Luminary tips for beginners

I was positively surprised how many of my readers turned up in Luminary and set me as their recommender. As only a handful of my readers tend to comment on my posts, I tend to forget how many lurkers there are. :) It was really nice to meet some of you in game and chat, although that obviously is a problem with my US readers and the time zone difference. I do get a message every time somebody who set me as recommender levels up, and if I don't have them on my friends list yet, I send them a friends invite. I do get recommendation points (RP) for people leveling past level 10, but right now they aren't used for anything. The Korean version has an NPC who hands out goodies for these points, maybe it'll be implemented later. Anyway, since I noticed some common problems people starting to play the game have, here is a list of some beginner's tips for Luminary:

• By default Luminary starts in windowed mode, with a fixed resolution. That is fine on a small laptop, but the window is tiny on a 22"+ monitor. So the first thing to do in game is to go to Menu, System, Setting, and put a checkmark next to the Use Full Screen box. Then relog, and the game will be in full screen mode. The disadvantage of that is that Luminary doesn't react well to Alt-tabbing, and can even crash to desktop on trying to get back.
• You start the game with the first quest already active, and the quest instructions in the lower right corner of the screen. If you ever lose that window, you can get it back via Menu, Quests, selecting the quest, and choosing quest relay.
• The first quests are from Sarah, who sends you to the next city to Airin, then back to the starting city. Then there is a series of quests from McCoy (crafting), Siegfried (fighting), and Gieselle (resource gathering). Do those in the suggested order. Try to keep the Siegfried and Gieselle quests at the same level, the monsters that Siegfried tells you to kill are usually those who drop the ingredients Gieselle wants to have. So sometimes you need to kill a couple more than the Siegfried quest says to do both quests. By the time you have done all Gieselle quests, you should already be level 20, and Siegfried leads you on to level 25.
• Two things I already mentioned in my review: Quests asking you to click on a "red box" or "red square" on the Game Info screen are talking about the black on white frame with a thin red border on the mid-low left of that screen. You first need to open the Game Info on the page you are asked to open for that to work. And second, the quest that asks you to craft a level 8 weapon fails to mention that you probably don't have the skill to do so. Buy at least 2 manufacturing books for that weapon from the market before doing the crafting, otherwise you will produce a worthless junk weapon.
• If ever you *do* produce a worthless junk weapon, you can still use it to enchant a weapon of the same type. Select the MIX window in your inventory, put the good weapon in the "power-up" field, the bad weapon in the "normal" field, select an element like Wind, and press Enchant. A wind enchanted weapon has bonus damage against earth based mobs, etc., in a circle of the 4 elements. You can find what mob is what element in the Game Info, but low level mobs tend to not have one.
• I recommend sword, spear, or axe as the weapon for your first character, as the stat distribution for those is easiest. Gun and bow are still okay, you just need additional agility, and arrows / bullets. Stay away from canes, as these not only need lots of different stats, but also consume mana, and combat is thus much more expensive. Wait until your first character is rich, and make a second character with cane if you wish to become a magic user.
• If you do the Siegfried quest to kill country rats, you should get a medal which allows you to summon a horse at level 15. Use F9 to mount up. A horse also doubles the size of your starting inventory. The first horse you get comes completely trained. So do *not* feed your horse, and turn off auto-feeding in the Status Info, Horse tab, because otherwise your horse will simply eat out of your inventory.
• Your first horse coming trained also means you don't need to read Horse training skill books for the moment. If you experiment with various skills and find that you wasted skill points, you should be able to reset them at level 10 and 30 for free. Later that only works with paid for skill reset tickets, so don't miss the chance at level 30 to rethink your skills like I did.
• At level 20 you can mine using a hoe in Shenburry, Ankha, or Kucha, or farm using a sickle in Athravan. That is expensive, you pay around 50k for the tools, which only lasts for 2 days or so, and 10k to 20k for a 10-hour mining/farming license. But some of the resources you can mine/farm sell for 1k to 2k each, and you can mine/farm afk, so this can be profitable. Check market prices, usually mining brings more than farming. Your chance to find something per attempt is 10% plus 1% per skill book you read, so read at least 10 skill books to get your chance up to 20%.
• Skill books marked BGN for beginner only get you so far, usually to skill 10. After that you need INT books for the next 10 skill levels, which are made out of 5 BGN books. You see how this gets exponentially more expensive. Don't overpay for INT books on the market if they are listed for much more than 5 times the price of BGN books. Rather set up a manufacturing request, or learn how to make INT books yourself. You need to either make the tools for that, or get them from a series of quests in the Monkey Hot Springs for levels 30+.

Well, I hope that covered most of them. Feel free to add your own tips in the comments section.