0.  Run the updater:
Run the updater, run the updater, run the updater!...  Don't post a thing to these forums without running the updater first.  Even if you've just installed the game, run the updater anyway to get the newest content updates and fixes.
If you have issues updating, check this.

1.  Lag and poor performance:
If you do not meet the system requirements, expect lag and graphical issues.  Even if you do, there can often be lag caused by network issues, which are simply unavoidable at this point.

Here are a few things you can do to help your system handle problems on your side:

• Update the game and your graphics card drivers.
  
• Don't use 16-bit color depth.  CS just doesn't work well with it.
  
• Try enabling the adaptive distance feature in the options menu. It'll try and maintain a framerate by not rendering farther away objects.
• Disable anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering in pslaunch
• Disable grass
• Disable the loader cache
• Disable HDR and bloom
• Disable background world loading
• Disable background model loading
• Set particle effects to medium and vary the shader details level (depending on your graphics card a lower or higher setting may work better)
• Set Video.OpenGL.TextureDownsample = 0 to some value bigger than 0. The higher the value, the more textures will be downsampled.
  
• You can always try lowering the game's resolution in pslaunch.  If you can't play with 800x600 or even (the horrid) 640x480, and you've tried everything else, ask for help. (note that the available resolutions depend on the aspect ratio, so if the one you want isn't available, change the aspect ratio accordingly)

2.  Stuck character:
If you've managed to cram yourself into a bad place, use the /unstick command.  If that doesn't help you, try to contact a GM or use /die.

3.  Messed up labels:
The /repaintlabels command can be used to fix many label drawing issues.  You can do "/repaintlabels force" to fix anything that the regular version can't do.  (slower, but does more)
If you crash upon /repaintlabels, check PS#3635 and post your hardware specs and client settigns there.

4.  Cannot connect:
Please check to make sure the server is running.  Goto the laanx server page and check the stats on the left side.  If no one is on, or there is a large discrepancy in the time and report time (indicating a crash) the server is down.  Please just be patient, and wait until it's restarted.  If it's running and you've connected before please post here with all available information.  If you've never connected before, goto the other tech help forum and read the main sticky.

5.  Cannot attack NPCs:
If all attempts to attack monsters result in a message saying "You cannot attack" it, the NPC client is down.  (the software running on the server that controls movement/combat NPC AI)  This affects everyone, and there is nothing you can do.  It will be restarted eventually.

6.  Game window is off-screen:
If you get the game running, and it's falling off the upper left of the screen, it's not the game's fault.  The game window is larger than your screen's resolution.  You're running your computer at a tiny resolution.  Please don't post here complaining about problems caused by you having your computer missconfigured.

If you're not convinced, look at this.  That is a screenshot of my screen looking at a screenshot of someone complaining about this problem.  (many browsers will require you to click the image to make it not shrink it to fit onscreen; nothing has been resized)  If you didn't already know, the actual size of an image is determined by how many pixels comprise it, and not how large it is on your screen.  The game is not designed to run at a lower resolution than 800x600 (which must be lower than the screen's resolution), and if your computer can't handle that, it can't play the game.

Goto your display properties, via the control panel.  If your settings show anything less than 1024x768, it's too small.  This makes everything on your screen to large, and low quality.  Increase it.  If the text is too small for you, there's a DPI setting in advanced that you can use to zoom it in, to compensate.  You can also change the game's resolution and/or make it run fullscreen via the setup.

7.  GeForce draw problems:
If your GeForce graphics card is giving you weird text corruption issues, try this:

Edit the file data/config/r3dopengl.cfg with and add these lines:
Video.OpenGL.UseExtension.GL_ARB_texture_rectangle = false
Video.OpenGL.UseExtension.GL_NV_texture_rectangle = false

8.  Radeon draw problems with mesa:
if you have a radeon card, use mesa as graphics driver and have texture corruptions (e.g. white item icons), try this:

Edit planeshift.cfg and add the following line (on linux/mac it's located in $HOME/.PlaneShift/ on win in %appdata%/PlaneShift):
Video.OpenGL.UseExtension.GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc = false

9.  Cannot delete installer file under Windows:
This is a common issue, and has nothing to do with us.  Windows is just dumb...  You should be able to delete it after rebooting.

10. Unreadable Text:
Example here. Open up the file [PS Directory]/data/config/r3dopengl.cfg in a text editor, and find this line:
Video.OpenGL.FontCache.UseMultiTexturing = yes
Change yes to no.

11. Invisible/Black Items:
This has gotten a rather common issue lately on lower end graphics cards. To fix it add the following line to your planeshift.cfg:
PlaneShift.Items.Instantiate = false

12. Weather Effecs cause Lag/Crash:
Uncheck the "Enable Weather" checkbox in pslaunch

13. HDR causes black screen:
There's a bug with HDR atm that causes it to only function properly if bloom is enabled as well, so enable bloom as well or disable HDR.

14. Invisible NPCs:
Disable Background Loading. Especially on single-core CPUs it tends to slow the loading down instead of speeding it up and may result in objects taking a very long time to load. Background Loading is not advisable to use if you're having a slow or single-core CPU.

[ More information on various graphical glitches may be found on this page. ]