Hello fellow Booties! My name is Wryn. I have only been playing Aardwolf for a couple months and I have encountered just about every struggle a new player could encounter, so that’s why I want to share this little guide about what I have discovered on my short adventure. Hopefully, some of the information will help you have an easier time!!

Firstly, you have clearly completed the Academy, so where do we go from here? Well, some might want to jump right into getting levels and making progress toward remort, however, I advise against this. It is in your best interest to take this first couple of remorts slower, so you can build a foundation for success in the game. Let’s start by making sure you are using the appropriate client to help you adventure in Aardwolf in the most efficient way. So, navigate over to: https://www.aardwolf.com/resclient.html and download Mushclient. This client is made for Aardwolf and has a feature called “mapper” that allows you to essentially map out the entire MUD and remember every room you have entered. This will save you a lot of time with navigating your campaigns, global quests, and regular quests. There are lots of other plugins that will help you and make quality of life improvements that you can explore, but for now, let’s keep it simple.

So, now that you have the right client, and you are ready to work on building the foundation to an easier time later – let’s jump in and figure out how to do that. You have Quests, which you may take every 30 minutes and require you to go find one NPC and kill them then return for a reward. You have Campaigns, which you may take 1 every level and require you to navigate to several areas and kill an assortment of NPCS. Then you have Global Quests, which trigger randomly and are available to players within a certain level range. These work just like Campaigns and you may win 3 per level. You will be utilizing all 3 of these as you make your way through your first remort.

I HIGHLY recommend that you toggle the “noexp” function and you try to do one campaign per level starting out. This will familiarize you with the MUD more, let you start working on acquiring keys for your keyring, learning how to use the external resources like maps and campaign manager. The links to those are here: https://aardwolfboot.com/maps/ and https://campaigns.gaardian.com/. This will also build your mapper. You will notice on your visual map that some rooms on the mapper are depicted with dark red squares, these are unexplored rooms which you have not previously mapped. You should spend a few quick minutes to grab as many of these as possible while in an area. Then you can navigate to them much easier in the future. Your mapper will require you to manually map out custom exits in the game. Custom exits are any exit requiring more than just N,S,E,W. In order to program these, you will type “mapper cexit enter crack” or “mapper cexit open west;;west”. Make sure you double up on the “;” in the syntax so that it registers appropriately. The neat trick here is if a door is locked and requires a key, as long as you possess that key all you have to do is open the door and you unlock it as a part of that command. There is something I recommend here, and that’s to play as the Wraith race until you buy the permanent Pass Door wish. The Wraith race will save you a bit of time and allow you to pass door most normal doors, so you will not need to regiser as many custom exits into your mapper. You will still have to register the locked doors, but not the unlocked ones. Please, take your time here and understand that building this mapper is one of the most essential keys for success within Aardwolf.

As you begin to level, sometimes the game will tell you that there is better equipment available and to use the “eqsearch” function. Make sure you do that. Clan equipment is very good and easily obtainable. All you need to do is “runto seekers” or whatever clan has the equipment from recall and purchase it from the vendor there. As long as you are doing campaigns, global quests, and quests, you will have the gold to buy whatever you want. Just keep your equipment updated so you can survive. There is a masterlist located here for the available clangear: https://tinyurl.com/aardOpenclangear. Now that you have the equipment, where should you best level? Well, the best way to find that out yourself is to use the “mobdeaths” command in game. Try for a little above your level, for instance if you are level 90 then try “mobdeaths 95 105”, and this will give you a list of the mobs most frequently killed between those two levels and the areas they are located in. Make sure you never waste double experience time.

Now, you might be getting close to Hero/Superhero range and worried that you aren’t understanding how this works. Hero is level 200 and everything works exactly the same as it has up until now, but now you have the ability to automatically go to level 201. For your first Superhero, it is free and costs 0 QPs but after that it will cost you. There is a guide located here in the forums to break down exactly what the differences are, but let me cover what is important to you as a fresh remort. When you remort for the first time, you will start back at level 1, however, one thing you do get to inherit from your Superhero stats is your carrying weight/carrying capacity. Strength and Dexterity contribute to this, so you should train your Strength and Dexterity as much as possible when you Superhero so that you will start fresh with a higher carrying weight and capacity for potions and other items.

Time to use those QPs you saved up from your first playthrough. Once you remort and are level 1 again, this is the time you will purchase Quest Equipment. My recommendation is that you buy the Aardwolf Breastplate and the Aardwolf Aura of Sanctuary. These will give you the two best defensive bonuses for surviving as a low remort character. You absolutely may purchase other pieces depending on how many QPs you grinded your first playthrough, but don’t feel pressured past these two items. The Helm of True Sight is also very helpful, just keep in mind that it does not give you night vision. As for trivia points, I recommend purchasing the Aura of Trivia first for the stats it will give you and using your trivia points to tpenchant it fully. The total expenditure for this will be 16 trivia points. If you took campaigns, quests, and global quests slow – you will find your mapper to be mostly filled out now and you can zoom through them, but keep doing the same thing, keep building on that foundation you put together at remort 0.

All in all, each person should play the game in whatever way they enjoy the most. I have made many mistakes in my early game, and I wish I had all of the knowledge I do now all at once. You can change your race/class every 7 days, so if you need to make sure you focus that during your early remorts on convenience and not end game strength. My suggestion would to be start playing as a Wrath Psi with Navigator as your specialized class. This gives you access to some interesting spells and skills to make the entire process easier. If you find an area you absolutely hate, because it takes too long, or because it’s a maze, then Navigator is able to use the bypass skill to try and make sure you never get those two areas for your campaigns and quests. You can also cast the beacon of light spell at the beginning of a maze and always find your way back to it with the navigate skill. Then, beacon of homecoming, which will let you place a beacon anywhere and go to it just like recalling. I use this when I need to go buy potions. I drop it, recall to buy, then teleport back to my beacon.