Welcome to Tabula Rasa. My online name is Lain, and I will be your tour guide through the beginning phases of Tabula Rasa. This guide will assume that you have installed the game, registered the game, and are ready to make your first character. I will be following along with you, creating a new character as I write this. Let us begin. 

Character Creation
At the creation screen, the biggest thing to note is your Last Name. Your first time creating a character, it will be blank, but once you have created a character, the rest of your characters will share the same last name either by new creation or cloning (I will explain cloning a little later). If you have not noticed, my last name is already filled out. This is not my first charector so it has been automaticlly filled in for my other charctors names. Your last name is your identity in the game. When you invite people into your team (in this game it is known as a squad), clan (guild/orinization) you will be invited by your last name. Your first name is just a reference between this charector and the rest of your charectors you will be building. The rest of this page is pretty self explanitory. I will not be going over these options, since this is your charector so you choose what sex/how they look/how tall they are/ etc, etc. (personally i never spend more than 1 min picking my charectors looks, by the time your lvl 5 in every mmorpg i have played, the looks have been covered up and by the time your lvl 15, you yourself wont remember what they look like. Also, since im a guy i dont like playing male chars. Dont like stareing at a guy's ass all day while i play a game =P). So now we move on to....cloning.

Cloning
As promised, I will now explain clones. Haven’t you ever hated or been frustrated re-leveling your character to match your main? Or decide later on that the path you took was not your matching play style? Well Tabula Rasa has fixed this problem. Every time you split the level tree (http://tabularasavault.ign.com/wiki/index.php/Class_Tree) you are awarded one clone point. I CAN NOT STRESS THIS POINT ENOUGH. CLONE. When you clone you are doing exactly what the definition of clone is. You make a copy of your character. At the end of level 4, right before you hit 5, you are asked what route you want to go. CLONE IMMEDIATELY. Why? Why clone? Unless you are a true avid gamer, and like to level everything yourself, cloning makes a duplicate character at the state you are in. So while one character chooses to go one route your clone goes the other route. so now, you NEVER have to level 1-4 again. The same goes at level 14 transitioning to 15. You get a clone. But this time, you still have to re-level 5-14, because you have to level your first clone to that level. confusing? I know. but trust me, clone. I would get more into cloning and ability tree but I am not writing a guide on that subject. But I do think it is important enough to spend a good paragraph telling you to CLONE.

First steps in the World
Ok, so you’ve made your character, your name has been ok-d and you’re ready to enter. What are you waiting for? do it, I dare you. Now first going into the game, you'll notice that this game does not move like most conventional MMORPG's, nor does it have the first person aspect of a FPS. It is a hybrid, which isn’t really surprising because it is a hybrid game. You control where your character moves by your mouse. the WASD template applies just like any other game. This is not surprising; in fact this is the intuitive part. But the hybrid aspect is when you are targeting an object. You look at it instead of pressing a button to toggle what you’re looking at and where it is and when/where to attack it. Take a second to get a feel for it. Jump around, Get yourself dizzy. Now a note on the UI (user interface). It is a pretty slandered UI. Dialogue box top left, your vitals (top blue is armor, red is health, and bottom blue is power, and orange is adrenaline). Top right is your mission tracker, although if you click the down arrow if gives you a few more options like what your frames per second is, and how much strain the game is having on your computer. But keep it at mission tracker for now. Every time you get a mission, its objectives show up here. You will see the name of the mission and the requirements it has. And hey, under that is our radar. When you get a mission, an orange arrow will appear around your radar. This tells you where the mission is to be completed if you need to talk to or kill someone to complete the mission. Note: if you are gathering objects or killing X number of creatures the orange arrow will not show up. Now let’s look at our surroundings. We seem to be at some base, with some guy yelling at you to report in or something. I guess we should listen. To interact with people/stores we press 'T'. Note that he has an orange walkie-talkie over his head. This means he has a mission for us to undertake. There is also a second person with a walkie talkie over their head. If you were to talk to this person and accept her mission, you would be skipping the boot camp area completely. 

You want to skip the boot camp area when you know what you are doing and don’t need me anymore to help you. But since you are reading this guide, you stay away from the bad person telling you to skip a section of the game. So, we will accept the yelling man's mission. He will be a secondary guide for us, telling us how to move, how to access some stuff, and run around a bit 

Basic Training
1. Open mission log. Simple enough. Hit 'L'. This area will keep hold of all the missions you are currently working on. Once you leave boot camp, the mission log tends to fill. If you look a bit to the right side of the log you will see a white person, and a green square. If you hit that green square, you will stop tracking the mission. And hence, will be off your mission tracker in the top right side of the screen.

2. Move. Once you hit L it will nicely say good job, and tell you that you have completed a part of the mission. Every time you reach a goal, or killed/collected something akin to a mission (tracked or not) a reminder will pop up. So let’s go ahead now and move. W-A-S-D.

3. Weapon to Weapon Tray. Here is part of the UI I did not go over yet. on the bottom left and right, there are these translucent square boxes. The left side will hold your guns. the right side will hold objects and abilities. 1-5 is tied to the left, 6-0 will be tied to the right. The right also has the multiple line feature, by hitting shift+2, your right side action bar will move to the second line. keep it on the first line for now (shift+1). We can reach our bag by hitting 'B'. We have a lone gun needing a home. Give it a home by clicking it, no need to drag once it is clicked it is locked onto your cursor, and then click again on the first slot on your weapon side action bar.

4. Ability to the Ability Tray. We access our abilities by hitting 'K'. Now here we see the tree class I was talking about in the cloning section. Looking at the tree should clear up some confusion that might have been caused earlier. At level 5, you get the first split. ALWAYS CLONE. the second split is at 15. Each split you get one clone. Also I would like to note, you can explore each tree now. Click on one of the red squares, and the abilities/skills will show up. If you hover over the ability with your mouse, a description will show. Likewise, if you hover over a skill number, a more detailed description will appear. Once you are done, click again on the blue square, and click the sprint ability once, and click again in the first right side action bar/tray. The exact same thing we did earlier with the weapon.

5. Accessing the radial Menu. Notice when you have no auxiliary menus open (and for lack of a better term I am referring to the mission log, your bag, your ability sheet, the stuff comes up when you press a button) your mouse icon disappears and moving the mouse moves your view. Hold ctrl. A menu pops up and your mouse re-appears. later in game you will need to access the mouse but having one of these pop up menus to access it will get frustrating. Also, each of the 6 icons shown will have sub menus. go into each one of these and you will start to see that your mission log, backpack, and etc are also here. A different way to access the same information.

6. Crouching. Crouching serves a different purpose in this MMORPG. Because it has FPS features, crouching will make your guns more accurate. And by accurate, I mean deal more damage. Regeneration of shield/armor and health is pretty fast in this game, so crouching for health and shield is not that useful. Crouching is done by hitting 'C'.

7. "Lock" onto the crate. As I said before, targeting is nothing more than just staring at an object for a couple seconds. yes they talk about hitting "Tab", and you will indeed have to move on to the next mission. But for the most part, tabbing to target, I really have not used in my time playing this game (currently level 15 so it might be useful, but I don’t use it). I wish to point out now that the radar in the lover right hand side does not move. The top is always north so it is easier to give directions. On that note, the crate in question is just north of the yelling angry man. To draw your weapon, simply press your first mouse button, also known as left clicking. And once again, left click to fire, and fire at the crate a couple of times to blow it up. And what happens naturally when you shoot? The clip eventually goes empty. Hit 'R' to reload.

8. Sprinting. Earlier I said the orange vital bar was adrenaline. Sprinting uses that adrenaline. Adrenaline is gained when you are fighting, and some abilities, like sprint, use it. Left clicking is to shoot, or more specifically shoot whatever weapon you have selected in your weapons tray. Right clicking does the same for your ability tray. This will activate sprint. To deactivate it hit the right mouse button again.

9. Report Back. Just go back to the person you have talked to complete the mission. Most often, you will get a follow-up mission. These are what are known as chained missions. When you complete one mission, it will be traded off for a mission of likeness. IE, after a mission of killing 10 pigs, the next mission you have to kill 10 cows . When reporting back, this mission will ask you to choose your reward. Late down the line choosing will mean choosing what armor specialty you have chosen. For now, it does not matter what you choose. So click on one, and hit complete mission on the bottom. Oo would you look at that. A chained mission. How convenient I talked about it not 2 seconds ago.