How everything works.

Getting started

Make an account, make a fighter, and walk out into Solum. Nothing here is missable.

Your first ten minutes

• Pick a race and build a face. You get three character slots per account.
• Spend your starting orbs on the stat screen. Nothing is permanent in the sense of being wasted — every stat is worth having, and you keep earning orbs forever.
• Walk into anything hostile and hit it with the technique on your bar. Orbs and drops come off it.
• Press C whenever you have orbs to spend. That is your entire levelling loop.

Keys worth knowing

Your fighter

No global level. Seven stats, bought one at a time with the orbs you pick up.

Experience orbs

Everything you kill drops orbs, and they lie on the ground in denominations until you walk over them. Orbs are not a bar that fills: they are currency you spend on the stat you want, on the character screen. Each level of a stat costs more than the last, and you can part-fill a level — ten orbs into a stat that needs two hundred is ten orbs of progress, not ten orbs wasted.

Power Level is just the total you have spent, shown as one number so other players can size you up.

The seven stats

Two schools of damage

Every technique is either spirit or physical. That decides which of the target's defences applies: Spirit Defense against spirit, Endurance against physical. So there are exactly two things to defend against, and you always know which stat to raise.

Races

Transformations

Transformations are techniques like any other: slot one, cast it, and you swap to your transformed sprite with an aura while it drains Ki. Run out of Ki and you revert automatically. Only one can be active at a time.

Fighting

Seven active slots, five passive ones, and a lot of aiming.

The bar

Seven slots on keys 1 to 7, filled from your technique book (B). Five separate passive slots sit alongside them: passives have a trigger rather than a cast, and they apply themselves whenever their condition is met — below a health threshold, on a kill, after going untouched for a while.

Aiming

• Most techniques fire where you are pointing. Ctrl + a direction turns you on the spot without walking.
• Anything with a wind-up can be steered while it casts. The lane or cone drawn on the ground turns with you, and what you are pointing at when it goes off is where it goes.
• Charged techniques keep tracking your aim for as long as you hold them. Let go and it leaves along your last direction.
• Lobbed techniques land where the target is, and re-aim between volleys.

Status effects

Buffs and debuffs stack as components: speed, shields, damage over time, roots, silences, deflect chances, and more. Your active ones show beside your health bars and in full on the character screen — hover any of them for exactly what it is doing, how long is left and where it came from.

Critical hits

Some effects, and some enemies, carry a critical hit chance. A crit multiplies the hit (1.5x before any critical damage bonus) and announces itself: an orange number, a gold flash and a burst on whoever took it, and a snap you can hear. Take one yourself and your screen shakes a little; that shake can be switched off under Graphics. Hover an effect to see the exact chance and bonus it gives.

Settings & controls

Escape opens the options. Four tabs, and every key can be moved.

Key bindings

Under Controls, every action below can be rebound to a key or a mouse button. Click the binding, press what you want, and it is saved.

Game

• Toggle Sprint — press once to run instead of holding the key down.
• Auto Target Nearest — keep the closest enemy selected without tabbing to it.
• Right-Click Equip/Use and Shift+Click Drop Stack — inventory shortcuts, either of which can be turned off. Right-clicking a worn piece on the Equipment tab takes it off, as long as the bag has a free slot.
• Show Vitals as %, Show Bars Out of Combat, Always Show NPC Names — how much the world tells you at a glance.
• Damage Numbers, Battle Messages, Overhead Warning Popups — the combat readout, on or off.
• Chat Popup on New Message, with per-tab control over which channels are allowed to interrupt you.
• PvP Zone Popup and PvP Zone Edge Glow — how loudly the game tells you that you can be hit here.

Video

• Zoom — how close the camera sits.
• Graphics quality, Shadows, Dynamic Lighting, Shader Effects — the big levers if the game is running hot.
• Day/night cycle — keep the world lit if you would rather not fight in the dark.
• Orb Glow Lights, Orb Pickup Trails, Sprint Afterimages — the small flourishes, each separately switchable.
• Screen Shake — off disables every camera shake, including the one from a critical hit landing on you.

Weather

Weather has its own block, because it is the heaviest thing on screen and the most personal. There is a master switch, and then:

• Per layer: particles, fullscreen shaders, lighting tint, post-process, ambient audio and one-shot audio, each on its own.
• Per weather type: a quality level for rain, snow, lightning, sun rays, fog, dust, hail, ash, embers, sandstorm, aurora, lava, fire, smoke and wind.
• Accessibility: lightning flash intensity, and screen shake on thunder (off by default).

Audio

Separate Music and Effects volumes. Both save with the rest of your settings and follow you between sessions.

Loci & objectives

Instanced challenges you walk into. Everything you earn inside is paid out when you leave.

Going in

A locus is entered through its warp. Some are shared, some spin up a private copy just for you, some take your party in together. Press O to see the list, what each one asks of you, and what it pays.

Objectives

Each locus carries its own objectives — kill this many of that, survive this long, reach that room, beat the thing at the end. Up to three of them ride along in the corner of your screen and tick over live as you play. Some are marked required (the locus is not cleared without them) and some are marked as the boss of the run; both carry a badge next to the objective so you can see at a glance which is which.

Getting paid

• What you pick up inside — loot, Zeni, orbs — is held in a pool and handed to you when you leave.
• Objective rewards are claimed from the summary screen on the way out. Some are straight grants; some offer a choice, and you take one.
• If your bag is full, nothing is lost. Unclaimed rewards stay pending and you can claim them later.

Leaving through an exit gate, dying, or logging out all end the run. The safety gate near the entrance is always open; the completion gate opens the moment the Locus clears. Stepping through either plays the Instant Transmission warp on the way out and again when you arrive. Clearing one marks it cleared on your account, and the summary tells you what you did: kills, damage dealt and taken, time, and everything you are walking out with. Objectives you already passed on an earlier run show as done rather than failed.

Crafting

Put things on the bench, take the chance.

Crafting happens at a table you interact with in the world, and each table has its own work: a salvage bench lists break-downs, and another table lists whatever it is for. The list shows the recipes you know at that bench, with anything you are short of the ingredients for greyed out.

The four slots

The middle of the window is four slots, and they are the craft. Drag items out of your bag into them and the bench works out what you are making — the order never matters. Right-click a slot to take an item back, or drag something else in to replace it. Picking a recipe from the list does the same job from the other end: it loads your own copies into the slots for you.

• The slot shows the real item, tier frame and colours included, and that exact copy is the one consumed. No wondering which of your three gi is about to go.
• Under each slot is what you put in over what the craft takes — "5,000/100" — green when it covers the craft, red when it does not.
• Dropping a stack in stages the whole stack, so one drop can cover a run of crafts. Max counts what is in the slots.
• A recipe you cannot afford still shows what it wants: the missing ingredient sits faint in its slot reading 0 over what it needs.

Discovery

Recipes have three states. Some you know from the start. Some show as ??? — you can see that something exists at that table but not what it is, until you find the recipe. And some are not listed at all until you learn them.

What you get

An output is not always a flat one-of-a-thing. A recipe can name a range — "2–5 Verdite" — and the exact number inside it is rolled when the craft lands. Some recipes also carry a bonus: a second item with a chance printed next to it, along the lines of "10% chance: 1–2 Thornite". The chance shown is your chance, with your Luck already counted in.

When a craft fails

A failed craft does not eat everything. Each recipe names which of its ingredients are consumed on failure — the rest are handed straight back. Buffs that raise your craft chance apply on top of the recipe's own number.

Where materials come from

Two places, and you will use both. The world drops them, and it drops them narrowly: anything you kill carries two or three materials and no more, so what you need decides what you hunt. Grey golems come apart into ore and flint, and each coloured golem carries its own vein — frost, greenstone or bloomiron, and the gem at the heart of it. Calibration bots give up jacks, wafers and the odd Tuffle chip. Kanassans work up from shells in the shallows to what the deep ones are carrying.

Bosses are their own tier. Each one carries a part that nothing else in the world drops, and the last tier of an infusion asks for it by name — one or two, not a pile. Bosses are also the only place a technique scroll is ever found, and those are rare enough that you should not plan around one.

Equipment is not a farming plan. No ordinary enemy carries a piece of gear, at any rate. Kit comes off bosses and out of what a locus pays you for clearing it, and nowhere else. Buy it, earn it, and break down what you have replaced.

And your own gear does, through the Break Down recipes below.

From there it is a ladder. Ore smelts into bars, rough stones cut into faceted ones, salvaged parts assemble into working modules, and the bloom you pick in the field brews into tonics. Each step wants the step below it, so the scrap you ignore early is the thing you are short of later.

Potions

The flasks and decanters are crafted, not bought. Sap, bloom water and reeds make the field flasks; the big decanters take two flasks and something you had to go somewhere unpleasant for. They are a mid-game craft and up, so the first time you can make one is usually the first time you needed one.

Breaking gear down

Gear you have outgrown is not dead weight. Any piece worth salvaging has a Break Down recipe: hand over the piece plus a Zeni fee for the tools, and it comes apart into infusion materials. Better gear breaks into better materials, and the good pieces carry a chance of something from the tier above on top.

Breaking down never fails. What varies is how much you get, which is where Luck earns its keep. A piece you have infused or recoloured breaks down like any other, for exactly what a plain one gives — and with a plain copy and an infused one in the bag, the bench takes the plain one unless you put the other in yourself.

Infusion

Upgrade a specific piece of gear, tier by tier, at an Infusion Bench.

Infusion works on the copy in your hands, not on the item type. Two identical swords can end up completely different: the tier and every choice made along the way live on that one copy and travel with it if you trade it.

At the bench

The left of the bench lists every infusable piece you own. A piece whose next tier you cannot pay for is greyed out — it still lists, so you can look at what that tier wants, but it reads as unavailable until the materials are in your bag. Pieces already at their last tier grey out too; there is nothing left to buy.

Click a piece and it goes in the slot at the top, with its own icon and tier, so the copy you are working on is never in doubt.

How a tier works

• Bring the item to a bench and open it. Browsing costs nothing and rolls nothing.
• The bench shows the item's current tier, the materials the next tier costs, and the options that tier offers.
• Pick an option and pay. The exact value inside that option's range is rolled for you.
• Each tier is one more permanent line on that copy. Higher tiers wear a brighter frame so you can see at a glance what a piece has been through.
• The same option can be taken at more than one tier, and the rolls add up. Three tiers of speed on one pair of boots is three rolls of speed on those boots.

Where the materials come from

Infusion materials are not bought. They come out of gear you already have: take a piece to a salvage bench and use its Break Down recipe, pay the Zeni fee, and it comes apart into materials. The better the piece, the better the material, and a strong one has a chance of giving up something from the tier above as well.

Only fighting gear breaks down — the boots, gloves, liners, armour and scouter you actually go out in, and their MK.2 versions. What you wear for the look of it does not come apart, so there is no reason to hesitate over a wardrobe piece: it is worth exactly what it looks like, and nothing else.

Raw materials also turn up out in the world — loci, bosses, the occasional drop — and recipes let you work the lesser ones together into what a higher tier actually asks for. So the loop is: play, salvage what you have replaced, and spend the result on the piece you intend to keep. Your Luck is rolled on both ends of that loop, on what a break-down yields and on the value an infusion rolls.

Luck & modifiers

The quiet stats. None of them hit anything; all of them change what you walk away with.

Alongside the seven combat stats there is a second set of numbers, carried by gear, infusions, techniques, food, weather and the auras in your home or guild hall. They never appear as damage. They decide how often a chance lands, how long a blessing lasts, and how much of a curse sticks to you.

Luck

Luck is a percentage, and it does exactly two things.

• It improves a chance. A chance is raised by your Luck as a share of itself: at 10% Luck a 10% chance becomes 11%. At 100% Luck it becomes 20%. The number printed in a window is always the improved one, so what you read is what you are actually rolling.
• It buys extra rolls, and keeps the best one. Where something is rolled from a range, Luck rolls it more than once. Every whole 100% is one guaranteed extra roll; the leftover is the chance of one more on top.

Extra rolls are invisible: you are shown the one that was kept, never the ones that lost. A range of 2–5 stays a range of 2–5 — Luck cannot push a result past what the recipe authorises, it just makes the top of the range the normal outcome.

Where it applies: how much a break-down or craft yields, whether a recipe's bonus item lands, the value an infusion rolls inside its option, how often a rare drop table is the one picked when something dies, and how many of a thing that table drops.

Where it does not: Luck never re-picks which item came out of a table, and it never touches damage, defence or anything in a fight.

The other modifiers

Weather

Rolled by the server per area, seen by everyone in it at the same time.

Weather is not decoration on your client — it is part of the world state. Each area rolls its own from the kinds that suit it, runs it for a while, then rolls again. Walk into an area and you get whatever is happening there, exactly as everyone else in it sees it. Indoors, nothing.

Heavier weather can do more than look good: some of it puts a status effect on everybody standing in it. Your active effects list tells you when that is happening and what it is doing, under its own Weather heading.

Your home

Buy the place, lock the door, and fill it with things you went and found.

Getting one

Houses are bought outright and owned by your character. Press H inside yours to manage it: who is allowed in, who gets thrown out, and selling up if you want to move. Visitors need to be on your access list; everyone else bounces off the door.

Decorating

Furniture is placed piece by piece, and where it goes is up to you. Pick it up out of your bag, drop it into position, rotate it, move it later, or take it back. Some pieces raise in an instant; heavier ones take a moment to build and hold you in place while they do, so you can see the progress bar fill.

• Placement zones. Some rooms mark out where certain kinds of furniture belong — a banner goes on a banner wall, not in the middle of the floor.
• Aura pieces. A few pieces do more than sit there: they emit a buff to anyone standing in range. You can see the radius while you are placing it.
• Nothing is spent. Picking a piece back up returns the item. Only deliberately destroying it throws it away, and that asks first.

Where furniture comes from

• Found in the world. Furniture drops like anything else — off things you kill, out of the places you clear.
• Bought. Shops stock furniture, and other players sell what they do not want.
• Made. Some pieces come off a crafting table once you know the recipe.
• Earned. Some are rewards: the kind you can only get by doing the thing that gives them.

Minigames

Queue from the M menu. Your character walks in; the match decides what carries.

The modes

Rules that change the fight

Each match is configured by a set of rule checkboxes, shown before you commit:

• Equalised stats. Everyone on the same block, so gear and grind do not decide it.
• Equal start. Everyone begins level, and what you buy inside the match counts — the MOBA rule.
• Ten percent health. Faster and far more lethal.
• Respawns on or off. Off means a death puts you out. Tournaments never respawn.
• Gear disabled. Your equipment still shows, but contributes nothing.

Everything a match does to your fighter is undone on the way out. Nothing you buy, equip or lose inside a match follows you back into the world.

Rating

Each mode keeps its own rating, so being frightening in the tournament bracket says nothing about your racing. Leaderboards show the fighter, not just the name.

Hosting a match

Put up a prize, set the rules, and let people sign up.

Anyone can host. Open the minigames menu, pick the mode and map, tick the rules you want, and put up a Zeni prize from your own pocket. The lobby is then open to whoever wants in.

Entry and prizes

• Entry into a hosted match costs a small percentage of the prize you put up, paid by each fighter who signs up.
• Leave before it starts, or if the lobby is cancelled, and your entry is refunded exactly.
• The prize goes to the winner when the match resolves.

Scheduled server-wide events work the same way from the player's side, with a fixed signup cost instead of a host's prize pool.

Guilds

A roster, a rank ladder, a shared vault and a house with pedestals in it.

Joining and running one

Press G. Guilds have a name, a tag that hangs off your name in the world, and a colour for it. Anyone with the right rank can invite; the browser tab lists every guild on the server if you are looking for a home.

Founding and upkeep

Founding a guild costs a Guild Token and 10,000,000 Zeni from your bag. Once it exists a guild pays 100,000 Zeni a week out of its treasury. If the treasury cannot cover a week, the guild gets a short grace period to top it up; if it still has not paid by the end of it, the guild dissolves, its members are removed and whatever was in the treasury is lost. Keep it funded.

Ranks

Four ranks by default — Guild Master, Officer, Member, Recruit — and the Guild Master can rename them and decide what each one is allowed to do. Permissions cover inviting, kicking, promoting and reaching into the vault. Nobody can kick or promote at or above their own rank, so an officer cannot quietly remove the person above them.

What a guild has

Guild chat

Its own channel in the chat box, reaching every member wherever they are — other maps, inside a locus, in the middle of a match.

Guild war

Seven Dragon Balls exist. One guild can hold all seven, and only one at a time.

The balls

There are exactly seven in the world, ever. Each one is somewhere: dormant on a pedestal out in the world waiting to be shaken loose, dropped on the ground by something that was carrying it, sitting in a player's bag, or standing on a guild's pedestal. Every pickup, every drop and every placement is announced to the whole server, so nothing moves quietly.

Taking them off each other

• Carrying one makes you a target. Anyone who beats you where PvP is live takes what you were holding.
• Leaving your guild, being kicked, or logging out while carrying one in a war zone drops it where you stand.
• A guild house full of pedestals is a statement, and a map everyone else can read.

The wish

Get all seven onto a single guild's pedestals and hold them there. The wish does not fire the instant the last ball lands — the guild has to keep them, which is the window everyone else has to take one back. Hold it, and the wish is yours.

Techniques

Every technique the Collection Log names. The rest is yours to find.

Bestiary

Who you'll be fighting. What they carry is between you and them.

The in-game bestiary (N) tracks every kind you have killed, counts them, and opens up more about each one the further you go — including what they drop. None of that is reproduced here: this is the part you can see by looking at them.

Collection Log

The completionist's list, and the reason this guide stops where it does.

The log tracks the things worth having: treasures, techniques, and the rest of the long tail. Entries you have found are shown in full. Entries you have not can appear in two ways — as a named slot you have not filled yet, or as ???, where even the name is part of the find.

This guide lists what the log would name for you anyway. It does not list the question marks, it does not print drop tables, and it does not tell you which thing carries which reward. That is the game.