Beginner Tips
An abundance of tips to help you enjoy your first time in Monsters & Memories
What should I be?
Pick whichever race and class you think looks and sounds the coolest. Ultimately, this is going to be a very long game and if you hate looking at your character then you will have a bad time. Starting stats can be compensated for with gear and racial abilities are situational at best.
If you want inspiration for a class, check out my [beginner guides.]
I also have an overview of [starting stats] and how you may want to spend your 10 points in the character creator.
I’m Confused Already
Use the “/help” command, little buddy.
Think About It
Unlike a lot of MMOs, Monsters & Memories does not explicitly tell you or automatically give you any indicator of an enemy’s strength or disposition towards you. Familiarizing yourself with the Consider function (default key: C) will make your time in Monsters & Memories much more enjoyable. Simple target something and press C to consider it.
Keep Your Eyes Open
A key part of Monsters & Memories is its emphasis on exploration. There is no mini-map (or even a regular map), no compass and no trials or big arrow guiding you where to go. Using the “/look” command will give you a general description of the area you are in and can help you pick up on something that your eyes might not have noticed or that you simply didn’t pay attention to.
Gathering Information
You can always reference what NPCs have told you by accessing your journal (default key: J) and you can always ask follow up questions to them by simply targeting them and writing in Say chat, as if they were players. For instance: “Where can I find [key word]?”
Make sure to also check out the tool-tips of items, especially quest items, as there can be hints hidden within.
Interacting With The World
Monsters & Memories draws heavy inspiration from old MUDs, Multi User Dungeons, online text-based adventures which are basically the precursors to the MMORPG genre. MUDs made heavy use of slash commands in order to interact with the world and during your time in the game, you will need to use these slash commands in order to complete quests and otherwise interact with the world as well.
The commands are:
- /break [thing]
- /insert [thing] (while holding an item with the cursor)
- /inspect [thing]
- /look
- /open [thing]
- /place [thing] (while holding an item with the cursor)
- /pour [thing] (while holding an item with the cursor)
- /pry [thing] (while holding a prying instrument with the cursor, for instance a dagger)
- /pull [thing]
- /push [thing]
- /rub [thing]
- /smell [thing]
- /take [thing]
- /taste [thing]
- /throw [thing] (while holding an item with the cursor)
Stay a While and Listen
A core component of Monsters & Memories is the campfire. It serves as a gathering point for players and provides buffs. Take some time of your schedule to sit a while and chit-chat with your fellow adventurers before rushing off to slay more rats. It even provides a Rested buff, granting 15% increased experience. Note that if you are not also Sheltered, you will not be able to accumulated Rested duration. You can also cook raw meat in the fire.
You can make your own campfires with just the Survival skill and eight pieces of wood, which you can gather with a Lumberjacking axe (you do not need to train Lumberjacking). Adding wood to the campfire increases its duration.
Eat, Drink and be Merry
Unlike most MMOs, food is not just a buff in Monsters & Memories, it is a constant requirement. Your character can and will get both hungry and thirsty, and when they do, your health and manage regeneration will be drastically reduced. You can buy packs of rations and flasks of water from innkeepers, or you can cook your own food at your campfire.
The Same Enemies Spawn in Different Locations
If the enemies you are after are currently being camped or swarmed by many other players, it might be better to simply move elsewhere. The same basic enemies spawn in a great variety of places, such as outside both Night Harbor’s West and North gates, explore around a bit and you might find an untapped vein of experience.
Help I’ve Fallen Gotten Stuck and Can’t Get Up Out
Geometry is well known to be one of the more finicky sciences, at least in video games, and sometimes you can get stuck. There are however luckily magic commands to help you escape: “/stuck” “/unstuck” and “/rewind” will release your from your prison of shapes. Take that, math.
If You Die With Your Boots On, You Have To Go Back and Get Them
When you eventually have your first death, you will automatically respawn at the last place you were Soulbound. For most people, this will be the same city they selected as their starting place. You will also be naked because all your items, both equipped and what you carried in your bags, will be where you left it. Or, rather, where you were forced to leave it. This means you are now naked (and possibly afraid) and will have to return to the spot you were killed with no weapons, armour or even spells in the case of spell-casters. Monsters & Memories is literally the Dark Souls of video games.
Luckily, having read this guide in advance, you now know this little future predicament and can take precautions.
First of all, for casters it isn’t all bad. You do earn Cantrip spell slots as you advance in levels, which allows you to memorize spells that persist through death. And with the gift of prescience I have given you, you will now remember to either put your spellbook in the bank when you aren’t using it, or you will buy a second spellbook to fill with spells and keep that in the bank for when the need arises.
Secondly, melee fighters can keep a spare sword and maybe an old set of armour in the bank to help them get their stuff back too.
If you are not sure where your corpse is, then classes like the Necromancer and Shadow Knight have spells which can help detect your corpse and even summon it (for a price).
It will also not be uncommon for people to ask for help recovering their corpse and you should not feel ashamed or hesitate to ask for help as well.
Even if you do not make it back to your corpses in time to reclaim your items, it won’t be lost forever. In major cities you will be able to find NPCs called “Opportunistic Adventurer” who can help you get your items back.
Free Six Slot Bag
Exit Night Harbor’s West Gate and turn left slightly to head towards the low walls of a ruined house. Within is the Shifty Gnome whom you will hail (default key: H) and when he is finished talking, reply “I am interested.” This will begin a repeatable quest for the Gnome wherein he will give you a bag with six slots that he expects you to fill with six Cloth Scraps and return to him. However, you can simply put off doing the quest and keep the game.
Getting More Bags
Bag Merchants, Goods Merchants and Dilshad Abolfazl in Night Harbor’s Tannery sell pouches and backpacks. Pouches have six slots and only cost 50 copper. Pick up some when you are able as inventory is incredibly limited early on in the game.
Repeatable Turn-ins
There are several repeatable quests in the game, which are an excellent source of experience. These require items which drop from enemies, meaning you should not be too hasty to sell or discard items you get while out levelling or grinding. Below is a non-exhaustive list of repeatable quests within Night Harbor.
| Farmer Ammar | Snake Egg, Scarab Leg, Fire Beetle Leg, Raw Rat Meat, Raw Jackal Meat | Experience, Ration, Water Flask, Torch |
| Old Mother Roshan | Raw Rat/Bat/Jackal Meat | Experience, Seekers of the Lost Eye standing |
| Old Rankle | Ashira Tail | Experience, Random piece of Tattered Rawhide gear |
| Quartermaster Obaid | Ashira Warrior Bracer | Experience, Random piece of Tattered Rawhide gear |
| Shifty Gnome | Cloth Scraps | Experience, Random piece of Tattered Cloth gear or a Pouch |
| Squire Ryland | Bone Chips | Experience, Penitent Knights of the Hospice standing |
Explore the town and you might find more!
Note that there are equivalent quests in other starting cities!
Bathing Wins Friends
Night Harbor has a bath house where if you sit in the water for a short while, you will receive a buff which gives you extra charisma. Charisma affects your interactions with NPCs and the price at which merchants will sell to you or buy your items.
Not All Merchants Are The Same
Unlike a lot of MMOs, merchants have preferences in Monsters & Memories and not all will simply accept your sack full of bear intestines or the sharp rocks you looted off a goblin. Explore the cities to find its different merchants and sell the correct items to the correct vendors. You might consider selling skins to leatherworking vendors, cloth scraps to tailors and so on. Money is important early on, especially if you want to buy those pouches for extra inventory space.
A Light in the Dark
With the Survival skill you can craft torches, which will be very useful for races without Infravision or Ultravision. Torches require wood and resin.
Even an Old Rag Can Stop Bleeding
Tailoring merchants will sell you a seam ripper for 1 silver and 50 copper, and a tailoring kit for 1 silver, if you did not pick Tailor as your minor non-combat trait.
If you place the seam ripper within the tailoring item, along with a cloth item, and press the Sew button, the cloth item will be dismantled into cloth scraps. These cloth scraps can then be used to create bandages.
An Exoskeleton To Call Your Own
In Night Harbor’s Hospital/Sojourner Camp, you can find a man named Hult Beetlewrangler. He will reward you with a set of medium armour, if you bring him enough beetle parts in the right combination.
| ARMOUR | PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scarab Helm | 2 Scarab Carapace | 1 Scarab Leg | |
| Scarab Breastplace | 3 Scarab Carapace | 3 Scarab Leg | 1 Scarab Thorax |
| Scarab Greaves | 2 Scarab Carapace | 2 Scarab Leg | 1 Scarab Elytron Plate |
| Scarab Boots | 1 Scarab Carapace | 2 Scarab Leg | |
| Scarab Small Shield | 1 Scarab Carapace | 1 Scarab Leg |
An upgraded version using Cinder Beetle parts is also available, as well as a quest to receive Hult’s Beetle Bowl, a six slot bag, in return for two Fire Beetle Carapaces.
Note that there are equivalent quests in other starting cities!
John Memories
You can set a surname for your character by using the “/surname [surname]” command. This can be changed once a month. Using the command with nothing will erase your surname.
I Know Everything Now, Thank You, How Can I Make It Harder For Myself?
Monsters & Memories does support alternative rule-sets, including Solo, Self-Found and Hardcore, all of which have to be activated at level one and cannot be reverted once applied.
Solo is what you’d expect. You will become forced to play solo on that character for as long as it exists. No creating or joining groups, no giving or receiving buffs from other players.
To activate this mode, seek out a Solitary individual in the capital cities and say “I want to be solo.”
Self-Found is means you will be locked out of trading and using a shared bank, you will also be unable to pick up items dropped by other players or buying other peoples’ items from Greedy Merchants, and you can only loot corpses that you personally killed.
To activate this mode, seek out a Pauper individual in the capital cities and say “I want to be self found.”
Hardcore. If you die, you return to the character select screen and will be unable to log back in to that character.
To activate this mode, seek out a Magnificent individual in the capital cities and say “I want to be hardcore.”
Reminder: These cannot be reverted once applied.
