Most of us gamers have become accustomed to having our hand held when we start a new game. But when it comes to Mortal Online 2 - “The Most Hardcore MMO” – things work a little differently. We reach our nervous little hands into the air, hoping for the warm embrace of a handy hint, a fraternal NPC, or at least a tutorial. “NO!” declares developer Star Vault, offering a clenched fist instead of a held hand, “You must fend for yourself!”.

Star Vault know only too well that some hardcore MMORPG lovers, present company included, are gluttons for punishment. Still, even in its current beta form, the challenging game has garnered a lot of interest and there’s a lot of people for whom a Mortal Online 2 Starter Guide would be very useful.

Beginning a Game of Mortal Online 2

To help acclimatise players to their unforgiving full-PvP world of Nave, players start in appropriately titled Haven – a tutorial island. It’s highly recommended that players learn as much as they can before leaving Haven. Unlike Nave, Haven is currently instanced. Use the coloured lantern system to work out if you’re in the same instance as your friends – companions are, after all, incredibly useful to surviving your first few encounters.

The first thing players will want to do is decide upon their Clade Gifts (perks). Spend all of your Clade points if you want even a fighting chance of survival. They grant you powerful active and passive abilities, and in the game’s current beta form are instantly resettable so don’t worry if you don’t understand exactly what they do.

Your next step is finding the combat tutor who is helpfully named “Combat Tutor”. He stands outside a large and obvious blacksmithing area close to the initial spawn point. Not only will the Combat Tutor explain the details of combat mechanics, but he will provide free boosts to certain weapon skills upon player inquiry. Be sure to ask him about resting and healing so that he grants you the requisite skills – you will need these very soon.

For both abilities and equipment, players will want to allocate their quick-slots wisely. Combat is too challenging and intensive to be messing around with them mid-battle.

Mortal Online 2 Combat Starter Guide

Currently, players start with a basic weapon. If you can scrounge enough money together for an improved weapon, you should do so. Shields and spears alike are very useful when you’re learning the basics. Certain items in the town can be picked up and sold in order to generate this initial income.

From here, it’s time to test your mettle and your metal. Head south-east from where you spawned and eventually you will come across one of the city gates. Follow the path further to the south-east keeping an eye out for any wild pigs which can be butchered to harvest armour parts. Your destination is the graveyard, a popular training and looting area. Haven is the only area that currently has a map so make the most of it while you have it – once you leave Haven, you’re on your own.

The bad news is that the foes in the graveyard, zombies, are multitudinous and not nearly as easy to kill as you’ve grown accustomed with the stumbling undead. The good news is that while they must bury the dead shallowly in Mortal Online 2, they also bury them with plenty of valuables. First of course, you’ll have to manage to kill one.

Melee battling in Mortal Online 2 features a directional combat simulation system for both attacking and blocking – look in a direction as you left-click or right-click, respectively. These movements are much more precise than you’d find them in similar games and enemy attacks are difficult to anticipate. Attacks deal more damage when perfectively timed; just clicking your mouse will not do optimal damage nor will leaving your attack until after your crosshair flashes. Find the sweet spot if you really want your attacks to sting.

Furthermore, your distance from enemies is vital. It will dictate whether you’ll hit them with your sword’s point, blade, hilt, or your own hand – which unsurprisingly vastly affects the damage you’ll deal. Equally important is where you hit your enemy; using your sense of hearing as well as sight is key to working out if you’re striking enemy armour or flesh. Succeeding in combat tends to require learning enemy moves and/or kiting them. Both require patience and commitment; don’t be surprised if you don’t kill your first zombie on your first attempt, we didn’t.

If you’re trying to work out how to heal, the best way as an early player is simply to rest - a skill that should always be in your quick-slots. Because Mortal Online 2 puts such an emphasis on skill over equipment, anyone can fight anyone in Nave and stand a reasonable chance of survival. That means that some of the very best advice we can offer you is to train up and get great at combat. If you can master it, which takes a lot of time, you will get far, and you will get loot.

Dying in Mortal Online 2

If you die, fear not – for all of the punishing mechanics of Mortal Online 2 – it at least does not feature permadeath. It is, however, full loot – so you’re going to want to return to your body quickly. Upon death, you enter a spiritual realm with great red beams shooting up from the sky and punctuating the horizons. These beams show you where priests are in relation to your position. Go to the nearest priest (if you were fighting in the graveyard, the nearest priest will be back by your initial spawn point).

These priests, naturally, have the ability to commune with the deceased. Approach one of them and hold R to be resurrected; if only they could do that for the zombies. In Haven, you’ll be resurrected with a sword. You’ll then want to quickly make it back to where you died.

Looting and Butchering Enemies in Mortal Online 2

If you were successful in defeating a zombie then well done on making it this far; you’ve slain a beast and earned its spoils. You have gotten further than many others before you and further than some might ever reach. Instead of simply collecting stray meat from the corpse, you can choose to butcher it. In the early game, butchering is the best way to gather sellable materials.

Just butchering out in the wilds is not the most efficient way to get the most out of a carcass or corpse. Instead, take the whole body back to a butcher’s table. In Haven, having re-entered the town from the graveyard, you will find the butcher to the right. Just as with the Combat Tutor, the Butcher Tutor will be able to tell you more detail and boost your butchering skills.

Mortal Online 2 Crafting Starter Guide

As you have probably heard, Mortal Online 2 will feature over 600 interrelated skills, from botany to calligraphy, so there’s a lot to learn and far too much detail for us to include here. But we can at least point you in the right direction. Your first step is to find the Crafting Tutor and Armour Tutor (right next to the Combat Tutor outside the blacksmithing area). Milk them for all the skills they’re worth through dialogue. They’ll teach you how to make basic weapons and armour. In the beta phase that we played, this was all the help you received. Working out more complicated builds is left for you to discover. Or at least it would be, if we weren’t here.

Head north to the library and speak with the various librarians who each have different specialisms such as combat, crafting, magic, and survival. Unlocking new recipes is a great way to passively gain skills and invaluable knowledge for more advanced creations. These skills can also be learned the hard way out in the wilds, but the fact that you’re here reading this suggests you don’t have any qualms with doing a bit of reading to give you a helping hand. Once you’ve bought some skill books and crafting recipes, return to the blacksmithing area and find the relevant crafting table to begin making more advanced gear.

When crafting items in Mortal Online 2 there are levels upon levels of customisation that you can make. You may have learned to craft a basic shield, but you need to unlock “round shields” in order to craft all of the round shield variants. Add your materials to the relevant crafting table; with a shield these materials are separated into core materials, coating materials, and framing materials.

For every weapon variant there will be trade-offs, such as weight vs durability. These variations also have different resistances to different damage types such as bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing. It is up to you to work out the right combination for your play style. Like all things in Mortal Online 2, the crafting system is complex and layered. As well as working out the rationale and underlying systems implemented by Star Vault, you will receive crafting experience as you experiment.

Mortal Online 2 Metal Crafting Starter Guide

If you’re looking to kit yourself out in metal for that extra level of protection against the hardcore world of Mortal Online 2, things are a little more complicated. You want to start by finding some granum nodes in the wilderness which are fairly common and look like rock piles. Hold R on these granum nodes to mine granum piles. Collect the ore and return to the extractors and extraction grinders (which are just outside the exit you will have taken to find the graveyard). They look like windmills.

Place your granum piles inside the extraction grinder (the large wooden box) and leave them. It will take a little time for them to grind, more so if you’ve inserted more materials. This will result in your receipt of a wide range of ingredients including flakestone, bloodstone, amarantum, and the valuable granum powder. If you upgrade the related skill, you’ll receive more materials as well as rarer materials for each piece of ore you insert.

Important - How to smelt ore in Mortal Online 2: In order to smelt your newly acquired ore, return to the library. Go upstairs to the Extraction Librarian and purchase the Thermal Appliances skill-book. Then, take your ore to the extraction furnace outside the blacksmith.

You should now have everything you need in order to craft some metal objects. Just as with extraction, the more you craft, the more crafting experience you’ll receive. Which means that the next one you craft will be of better quality. This mechanic is not only satisfyingly lifelike but encourages a level of specialization that could really make Mortal Online 2 stand out from the MMORPG crowd.

We hope this Mortal Online 2 Beta Beginner’s Guide saved you some pain; we’ve brought it to you as part of our new Endless Sagas series. We want to give special thanks to YouTuber ESO whose own Mortal Online starter guide was very useful for the creation of this one as well as for our Mortal Online 2 beta review: Without his guidance, we probably never would have defeated that first pesky zombie.

Mortal Online 2 is still in beta-form and is receiving bi-monthly patches implementing significant changes. It’s a big game with bold ambitions and we look forward to seeing how it progresses. We’ve got an upcoming interview with the CEO of Star Vault where we’ll be asking him all the questions that you’re dying to hear answers to. If you'd like to put your skills to the test, you can sign-up for the beta here.

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