Warehouse hints

                          Hints for Rat Hunting

- Nothing in the warehouse will attack you first (except undeads), so feel free to
explore all of the levels.  Use the 'consider' command on a monster
before attacking it, to see if you can handle it.  However, you should
consider, fight, and kill rats on the first level for a bit before
even thinking about taking on the monsters on the lower levels.

- Use the 'battle' command to set how you split your effort in combat
between attacking and defending (read 'help battle').  Mages should do
'battle -a casting', to spend as much effort as possible on casting
spells, and no effort on physical offense.

- To flee from a battle, simply enter the direction you want to flee
in.  You can also use the 'wimpy' command to automatically flee when
your health gets to low; 'wimpy normal' is recommended.  Read 'help
wimpy'.

- Don't worry TOO much about dying: you only lose a portion of your
unspent experience points.  You won't lose a level, your equipment,
your inventory, or your money.

- You do NOT gain levels simply by gaining experience; rather, you
must SPEND the experience you've earned to gain levels.  To advance a
level, first go to the adventurer's guild (labeled as "G" on the map
given by the 'map' command), spend your experience points to gain four
advancement points, then go to your guild and type 'advance'.
However, you should first check that you have what it takes to
advance; type 'info' while in your guild to see what you need to
advance to the next level.

- You do NOT gain hit points or spell points by advancing levels.
Advancing a level will give a small boost to one of your stats, or
give a small boost to your regeneration rate, will allow you to train
your skills further, and will increase the maximum to which your stats
can be increased by training, blessings, and magical items; that is
all.

You should not advance a level unless you have trained a skill as high
as you can at your current level, and need to advance to train it
further, or there is a new skill at the next level that you want to
start training in.

- You can also spend your experience points on training your skills;
however, this also takes money, in addition to experience points.  To
make money, you can present rat corpses to Vizra, and you can also
find areas where higher level players go to kill monsters; they will
often leave behind the equipment of the monsters that they kill, so
you can take that equipment and sell it to shops.

- If all the rats you are capable of killing on your own are gone, you
can form a party with other players and try killing rats on the lower,
more difficult levels.  Read 'help party'

- If there aren't any rats around to kill, someone else has already
got them all; they will come back in a while.  In the meantime, try
exploring the city; there are certain rooms that you will be awarded
experience for finding.

If it's daytime, you can also try exploring the outdoors near Vaerlon;
it is generally safe for newbies to explore the outside world during
the day, as long as you stay on the roads and paths.  The following
URL is a map zoomed in around Vaerlon (Vaerlon is the big yellow
splotch):
http://www.icesus.org/Icesus/zoomer/dst_html/zoomed_(480,513)-(639,683).html

Red dots are special places, and blue dots are elemental altars.

- If you get tired of killing rats, go east of Vaerlon and find
Drudric's Hut.  Read 'help newbie areas', and look at the section on
Drudric's Hut.