Alright. so you actually want to play Unplagued, right? well, first off, you probably noticed that unless your pc is from 2010 the default visual quality is not very good. Well you should probably get used to it, as currently it seems like it randomly chooses whether or not to save your graphics settings. off to a bad start, but thats okay! because another important thing to note is that if you ever get disconnected from a lobby without it being from you pressing the leave game option in the pause menu, you will have to restart the game to join another lobby. That is still fine, because now we gotta do:

CONTROLS!!!!

it has the usual first person game controls, with a key note of "ctrl" being crouch and it not being a toggle. thankfully, crouching seems to do literally nothing, so its not of importance.

now we gotta do the main important buttons:

left click: use item

right click: if you have a lantern it will be held in a sort of "off-hand" thing that no other item can do

q: drop item

e: interact

r: turn an item into a gift that needs to be used to get the original item back

f: funny little dance that you cant see because it doesnt enable a third person camera

t: push to talk if you have it enabled

j: lore journals that you dont have to read but could help with "immersion" if you do and also has a garten of banban reference in at least one of the logs

KEEP ALL OF THESE IN MIND!!!!! ^^^^^

this is the part where i might start sounding insane, but dont worry! thats just how it feels to play this game :D

alright, so first you gotta either join a lobby or make one, either way you should probably try to be in a 4 player lobby thats filled considering people leave lobbies like no other game i have seen.

it will spam the top left of your screen with information i have already told you so just ignore it all.

then you gotta go down the stairs to the cart and click the candles. if you wait long enough someone else will just do it for you so this doesnt really matter much.

Now, you are officially Actually playing Unplagued. this is the hard part. now, you have to actually play the game. i know im kind of hyping this up too much but really it is quite confusing for the first while.

next to the cart you start out in there will be a sign that when you interact will show you a shop menu. i dont think you actually need to buy anything there but a lot of that stuff could be useful so keep it in mind if you get a lot of cash. OH i almost forgot to say that money is globally shared so if you spend money you spend everybody's money.

inside of that shed looking building thats comically tall, there will be a cauldron. this is the most important thing in the game. but first i need to explain the things that arent this but keep it in mind for in a little bit.

now that you are all situated and familiar with the basic stuff, you now gotta go in those big walls. inside, you will find the main focus of your quest, the village. there are many different things that you can find inside a village, but im just going to simplify it down into a few basic things:

Buildings: big structures that you can loot to find things like shredded nails (picking one up unlocks a cosmetic color), or one of those scrolls with the name i forget, or some other stuff. decent hiding place but doesnt stop enemies from coming in so its better to retreat to the cauldron shack when in danger (there are exceptions to this)

Farm plots: where you will usually find most of, if not all of the healing items inside the village. there are multiple different things, such as corn, grapes, and tomatoes, that can be inside one of these farm plots. the only one used for the cauldron is the gliggling turnip. more on that a bit further down.

Monsters: they usually spawn pretty far from each other, and will all be differing levels of annoying, but most if not all of them can drop cauldron items so killing them can be not just a convenience but a necessity. again, more on this cauldron stuff below.

Random item sources: not sure of a good name for these so i just went with that. seems to just be stuff like rocks which drop gunpowder, mushroom rocks which drop poopfungus, and little grape vines that drop fairy's delight. if there are more, than dont blame me because this game is a lot of information at once.

before we talk about the cauldron, we need to look at the bottom right of your screen. 3 big squares, 2 of which are filled with things already. now, this is where the game gets Really Annoying. you need both of the default items quite a lot, as one can be your only source of light in darker areas, and the other is your only way to harvest items and deal damage to enemies. this leaves you with one empty slot.

And you use that one slot to transfer items that you find back to the cauldron shack. most sources of items dont only drop one, so you will *have* to walk back and forth multiple times. now, what do you do with these items?

THROW THEM IN THE CAULDRON!

this is where the designs start to fall apart, as there are multiple things that imply that the cauldron can take FOUR items when in reality its limit is TWO.

so you just gotta interact with the cauldron with a valid item in hand and it will sink right in.

Now, after putting two items in, look at the board that is to your left when you enter through the doorway. it will tell you if any items you put in are part of the "Cure" that you need to clear this stage/cure this village.

but before that board tells you anything, you need to interact with the cauldron to get a potion. dont worry, there are infinite potions. but sadly you cannot drop them with "q" to horde them. the only way to drop one is to throw it by using it. someone i played with made it seem like they took damage from a potion but it that does not seem like the case from what i can tell. EDIT: someone in the comments said that potions deal damage so it was either that i was host, that i threw the potion, or that my game was just bugged. be careful tho!!!

NOW, you look at that board. im not gonna explain the stuff on there to you, since the board is actually pretty well communicated to the player. but be sure to ignore anything that implies there are more than two items that can go in a cauldron, since that is just not possible.

not sure why its like that, maybe a last minute decision, maybe just to make the game easier while its free, who knows. for all i know, it could totally raise the limit as you cure more villages, but some of the enemies are so obnoxious and the gameplay can get pretty tedious so its quite hard to get a high cure streak.

anyways, once you get the cure after trial and error, it will say "cure the village" in the same spot it filled with barely comprehensible tutorial info at the beginning. and then you grab a potion, run to one of the blue cylinders inside the village, and throw it in there. you can see them through the dark so it is worth considering if you want to leave your lantern behind.

although once the village is cured, another player in the lobby could just instantly make the lobby go to the next village so maybe dont do that.

and then you go to the next village! and the next! and the next! as far as i can tell, this is the entire gameplay loop. if you have some good pals, it can be pretty fun. but just like other games in this genre, public lobbies can be either the worst thing ever or absolute peak.

so there is a "customize" button on the main menu that takes you to a screen that lets you change the colors of your plague peeper. yes that is what they are actually called, i read the entire world tab in the journal.

you seem to just sorta unlock colors by doing random things, and i dont know exactly what. i think i mentioned it earlier but picking up a grinded nails item you can get the color green. besides that, i do not know. i met a player who got the color yellow, but they never said how.

anyways, this, as far as i can tell, has been a concise tutorial on how to play Unplagued. there is a 300 coin item in the shop that seems to have some sort of lore function, but i could not figure out how to use it and died in the village i bought it.

i guess now you just gotta try to have fun :D