One of the almost-indefinable reasons that Fallen Earth has resonated so strongly in myself — and, I suspect, in others — is that this is truly a MMO where you are carving yourself out an existence in an incredibly harsh territory. Life isn’t handed to you on a magic platter; you have to work for everything good that you want, including shelter, transportation, food and even bullets.
I don’t think there’s a better feeling than being a fresh, wet-behind-the-ears newbie in MMOs, at the base of a large mountain of levels and achievements and gear and skills. Starting from scratch, there’s a special exhilerating feeling of accomplishment when you finally do make it up the mount. Before, the world didn’t even acknowledge your existence, and now you are master of your domain.
That said, one of the more valid criticisms levied at Fallen Earth is that the starting experience is simply too wide, too inscrutable and too bewildering for some players. You learn as you go, for sure, but the problem is that you can make a few regrettable errors at the start that you will kick yourself for later. So while I’ve previously posted a few tips for Fallen Earth, here is a follow-up guide on what I’d consider to be essential steps to getting off to a good start in the game:
- Your three best sources of info are the newbie help channel (read it!) and the helpful advisers that inhabit it, Globaltech ATLAS (awesome guides), and by typing /support in game, which brings up an in-game wikipedia thing that covers several helpful topics.
- Running around stinks as a form of transportation. Craft (train) an improved riding horse as soon as possible.
- Hold off on spending Advancement Points (AP) until you’re fully informed as to how you want to build your character. You can get by on 0 AP spent for the first half dozen levels or so.
- Save your money! Generally don’t spend a lot (or anything!) on ammo or gear starting out — that’s a good way to go broke. Instead, I’d recommend that you begin in one of the crafting starter towns (South Burb or Midway), as they give you lots of crafting books as quest rewards. Then pick up and scavenge everything, and make your own weapons, ammo and gear, and continue to do quests to get gear as rewards from them as well.
- Store commonly-used crafting mats in your sector vault, less-used items in your barter vault (every town has a sector vault, only a few have a barter vault, and only one per sector has a VIP vault). The more crafting skills you try to level, the more space you’re going to have to devote for mats.
- Never get rid of older transportation vehicles/horses! They can sit in the garage/stable forever, and each has an inventory that you can use as an auxiliary vault. Right now I have three horses, an ATV and a bike that I use for storage. Speaking of which, whatever you’re riding around on, make sure you have fuel and healing/repair kits on the mount itself.
- Even if you’ve outleveled the content, plan on doing as many AP missions as possible (here’s a great guide for them). The more AP you get = the better your character can become.
- Gear and weapons need to be repaired once in a while, or they’ll go “red” and you can’t use them until you fix ’em up. Just buy an appropriate repair kit (armor, ballistics, melee), then go to your gear screen (“G”), right click on the item that’s showing a damage bar underneath, and select “repair”.
- If you’re not a crafter, consider at the very minimum doing geology, nature and science. Geology and nature lets you harvest more items in the world (along with scavenging), and both science and nature are important for crafting mounts (science for vehicles, nature for horses). Science + Ballistics = bullet production for rifle/pistol users.
- Buff the heck up. It’s easy to overlook buffs, but they really can be the difference between life and death in the game. You can always have on one stance at a time, and have on buffs that regenerate stamina, health, and increase various stats. Food and drink also add on one buff apiece, depending on the item.
- Read this great thread over at Globaltech ATLAS on new player tips. Invaluable stuff!
Bio Break 
Very helpful stuff, you are correct in saying that the beginning experience can be overwhelming. But it is improved over the first few weeks after the game launched, at least they kinda give you an idea of what is possible nowadays.
One of the best things for me was to just TAKE IT SLOW and really try to make sense of all the different systems in the game one at a time. I know that “don’t rush through stuff” is just about as cliche as saying “this isn’t WoW,” but I have seen new players who speed through stuff early on and then end up asking /help how to swing their weapon or fire their guns.
Rushing through the tutorial will actually slow you down in the long run because you’ll spend extra time learning stuff that was already taught to you.
“I don’t think there’s a better feeling than being a fresh, wet-behind-the-ears newbie in MMOs, at the base of a large mountain of levels and achievements and gear and skills.”
Syp, come back to that thought after you’ve tried EQ2 for a month or so.
Hi Syp,
I wanted to actually send you an email but I cannot find an email function. This is probably going to be too long for a post and I dont intend it to be posted, just wanted to fill my favourite blogger in on something I have been thinking about.
I think the idea and the asthetic of Fallen Earth is awesome and I was so excited to try it out. I recently tried it out when they were offering the free trial.
Now, I live in country Australia, my internet is not the greatest. MMO’s like World of Warcraft/Warhammer Online/Everquest 2 work fine on my connection. When I say fine, a good latency for me in WoW is around 300.
My issue is that with the smaller MMO’s like Fallen Earth/Aion/Champions Online is that the latency that I get renders the games pretty much unplayable (Fallen Earth in particular, in the games i have mentioned I get roughly 700 latency depending on how busy the server is), I assume this is because the companies have a smaller budget to spend on piping the data to Australia as well as other countries.
I am not the only one, I also have friends in the capital cities around Australia that have have complained about command lag (where you press an action button but it takes 2-3 seconds to fire, as opposed to WoW for example when unless we get a lag spike the action fires off almost immediatly). On a good connection I am asuming that the command lag is either minimal or non-existant.
Out of all the MMO’s i have tried this year the only one that works anywhere near as efficiently as WoW does is Warhammer Online (I signed up to the unlimited trial that Warhammer has put out) although it is still not as crisp and smooth as WoW is.
To not come off as a fanboy, I am sick of WoW, i have been playing it since release and I believe that the last expansion was rather boring (I stopped playing my 80’s and started levelling alts).
I have been trying so many different MMO’s and most of them are hard enough to play solo but with the crappy latency I get it is impossible to get into groups without being carried by the rest of the team. Healing and tanking are definitely out of the question.
I believe for many people in countries like Australia and possibly others are quite willing to try out these new games but due to crumby connections are railroaded into maybe 2-3 games. This is probably not the case for all Australians as some of the suburbs in the bigger cities have better connections. That said if it takes 150ms to send a signal across the ocean there is not much that a faster connection at home is going to do.
Should these other companies look into shortening the data pipe to other continents or would that cost more money than it would bring in?
As noted before, I dont intend this to be posted, just filling you in on some of the things that people in other parts of the world may be feeling.
I don’t really know why i felt compelled to tell you this, you probably already know. This is also an opportunity to let you know how much I enjoy reading you blog so much. I have a big blogroll (53 feeds) but your blog is the one I always read first. Keep up the awesome writing!
Kind Regards,
Sighfigh
P.S. Please forgive me if this is a little hard to read, its a little hard to keep track of what I have said in this comment box.
I must say this is a great article i enjoyed reading it keep the good work