Welcome to The Black Death!

This Quick Start Guide is designed to help you make your first steps in the dangerous lands of Mercia. Every section here represents a step that you should take, starting from spawning at the Freeman's Port and ending at building your first house. This guide should easily occupy you for at least a couple of in-game days. Enjoy!

When starting the game, it is a good idea to choose one of the servers that is nearest to your real location. For example, if you are from England, you may want to join one of the London servers.

You may not meet a lot of people at first, but it is usually for the best, since in The Black Death you never know who is your friend and who is a foe. The Official Megaserver can be a good start for new players.


This is the Server Browser showing ALL servers, Official, Community and Privately hosted servers.


This is the Server Browser showing ONLY our Official Servers

Our Official Servers are displayed with golden coloured text, whilst Community & Private servers are listed in white coloured text.


This is the Server Browser showing the "Alive Only" filter

The "Alive Only" filter is a quick way to see which servers you have characters on that are currently alive.

The main difference between Official and Non-Official servers is that our official servers always have the latest updates applied, meanwhile private server owners may not have the latest updates. If your version of The Black Death is not the same as the one on our Official Servers, you won't be able to join.

Community Servers usually impose certain rules on joining the server, which also may be protected with a password. You may have to ask the private server owner for a permission to join if the server is not readily available for you.

Upon spawning you will find yourself at Freeman’s Port. It is a small town but has all you need when starting out!

Freeman's Port features a few Crafting Stations (Anvil, Furnace, Workbench & Campfire) a variety of Merchants to purchase goods from, a Well for fresh water, streams running through town as a source of water and a Town Earl to buy contracts and Land Claims for housing!

Controls

Keybindings can be changed in the Game Launcher

Movement is done using the: W,A,S and D keys and the Camera is controlled using your Mouse.

The Enter key is used to chat in the Chat Box (bottom left corner)

Space Bar is used to Jump.

C is used to Crouch.

Q is used to bring up the Emote Wheel.

I is used to bring up your Inventory & Crafting screen.

M is used to bring up the World Map screen.

P can be used to hide the Quest Tracker.

O is used to bring up the Guild Menu.


Freeman's Port - Starting Area

You start with a basic attack of being able to throw punches! Left click throws a basic jab, right click blocks and the side mouse button throws a more weighted punch.

Freeman's Port also features some crafting stations that are available: Anvil, Furnace and a Campfire. There are also sources of water in the town these are: a Stone Well (Clean water), a river that runs through the town into the sea (Dirty Water) and small streams that run through the town too (dirty water).

There are different types of Merchants in Freeman's Port. A Doctor, Tailor, Food Vendor, Blacksmith, Peasant Farmer and Town Earl.

Notice the hunger and thirst indicators. The Black Death is a survival game that requires you to collect, make or buy food and water. Every day you survive you are rewarded with a Gold bonus, you can use this Gold and find one of the traders and buy some food and water, or scavenge through crates found in the world and sell items you find for some Gold. Make sure to always check your hunger and thirst levels or you will be at risk of dying from hunger or getting sick with the plague!




You can also collect Wild Berries and Honey outside of towns, as well as water from nearby rivers and puddles, if you can’t afford to buy them. Foods such as Berries and Mushrooms can cause sickness when eaten, so be careful! Later on you will be able to cook advanced foods using the Cooking skill tree. These foods will restore more health and will not be poisonous.

You may have noticed a lot of coughing and sick looking people around Freeman’s Port, and if you were particularly unlucky, you might have already got sick yourself. Be cautious! The Plague is dangerous, and you must keep your hunger and thirst levels up in order to get better. If you die, you will lose all your unspent skill points, all your gear & gold, as well as your daily surviving bonus.

In order to prevent yourself from getting sick, avoid staying near sick NPC’s and players, which means don’t spend too much time in towns at all. Towns and cities are full of sick people and the risk of falling ill is very high.



If you’re already sick, get out of town as soon as possible and make sure that you are not hungry or thirsty to keep your wellness up. If sick, you will have reduced health points which will make it easier for you to die. Stay away from danger and you will soon get better.

Stage 1 sickness will cap your health at 25%, this means that you will need to keep a close eye on your food, thirst and infection level. If you catch the plague again you will encounter stage 2 sickness. This is hard to recover from, you will start to cough and vomit more, you can take this as an opportunity to find other healthy adventurers and infect them too, or try to craft or steal a cure!

In order to progress further and buy yourself a House, you will need to obtain some gold.

Gold is the currency in The Black Death, and while you can go without it by collecting your own food and resources, you will still need it for things like buying gear, paying house upkeep costs and obtaining Land Contracts.

Here are some of the ways to get gold:

• You will be given free gold for your survived daily bonus. Every day that you survive you will be getting a wage and some experience. Survive for 10+ days to get a hefty bonus every time.
  
  
  
  
• You can collect valuable items such as paintings and jewellery and sell them to traders for some extra gold. You can also forage Bandits hideouts, abandoned barns and old manor houses, but be careful not to die from the hands of bandits!
  
• Later on you could craft valuable materials such as Iron Ingots and sell them to traders. Same applies to some foods that you can grow and sell for nearly 50 gold a piece.

Your next step should be to find a suitable place to build your own house!

Important: to build a house you will need a Land Claim, these can be purchased from a Town Earl for around 250 Gold. Freeman’s Port and Raven’s Reach both have their own Town Earl. The Earl of Freeman’s Port is sat at his desk and is dressed in blue with a crown. The Earl of Raven’s Reach can be found in the Market Square next to the Arena entrance.

Mercia has plenty of places for you to build a house or a castle. Houses can be built on buildable land located at specific areas around the map. Areas closer to Freeman’s Port are very likely to already be taken, so it may take you some time to find a free space. Roam around the world, avoid getting killed by wandering bandits and search for places that look like areas covered with cobblestone:


You will know if the area is suitable for building when you see a 'Stable Ground' sign at the bottom of your UI:



It is up to you to decide where to build a house. Scout the area around the node and look at the resources available to you. Long journeys outside of your house can be dangerous, so learn the area, as well as landmarks and signposts, for easier navigation. You can see the location of your house on the map.

Having a house is nice, but you can’t leave it unprotected, otherwise it will be easy for another player to get in and claim it for themselves!



You can hire Guards using Guard Contracts (which can be purchased from a Town Earl), you will need to be in a Guild to use these, or you can make your own Guild from the Guild panel by using the O ky. You can also build a fence around your house, but the fastest way to secure your house is to build a simple Wooden Door.

It will prevent an intruder from getting in without putting in some effort. The highest tier of door is a Iron Door, these require more resources but will present players with a challenge to break down! Other defences include Wooden Spiked Barricades!

After building your house, it is important for you to start obtaining resources and making tools. Tools are necessary for gathering resources, such as Wood, Stone or Iron, which are essential for upgrading your house and building on house nodes.

All tools can be crafted through the skills menu, and various tools require ingredients crafted from different skill trees. To make a simple Stick Woodaxe, you will need one of each: String, Stick and Stone. While you can find Sticks and Stones on the ground, you will need to spend some skill points in the Hunter skill tree to make String. String requires the recipe Thread, this can be found in the Hunter’s Skill tree. To craft Thread you will need 2 Cotton for 1 Thread. Craft 2 Threads to be able to then craft 1 String for your Stick Woodaxe. Cotton can be found around the world as Cotton Bushes. The recipe for the Wood Axe can be found in the Peasant’s skill tree.



After crafting your Woodaxe, search the area around your for Wood Logs. Equip the Woodaxe and chop down the Log to get Wood. Wood Logs are spawned all over the map, and you will find them wherever you go.



Stone is the next important material that you have to obtain through destroying Stone Ore. You will need to craft a pickaxe in order to crush Stone Ore.



Wood and Stone are heavy so you can’t carry many of them around. Navigating to the Artistry skill tree you can craft Inventory upgrades that allow you to carry more items with you in the world. These start at the Small Bag, Medium Bag and lastly Large Backpack.

Now that you have a house built and secured, it’s time to explore.

The Black Death offers you a variety of activities.

• You need some advanced tools, such as Needles and Scalpels to gain more experience and valuable materials from corpse investigation. Prepare your tool kit and become the Plague Doctor.
  While you will need to be careful to not get sick yourself, advanced investigations will yield much more experience and materials for you. Kill sick bandits and burn their corpses and find rotting rats in abandoned buildings and dwellings. You will even be able to create a Cure for the plague if you progress enough!
  
  
• Research Cooking to make your own food. Not only will it be of a better quality and will last longer in your backpack, but it will also restore you more health points and prevent you from getting sick.
  
  
• You will need to arm and protect yourself. Several skill trees allow you to make your own weapons and armour, so make sure you get geared! There are some really cool skills that you can learn from the Survival and Banditry trees, so make sure to check them out as well!
  
  
• After getting a good set of armour and a weapon, grab a friend and head out to explore one of the pillage areas. You may find The Black Gate at the eastern part of the map, near Ivan’s Head Colliery, with the entrance right beside the seashore. Loot the area and find tons of useful materials in there!

If you found this Guide helpful, be sure to check out our Advanced Guide at this link to see what more The Black Death has to offer: The Black Death Advanced Guide

We hope that you enjoyed this guide for The Black Death!
If you did, be sure to leave a comment, add this guide to your favourites and give it a vote! All of these things help us to track how useful our content is to the Community.

If there is any information you feel is incorrect or if there are any sections that you would like to see please contact us by email below and let us know.

This guide will be updated as new Updates to The Black Death are released and we will do our best to make sure that the information provided is of the best quality and accuracy.

To keep in the loop, follow The Black Death on our social and news sites!

The Black Death Official Website [www.small-impact.com]

The Black Death on Twitter

The Black Death on Facebook [www.facebook.com]

The Black Death on Reddit

The Black Death Official Discord [discordapp.com]

The Black Death on Steam

The Black Death Steam Community Hub

The Black Death on Green Man Gaming [www.greenmangaming.com]



dmitri.masinski@small-impact.com

Emily@small-impact.com