Welcome to the Apocalypse!

So, you’ve decided to sign up and play Fallen Earth.  Allow me to impart to you my tips for making your life there enjoyable.

1) The only forum you should bother going to is the Technical Support forum on the Fallen Earth website, and only if you are having a problem with running the game.  Pretty much every other forum on the Internet, even on the Fallen Earth site, is posting spoiler information about build trees and maximizing advancement and lists of which quests are “worth doing” and so on and so on.  Look, unless you are the type of person who only enjoys a game when they reach the max level and go grind end game content, unless you are the type of person who spends their time running their EVE Online galactic empire, you need to stay away from all that information because it is going to do nothing but spoil the game.  You’ll end up racing through with the “perfect” build and you’ll get to the end and wonder why you bothered…  Just ignore all that and play the game.  You might be saying to yourself that you want to read up on those builds so you don’t “gimp” yourself, and I understand that.  But remember that this month’s perfect builds won’t be next month’s perfect builds, you should just feel out the game and play it the way you want to play it.

2) One of the cool things you can do in Fallen Earth is make tabs on your chat window.  So, right after you get in to game, even before you take one step out of the pod in the tutorial, click the small tab right next to the tab labeled “All” to create a new tab, check the “New Players” box, uncheck the “Local” and “Flash on New Message” boxes, name the tab “New Players” and save it.  Now right click the original “All” tab, choose Edit, uncheck the “New Players” box and save.  What you have just done is to move the “New Players” channel to its own tab where it can be largely ignored.  The reason you have done this is because, while that channel is good for asking a question when you get stuck, 99% of the time it is nothing but people spamming questions and spoiler info.  Have you played WoW?  Did you play on the Horde side?  Remember Barrens chat?  Its like that, only every question is “Where is Mankirk’s wife?” and it is always followed by complete directions to her and people giving their opinions on if you should even bother to find her.  If you do find yourself in need of help, you just click that tab, make sure your chat is set to go to that channel, ask, get your answer, then go back to your other tab.  You might find yourself needing to do this for the “Region” channel also as people tend to treat it the same.  (In fact, people pretty much treat every channel in game like a Q&A spoiler channel because people don’t even try to play games for themselves anymore, but that is a rant for another post.)

3) Down in the bottom left corner of your screen is the menu bar, all the way at the right end of this bar is an icon that expands and contracts this bar, just to the left of that is one called “Filter”.  Click “Filter” and then check all the items on this list, then click “Filter” again to make the list go away.  One thing Fallen Earth’s tutorial is not good at is teaching you anything beyond moving and fighting and navigating dialog boxes.  Take a few minutes and click each and every icon on the menu bar and learn what it opens and play around with each window.  Of great importance is the “Actions” item as this is where the game hides all your abilities you need to put on your hotkey bar.  By the way, while the hotkey bar appears to have only 12 buttons (“1” through “=” on the top of your keyboard), if you resize the window you’ll find that there are actually 36 buttons, the regular, shift+ and alt+.

Once you’ve done these three things, follow your quests, through the tutorial and in your first town, they really will explain how most of the game works.  And have fun, because, I hope, that’s why you are there.  Feel free to look me up, Jhaer Buegren.