Strict Machine

My collection of notes on starting out in Darkfall are below. I hope some of these are helpful for those new to the game.

Reference Material
Crafting Spreadsheet
Magic Spreadsheet
Sinister’s Darkfall Map
Political Map

UI
The UI takes some getting used to especially with the way you’ll:
1 – press a key to get a particular weapon in hand – let’s say staff for this example
2 – press a key to bring out the staff (skippable if you were already in the wield/item out mode)
3 – press a key to select the spell you want to cast
4 – left click to actually cast
As you can imagine, switching between different weapons and tools quickly takes a bit of practice.

Long post, more after the jump..

UI Settings
Disable – Video Options – Enable Shadows (not quite as pretty, but a very large FPS boost)
Enable – GUI Options – Identify Distant Targets

UI Layout
There are at least 4 chat displays that you’ll want to see at all times. I have 3 windows + 1 built in all aligned across the bottom of my display. You may find this useful, or not…

First, an immovable invisible window that’s always on the lower left. It shows who just hit you and for how much. The text autofades but you can line up other chat windows against the invisible edge with some trial and error. Hugely important so you know whether or not the thing beating your ass is something you can defeat or not. There are no levels so you either use reference material or on the job training to guesstimate your chances of survival.

Next window to the right of the invisible one has ClanKills and Public. Public is often handy for any nearby ’say’ activity. ClanKills is important so that you know when everyone near you, but out of earshot is dying – often a leading indicator of trouble. I switch between these depending on my interest. Out in the wilds I prefer ‘Public’ so I’ll know if there’s someone chatting nearby I didn’t hear.

Next window I have Race Alliance, Race, and Clan. I don’t really use Race Alliance and Race much, but I always have Clan open for the obvious reasons.

For the last window I have Trade, Monsters, Quest, System, and PartyKills. I leave System open on this one as there are tons of activities in the game that the UI doesn’t give you enough information on. Like, you may click on a skill or perform some action and receive no on screen feedback as to why it did not execute. The reason will be burried in the System window along with lots of information about folks entering and leaving your clan city (great for spotting attacks), inventory changes (what did I just get from that chest?), and more.

By default the windows will blink and turn green when they have new text. I find I only want this for Public and Clan so to make a window not blink you’ll set ‘Max importance level for this tab’ to LEVEL_NONE. The chat system in the game needs a serious overhaul. It’s useable, but a tad crude.

Key Bindings
I’ve rebound a fair number of my keys as I prefer EDSF instead of WASD. While your prefences may lead you to a wildly different key layout, I should mention that at first the Lean Left/Right keys (Q and E) seem useless. I even had them unbound for a bit. Then I learned they’re of critical use when performing mounted combat so you can lean out of the saddle to whack folks. So, keep ‘em around – wherever you put them…

Be sure to remap the hotkeys for hotbar selection. By default it’s shift-1/2/3/4 and so on. Simple enough except that Sprint is bound to shift. Without a rebind you’ll find yourself sprinting away from an attack chanting, ‘oh crap, oh crap’ and hitting 1, 2, 3, etc. to swap weapons. Instead, you’ll find your hotbars swapped and you actually have to stop Sprinting and get smacked in the back to change weapons (or use mouse clicks).

Getting Dressed
Changing armor pieces has a delay of a few seconds for each piece. This is great in that folks won’t be changing out armor on you in mid-combat to whip out armor with less chance of spell fizzle, etc. However, it sucks when you’re at the bank and you want to swap out gear without click dragging many times. I learned that Robes and Armor will cancel each other out. So, you can equip a Robe and remove all your armor with just one click and a long timer delay. You can make Robes early in the game with Tailoring.

Miscellaneous
Check out Title Quests. You get them from your racial captial city. I believe you can only have one title active at a time. Each one has some sort of stat bonus.

Speaking of stats, focus on skill increases rather than stat increases as the activities involved in pumping skills tend to slowly increase stats as well. Stats go up more slowly than skills so only grind on those if you have a stat requirement for something you really want to do.

If you have your player stats window open and use a skill, attributes exercised by the skill will change to a slightly different shade of yellow.

Eat some food while gathering to reduce downtime due to stamina.

Turn off the music. It’s nice, but you need to hear the environment.

Always gather in the nude. You’re going to get killed so you might as well keep your gear safely banked.

Before you harvest, pick a location that allows an escape from danger. Know what trees can be climbed or nearby rocks that can be used as cover against mounted riders. I’ve successfully escaped while nude from two mounted riders by creative use of the terrain.

Access your journal and clan pages from outside the game. Very
handy if you play in windowed mode.
NA1:
http://app001.us1.darkfallonline.com/sf/fwd
EU1:
http://app001.eu1.darkfallonline.com/sf/fwd