About This Guide

This is not a Walkthrough

This guide is not a step-by-step hold-your-hand-through-every-detail walkthrough. Each race and each starting area for each race is different. To detail every single step would require 18 different guides.

I am not going to go into detail about each and every function of the user interface, or tell you exactly what to do with your time in the world of Darkfall.
If you need your hand held through each and every step with exact locations of towns, vendors, goblins, and resource nodes, stop reading right now. Uninstall Darkfall, and return it to your local gamestore if you can. Darkfall is not the game for you.

If you like to explore, crave danger, and are seeking a game that offers exciting and meaningful combat, you have come to the right place. Darkfall is a harsh, but rewarding world.

General Tips

• Paranoia is your friend!
  Bank anything you don’t immediately need on you early and often. You will die a lot at first, and you will lose everything you had on you more than once.

• Don’t trust anybody!
  People will try to scam you. They will try to jump in front of your attacks to turn you grey. This will allow them to kill you without penalty. They will pull any dirty, underhanded trick in the book to profit at your expense, and sometimes just seeing you suffer is profit enough. Always be on your guard.

• Keep spare gear!
  When you get an upgraded piece of gear don’t just vendor your old one. At some point you will lose everything you have on you. If you vendored all of your extra gear, you will be left naked. Stockpile a lot of extra gear in the bank. Not just one extra set, many extra sets.

• Save the good stuff!
  I know it’s tempting to cruise around in that shiny new kit you just looted, but don’t run off solo in it with no consumables. The shinier the gear, the bigger a target you become. Only break out the good stuff when you are running with a group you trust and/or when you have plenty of food/potions with you to help you get away from danger.

The User Interface

It's Different.

The user interface in Darkfall is very different from what you are used to if you have played World of Warcraft, Warhammer, or other similar games.

As of this writing there is definitely room for improvement. Some windows are slow to load. A lot of tooltips and information could be more clear. Chat windows and slash commands need work.
Many actions may seem cumbersome requiring many steps to perform.

Note: The Developers have been improving the chat system in the last few patches, and more improvements are promised.

The reality of FPS style combat means that your mouse is how you aim. So in order to be able to aim and still enjoy using the mouse for what it was designed (clicking stuff!) you need to switch between modes.

Right-clicking is the default to swap between aim-mode and clicky-mode. Some people like to rebind the mouse-mode-toggle from right click to the Escape key, or their middle mouse button (if they have one).

You don’t use your abilities by hitting their corresponding hotbar button. That only loads them up. Once loaded you need to left click to perform the action.

Holding down the left shift key will make you sprint. This will make your character run faster, but it uses up your stamina.

There are some functional difficulties with having the shift key as your sprint key. While sprinting if you hit one of your hotbar buttons you are actually hitting shift-1 or shift-2. This switches to a different hotbar instead of loading up an action. For this reason it is a good idea to rebind Sprint to something else.

If you moved the mouse-mode-toggle away from your right mouse button as suggested earlier, binding sprint to your right-click is a good way to go.

But It’s Good.

All I can say is give the interface time. What may seem cumbersome and frustrating at first will become second nature in just a couple days. This is really a well thought out interface, it’s just very different then what you are used to.

There is a reason your bags are a mess. There is a reason it takes time to loot a tombstone. The first time you polish off some jackass that looked at you funny and you get attacked by some opportunist that came along to find you with a grey (or red) alignment, you will have a choice to make.

You can try to grab what looks good, and run for the hills. Or you can decide you want it all and fight back. Either way standing there while dragging each and every item from the tombstone to your bag is not an option if you want to make it out alive.

At that moment you will appreciate, even if you still don’t like, the fact that there is no auto loot.

Getting Started

You will arrive into the world of Darkfall naked, and with only a small crappy sword to your name. Next to you will be the starter town’s Clanstone. This is where you will respawn when you die.

Somewhere nearby is a Councilor. Go talk to him/her. Make sure your weapon is sheathed (default key is 'r'), run up and target him/her and hit your ‘use’ key(default is 'f').

The Councilor (and all NPCs) is a combination quest giver, trainer, and vendor. Accept any quests you can from him/her. The Councilor will start you on a quest chain that will take you to a nearby goblin spawn, and run you around town to get acquainted with the various NPCs there.
These quests will get you some gold, and some basic tools to start gathering resources.


WAIT!! Don’t run off to smash some goblins just yet. There are a few things you need to know first.

Your First Goblin

Little Green Bastards

The quest you got from the Councilor should have put some marks on your map to help you locate those filthy buggers. Hold on, you aren’t just running for the closest marker like a newb are you? Use your brain. Every other nubbie is doing the exact same thing.

If hanging out naked in the woods with a bunch of other clueless naked idiots is your thing, then go for it. But if you want to actually kill some goblins, go to one of the further locations. You will find many more tiny jerks with bad breath to kill.

Forget everything you think you know about fighting monsters in an MMORPG. Your hundreds of hours raiding 4 story tall dragons will do you no good against these tiny little buttheads. Goblins are bastards. You will hate them and love them at the same time.

First off, the obvious: you have to manually aim your attacks. No auto-targeting.

Secondly, less obvious: unlike in most other games, these goblins do not want to die. I can’t imagine their pathetic smelly existence is all that great, but it’s all they’ve got, and they don’t want to give it up.

They will run away, they will call in their buddies, they will try to get behind you, and they will lodge arrows in your backside from far, far away if they can see you.

As big of bastards as these goblins are, they don’t cheat like monsters in other games do. Their health won’t rocket back to full as soon as you lose aggro.

You need to unlearn the tendency to stick it out and get that last swing in to finish them off. When you are at 50% health you should be evaluating your escape options, and when you are at 25% health you should be running away like a bitch. Remember, you drop everything you have on you when you die, and anybody can come along and loot your grave before you get back.

Go ahead. Run away. Eat some food. Cast your self heal. Rest up a bit. When you come back that teenie green douche will still be wounded, and you can resume bashing his brain in.