Advice for beginners

Here is some advice for beginners, It's really useful and may well save your life. Really, this article is a gold mine, so pay attention to it.

• First, read the Game Rules.
• For help getting started with FOnline: 2238 go here, it contains information about how to create a good character, starting the game, and so on.
• If you need any extra help other than that guide, it might be a good idea to check that whole section of the forum here.

Advice

Basics

• When you exit the game, your character will still be on its position for another 3 minutes, before it logs out completely and disappears from the map. In that time, you can be killed or robbed, so think of where you logout. Most players chose to logout while standing still on the worldmap.
• Once you're in the game, you may want to know some useful shortcuts. F1 will show them.

Q shows the range of your sight.

W shows the range of your weapon.

A changes to attack mode.

F6 displays names above players' heads.

• Beware when you're in towns without guards (Most Northern towns). Gangs there will kill you without hesitation. You should try to do some quests to gain your first levels.
• Guards punish assault with deadly force, but ignore theft. keep your most vital items in your hands (note that some town's guards will attack you simply for openly carrying a weapon, so be careful).
• Be careful with drugs, some of them, like Jet, are instantly and permanently addictive. Get the infos on drugs on this wiki before using "Chems".
• Pay attention to your reputation. Attacking or stealing in a guarded town may make town NPCs hate you. Killing slavers will make you hated in Den, killing Rangers will make you hated in NCR, and so on. Of course, animals are usually reputation-free so you can kill them guilt-free with no change to your reputation.
• When reading chat messages you may encounter abbreviations. Check their wiki page to learn more about them.

Survive and grow stronger

• At the beginning, trust nobody. Seriously, newbie-abuse is very popular.
• Be careful. In the beginning random encounters are deadly. Even rats can kill you if you don't run fast enough! But as soon as you've grabbed a gun, you'll be able to slay 'em all!
• When you've got your first gun, avoid human encounters. Try to kill spore plants, rats, little geckos, little radscorpions, brahmin (to get hides for your first tent) and so on. Dogs are tough and fast, so beware. The FOnline Encounter Finder made by a player named Opera can be very useful to find encounters.
• If you keep dying in random encounters, try making a new character and tagging the Outdoorsman skill, it will help you avoid fights you can't handle once raised.
• You can rent an hotel room for only 100 caps a week: you will respawn there. It might be a good thing to rent one if you start the game for the first time.
• You can go in the desert and enter in a random location to search for resources. Resources are needed to craft items and are most of the times on the ground of random encounters (more advanced ones need to be mined in a quarry). Once you've gathered a few resources, you can craft some primitive but useful tools, or trade them for a small sum of caps.

• A very common and efficient way of earning stuff is (once you've got a tent to store everything) looking for encounters commonly known as "versus encounters", in which two factions fight and the victorious one is often the non-aggressive one, for example Vault City patrols versus ''Raiders'' below Vault City. The patrols always win, and once they have looted a few (sometimes all) corpses, you can loot the rest and grab an armor, a pistol, or stuff like that.

Get caps

Caps are the currency of the Wasteland. You'll need some in the beginning, because they allow you to buy (for about 1000 caps) a folded tent which you can use to create a safe location to store your stuff. Obtaining a tent, by whatever means, should be your first priority : Earn caps, buy brahmin hides, fiber and wood from a trader in a guarded town, and make a tent. Unfortunately, the items you need for tents may be rare in shops these days, so you may have to buy some from other players, mug them or go get them yourself! Go hunt Brahmins, chop some wood and look for fibers!

• Get yourself tents. You are able to get a folded tent from the tent quest. For your other tents you'll need 8 brahmin hides 4 sharpened poles and 1 rope to make a folded tent, which at early levels can be hard to get. Check shops often for them (especially Hub shops).
• Before you get a tent, you can store your stuff in different towns. Choose towns with very few people and hide your stuff well, it should be moderately safe if you don't leave it there too long.
• Open a bank account if you start near a town with an FLC bank. It costs 100 caps but it's worth it because of the interest rate from 1% to 3%.
• Shovel shit for experience and caps. Several towns contain a brahmin pen (Klamath, Modoc, Vault City, Redding, NCR...). Talk to the pen keeper, grab his shovel and you're ready to clean the pen of all the shit there is! Talk to the pen keeper again when you're done, you'll be rewarded for your work. You can easily reach your first level this way.
• Beside shoveling shit, you can lift caravan boxes for caps also there are some quest that rewards you with caps.
• A note on the Economy Most of the caps in circulation are already in the hands of other players. To get around this check back at the shops every few hours, because the storekeepers' supply of caps is periodically refreshed. If you get lucky you can find individual traders who haven't been relieved of their wealth yet, and some of them carry upwards of 10,000 caps!