Your first hour in Britain

TIS is an idle game wearing Ultima Online's clothes. You do not steer a character around a map — you pick something to be doing, and it keeps doing it. A gathering activity resolves one attempt every 17.0 seconds, and each attempt is a roll at the material, a roll at the skill, and a roll at a stat point. Then it does it again.

Progress does not stop when you close the tab. Up to 8 hours of whatever you left running is simulated and handed to you when you come back — see Offline Progress for exactly which activities count.

Auto, or by hand

Arrive at a mine or a forest and the game offers you two ways to work it. Auto is the idle loop above: your character walks between the veins by themselves, on their own clock, and it is the one that carries on while you are away. Manual hands you the walking — you pick the vein — and pays out on a shorter, flat cooldown, so it earns more for as long as you are watching. Nothing is locked in: stop one and start the other whenever you like.

Everything you look at is a panel floating over the world, and every panel can be moved. The first time you log in they are laid out around the edges — you on the left, your skills on the right, the logs along the bottom — so the middle of the screen stays the place you are standing. Click a number to jump to what it does.

1. 1

   The world behind your panels

   The picture filling the screen is where you are standing — right now, the square of the town you started in. Hold the right mouse button to walk toward your pointer (on a phone, tap the ground; Options can switch a mouse to left-click instead), and click one of the town's vendors to open their shop. When you are out working, this is where you watch it happen — the rock face, the tree line, the fight.
2. 2

   Who you are

   The crest under the header is you at a glance: your name, the level of your Virtue Binding and the bar that fills it from the gold your kills earn, your attack and armour ratings, and how much weight you are carrying.
3. 3

   Your character

   Health, mana and stamina up top, and a slot for everything you can wear below. Drag gear from your backpack onto a slot to put it on. The Binding has its own slot and never comes off — right-click it to spend a talent point each time it levels.
4. 4

   Your backpack

   Everything you carry. Right-click any item to see what it can do, and double-click a bag to open it. Double-click a tool to make it your active one — nothing is gathered or crafted without one — and double-click a crafting tool again to open its crafting window. The backpack has no title bar: hold Alt and drag anywhere on it to move it.
5. 5

   Skills, and the cap over them

   Every skill in the game, grouped — open a group to see its skills and a Start button for the ones you can do where you stand. Skills rise by being used, never by spending points. All of them together may not pass your skill cap, which starts at 1,000 and is raised one point at a time by Cap Stones. Your three stats sit at the top.
6. 6

   The Journal

   The game talking to you: every ore, every kill, every skill point, sorted into tabs. When you come back from a night away, this is where you find out what happened while you slept.
7. 7

   Chat — and talking to the town

   Local is everyone standing where you are; Global is the whole shard. Chat is also how you speak to a town: say bank for your bank box, res when you are a ghost, and type /journal for your quests. The full list is on the wiki's Player Commands page.
8. 8

   The Action Dock

   The things you reach for: Travel, your Bank, the Quest Journal, Friends, Mail, your Guild and Party, Titles, your Character Sheet and Options. One click opens a window and a second click puts it away. The letter on a tile is its hotkey.
9. 9

   Getting around

   Travel opens the world map. Journeys take real time — 2 to 10 minutes, and Britain to Britain Mines is about 2 minutes. Where you stand decides what you can do: Mining only works in a mine, Lumberjacking only in a forest, and every town has water to fish. Arrive at a mine or a forest and the game offers to start the work for you.
10. 10

    Up in the header

    The padlock freezes your layout so nothing gets dragged by accident, and Panels shows or hides each panel. Help has I'm Stuck, Page a Game Master and this tour. The Wiki opens in its own tab — its Getting Started guide covers all of this in more depth.
11. 11

    Make the screen yours

    Every panel moves: drag it by its title bar (the backpack and the buffs bar with Alt held). Panels have hotkeys too — S Skills, I Backpack, P Paperdoll, J Journal and C Chat by default. Lost something? Options → Display → Reset Window Layout puts every panel back where it started.

You do not have to invent a reason to do anything in your first few days: the Quest Journal hands you one. Open it from the Quests tile on the Action Dock, or type /journal. Its first shelf, Getting Started, opens on a single prize — and every one of the 7 starter lines on the shelves beside it is a step towards it.

Starter quest reward · granted once

Cloak of the Hourglass

• −2s off every Mining, Lumberjacking, Fishing and Begging attempt
• −2s off the wait after every kill
• Blessed — death never takes it
• Yours alone — it cannot be traded

Finish every tier of every starter line and it settles across your shoulders. It is the only cloak in the game that speeds up both a harvest and a fight: every town cloak you can earn later carries one of those two cuts, never both.

The 7 lines

Each line trains one thing and asks for more of it at every tier. Most want materials handed in; two simply count — every spell you ever cast, and every kill in the Britain Sewers — and take nothing from you.

Miner's Bounty

Mining · Gathering shelf

Take a pickaxe to any of the mines — Britain Mines is nearest the capital — and let it swing. Iron Ore is the first thing out of the rock, and every attempt trains Strength and Dexterity on the way. The last tier wants ingots: right-click ore at a town Blacksmith to smelt it.

1. I25 Iron Ore
2. II100 Iron Ore
3. III250 Iron Ore
4. IV1,000 Iron Ingot

Woodsman's Due

Lumberjacking · Gathering shelf

A hatchet and any of the woods — Yew Forest, Spiritwood, Trinsic, Verity or Vesper. Wood comes in at the same pace as ore and trains the same two stats. The last tier wants planks: right-click wood in your pack to saw it with Carpentry.

1. I25 Wood
2. II100 Wood
3. III250 Wood
4. IV1,000 Wood Plank

Angler's Catch

Fishing · Gathering shelf

A fishing pole and a pier: Skara Brae, Jhelom or New Haven. Fishing trains Dexterity alone, and the catch cooks into the food a fighter eats.

1. I25 Fish
2. II100 Fish
3. III250 Fish

Hunter's Trophy

Camping · Gathering shelf

Leather comes off the creatures you kill. Keep a Skinning Knife active and Camping rolls a hide on every victory — there is no separate activity to run.

1. I25 Leather
2. II100 Leather
3. III250 Leather

Healer's Stockpile

Healing · Healing & Magery shelf

The Healer in any town sells Lesser Bandages for a few gold, and the Combat Trainer hands over fifty with every skill you claim. Bandages heal on a timer and, with Healing and Anatomy behind them, cure poison too.

1. I25 Lesser Bandage
2. II100 Lesser Bandage
3. III250 Lesser Bandage

Apprentice's Reagents

Magery · Healing & Magery shelf

A Spellbook from the Mage Shop, a scroll to learn from, reagents to burn. This line counts every spell you ever cast — nothing is taken from you to complete it — and each tier hands back a stack of every reagent.

1. I10 spells cast + 50 of every reagent
2. II35 spells cast + 100 of every reagent
3. III100 spells cast + 250 of every reagent

Sewer Slayer

Combat · Combat shelf

The Britain Sewers are the first dungeon and the gentlest. Every kill down there counts for life; nothing is handed in. Tier III pays the Band of Early Fortune, a ring worth +10% gold from every kill.

1. I20 kills in the Britain Sewers
2. II75 kills in the Britain Sewers
3. III200 kills in the Britain Sewers + Band of Early Fortune

What every tier pays

Cap Stones are the prize inside the prize: each one raises your total skill cap by a point, and nothing else in the early game raises it anywhere near as fast (chapter 5). The weapon arrives unidentified: the Item Identification skill works out what it is, and it may turn out to carry magic properties. Full reward detail for every line, the endgame ones included, is on the Quests page.

What else lives in the journal

The starter lines sit on the Gathering, Healing & Magery, Combat shelves. Beside them, First Facet holds the jobs travelling tradesfolk and bounty hunters offer — on a clock, and paid in goods rather than gold — and Wanderers the long roads that end in a title. Below the divider are the trackers, which you never hand anything in to: Housing, Boss Progress, Virtues — the last of them ten things worth doing once, each paying a talent point into your Binding the moment you have done it.

Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence. Each one caps at 100 on its own, but the three together can never exceed 225. That second number is the one that matters: you cannot have all three at 100, and choosing where the missing 75 points come from is the first real decision you will make.

How they actually go up

You do not spend points. A stat rises on its own while you use it, on a roll that gets steadily meaner as the number climbs — about 9% per attempt at 10, down to 1% at 90, which is the floor. The early points come quickly and the last ones take real time.

There are 43 skills. Any one of them can reach 100 — Grandmaster — and they all train the same way stats do: by being used, on a roll that thins out as the number climbs.

The catch is the second ceiling. Your character has a total skill cap, and it starts at 1,000 — every skill you own, added together, may not exceed it. That is 10 Grandmaster skills' worth and no more. When the total is full, every skill stops gaining at once.

Every character is born wearing a Binding, in its own slot on the paperdoll beside the helm. It never comes off, never drops and is never lost to death, and it is the third kind of progress here, beside your skills and your stats: it levels from 0 to 30, and every level is a talent point to spend across eight virtues. Right-click it to open the talent board.

Fighting

Every gold coin a monster kill pays out is also a point of Binding XP.

Crafting

Every crafting attempt adds a little, success or failure.

Starter quests

Every tier pays Virtue XP straight into it — 74,500 across all 7 lines, which is level 3 on its own. Level 1 is 12,500.

Feats

The journal's Virtues tracker pays a talent point each for ten things worth doing once.

The talent tree, what each tier grants, and a calculator to plan a build with are on the Virtue Binding page.

Every gathering and crafting skill in the game requires an active tool. No pickaxe, no mining. The good news is that your first full set is free.

The Provisioner's welcome kit — free, once

The moment your tour of the screen ends, Britain's Provisioner waves you over and hands you a bag holding one Iron-tier copy of all 10 tools. They are blessed, which in this game means one specific thing: they do not drop when you die. Every other tool you ever own will.

Pickaxe

Hatchet

Fishing Pole

Skinning Knife

Blacksmith Hammer

Carpenter's Saw

Tinker's Tools

Mortar and Pestle

Tailor's Kit

Writer's Quill

Making one active

Having a tool is not the same as holding it. Double-click the bag to open it, then double-click a tool to make it your active one for its skill — right-click it and choose Set Active if you prefer a menu. Double-click a crafting tool that is already active (Tinker's Tools, a Blacksmith Hammer) and its crafting window opens. A tool still in its bag works fine; it only has to be active.

If you break your last one

Tools wear out and vanish, and the game will not let that strand you. The Provisioner also gives away makeshift tools — Makeshift Pickaxe, Makeshift Hatchet, Makeshift Carpenter's Saw, Makeshift Tinker's Tools — one of each every 1 hour, free. They work exactly like an Iron tool but last only 35 uses: enough to gather the materials for a real one, never enough to live on.

You can also just buy an Iron Skinning Knife or a set of Tinker's Tools outright, and gold is easy enough to come by. But the intended answer is the next chapter.

Tools are made by Tinkering, out of ingots and planks. Which means the whole opening of the game is one loop, and it closes on itself:

1. 1
   Mine Iron Oreat any of the 5 mines — Britain Mines is the nearest to Britain
2. 2
   Smelt it into Iron Ingotsright-click the ore in a town with a Blacksmith — smelting trains Mining too
3. 3
   Chop Woodin any of the 5 woods — Yew Forest is the lumberjacks’ own
4. 4
   Saw it into Wood Planksright-click the wood in your pack — that is Carpentry
5. 5
   Tinker the tooldouble-click your active Tinker's Tools for the Tinkering window

What each tool costs at the base tier — and note that a tool's own recipe is what makes Tinkering the skill you cannot skip:

Tool	Serves	Ingots	Planks
Pickaxe	Mining	5	4
Hatchet	Lumberjacking	3	4
Fishing Pole	Fishing	1	8
Skinning Knife	Camping	2	—
Blacksmith Hammer	Blacksmithing	4	2
Carpenter's Saw	Carpentry	3	2
Tinker's Tools	Tinkering	3	—
Mortar and Pestle	Alchemy	1	—
Tailor's Kit	Tailoring	2	—
Writer's Quill	Inscription	1	1

The ladder that follows

Ten materials, and the tool you hold decides how far its skill can climb — and, for a pickaxe, hatchet, fishing pole or skinning knife, the richest thing it can take. Your skill decides what turns up; anything past the tool's reach gets away, however good you are, and your journal names it. This is the table to come back to when a skill stalls or the rarer finds keep slipping through your fingers.

Full detail, including the skill bonus each tier carries while you hold it, is on the Tools page.

There are 37 places on the map, and moving between them takes real time — between 2 and 10 minutes, scaled by how far apart they actually are on the map you are looking at. Britain to the mines is about 2 minutes; Britain out to the Yew Forest is nearer 4.

Where you stand decides what you can do, and for the two skills a new player leans on hardest, that is a real gate:

Mining

Only in a mine — Britain Mines, Minoc Mines, Cove Mines, Jhelom Mines, New Haven Mines. Not in town.

Lumberjacking

Only in a forest — Yew Forest, Spiritwood, Trinsic Woods, Verity Woods, Vesper Woods.

Fishing

Anywhere. All 3 towns work their own water.

Vendors

Every real town has a Provisioner, Healer, Blacksmith, Mage and Stable Master — click them in the square, or say provisioner, healer, mage or stable in Local chat. The Foreign Exchange is Britain only.

It will happen, and it is worth knowing exactly what it costs before it does. The short version: you keep your skills and your stats. Death takes your things, not your progress.

Getting back up

Say Res in Local chat

You stand up where your body is, healed to full. This is the one you want — you are already next to your things.

Teleport to Town

Hops your ghost to Britain instantly. It does not resurrect you, and it leaves your pile behind. A last resort.

An Ankh at home

Takes you back to your house and resurrects you in one step, once you own one.

Everything above is about earning a living. This is about surviving the thing that interrupts it — and you do not have to find a monster to start. Every town keeps a Training Hall: a townhouse with a straw practice post inside, a Combat Trainer who will call you over if you look like you need it, and a chest of makeshift weapons by the door.

Start at the chest. It holds one crude weapon for each weapon skill — a makeshift sword, shiv, club and bow — free to take, one of each at a time, and the chest restocks the moment yours is gone. They deal a single point of damage, which does not matter here at all: skills climb on swings, not on wounds, and the post has no opinion about being hit softly. (Wrestling needs nothing from the chest. Your hands came with the character.)

Then walk up to the post and hit it. It never hits back, it never dies, and it trains your fighting skills for real — up to 30, and then it stops paying. That ceiling is the point rather than a limitation: the hall exists to get you to the bottom of five ladders and then send you off them.

Reach 30 in any of them and the trainer hands over a starter kit, once per skill. Take all five and you walk away with 250 bandages, 250 cooked fish and four weapons, without having fought a single thing that could hurt you — and those bandages are a head start on Healer's Stockpile, one of the seven lines to the cloak.

Two skills climb quietly while you do it — Tactics and Anatomy ride along on every swing, and Parrying trains too if you are holding a shield. None of the three earns a kit of its own; they simply come with the practice.

After 30 the post has nothing left to teach you, and that is the moment to go and use what it gave you — the Britain Sewers are the shallowest water in the game, and Sewer Slayer in your Quest Journal pays you for going there. Further along, an Attack Dummy of your own (Carpentry, in a house you own) picks the ladder back up and carries it to 75 — but that is a long way off, and the square you are standing in is free.

1. Take the Interface Tour when it starts — two minutes, and /tutorial brings it back whenever you want it.
2. Accept the Provisioner's welcome: a bag of 10 blessed tools. Double-click the bag, then double-click the Pickaxe to make it active.
3. Travel to the Britain Mines — about 2 minutes — choose Auto when you arrive, and go and do something else.
4. Come back to a pile of Iron Ore, a chunk of Mining skill, and Strength and Dexterity you did not have to think about.
5. Open the Quest Journal and hand 25 Iron Ore in to Miner's Bounty for your first 10 Cap Stones, 500 gold and a weapon.
6. Chop wood, saw planks, and tinker yourself a Dull Copper pickaxe the moment you can — Iron stops training you at 75, and never digs past Dull Copper Ore.
7. When something kills you, take a makeshift weapon from the chest in any town's Training Hall and hit the Training Post until a fighting skill reads 30, then see the Combat Trainer for bandages, food and a real weapon.
8. Work down all 7 starter lines, one tier at a time, until the Cloak of the Hourglass is yours.
9. Everything after that is your business.