to be an archer you will need to get a bow from a player as you don't start with a starter bow. Buy bodkin arrows and shoot pigs to raise your skill. Arrows do arc. When you max it invest in good bows. Make sure you tell the bowyer what your STR is because it matters if you can draw the bow or not. Thursar/Khurites shouldn't have to worry about most bows. While bows require skill to aim and shoot, they're also really good if you have poor system specs or like PvP but aren't wonderful at it because they're incredibly useful as support in groups and you can stay off at a distance.

Mages have high cost for reagants and practicing their skills up, but in groups they're great even if they have some line of sight issues. Mages can heal and do damage, and they can do enough of both to sway battles. Spells are cast from the hotbar, either on your selected target or yourself by holding left-alt as you cast the spell. Practicing on yourself while raising resting is a good way to level, or you can just kill pigs. Mages start to become viable before they reach max skill. If you can do Thunderlash and Greater Healing you're set.

To the point of it being tiresome, yes

They plan to release a trial in the next 6-12 months, I would probably assume it'll happen on the lower end of it.

Somewhere, in the godless and liberal land of Malmo, Sweden, a group of 20 something programmers decided that they would make a game so hardcore that there would be full frontal nudity. All male characters have small uncircumcised Euro penises and all female characters have D-cup breasts. You cannot turn it off. Does this offend your delicate American(?) sensibilities? Deal with it, prude

It's not uncommon to see naked characters infesting the streets of town and they're not even doing it to be edgy.

This has a harsh learning curve but it's a lot better than Darkfall in my opinion

It's not really that bad and since most of the players are US and most of the Euro players seem to be really bad at PvP you should be alright.