Updated 27/11/04 I\'m posting this to address all the questions new players have ever asked me in the game (that I can currently think of). I assure you, if it\'s been asked before, it\'s probably been written down here.
###################################FIRST OF ALL!! Anyone looking for the full pre-compiled setup/install file, here\'s the link:
http://www.fragnetics.com/download.php?file=planeshift###################################If you\'re looking for a guide to downloading and running the game, look no further than the
Step-by-Step Guide to Downloading and Running PlaneShift: MB, by Gronomist.
For one of the most comprehensive guides to actually playing Molecular Blue, check out the
Explorer\'s Guild Guide! NEW : What do I do in PlaneShift, where do I get started?[/U]
This is for anyone who is looking for some answers about the current playability of the game.
In the current release, Molecular Blue, there arn\'t many things to do. There are basically 2 large maps to explore- the city of Hydlaa and the Dungeon.
All over these maps you\'ll chance upon small crystals sticking out of the ground. Crystals are the game\'s currency at the moment. If you collect these crystals, and learn where they appear, you may eventually gather enough to buy a decorative weapon. But before you ask, no, there is no combat or monsters yet.
Aside from the \'Crystal Hunt\', there are 2 NPC quests to find and complete. Anyone asking for the solutions to these quests will be shot... seriously, don\'t do it. There is no reward for completing these quests other than the satisfaction of having done it. To find a quest, talk to all of the NPCs in the world. There are 13 in total. For guidance on talking to NPCs, read the
Player\'s Guide on the main website.
The Questions[/U]
Ok, here goes. To find the answer you need quickly, just use the Index below. Find the question you want to ask, then use Ctrl+F to Find it below.
Index 1. Where can I earn money?
2. Where can I buy weapons and armour?
3. Where can I go fight mobs/monsters?
4. Is there any combat or magic yet?
5. How do I pick up crystals?
6. What does a crystal look like?
7. How do I add a buddy/start a guild/find out who is online/other command?
8. How do I talk to NPCs?
9. How do I get a Quest?
10. Where are the NPCs/How many are there?
11. Where is the tavern?
12. Where is the library?
13. I\'ve fallen under the temple into some kind of cave and I\'m lost! Help!
14. I\'ve fallen off the leve/become irreversably stuck- Help!
15. Why is there SO MUCH LAG!?
16. How do I switch to fullscreen/change the game\'s window size?
17. How can I disable music?
18. What are the system requirements for Planeshift?
19. Can I crouch?
20. How do I greet someone?
21. Can I open doors?
22. How do I get on the temple/climb walls/hop along roofs/other cool ability?
23. You\'re not supposed to be able to get on the temple/climb walls/hop along roofs/other cool ability, you\'re exploiting glitches!
24. Is there any way to add my own skins/skin parts of the GUI?
25. How do I enable Mouselook?
26. My character is running forward on his own and I can\'t stop him! Help!
27. How do I change the mouse sensitivity?
28. How do I display my framerate in the game?
29. When will the game be finished?
30. Is there fall damage?
31. How do I get on that huge tall tower that\'s next to the temple?
32. How long does it take for crystals to respawn?
33. How do I get into those little tunnels in the labyrinth?
34. How do I get rid of the chat window?
35. Is there a quick key I can use to switch between chat and movement?
36. I found a crystal but I can\'t pick it up. It seems stuck to the floor! Help!
37. How do I leave the town?
38. Are you a dev?
39. I just logged in and I can\'t see anything- it\'s total darkness! Help!
40. The spawn command doesn\'t work. What do I do?
41. Is there a mailing list I can subscribe myself to?
42. I use an Azerty keyboard. What key do I use the activate mouselook?
43. How do I use skills/jobs?
44. The third View mode seems pretty useless... how do I use it?
45. How do I know when the server is online/offline? In no particular order, let the questioning commence! 1. Where can I earn money? Right now, there is no way of earning proper money (called Tria in the Planeshift world). However, you may collect varieties of crystal which you can later exchange for weapons. Crystals can be found in the places you\'re not normally going to look- so for example, behind barrels, between narrow alleyways, at the back of houses, under rocks, in dark corners and even places that require you to scale walls.
2. Where can I buy weapons and armour? Go to
http://planeshift.fragnetics.com/merchant/merchant.html for a list of items you can currently buy. You must have enough crystals in your inventory to be able to purchase these items. Unfortunately, you cannot purchase armour in the current release.
3. Where can I go fight mobs/monsters? Right now, you can\'t, as they don\'t exist.
4. Is there any combat or magic yet? Nope. Hopefully Crystal Blue (the PS release expected in a couple of months) will have some form of combat however.
5. How do I pick up crystals? Right click the crystal when you see it\'s name appear on your screen. In the popup menu, click the hand icon.
6. What does a crystal look like? You\'ll know a crystal when you see one. Rubies (worth one unit of money) are red, Emeralds (worth ten) are green and Diamonds (worth a whopping one hundred!) are blue. As you can imagine, Emeralds are rarer than Rubies and Diamonds are extremely rare indeed.
7. How do I add a buddy/start a guild/find out who is online/other command? In the chat box, type /help for a useful list of all available commands in the game. Also, check out the Player\'s Guide on the website (or by going to the start menu, programs, Planeshift, Player\'s Guide) for another long command list.
8. How do I talk to NPCs? Again, check the Player\'s Guide. This will hopefully give you some clues as to what kind of words and phrases NPCs will react to. Don\'t worry, the rest of the community find it just as incredibly difficult as you do to talk to them, so don\'t feel like you\'re doing something wrong. (NPCs and their dialog will be greatly improved, by the way- they\'re only here in the current release for debugging purposes and to try to give the game a little bit of variety or life.)
9. How do I get a Quest? The developers have asked that this remain a secret and only people who have not completed the quests themselves may help you. However, I can say that you get the (only) quest (in the game at the moment) by talking to one of the NPCs. There would be two quests, however some NPCs have been missing for a while now, so you can only complete one of them.
10. Where are the NPCs/How many are there? There are thirteen NPCs: five at the library, five at the tavern, two in the park outside the huge iron tower and one in the dungeon beneath Laanx temple. Note that NPCs frequently go missing, so don\'t be suprised if you can\'t find many of them.
11. Where is the tavern? Starting from the statue in the center of town, go down the road towards the huge brown tower. Take your second left-turn (the first is an alleyway) and follow the path around. You\'ll come across the tavern to your left.
12. Where is the library? Starting from the statue again and facing the temple\'s front, travel to your east. Along that line of houses you\'ll find the library.
13. I\'ve fallen under the temple into some kind of cave and I\'m lost! Help! You\'re not lost, you just didn\'t expect to have to find your own way back out. I suggest you explore this cave a little first- you\'re more likely to find crystals down here than in the town (simply because they\'re less hidden, sometimes spawning in the middle of a path). To get out of the labyrinth, find the room on the bottom level which has many rows of tall pillars and a green, rocky floor. Starting from either entrance to this room, head over to the left-hand staircase and climb it. Look around up there and you\'ll see a corridor which leads to more stairs up. It doesn\'t matter which direction you take from here- either way, you\'ll end up back at the surface.
14. I\'ve fallen off the leve/become irreversably stuck- Help! Don\'t panic. First, you must make sure you have run the Updater program, located in your root PS directory. If you have not previously done this, just quit the game, run it, and log back in. Now, in the chat box, type \"/spawn\" (without the quotes). You\'ll be teleported next to the statue in the center of town.
15. Why is there SO MUCH LAG!? This is a commonly discussed problem and everyone will experience it sometimes. If you find your in-game messages not appearing for as long as sixty seconds, or your framerate drops dramatically and you can\'t move, I feel for you. I know exactly what it\'s like, but there\'s nothing we can do about it. There\'s no fix and we don\'t even really understand the reason for this happening. Just grin and bare it untill the devs are able to address the problem.
16. How do I switch to fullscreen/change the game\'s window size? Run the PSSetup.exe file found in your root PS directory.
17. How can I disable music? While in the game, click the O menu button (the one at the far left of your screen).
18. What are the system requirements for Planeshift? Currently there\'s no official word on this, but I would recommend a fairly high-end PC to enjoy Planeshift with as little peformance trouble as possible. This ideally means over 1ghz processor, at least 300mb of RAM (as various people have reported the game\'s memory usage reaching this amount) and a decent graphics card with up-to-date drivers.
19. Can I crouch? Nope, the only things your character can handle right now are walking, running, jumping and greeting.
20. How do I greet someone? Target them (right click while their name is visible on your screen) and type /greet into the chat box. To greet \'everybody\', have nobody as your target.
21. Can I open doors? I thought I told you to read Tomaseth\'s guide first! He answered this question before I will- no you can not open doors yet.
22. How do I get on the temple/climb walls/hop along roofs/other cool ability? Ah, that takes skill and lots of practice. Half of the fun of the game for me is discovering such bugs and glitches, so I won\'t tell you how to do them. It\'s a nicer feeling to know that you discovered how all on your own- even if other people have achieved the same thing many times before you.
23. You\'re not supposed to be able to get on the temple/climb walls/hop along roofs/other cool ability, you\'re exploiting glitches! Not I nor anybody I know exploits any glitches or bugs that would give us an unfair advantage over other players. What we are doing is testing the game- testing it\'s limits, it\'s physics, it\'s quirks and oddities, so that the developers can be aware of weaknesses in their coding or level design and work towards building a better, fairer game for us all. Also, it\'s just a game- calm down.
24. Is there any way to add my own skins/skin parts of the GUI? Yes there is and it just so happens that I covered this in my first Guide thread. Check out
http://www.planeshift3d.com/wbboard/thread.php?threadid=4575&boardid=13&styleid=325. How do I enable Mouselook? Press \\ or # button on your keyboard.
26. My character is running forward on his own and I can\'t stop him! Help! R is the Autorun key. You probably pressed it by mistake- just press it again and you\'ll stop.
27. How do I change the mouse sensitivity? Quoted from my Customisation Guide thread:
\"To alter the speed of your mouse movement when using the mouselook mode, open up psclient.cfg found in your root PS directory. Scroll down to Part 3 and look at the line just above it.
The default value here is 1.0 but I think this is horribly low. You may change this value to whatever you please, but for guidance I suggest you first change it to 3.0 and then test the difference ingame.\"
28. How do I display my framerate in the game? Posted below by mrsamd:
\"To see the fps counter you need to add the following line to your psclient.cfg file (I put it in Part 1: Plugins)...
System.PlugIns.iBugPlug = crystalspace.utilities.bugplug ...then save it and you\'re done.\"
Thanks for that!
29. When will the game be finished? Well, the not-so-official word is that they\'re hoping to be near enough finished in as little as 14 months. Little? Yes, considering the type of game they\'re envisioning, I\'ll be quite suprised to see everything finished in such a short development time.
30. Is there fall damage? There\'s no fall damage just yet. If there was, you would probably injure yourself simply by jumping down the hole inside the temple- and I assume that\'s not what the developers had in mind.
31. How do I get on that huge tall tower that\'s next to the temple? Let me refer you to question 13. When exiting the dungeon, take the left-hand staircase. This will bring you to the top of the tower. Don\'t worry though, there\'s no fall damage, so it\'s safe to jump down from here.
32. How long does it take for crystals to respawn? It can take anywhere from 1-45 minutes. There\'s certain spots all over the world where crystals will appear, but you\'re not guaranteed to find a crystal in those places whenever you look. The type of crystal spawned is also random.
33. How do I get into those little tunnels in the labyrinth? Unfortunately, not even the dwarves can get in there. The tunnels are just for show... however, there is a cave which most people miss, even though it is practically right infront of you as you climb the steep hill. Apparently, crystals spawn there sometimes...
34. How do I get rid of the chat window? Firstly, click the little arrow in the top-left corner of the screen, and then press F1. You\'ll have a less obstructed view now, but the downside is you won\'t know if anybody\'s talking to you. Just press F1 again to make the chat box visible.
35. Is there a quick key I can use to switch between chat and movement? Yes there is. Pressing Tab switches from typing in the chat box to being able to move around.
36. I found a crystal but I can\'t pick it up. It seems stuck to the floor! Help! Aww... sorry, but sometimes that happens. Try to pick it up a couple of times, as it may just be lag causing the crystal to not immediately be picked up off the floor. If after a while nothing happens however, I\'m afraid that the crystal is bugged. When the server reboots sometimes, this problem either fixes itself or the crystals simply bug in another spawn point. The developers are aware of this bug, so there\'s no need to report it.
37. How do I leave the town? There\'s no proper way to get out of town and certainly no reward for doing so. Infact, there\'s nothing outside the walls *at all*, apart from the occasional crystal spawn. To leave town, find some way of jumping over a fence or wall. I\'ll leave the method up to you to discover- it\'s part of the fun.
38. Are you a dev? I\'m not a dev, but I am \"on the team\". I\'m a forum moderator here, a game moderator in the actual server, and a contributer of 2D spell textures and spell effects.
39. I just logged in and I can\'t see anything- it\'s total darkness! Help! This is a glitch that happens sometimes when you first log in. Try moving around a little and wait a few minutes. Soon the lights will switch on for you.
40. The spawn command doesn\'t work. What do I do? If typing /spawn does not work for you, quit the game and run the Updater program found in both your PS directory and the PS start menu group. After your client is all up-to-date, log back into the game and /spawn will work. (this is already answered in #14)
41. Is there a mailing list I can subscribe myself to? As a matter of fact, yes there is! Many thanks to Keldornl, as I didn\'t actually know this myself. Follow this
link to reach the information page, then click on \'subscribe\'.
42. I use an Azerty keyboard. What key do I use the activate mouselook? \"people with azerty keyboards (yes there are some i am sure) may find it useful to activate mouselook using the \"?\"/\"*\" key.\"
Thanks go to Antity for contributing this.
43. How do I use skills/jobs?You can\'t... not yet. The most popular answer to this question is: \"The same way you crouch.\"
44. The third View mode seems pretty useless... how do I use it?[/B]
This is the Camera mode. Click and hold the right mouse button and move the mouse to rotate/tilt the camera. Hold both buttons down and move the mouse towards/away from you to zoom in and out.
45. How do I know when the server is online/offline?At the top of any forum page you can see the text: \"Laanx: Server: running World: loaded. Clients: ##\" if the server is currently online. If it is offline, you will see \"Laanx: Server: OFFLINE\". You can also go to the
Planeshift Fragnetics Server Website to check the status.
Planeshift is still in it\'s very, very early stages of development and you\'re lucky to be a part of it right now. As the game progresses, you\'ll be able to fight monsters, train your skills and work on your jobs. Just give it time- alot of time.
I hope this was of some use to you. If you have further Q&A you\'d like to contribute here please do so.
Thank you.
