This newbie guide is a mashup between Eagle's newbie guide on the forums and my own submissions. If you want to contribute to this guide, please email me anything you would think would be helpful for new players.


HELPFUL COMMANDS

Okay, so upon reading this I assume you know the basic mechanics of how to play a MUD, which includes movement, killing, and communication for the most part. There are a few commands you can't live without in this game, and they are:

SAVE will save your character, BUT it will not save your equipment you have on you. For more information on how to save your equipment, scroll down to the Renting section.

POLICY tells you what you can and cannot do in this game. For example, did you know you can play with THREE characters? Yeah, get on that right away. It's a big help.

CONSIDER, or CON for short, will tell you if an enemy is too hard for you are too easy for you. Just type "con enemy" replacing the word enemy with the name of the enemy you are thinking about fighting. This command is usable until level 25, where you are considered to kick ass so much you don't even need that command anymore.

AUTOLOOT like most of these commands are self-explainatory. When you kill an enemy, you automatically loot everything that enemy has, including money and equipment. If you are unable to loot a corpse, your inventory is probably full or you don't have enough Strength to carry the object.

AUTOEXIT will show you which directions you can move from the room you are currently in. Without it you are pretty much in the dark.

AUTOSPLIT will split the money you recieve from an enemy with everyone in your group upon the enemy's death. For example if you loot 300 dollars from an enemy and you have 3 members in your group, each member gets 100 dollars.

COLOR COMPLETE will turn on the COLORS in the game, which is optional, but hey, if you are tired of the monochrome, it's about time you type this. And sorry TELNET users, this won't change anything for you.

QUEST is actually an optional command but alot of people use it. Turning this on will make the text "(quest)" appear after your name on the WHO list, which means you are interested in participating in any quests the immortals have planned for the players.

TOGGLE will tell you what is on and off of the commands I just listed above, plus more I didn't list. Pretty helpful to see what you have enabled/disabled.

HELP is a very... helpful command. If you need information on your class or any class in that matter, or any skill you are interested in learning, this is the command you want. A few helpfiles I think you should check out are HELP NEWBIE, HELP REMORT, HELP AREAS, HELP CLASSES.
ROLLING YOUR CHARACTERS

Ok, since this is a hot topic among new players, I'll outline now what the stats you roll for, do for you. When you create a new character you'll see something like this:

"What do these stats mean?" or "Which stats are best for my class?" you might be asking. Keep in mind, the amount of anything these stats gives you depends on your class.

Constitution (CON) determines how much HP you will recieve per level as you level. It is one of the most important stats in the game, however in the game, you can BUY you own con points for a price. You want to try to get this stat as high as you can when you roll, but keep in mind you can always buy this stat point in-case you get an awesome roll of other points but low con, it'll just cost you a bit of money. Con is expensive, but it gets more expensive the higher level you are, so keep that in mind. Typically at around level 1-10 it can cost around 4000 dollars per con point, thats just a rough estimate since I haven't got the numbers on hand. By level 30 it gets to be around 10000 dollars per con point. Also, when you die in combat AFTER level 10, you will lose anywhere from 0 to 2 con points (as well as a bit of HP and experience gained).
If you want to buy con points, you have to visit a doctor that specializes in giving injections of constitution points. You will have to remove all your armor/weapons in order to get this injection, then type "buy" to get the injection. Just make sure you are in the right doctor's room or else you'll waste money buying something... foreign. Here are the directions:
Directions from SF Bay: 2ed2es
Directions from RS: 4wned2es

Power (STR) determines how hard you can hit, as well as the amount of weight you can carry and the weapon you can wield. Higher strength means more stuff to carry and heavier wieldable weapons. The Enhancement field is a bit mysterious as to what it actually does, but it doesn't hurt to attempt to max this out while rolling (upon making a new character, only Marines and Mercenaries will be able to get these Enhancement points, however upon remorting [type HELP REMORT ingame], any character can max this stat).

Intellegence (INT) works like CON but for mana points instead of health instead. This stat determines the amount of mana you receive when you level. Very important for any spellcaster.

You get 3 of the 6 stats to work with from this guide, and they are the most important in my opinion. The other 3 you will have to figure out for yourself, as they are very "mysterious" and probably shouldn't be ignored.
PLAYING WITH MULTIS (Multiple Characters)

Remember how I said you could play with three characters? Many players who start out choose to create 1 character and level it up. This is completely fine, although it may take longer and be a little more difficult. Fallout allows for up to 3 characters to be online at any given time. Using a team is of course optional however it certainly makes things nice and easy. There is no right or wrong combination, but there are certain teams which work very well together. The general outline of a team is to have a tank, a healer, and a hitter. The tank takes all the damage during the fight, the hitter just beats the mob to a bloody pulp, and the healer makes sure the tank doesn't die letting the mob come after your other 2 characters. If you choose not to use a team, then pick a character you think you'll have the most fun with.

With multiple characters some great multitasking. You will need a MUD program suited to handle the task of easily switching between 3 windows quickly. Also a program that has the use of abilities called triggers, macros, and aliases.

Triggers are used to automatically send a command based on a line of text you see in the MUD. For example, you can make a trigger for your characters to automatically assist your tank once he starts attacking.

Macros are used as hotkeys for any command or commands that you want. For example you can set F1 to a button that tells your healer to heal you, and F2 could be used to tell your characters to assist you in battle.

Aliases are just like in-game aliases. You can make up your own keyword which can be used as a shorter/alternative way to use a command. For example, you could make an alias called "heal" to send " cast 'cure light' ", and every time you type the word heal into the game, it would cast "cure light".
BUYING AND SELLING
When your fighting mobs and leveling up they will almost always drop some good stuff or they'll just drop junk which is of no use to you. You can sell just about anything in Fallout so make sure you keep whatever you loot until your hands are full, and then sell it to the appropriate store. If your not sure which store will buy which items, either ask people, or just use trial and error until you figure it out. The stores in most towns in Fallout are the same: clothing, armor, weapons, jewelry, random junk, and guns. You can also buy eq from these stores to better equip your character or characters.
SKILLS AND SPELLS
As you level up you will notice that when you type score or sc, for short, you will continue to gain knowledge points. These are points that you trade in to learn skills or spells. Each class in the game has a specific area to train in. All 10 are located within the city of San Francisco, and you can use the map to find out where yours is. When you get there, remember ... HELP is your friend, type practice, or prac, to see which skills are available to you that you can practice. Type help <skill> to see what that skill can do for you. If your still unsure, just ask someone online, and they should be able to tell you whether or not its worth getting. To practice the skill just type prac <skill>. You may notice that it will go up incrementally so practicing it once, uses 1 knowledge point, but you can still train in it. Each time you train it (up to a maximum of 5 or 4 in some cases) there is a better chance that skill will work, so if you want to practice something, its beneficial to practice it fully, that way it will work much better for you than if you had only practiced it once or twice. In some cases some skills will get practiced up to Professional, and in other cases it will be Heroic, it just depends on the skill and the class.
RENTING/CYRO

When your all done playing for the day, don't forget if you want to keep the equipment you've earned you have to rent in the hotel in town. To rent your eq just go 1 east, 1 south, and 1 up from Reagan Square (RS for short, the center of San Francisco with the fountain), and type offer. The receptionist will then tell you the cost to rent and how long you can rent given your total amount of money. The cost to rent per day is based on the cost to rent of your most expensive item. Let's say for example you have an item that costs 40 dollars a day to rent. Also you have an item that is 50 dollars to rent, that means typing offer, she will tell you that you require 50 dollars a day to rent, and you can rent for X amount of days. (If you have 5000 dollars then you can rent for 100 days). This means over a period of 24 hours, the total amount of money you'll lose is 50 dollars. The receptionist will let you rent until you've run out of money, so if you rent for 101 days given 50 dollars a day rent, and 5000 total dollars, after the 101 days, your eq will be gone. The good news is, most items aren't very costly to rent, and money is very easy to make. JUST REMEMBER TO SELL STUFF YOU DON'T NEED.

If you are planning on being away for more than 4 days, you should go into the Cyro chamber, which is 2 down from the receptionist you use to regularly rent. Using the cyro to rent will cost you 4 days worth of your regular rent up front, and that is all you pay (for instance, if your regular rent price is 100 dollars per day, you will have to pay a one-time price of 400 dollars to use the cryo chamber. But remember, this is all you have to pay for however long you will be in cryo, be it a month or a year, etc. You only pay that one price up front). And your player file will last alot longer than if you were to regularly rent. Players often use this to hold equipment on other characters or to actually use it if they are going to be away for a long time.