1. Join up. Hit Join the Wastelands on /play or the Twitch panel (or type !startrpg in chat), then pick your class — the first pick is free. New recruits earn bonus XP (1.5×) until level 10, so your first levels fly by.

2. Explore. Then explore again. The Explore button is your engine: every trip pays XP (that's how you level up), caps (the currency), and a shot at weapons, chest gear, potions, salvage parts and enchanting essences. Pick a zone to bias what you find — the Off-License leans potions, the Motorway leans parts and tools. Sometimes a find offers to go deeper: bank it or push your luck for double, it's your funeral.

3. Exploring stirs things up. Every explore has a chance (~6%) of waking a mini-boss — a pile-on fight anyone can join for XP, caps and loot. No boss around? Get exploring: you're not just farming, you're beating the bushes. Big bosses roll in on their own schedule and hit much harder.

4. Fight together. When something's up: Attack (and the bigger Power hit), Block or Parry when the boss telegraphs, and Heal if your class can. Everyone who chips in shares the kill rewards — showing up matters more than topping the damage chart.

5. Recover & upgrade. Rest restores HP and sobers you up (yes, drinking is a mechanic — mind your impairment meter). Spend caps at the Shop and the 🛠 Workbench — forge weapons and reinforce chest/kit gear up a tier, repair the wear, and later: enchants, gear secondaries, prestige. It all snowballs from step 2.

Want a different look? Type !gender male or !gender female (or use the ♂/♀ toggle in the class panel) — free, swap anytime, changes your art on the overlays.

TL;DR: Explore to level up and flush out mini-bosses, batter what appears, spend the caps, repeat. The sections below go deep on every system.

Your main stats start higher and are the best place to pour your attribute points — but you're free to build however you like. See what each stat does in the Attributes section below.

Your first pick is free, and you get one free change after it — then that character's class is locked for good. Want to play something else? Roll an alt (below) and build it properly.

Your first character is your main, and it's locked in — it can never be deleted or replaced. On top of it you can run up to two alts: separate wastelanders with their own name, class, level, gear, caps and relics.

Alt creation unlocks once any of your characters hits Prestige 1. Take the reset once and the slot is yours.

What's shared, what isn't. Your Ledger, feats, Trophy Wall and daily claim belong to you as a person — they follow you across every character. Everything else is per-character: level, class, gear, caps, essences, parts, prestige, talents and relics all stay with the wastelander who earned them.

Alts appear on the leaderboard tagged as [ALT of yourname], so nobody's left guessing who's who. And in the relic raffle, mains get first claim — an alt only draws when no eligible main stood in the fight.

There's a full switcher on /play and in the Twitch panel — you never have to type any of this if you'd rather click.

You earn 1 attribute point per level. Spend them with the +1 buttons on your stats over on /play or the panel, and reset everything anytime with the Respec button (costs caps, doubling each time).

Most bonuses only tick over at thresholds, so points stack up before the next gain — except CON, which adds HP on every single point. Your max HP also rises +10 per level automatically, separate from stat points.

Bosses occasionally go ENRAGED — damage output spikes, so finish them fast. Mini-bosses can also appear while exploring. Everyone fighting the same boss shares the fight — team up!

If a boss goes untouched for too long it wanders off on its own. If the fight drags on past its time limit the boss flees — everyone who dealt damage still gets 30% consolation XP and caps. A full wipe (everyone dies) ends the fight with no rewards — hit Rest to regroup.

Pull your weight for loot. Caps and XP scale with how much you contribute (damage and healing both count). To roll for loot, you need to either deal a fair share of the fight or show up early and stick around — jumping in at the last second no longer earns you a Mythic drop.

Expeditions turn time away from the game into a scavenging run. Open the Expedition card on /play, choose the Off-License, Motorway, Estate or Bogs, then pick a 2h, 4h or 8h trip. Longer runs roll more finds. Your character cannot explore or fight while away; Recall brings them home early with a partial haul. Prestige players can also enter The Blackout, where each leg lets you push the haul and bust risk higher or stagger home safely.

Weapons, chest pieces, trinkets and kit pieces come in tiers, each tougher and pricier to upgrade than the last (Hunter pets instead level up 1-60 — see the Actions guide):

🪖 Kit pieces: Helmet, Gloves, Legs, Belt and Boots — defensive gear with its own drops (mini-bosses are the best source; bosses and Mystery Stashes too). Every piece adds flat soak + % damage reduction, and each slot has a signature: Helmet soaks hardest, Gloves +crit, Legs +dodge, Belt +potion pouch slots, Boots +explore XP & caps. Class rules apply — plate for warriors/paladins, leathers for rogues/hunters, weave for mages/healers.

Common → Rare → Epic → Legendary

Weapons, chest and kit gear then climb the Prestige ranks: Prestige → Prestige II → Prestige III. Trinkets top out at the rarest tier of all — Mythic.

Bags come in tiers too — from a basic pouch up to Mythic, looted from tougher bosses. Bigger, rarer bags carry more spare gear and potions.

Gear has durability that wears down as you fight. You'll get a warning in the feed as it runs low. At 0% the item does not shatter or disappear — it simply stops providing stats, perks and enchants until repaired. Wear is gentler at lower levels so new players aren't punished. Prestige tiers require both a minimum level (20/40/60) and salvaged parts, earned by dismantling spare gear.

On top of its tier, every weapon and defensive piece has a type that changes how it fights. Drops lean toward your class, but off-class gear is salvage rather than equipment: sell or scrap it. Mythic relics are the exception and can be worn by any class.

Weapons

Chest & defensive kit

The trade-off: casters hit like a truck but crumple fast, plate-wearers tank everything, and daggers/bows live and die on crits. Play to your class's strengths and compare the compatible gear that drops.

Every Rare or better weapon, chest or kit piece carries a random second stat on top of its main one — rolled the moment the item drops. Two identical-looking items can roll different secondaries, so check the teal badge before you scrap a "duplicate".

Weapons roll one of:

Chest & kit gear rolls one of:

The rules: forging keeps an existing secondary family and scales the number up with the new tier (a Common forged to Rare rolls its first one). Defensive secondaries stack across your chest, five kit slots and active trinket, but each family has a shared total cap. Stout tops out at +30% max HP across the whole equipped set; item cards and 📊 Total Stats show each family's current live ceiling. Before Prestige 10, a different secondary means finding a different item. After that, the Black Market can re-roll an equipped item's secondary to a guaranteed-different result. Commons have none.

Explores and boss kills occasionally shake loose an Essence — Murky, Potent or Pristine. The ritual is hungry: it takes 3 essences of one quality (plus some salvage parts) to bolt an extra bonus onto your equipped gear — via the 🔮 Enchant button on /play or !enchant weapon <name> in chat. !enchant on its own shows your pouch and the menu.

Weapon enchants (combat procs)

Chest & kit enchants (survival — castable on the chest and every kit piece: helmet, gloves, legs, belt, boots. Each worn piece holds its own enchant; stacked effects are capped so a six-piece wardrobe stays honest.)

Trinket enchants (scoundrel economics — all Pristine only, and the ritual is greedy: each one burns 5-10 Pristine essences per cast. They follow the trinket's Lv20 activation gate.)

The roll: better essences roll stronger numbers. Most enchants land somewhere in the band — but ~5% come out ⚡ SUPERCHARGED (well beyond the cap) and ~5% come out 💀 CURSED — the greedy roll: the strongest numbers in the game, stronger even than Supercharged, paid for with a drawback that genuinely bites. Take the deal or don't. Re-enchanting always overwrites.

🫧 The Distillery: 3 essences of one quality distil into 1 of the next up (plus a caps fee) — the still lives on the enchanting page. Run batches back-to-back and the still runs hot: better odds of a double yield, but growing odds the whole thing explodes and torches the batch. Your call.

The catch: an enchant sticks to the item. Forging or reinforcing it keeps the enchant — but swapping to a different item loses it for good. (Worn-out gear no longer shatters — at 0% durability it just goes dead, enchant and all, until repaired.)

Level 60 is the cap. Once you reach it you stop levelling and every bit of XP you earn starts filling a Prestige bar instead. Nothing resets — you keep all your gear, caps, bag and titles.

When the bar fills it automatically ranks you up — ⭐P1 → ⭐P2 → ⭐P3…, shown next to your name. No button to press: you bank the rank, the bar resets (any overflow XP carries over), and you collect the reward. P100 is the maximum Prestige rank.

Every rank through P99 stacks +2% XP and +5% caps, forever — a P10 banks half again in caps on everything. On reaching P100, the now-useless Prestige XP stack becomes Sovereign's Share: +25% personal boss-loot odds, while the caps bonus reaches +500%. Milestone ranks pop bonus titles: P5 Pickled Veteran, P10 Absolute Unit of the Wastes, P25 Landlord of the Last Pub.

📜 Veteran Contracts unlock at Level 30 — a bigger daily job (on /play next to the dailies) paying salvage parts, an essence, and a hefty chunk of XP towards the next level or Prestige rank.

Prestige also unlocks 🌑 The Blackout — an expedition zone where each leg asks you to PUSH ON (haul multiplies, bust risk climbs) or STAGGER HOME (bank it). It's the only expedition that drops Pristine essences. And the 🔧 Cursed Grinder re-rolls Prestige III and Mythic weapons, chest and kit pieces — including legs and relics — plus both buffs on a Mythic trinket. Costs double per item per roll each day; ~5% come out blessed and ~5% cursed.

Weapon signatures now climb to tier 5 (120 and 300 kills), and mastered weapons are remembered — re-equip one you've named before and half its signature comes back. The 📒 Ledger on /play tracks every weapon, chest piece, enchant and title you've ever owned, with a completion rank to chase — and it pays out now: a caps bounty at 50%, an essence cache at 75%, and the one-off title "The Compleat Wastrel" (plus caps and Pristines) at 100%.

The Talent Tree opens at Level 10. Every level from 10 through 60 grants 1 separate Talent Point alongside the normal attribute point (51 points), then every Prestige rank through P100 grants one more (100 points) — 151 total at P100. Open the full tree on /play or directly inside the Twitch extension, preview as many ranks as you like, then apply the build in one go. Chat players can inspect it with !talents or buy a single rank with !talent <name>.

The tree has three equally sized 103-point routes: Bruiser for damage, crits, Power and AOE; Survivor for HP, stronger recovery, lethal-hit saves and gear protection; and Scavenger for boss-loot chances, bags, repairs, parts and essences. A complete route plus its 35-point class strip costs 138, leaving 13 points for another route. At P25 the Ascended tiers and one mutually-exclusive major capstone open. Your class signature strip then grows at P25, P50 and P75.

Existing Perks and Back Room ranks transfer into matching talent nodes with every point preserved. Applied ranks lock in place and their remove controls grey out; changing direction requires a separately confirmed Paid Reset that clears the whole tree for caps and parts. Apply Build also asks for a second confirming press, and builds cannot change during encounters, PvP or expeditions.

The Long Ladder runs past the pub now: new milestones at P50 (Baron of the Burnt Motorway), P75 (Viceroy of the Vats) and P100 (Sovereign of Sod All), each a feat with a serious caps payout. Signature tier 5 also earns "The Regular", and P50 pours "Last Orders".

Daily reward — finish all three daily quests and the reward is claimed automatically: no extra button press. Claim on consecutive days to build a streak 🔥 — the payout grows each day up to a 7-day max. Resets at 00:00 UTC.

Daily quests — the Daily card shows 3 rotating tasks everyone shares each day (explore, deal boss damage, land crits, kill mini-bosses, heal). Finish them through normal play for bonus caps and XP. You can reroll only before any quest bar starts filling; once progress begins, that set is committed until the new set at 00:00 UTC.

Feats — the Feats button tracks permanent milestone achievements (kill 25 bosses, reach Level 50, prestige, bank 100k caps and more). Each one you unlock grants a title and a one-time caps payout.

Weekly season — every bit of XP you earn also counts toward the week's season leaderboard (check the Season button). Top the board when the week rolls over (Monday 00:00 UTC) to win a unique 👑 Wasteland Champion title and a big caps prize. Scores reset each week so everyone has a fresh shot. Everyone else isn't left empty-handed either — reach 🥉 Bronze, 🥈 Silver, or 🥇 Gold season XP milestones to bank a caps reward for your best tier at rollover.

Random events — exploring can trigger surprises: caps caches, a server-wide double-XP window, or a rare ✨ Shiny mini-boss with bigger rewards.

Drinking and... questionable substances raise your impairment: Sober → Tipsy → Wrecked → Absolutely Gone. The drunker you are, the more your attacks miss and the less damage you deal. It no longer affects how fast your gear breaks.

But it's not all bad: while Tipsy you get a bonus crit chance (Liquid Confidence), and while Absolutely Gone every swing has a small chance to skip the miss check and hit for massive damage (Blackout Rage) — drinking is a gamble, not just a tax.

You now sober up over time on your own, and being healed clears a little too — plus Rest and tonics knock it down faster. So it spikes during a rough boss fight, then wears off.