Hello. The aim of this guide is to give you a very straightforward character to enable new players to easily see much of the game quickly. This guide will consistently get you through the early game with a character who can then continue to complete all game content.

This character is based on being really good at melee combat with some limited ability to escape if overwhelmed. We excel in combat by starting the game with the second best melee weapon in the game and by having more turns than anything we'll fight.

We will be a Mutant and will take the Warden calling. Our starting mutations will be Double-Muscled, Heightened Quickness, Horns, Photosynthetic Skin, the defect Tonic Allergy and Precognition.

Double-Muscled and Horns synergize well because Horns has the second highest damage in the game and grants the largest to hit bonus in the game. You will be hitting your enemies hard and frequently and when you do hit them you will be debuffing and stunlocking them. The debuff comes from Double-Muscled which gives us a chance to daze, and dazing a dazed opponent stuns them which can be permanent if you continue to attack them. Heightened Quickness and Photosynthetic Skin give you more turns by giving you a quickness boost. Precognition is very powerful later in the game but we will use it fairly early on for good effect and it will help us in certain situations.

For our Attributes we will take:
STR 26
AGI 18
TOU 18
INT 18
WIL 10
EGO 10

We take maximum STR because our Horns will infinitely scale with STR. The 18 AGI will help us dodge attacks and will help us hit our opponents. Horns also gives us a large bonus to hit. The 18 TOU will give us a large HP pool and will synergize with the regeneration buff we get from Photosynthetic skin. The 18 INT will give us early access to some skills that will help and will also qualify us to be a good tinker later. We can dump WIL and EGO. This will give us long cooldowns and make any purchase very expensive but we don't need active skills or need to buy items.

When we gain levels we're going to want to purchase our skills in this order, broadly.
Short Blade
Single Weapon Fighting
Weapon Expertise
Weapon Mastery
Penetrating Strikes
Cooking, Butchery
Tactics, Charge
Jump
Self-discipline
Acrobatics, Spry
Deft Blocking
Staggering Block
Juke

The first 4 skills are obtainable by level 6. They will make your Horns hit more often and harder. Cooking - Butchery will seem odd but it's to get us free equipment made out of the corpses of our fallen foes. Metal. All of the following skills broadly increase our melee combat or help us escape. The one exception is Self-Discipline, this one makes you heal incredibly fast out of combat which will be useful.

When you are given attributes on level up use them to increase STR. A later section will describe how to allocate mutation points.

This is what we should do in combat.

Use charge first. This will hit hard, it gains a +1 penetration bonus and will attack multiple times. You will attack with your horns either once or twice depending on the skill level you have in Single Weapon Fighting and will also Shield Slam without putting that skill on cooldown. Next do one melee attack. If lucky your first attack will have dazed the target and this second attack might move the daze to stun. Since your charge also used Shield Slam your target may also have been knocked prone. Next use Shield Slam to knock them prone and then just continue to melee attack them until dead and move on to the next target.

If you have bitten off more than you can chew Jump, Juke and Sprint will be your way out of the problem. Even though you only have the base movement speed, since you have a high quickness score you move faster than most enemies in the game. The first thing you want to do is get at least one square of distance so they can't melee attack you. In most cases you can just move away from your opponent and be safe, but if there are multiple enemies or if they have ranged weapons use jump or juke to create some distance then use sprint to get to a safe distance. Your cooldowns will be very high because of the low WIL so if you do escape make sure to rest to heal and let your escape cooldowns come down. You will also begin the game with several Witchwood Barks and may get some Salve Injectors later. Even though we have the Tonic Allergy defect the benefit of a Salve Injector outweighs the risk so just use them up if you think you're in trouble. The Witchwood Bark has the advantage of immediate hp gain but has a high risk of confusing you.


A sneaky dirty trick you have once you get the Self-Discipline skill is to run a short distance away, or a screen away, then use the Meditate skill. You'll begin to regenerate extremely fast, the skill multiplies your regeneration rate by 3 and you'll have a buffed regeneration rate because of Photosynthetic Skin. If you're going to do this make sure not to move or take any actions until after you've regenerated as much as you plan to.

There are a few things you'll want to keep in mind while playing this character. First, when you start the game you'll need to change your primary weapon to Horns. You can do this on the equipment screen by mousing over your horns and pressing the Insert key which will move the green star onto the Horns. Second, the bonus you gain from Photosynthetic Skin is only active when you have either basked in the sun or eaten the lignin and starch it produces. You'll be able to quickly tell if this bonus is active by looking at your hunger condition. As long as your hunger condition is Sated you'll have the bonus.

Now lets begin our game. In Joppa we want to get the quest to travel to Six Day Stilt from the Zealot. You can also pick up the other two quests as we'll do those also. Before you leave Joppa remember to set your Horns as your primary weapon and make sure to (l)ook at the shrine to Resheph in the top right of the screen.

First we'll go to Six Day Stilt. This is a great way to get easy Experience early and low risk. On the way to Six Day Stilt the biggest risks is getting lost along the way and having to fight dawngliders or Issachari riflers. You can kill Issachari raiders very easily and they give pretty good experience and can potentially drop banners or sun veils which will be a slight equipment upgrade. If you find some ruins they often have books which are another great source of experience but are risky. To be safe you can just discover the ruins then come back at some later point in time as we'll be traipsing through the desert a few times. If you gain any levels before you make it to Six Day Stilt do not assign the mutation points.

Upon reaching Six Day Stilt you should receive 4000 experience which should be enough to make it to level 4. (L)ook at the shrine to Resheph in the bottom left of the screen then talk to Tszappur near the shrine who lets you turn in any lore about Resheph for increasing amounts of experience. Turning in the two lore bits you have should push you over level 5 and give you the option to spend 4 mutation points. Don't do this. We will be given the choice of which mutation we want to rapidly advance and we will choose Photosynthetic Skin.

Now we're going to use our Precognition mutation for the first time. This skill lets us look into the future and then determine if we want that future or want to do something else. We will use this skill to find out what mutations we could purchase with those 4 points. If there aren't any good choices we'll just start leveling up the mutations we already have. To do this use the precognition skill. You'll see an entry in the log that you're peering into the future. Then press X to open the character screen then press M to buy a new mutation. Good mutations to look for at this point are Regeneration, Wings and Temporal Fugue. Now that you've used the Precognition mutation you'll have the option to wait out the mutation or to end the vision prematurely. If there is no mutation you want there is no reason to wait it out. Regeneration improves your melee combat strength and can make you impervious to disease which is incredibly annoying and decapitation which can end your run instantly. Wings makes travel much better, has a situational use, slightly improves your charge attack and makes you great at escaping from many bad situations but is mostly useless inside. Temporal Fugue summons multiple clones on a high cooldown which grants you incredible combat power, but since your EGO is so low you'll only get 1 clone that only sticks around for 20 turns.

There are several other mutations that are very powerful later on but either serve no use now or make you weaker at this point of the game. Some of these are Freezing Ray, Multiple Arms, Multiple Legs, Two-headed and some of the Mental Mutations. Freezing Ray essentially makes you invulnerable to being frozen and stacks another debuff onto your melee attacks. Multiple Arms and Legs and Two-headed give you more equipment slots which has extreme value later on but right now if you have those slots empty it will lower your Armor Value.

If you don't see a mutation that you want to add to your character use the mutations points to level up Horns and Double-Muscled as high as they'll go. Our mutation leveling strategy will be to max out Horns and Double-Muscled and use all rapid advancement on Photosynthetic Skin. Once Horns and Double-Muscled have reached 10, the max, we'll then level up Photosynthetic Skin which will be able to go beyond the max due to the rapid advancement.

If you did choose to add a mutation I would advise not leveling up any mutations until you've built up 4 more mutation points and using Precognition to see what the next options are. If you didn't add a mutation the list of possible mutations doesn't change until you use an Eater's Nectar or gain a mental mutation through drinking Brain Brine which you won't have access to until much later.

Now we should be about level 5 but we might be a bit low on water. Accept the quest from the Luliheart and she will give you a yondercane. Sell this to the warden for about 30 drams of water. Then leave Six Day Stilt and go North of Joppa to Red Rock.
This is where we'll complete the quest given by Mehmet. Make sure you have allotted your skill points on the world map then enter Red Rock.

While you're doing these Joppa quests be on the lookout for gear. Try to find some gloves or if you're lucky gauntlets. Try to find some croccasins or leather boots or if you're lucky chain or steel boots. If you didn't manage to find an Issachari banner and sun mask you can also find a cloak or burnoose and a mask to wear. When you find a new type of equipment just check it out and equip it if it's better.

The first thing to do here is to bask to activate your Photosynthetic Skin buffs. When you bask you remain Sated longer than if you ate a meal so make sure to bask immediately before going down into any cave. There is no enemy here that is a risk for you except for Slumberlings who are asleep by default. You can defeat them most of the time and if you want to try your luck make sure to use precognition before you attack them. If the fight is going poorly simply terminate the vision. All you need to do for this quest is make it to the bottom of the cave and grab the corpse of a Girshling, which I think is some sort of giant spider. Make sure to grab the corpse or you'll have to do the walk of shame back to the large rock.

While you're at Red Rock you'll want to try and find two trinkets to give to Argyve. If you are dishonorable you can give him the trinket the Zealot entrusted you to drop into the hole in Six Day Stilt. You did drop it in the hole, didn't you? You didn't just take the Experience and bounce, did you? If you didn't find any artifacts you may be able to find some for sale at the Dromad merchant in Joppa but since your EGO is so low they'll be very expensive.

Once you've given Argyve the two artifacts he'll progress your quest to find some wire. You'll go to the Rust Wells, east of Joppa, to do this. The Rust Wells don't have any enemies you should be worried about, but there are several enemies here that will rust your belongings. You don't have anything of value anyhow so it doesn't matter. Search the Rust Wells for the wire then return to Joppa. You have three Rust Wells to search for and normally the most wire is on the bottom floor. You don't have to search every inch just move onto the next well.

Once you return to Joppa turn in the quests you'll have a recoiler and a few tonics. The recoiler might have come with a battery. If not try to get one. Having one working and powered recoiler can increase your safety by a huge amount if you get lost while traveling overworld in some sketchy locations. Next we'll be traveling to the Asphalt Mines so we'll want to sell any junk we've accumulated. One of the tertiary benefits of your STR is an increased carrying capacity but at this level we won't have access to much of value. While you are adventuring it's a good idea to always pick up any daggers as they have the highest weight to value ratio. We'll want to sell some stuff as we're probably running a bit low on water right now and we're about to go on a journey to the top of the map. If some of your gear rusted Argyve can repair it.

The Asphalt Mines are Northeast of the Six Day Stilt. This is where you'll face your first realistic chance of death. Make sure to bask before entering. The two main enemies in the Mines are Eyeless Crabs and Fire Snouts. Fire Snouts are the more dangerous of the two and should be prioritized. You will be set on fire by them. If you wait a turn you will automatically pat out the fire. Fire hurts so do your best not to fight while on fire. It is generally better to take some attacks from the crabs while putting out the fire than to stay on fire. If you're on fire in a bad spot you can (p)our your water on yourself to put the fire out. I don't know the exacts on this but I normally pour 10 drams of water and that seems to always work. If it seems like you might be in danger feel free to use your Precognition skill to get a second chance.

Eyeless Crabs are mostly harmless for you when you first enter and by the time you get a few layers down will be trivial. You are made in a way that makes these guys no problem. They have terrible AGI so they very infrequently hit. When they do hit it isn't very hard. Their main defense is a fairly high AV of 7 which is probably a bit higher than yours but since their AGI is so low they have a very poor Dodge Value. Since your strength is so high you'll be able to penetrate their Armor Value every time you hit and you'll hit practically every time since you have fairly high AGI and the to hit bonus from Horns. At some point in the Mines you'll want to take the skill Cooking - Butchery so that you can butcher the corpses of these crabs. Every crab you kill has a chance to leave a corpse which can then be butchered and each of their corpses has a chance to leave behind an Eyeless Crab Shell which is a higher tier shield. Each Eyeless Crab has an approximately 1% chance to give you this shield and you will kill over a hundred of these crabs in the mines.

Drillbots and Quillipedes are also here in lower numbers. slightly stronger than Eyeless Crabs but not by much. If I were surrounded by the three I'd probably prioritize the Quillipedes then the Drillbots first. Sometimes there are Eyeless King Crabs which are a source of danger as they come with a crew of eyeless crabs. You'll be able to out maneuver these guys so just try to fight the lesser crabs one at a time and then fight the big one and it shouldn't be a problem. Sometimes there are also some types of Cragmensch which are some sort of rock persons. They are basically Eyeless Crabs who can throw rocks with a huge weakness of being extremely slow. The thrown rocks can hurt but if you close the distance with charge then attack them rapidly you can deal with them without a problem.

The number one danger in the Asphalt Mines is the humors. There are four types that correspond to the 4 resistances and each of them explode in a corresponding element when they're killed. The fire one will light you on fire and the ice one will freeze you. Being frozen is dangerous because you'll take damage for as long as you remain frozen and you'll be vulnerable to other creatures that may be in the area. The acid one will expode into a very annoying pool of acid that isn't very dangerous but it can destroy your equipment and should be cleaned off your equipment with water. The Electric one has an electric shock that can be highly damaging since you probably won't have any electric resist gear at this point. The safe strategy for dealing with these is to make sure you're fighting them 1v1 and just charge and retreat. They don't have any ranged capability and have default quickness. You'll be able to jump/juke/sprint out of range after you've used your charge attack and you can just watch them bleed to death or just charge a second time.

There are three reasons why we went to the mines. The first is that the enemies are weak to us and give good experience. The second is that there is some good equipment that we need in there. The third is that when we complete the mines we'll have access to a near limitless source of money at a later point in the game which overcomes our low EGO.

The equipment we'll be on the lookout for in the Mines is anything made out of carbide or steel. At most before the mines we'll probably only have one piece of steel armor. We should come out of the mines fully decked out in steel and possibly one piece of carbide gear. We'll also gain a floating glowsphere on the 5th level which is a huge upgrade over the torches. We'll probably also get an Eyeless Crab Shell shield which is equivalent to a Carbide Shield.

If you get hungry while in the mines either cook a meal if you've got the Cooking Skill or go back up outside of the mine to bask again. If you find yourself low on water collect some of the oil in your water skins and return to Six Day Stilt and sell it or some of the junk you've acquired.


The 19th level of the mines is going to be different than the rest we've seen. Clear it out and check out what's below if you'd like, but we have no further business here for now. If you do go downstairs don't stay long. Just look around for a turn then come back up stairs and leave the mines. If you have a functioning Joppa recoiler now is a perfect time to use it.

Once we're back in Joppa our next stop is going to be Kyakukya on the east side of the river. There will be a small amount of risk in getting there but that's the only guaranteed way to protect us against some diseases we're going to be exposed to soon.

The trip to Kyakukya has two terrains, jungle and river. Each are dangerous in different ways. The main threat of the jungle is goatfolk. These won't be much of a danger to you unless they have you significantly outnumbered. The most dangerous goatfolk will be the one who throws explosives. Explosions in Qud bypass all forms of defense and simply do straight damage, you can't dodge or armor your way out of an explosion so the red goatfolk sowers with the bag should be the priority target. The will not throw explosives if you're next to them and they can only throw about 4 squares away from them. Goatfolk of all kinds when killed will frequently drop Carbide and Elastene gear so don't be afraid of fighting some lone goatfolk. When in the Jungle keep an eye out for the chitinous puma. When killed they have a 5% chance to drop a corpse that gives you a puma chitin vest which will be probably the best piece of body gear you could have access to.

The river terrain is worse but there is less of it. The problem in the river is that the water has madpoles in it. Madpoles can have a 100% chance to dismember and they can latch onto you making it very easy to get surrounded. The best plan is to avoid the water as they can't leave.

Once you've made it to Kyakukya talk to the ape village elder and trade for his copy of Corpus Choliys. The contents of this book are procedurally generated each game so that the disease cures are always different. Hopefully we won't get a disease but if we do it is not fun to have to acquire the book and then acquire the cure ingredients. If you are a complete cheapskate in game you can always use Precognition to trade for the book, copy the recipies for the ingredients then stop peering into the future. Feel free to skip Kyakukya if you'd like.

Next we'll go to Grit Gate to progress the quest from Argyve. This is slightly Northwest of Kyakukya but if you have a powered Joppa recoiler it is probably safer to recoil and travel the farther distance from Joppa.

In Grit Gate there won't be any dangerous enemies. The one possible exception is a Seeker of the Sightless way. These guys will use a mental mutation that we're particularly weak to even if you're not in their line of sight. This attack, Sunder Mind, will deal some damage each turn and then at the end of 10 rounds will do a big burst of damage. If you're attacked by one you have two options. Kill them fast or leave fast. When you're attacked by one of them it will reveal their location and you'll need to decide either course of action. The attack ends when you kill them or you leave the screen.

Once you make it to the bottom you'll be able to go north to a new underground city but you won't have full access. When here you'll talk to the speaker in the wall on the right side of the red laser to get a quest to go to Golgotha. Afterwards speak to Mafeo the local merchant. You will want to purchase a Grit Gate recoiler from him. This will be an unidentified artifact but all recoilers are listed as odd trinkets rather than weird artifact so that will narrow down the possibilities. If the odd trinkets are priced too high for you keep in mind that shop stock refreshes every few in game days or 6,000 to 9,000 turns at random. The high price means that the recoiler has a high tier battery preinstalled. Every village you go to will have a merchant which will sell a recoiler to that city. Since you have Precognition you can ensure you purchase the right unidentified artifact.

Once you have the recoiler and a working battery with enough charge go back up the cave from whence you came then travel overworld to Golgotha just north of Grit Gate.

Golgotha should be the first real source of danger of the run. When you arrive at Golgotha you'll have the option of three holes to jump down in order to enter the straightforward way. There also will be a walled off area with a door to the north. If you have a pickaxe or some time to waste you can equip the pickaxe and set it as your primary weapon and tunnel through the wall(remember to set horns as primary afterwards) or just headbutt your way through the wall. If you do this you'll be met with another hole in the ground that is a dangerous fall. If you have wings, or mechanical wings you can enable flight and fly down bearing in mind there is a failure chance with flying at lower levels and with mechanical wings. What you should do is use precognition before you attempt to go down the hole and if you fall to your death wait and try again. If you have rubbergum injectors you can use those to halve the fall damage which might be sufficient. Otherwise just choose a hole, use precognition then jump down. If it goes well continue and if not revert the passage of time. When you jump down a hole just follow the conveyor belt to the next hole down as fast as you can. Don't fight any enemies here we really just want to minimize our time spent in this place.

The bottom floor is different. It has large pools of liquids slimes eels and a large slug. The Slug is the only source of death danger here. The liquids and eels can rust your gear and get you sick. You're looking for a broken waydroid. Grab it and recoil back to Grit Gate. Repair it in your inventory at Grit Gate and talk to the door and you'll be able to enter and complete the quest.

You will probably be sick unless you have regeneration. You'll be able to know that you're sick if you have weird statuses you haven't seen before that don't go away like sore tongue. The chance to contract an illness is based on your TOU stat and we can increase our chances to resist sickness by eating the food the bears offer. If you do get sick you've already purchased Corpus Choliys which contains all the instructions on how to heal these illnesses and most of the ingredients are available at Six Day Stilt.

This is where I'll leave you. You should be somewhere between level 16-20 and you'll be fairly well equipped for the next steps. The main quest will take you to Bethsaida Susa. I recommend visiting Ezra/OmonPorch, the city at the base of the spindle in the North East part of the map and then visiting the Yd Freehold south in the Palladium Reef. The trip to Yd Freehold with have some danger involved but Ezra should be an easy trip. If you do travel to these locations make sure to buy recoilers at each. These locations have high level merchants which will have useful stuff from time to time. Since we have bad EGO the way we can go about buying expensive gear is to collect lava from the bottom floor of the asphalt mines. There is a practically limitless amount of lava there but we can't hold it in our waterskins or canteens as the lava will set them on fire. Instead we'll need to learn how to build lead-acid cells or any other type of tinkerable item that can hold liquids. All tinkered items can hold dangerous liquids like lava and acid(not neutron flux) so we can tinker up a large amount of these lead-acid cells, fill them one by one full with lava then they'll sell for a good amount. The floors below Grit Gate(accessible from the northwestern stairs in Grit Gate) are a great place to acquire bits to tinker these up.

Another way to become stronger is to gather up some followers. Since we started as a Warden we have good starting opinion with Wardens and if you've been water ritualing with the Wardens in the cities we've visited you should have more than enough opinion points to convince a couple of them to follow us around. As you level up the cost to convince them to become a follower decreases.

You'll come into a pretty big power spike at level 30, or when your INT and AGI hit 23. This enables you to get some skills that start to change the game. 23 INT is where you can get Tinkering II which lets you build programmable recoilers and a whole bunch of other useful things.

I hope this guide functions as a relatively spoiler free new players guide. I hope this lets you consistently get to a point to where you can explore the map and learn more about the game to better enjoy Qud.