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Forum Name New Player Q&A
Topic subjectNewbie's guide for a strong start in CF
Topic URLhttps://forums.carrionfields.com/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=5&topic_id=3875&mesg_id=3875
3875, Newbie's guide for a strong start in CF
Posted by DurNominator on Wed 31-Dec-69 07:00 PM
These are all basics for a person that is very new to the game. Primarily, this FAQ is about basic minmaxing of the character that is not too arduous to do.

Rolling a character:

When rolling stats the sum of your stats is a constant. The mechanism of rolling is such that two points are substracted from random stats. It is advisable to take maximum rollable points to int wis and con, while the lost points are subtracted from strength and dexterity.

Training your stats:

The most important stat to train in the beginning is wisdom. For wisdom, it is important to ensure that you get maximum amount of practices on levelup. For most races, the value of wisdom that does this is 18, giving 3 practices per level. Gnomes, svirneblin and minotaurs have high maximum wisdom and should practice wisdom to their racial maxima of 22 and 25. For races that cannot reach wisdom of 22, 24 or 25, it is advisable to not practice it beyond 18 at this point.

After wisdom is practiced to 18, 22 or 25 depending of your race, you should practice constitution to your racial maximum. Constitution affects your hp gains upon levelup, so it is advisable to keep it at maximum at all times.

After constitution, it is time to train intelligence. It is advisable to maximize your intelligence as intelligence affects the rate at which you learn skills and your mana gains upon levelup. If you do not wish to maximize your intelligence, the critical figures for intelligence for practicing purposes are 17, 23 and 24.

Strength and dexterity are also important for your combat prowess, but you can train them later as they do not affect leveling gains.

Practicing skills

When practicing skills, the maximum % to which you can practice a skill is 75%. Characters with 17 int should put 2 practices for each skill, which is sufficient to practice the skill to 75%. Characters with 23 int and above should put 1 practice for each skill.

If your race has inherent infravision, you should not practice infravision spell or dark vision skill, as your character does not need them.

Assassins, thieves and rangers should put only one practice to hide, sneak, camouflage and gentlewalk. After this, they should practice the skill to 100% by spamming the command repeatedly until the skill is 100%. This is required for the skills to be 100% reliable as these skills failing at critical moment may lead to the death of your character. How fast this process is depends on your character's intelligence, my estimate is 20 minutes/skill. In case of gentlewalk, you should spam gent;vis gent, with ; acting as line separator. In MUSHclient, you can do the spamming conveniently by pressing CTRL+R. The spamming should be done in medium-lenght bursts to avoid being kicked from the server due to command flooding. The sufficient burst length can be found by trying. Rangers should obtain fast camo before spamming the skill up, as the spam becomes too arduous without it. Fast camo is obtained by sitting in the wilderness long enough. If you don't have it by the time you get camouflage skill, play in the wilderness area until you get it and spam camo up after that.

Most mages spam-practice word of recall and teleport to 100% as these skills failing can result to the character's death at crucial moment. Word of recall is spammed by buying a pet and recalling it and teleport is practiced by spamming the spell in a cursed area.

Gearing up

To gather gear, you should complete the fine leather quest in Academy. Note that you have two wrist and neck slots so you should gather two cloaks and two bracers to wear. While fine leathers are newbie gear, they are actually pretty decent items and the decision to replace them should always be informed as the game is full of crap gear that is worse than fine leathers. You can obtain the gear stats by either using identify spell or by giving the items to Alduk in the Inn of Eternal star and he identifies them for you. Also note that armor class is not very important in CF beyond the very low levels and generally affects only hit vs miss (misses damage noun) and armor use skills. Fine leathers will provide you with sufficient AC for the low levels.

Gathering supplies

It is advisable for new player to complete Simon's quest and thus learn about the geography of Thera. The quest will also provide you with some starting money. You can obtain money by selling items you've found to merchants that buy that type of item. It is advisable to replace your newbie water container and sack early on as their quality is fairly poor. Aside food and water, the supplies you need are teleport potions, recall potions, flight potions and detect invis preps(if you don't have the class ability). The potions can be purchased from various apotecharies in the cities and the merchant outside kobold warrens has low level detect invis preps for sale. Ysigrath has also black roots, which provide high quality detect invis at higher levels. Recall and teleport potions are important tools for escaping lost PK fights and threatening situations. You should always have at least one of these at hand. It is also advisable to have a quick macro for quaffing the recall/teleport potion, as the adrenaline caused by PK situation may disrupt and slow down your actions during the game. Flight potions are good against tripping foes and detect invis will negate the threat of invisible foe jumping on you during an opportune moment.