As Solace Crafting is intended to be a sandbox game with no one way path, this is intended to give a few tips and tricks learned the hard way to make the game a little more enjoyable. In that it is a game and fun I shall keep it light hearted.

In the Beginning
Your life as an adventurer in this game starts much like your life did. You have a body, oh yeah and your undergarments, but no parents. A quick look at your inventory (tab) you see, well ummm not much help. However you are standing somewhere in a beautiful outdoors setting, on a slab of stone beside a purple crystal. The good news, you can use it, the bad news its not yours.

The escape key is kinda handy right now, there is a section for help that explains some of the basics. After a quick read through all the topics your ready to set the world on fire.

Melee, ranged or Magic fighter, about the only thing you really have to decide everything else is the same.

Fastest start I have found, while you are not equipped with any tools, you have some (barely) super powers, you can break down trees, rocks and ore deposits with your bare hands, very slowly for sure but those things are not going to come to you.

Everything is created in this game from Stone, Wood, Ore, And stalks for plant fibers, and hides from pigs, The menu tonight will be carrots and cabbage, which give you both water and food. or later you can choose pork and water from the Stalks. BTW that will be the same menu tomorrow and the next day and.....

Run out to the nearest Tree, stone node or ore node, that does not have a green rock looking monster hovering around it. As you get close enough a message will pop up telling you to hit 5 to harvest. Gather 50 stone 60 ore and 60 wood and head back to the platform you. If you are lost already, there is a wagon on the end of your tool bar that you can click or hit 0 and your there. Also gather cabbages or carrots as you see them.

Note you can make stone tools out of as fate would have it stone, 8 stones will make you an ax or a pick or a hammer. it will double your harvesting, but you will be tossing them after this first haul. Tab key opens your inventory and character slot, and you can drag those down to the respective slots and your off to the races. I usually skip the stone tools, as I just toss them after this first load part anyway and it just means I have to gather more stone as I still need 50.

Once back at your Solace, (thats the crystal) Craft a Forge from the stone, put the ore in the forge and make metal bars, take them out of forge into your inventory and craft a saw station, put it down, put in 40 wood and make 40 lumber, take it out and craft a blacksmith and a woodworking station. Put these down, andnow make yourself a proper axe, pick and hammer out of metal.

Life is good, have a carrot or cabbage if you need it and picked them up. While you look at the weapons available to craft, and decide what type of a adventurer your gonna be then look at what type of armor your gonna wear. From here on its just a matter of going back out and gathering at a much quicker speed the materials for a weapon and armor to gear yourself up for the journey.

Now What?
So your all geared up, and ready to take on the world.

Remember that Solace (crystal and platform) I told you you could use, but was not yours and broken anyway. Well its really nice as it is in in the center of your world, x0 Z0 are the actual coordinates and while you can fill it up with stuff, you can't really build on it, or do anthing else with it, and building a place for all the stuff that you will find and make your stuff is a pretty cool thing and an awsome plan.

You could build beside it, but Solaces have lots of special things you will want to do, so its really not good as this one will be broken forever.... as you go through the world you can build these anywhere you want and as many as you want I assume but have not really gotton carried away finding out and then teleport from one to the other almost instantly (excluding loading time) . But there are rules, first they much be at least a half km away from any other. .5 km for those who like numbers. and second they require Light to build. 20 light to be exact. And as fate would have it, light is awarded for ridding the world of the never ending spawn of Green rock like monsters. Also as fate would have it, Green Rock like monsters do not like you. Which is why you need a Solace broken or othewise in case they decide to rid the world of you.

Go towards the light, and gather 20, then go at least .5 km away and build your very own Solace by laying a foundation and adding a Solace to it. Now you got a home. Build to your hearts content, and put in all the things you feel a great home needs. At first the building screen may seem a little daunting, but soon you will discover it is perhaps one of the greatest free form building tools ever invented. Play with it, you will want to know how to build things out in the wild when the Rock Like Monsters get bigger, and meaner and well you get my drift.

Finally the Tips
Ok so as I stated this is about tips, not how to play the game, by now you have figured out the basics, or have enought to figure them out. Here are some tips and information that makes the game a little easier or enjoyable, well at least for me, hopefully you will find some of them useful too.

In this game there are very few varieties of resourses, and all are gotton from the same places. Wood, Stone, Ore, Stalks,pigs, cabbages and carrots, and of course mobs. You will also pick up essences and gems along with the resourses as you gather them.

However, using wood for an example not all wood is created equal, There are Tiers of wood, from Tier 0 through T 11 that you can use to make upgraded crafting stations and gear. Also there are Various Raritys of resourses, white, green, blue, purple, and red. The raritys are gathered two ways, either along with the white common pieces you usually get, and occasionally you will see little colored sparklies arond a recourse, meaning if you harvest that all the resourses you get will be the same color as the sparklies. Thats the treasure hunting part.

The Tier part is much more straight forward and much more work. Every 5 km from your starting point in any direction you will get the next Tier of any resource, when you reach 5km you will start getting Tier 1, after you get out to 10km from starting point Tier 2 and so it goes. You will also get Mobs that are tougher and give more experience. Mobs level up just like you do, and eventually as you get bigger you will stop getting experience from lower level mobs and need bigger and better, and meaner and nastier, and harder hitting and..... yeah its that kind of world. And yes if they win, you loose all the inventory your carrying but the good news they don.t use tools, weapons and armor, so you get to keep that. And yes you get to go back to the starting point and try again, or whatever Solace you have set as your home point. hint hint, build Solaces along the way or build really good shoes.

More Tips
You can light your Solaces with campfires, and if you want a lit up forge, you can place a campfire inside a forge and it will look like its cookin... if you dont like big dark forges.

You can also put campfires under wood ramps make the light reflection more visible from farther away in the dark.

If you need a lot of a one or two resources, wood for example, but dont want your pack filled up with all the other stuff, say for building, Go to the lower levels, (starting point for me) and harvest there, more wood in lesser time. Also after you pick up a few of the item you are trying to gather, you can pick up the pile in you inventory and by right clicking in every open slot in your inventory you can add one piece to that slot making that slot only available for that item. If you do this in every slot, everyting else you pick up will be dropped on the ground and you can later collect them if you find a need. Also if you lock your F key down, you can then just run around from tree to tree and quickly gather wood without having to stop and hit more keys. if you leave a slot for cabbages or carrots, you can gather your food as you walk over them as you harvest trees. If you also need either say green pieces of wood, or essences of wood once you find one, just replace the wood in one slot and you they will come home too.

Setting up a Solace and a safe place to work out of every 5km is a good safe way to go, or if you like to a little more challenge every 10 km . Then work the area, for the next tier resources, and leveling off the mobs. You can build full workshops for that tier at each solace, or you can have one larger facility in your favorite area and keep all your workshops there and just teleport between them.

The first 4 crafting stations you build will be used all the way through the game so you will want to level them up as you go, the leather and clothing crafting stations may or may not be used, but takes very little time and recourses to build them along the way in case you later want to change adventure styles. When your level 40 working in the Tier 8 area, is a bad time to decide you want cloth or leather armor, it means a trip back to every level to gather the resources to level it up. Thats a lot of teleporting and fiddling with various Tiers of resources.

Also at this point Tier 2 recourses make only Tier 2 gear. Tier 3 make Tier 3 gear etc.

Also while Gems for enchanting are iffy right now, and essences are not used, you might want to store them away for later use.

A Few More Tips
Terrain editing is a bit difficult to get a grasp on right now, At the same time finding a plot of level ground to build on out past the starting point is also difficult. One trick that works every time, go to the place you want to start and raise or lower the first section (center diamond) to what level you want, then note the number. From then on just move from block to block and raise or lower it to the same number. Soon you will have a level spot as big as you want, it takes a while but did you ever try to level a field without a big piece of mechanical equipment?

The mobs keep getting bigger, and the Resources keep Going up in Tier levels, but The highest level of crafting available right now is Tier 11. I suspect the biggest mob available is the size of the world and has millions of hit points, that's my opinion, and it I am sticking to it cause it won't really matter because lesser ones will take you out with one hit long before you reach him.

Well That Was Easy
This section is dedicate to those little things, that you find quite by accident, or are there but you seem to miss them. Many thanks to all those fellow players who answered my posts (probably thinking gee this guy is dense) These little tips are discovered along the way, many posted in forums but then get buried under pages and pages of new topics.

Solaces can be renamed, when you go to any solace you have put down, and click on it, you will see the name (default is the number as you put them down) to the left of the name is a pillar (well thats what it looks like to me anyway) double click on it and it will open a naming box. Type in your name and your off.

Solaces that you no long want to use can be deleted, as Solaces are put down like building parts, you delete them the same way you delete any building part.

You can delete a solace and then rebuild it in same spot and that will move it to the bottom of your solace list.

Any higher level craft station can craft lower level gear, you will still need the correct Tier material to build the gear, but can do so in a higher level crafting station, Note: a Tier 8Forge for example, can smelt Tier 5 ore but the wood used to make it must still be the same as the Forge Tier level, (suspect same with Leather and cloth.)

F4, well now that brings up those coordinates, where in the world are you, they will be just above your health maybe when you die and loose all your stuff especially the really nice thing you took a chance at getting and got yourself killed for, you can look those over and find that stuff again.

If you want to go pretty much in a straight line, but get distracted by oh I don't know, shiny trees, and ores, Monsters that are chasing you, or your chasing... one easy way to stay fairly on track is hit T, yep terrain tool, you will see a little red line in the center number on the right hand side. turn around until that red line is pointing whatever direction you want to go and then head out, when you get distracted, or log in facing a diffrent direction.. whatever... just hit the T again and take a quick look, Note if you are holding the right mouse button at the same time you will not stop, if you have Terrain tool open without right mouse button, your character gets distracted by all the pretty colored diamonds.