Start here

Nothing in the mod opens until you are measured. Look for a Hunter Rank Evaluator and use it. The Evaluation rolls three things: your class, your style within that class, and your Hunter rank.

Class and style can both be rerolled as many times as you like before you accept. Your rank cannot be rerolled — so if you are chasing a specific rank, your only lever is the world settings that control the odds.

Take your time here. Accepting is what grants your first abilities, and nothing is handed out until you do.

Gates are rifts that open into instanced dungeons. Each carries a rank from E to S, and the rank tells you how hard what is inside will hit.

Start at the bottom. E and D gates exist to teach you the loop: go in, clear it, take the reward, come out. Mine any mana crystals you find - Silk Touch preserves the deposit and Fortune increases the yield.

Watch your Fatigue. It builds as you fight and it does not care that you were winning.

Keep going and the Cartenon Temple will find you - it is guaranteed to appear within your first three gates, and it is the next step.

Getting a job at the Evaluation made you a Hunter. The Cartenon Temple is what makes you a Player, and it is guaranteed to appear within your first three gates - so this happens early, ready or not.

When the summons is up, hold crouch on the ground for two seconds to answer it. Particles confirm it is counting; releasing resets it.

Then fight the Statue of God and lose. That is the intended outcome. The temple will not actually let you die on this first visit - the killing blow is intercepted and the System asks whether you want to become a Player instead. Say yes and you are pulled back to the overworld, awakened.

Not ready? Hold crouch for four seconds to withdraw. The summons re-opens and you lose nothing.

Now that the System is yours, press N to open the panel. This is where everything lives: your stats, your skill points, your quests and your class information.

Your style decides your native ability tree, not just a damage bonus. A Fighter running one style plays nothing like the same class running another. Read your style page before you spend anything.

To fight: R toggles combat mode, and 1 through 8 use whatever ability is equipped in that slot. Z flips to your second page of equipped skills, so you have sixteen within reach. X, C, V and B are fixed quick keys - Melee, Ruler's Authority, Dash and Aura - and cannot be reassigned. Full list on the Keybinds page.

Every level costs level x 16 + 8 XP, which means the total to reach level N is exactly 8 x N squared. The curve is gentle early and steep late.

Each level gives you 3 skill points to spend in the panel. Points go into Strength, Vitality, Agility, Sense and Intelligence, and what those do depends heavily on how you fight — an Intelligence point is worth far more to a Mage than to a Tanker.

There is a ceiling: the default level cap is 150, and reaching it is what reopens the Cartenon Temple for the last time.

The System starts setting you Daily Quests. They reset every day and they are the most reliable progression in the mod.

They are not optional in spirit. Failing a daily carries a penalty, and the penalty is designed to be unpleasant enough that you remember it. If your world has punishment switched off in the settings, this is much gentler.

While you are out clearing gates, keep an eye out for Urgent Quests — timed objectives that fire mid-dungeon, more often inside Red Gates and procedural dungeons.

At level 40 — adjustable between 20 and 100 in world settings — the Job Change Quest becomes available. This is the biggest decision in the mod.

Passing it lets you take a Vessel: the inherited power of a Monarch or a Ruler. Monarchs give you a themed skill tree that unlocks as you level. Rulers hand you their Spiritual Body Manifestation immediately and unlock shared Ruler abilities afterward.

The Shadow Monarch is the one most people come for — it is the path that lets you extract shadows from things you kill and build an army out of them.

Vessel abilities are level-gated on a shared ladder: 55, 60, 65, 70, 75, 85, 90, 95, 100, and finally 120 for Spiritual Body Manifestation.

If you took the Shadow Monarch, your other axis of growth is the army itself — how many shadows you can hold, what rank they climb to, and which ones you can get. Bosses you beat are candidates for extraction.

Alongside this, runestones teach abilities permanently. The important rule: a runestone works even when the ability does not belong to your class or style. Your style decides what you are natively given, not what you are allowed to learn.

The Secret Quest becomes available from level 30 and is how you get the key to the Demon King's Castle — a twenty-floor tower that is the mod's long endgame.

The floors escalate. Vulcan holds Floor 10. Floor 15 puts a genuine choice in front of you at Radiru Castle: make a pact, or take what you want by force. At the summit, Baran waits with Kaiselin.

If you get stuck inside, you are not trapped: /slr stuck returns you to the current floor's entrance and /slr dkc leave abandons the castle while keeping your completed floors.

Spiritual Body Manifestation is the top of every Vessel tree. For the Shadow Monarch specifically it wants four things at once: level 120, shadow storage usage of 60, Shadow Exchange unlocked, and 10 floors of the Demon King's Castle cleared.

Beyond that sit the things that do not follow the main line. Red Gates are frozen worlds you cannot simply walk out of. Monarch Territories open onto the domains of individual Monarchs. And the hardest fights in the mod — Monarch-tier bosses — are waiting whenever you think you are ready.

The climb ends at level 150, which reopens the Cartenon Temple one last time.