System mechanic — not covered elsewhere

The Endless Guide

The tutorial doesn't stop after its own steps — it just quietly becomes an endless supply of tasks, generated live from the game's own data

Blister Online's tutorial is only the first phase of a much larger system. Finish (or skip) the original tutorial and the game doesn't stop guiding you — it starts handing out fresh, skippable tasks pulled from the game's own live data, one at a time, forever. This page is about that ongoing task engine, not the fixed tutorial steps themselves.

Eight categories, all generated, none hand-written

Every task is generated from a registry the game already keeps — nothing is a hand-typed list, since a hand-typed list goes stale the moment new content is added:

A task's completion is never tracked separately — each one simply reads the same registry it was drawn from, so it's finished the instant the game itself says it is. Nothing has to notify the guide when you've done something; it already knows.

Preferences you actually control

Hunting, Gathering, and Achievements start switched off for a brand-new character — those three categories are enormous (the whole creature roster, every material, the entire achievement log) and would otherwise crowd out tasks that read like an actual thing to go and do. Every category can be toggled on or off individually through a real panel reachable from the console's own TASKS button — the toggles existed before the panel did, reachable only through the developer console, and that choice is remembered in your browser rather than in your save file, so it travels with you rather than being tied to one character. Each category also shows exactly how far through it you are, like "22 of 448," and reaching 100% with every category still switched off tells you so directly rather than leaving the panel blank. Don't like the task you're given? Skip it for a new one at any time.

Finding the place, without reading a word

A task that points somewhere specific gets its own on-screen guidance without you ever needing to read the task text. First, a distance and bearing appear directly in the console — "340m north-west," for instance — found by sampling outward from your position until the world itself answers with the right biome, rather than by any hand-placed coordinate. Later, a genuine directional arrow was added on the rim of the screen, swinging to track your camera as you turn. The arrow used to hide itself once you were within about 30 degrees of facing the target, and again once you were within 40 metres — both fixed after direct reports that the arrow disappeared exactly when you'd actually found what it was pointing at, or the moment you got close enough to want it confirmed. It now stays visible facing the target directly (sitting at the top centre of the screen, well clear of the crosshair) and turns into a stationary diamond once you've arrived, rather than vanishing outright either way.

A handful of exploring targets — the Great River, the Sea, the Endless Ocean, the Crater Pit and the Burn Ring beside it, the Quiet Place, the Haunted Cathedral, the Pit Stop, and the Far Lands — never get a marker at all, at any distance. According to the development log this isn't rarity or bad luck: the function this whole waypoint system asks for a location never reports water, structures, or these particular regions as a biome in the first place, so there's nothing for the search to find no matter how far it looks. These tasks still complete normally the moment you actually set foot in the right place — only the waypoint itself is missing for this specific handful.

A task that's about the interface rather than a place gets a completely different kind of guidance: a highlighted ring drawn directly around the real, live control you need to press — found from that control's actual on-screen position rather than a remembered spot, since the console's own button row is elastic and fits however many buttons the window has room for. If the control isn't currently visible on that row, the ring goes on whichever button opens the menu that contains it instead, so there's always something real to follow. This only happens for tasks that are genuinely about a piece of interface — earning an achievement doesn't ring anything, since no single button represents doing that.

Exploring is the one category that isn't reading the full registry

Every other category above draws from a genuinely complete list — the full creature roster, every recipe, every quest line. Exploring is the exception, and it's worth knowing why the number on that progress bar looks smaller than the game's own "over 120 biomes" headline. Rather than pulling from the world's real biome registry, the exploring category is built by throwing 4,000 random sample points across a fixed square around the map's origin and recording whichever biomes those points happen to land on — which comes out to roughly 62 biomes, not the full count, because a purely random scatter of points is never going to land on every single one, especially the rarer ones concentrated far from the centre. According to the development log, that sample used to be re-rolled fresh every time you loaded the game, so the exact number of biomes your progress was measured against could quietly shift between sessions — fixed by seeding the sample so it draws the same roughly-62 biomes every time now, which stopped the number moving on its own even though it's still a subset rather than the true total.

Version history

• The task engine itself, built headless first. Directly from two operator requests treated as one system: "the tutorial should keep going on forever... you should get a random task each time, with the option to skip... the player should be able to set their preferences," and "there should always be a waypoint on screen pointing you to where you have to go... you should be able to complete the entire tutorial without even reading the text." The very first version shipped with no UI, no waypoint, and no HUD line at all — just the pool, the selection rule, and the completion test, verifiable entirely from the console before any of the visible pieces were built on top of it.
• The original tutorial folded in as the first tasks. They aren't shuffled into the random pool — a new character is offered them in order, ahead of everything else, because their whole value is teaching the game in a deliberate sequence. Once that's done (or skipped), the endless pool takes over and never goes back.
• The console readout added: a distance and compass bearing to whatever the current task needs, found by asking the world directly rather than from any stored coordinate.
• Hunting, Gathering, and Achievements set to off by default for new characters, since between them they make up most of the pool by sheer size and were crowding out shorter, more inviting tasks. The toggles already existed — this only changed what a player who'd never opened the task panel would see first. Anyone who'd already set their own preferences kept exactly what they'd chosen.
• The on-screen arrow added — after initially deciding against one. The console readout had shipped with an explicit note that a screen-edge arrow "needs a frame to place" and wasn't worth building. That reasoning turned out to be wrong: an arrow doesn't need a frame at all, only the camera's current facing, which is available at any time. Once that was recognised, the arrow became the last visible piece of the original request.
• v1259 — fixed the arrow pointing to the completely wrong side of the screen. A goal genuinely to your right drew the arrow pointing left, and vice versa — the direction itself was always calculated correctly, but translating that direction onto the screen mirrored it left-to-right. A prior attempt to fix this exact bug had shipped and appeared to work, but every test it used happened to check only the one camera angle (facing the goal directly) where a left-right mirror produces an identical, correct-looking result — the one angle at which the bug is mathematically invisible. Re-verified across all five basic directions this time.
• v1359 — fixed the arrow disappearing the moment you looked directly at it or got close. Described above — the arrow used to vanish entirely both when a goal came near the centre of your view and again once you were within 40 metres of it, exactly the two moments a player most wants confirmation. It now stays visible at every angle and becomes a stationary diamond marker on arrival instead of disappearing.
• Fixed a failed location search being remembered forever. When the guide couldn't find a task's target biome nearby, that failure was cached with no expiry — meaning a task the guide once failed to place stayed unplaceable for the rest of the session, even after walking hundreds of thousands of units away to a completely different part of the world where the same search would have succeeded immediately.
• Fixed a brand-new character's progress readout claiming they were 93% through the tutorial before doing anything. Most categories track progress as "total tasks minus however many are still in the pool," which is right when the pool holds one entry per remaining thing — but the tutorial category only ever holds one entry at a time (whichever step you're currently on), so that same formula read a fresh character sitting on step 1 of 16 as having finished all but one of them. Tutorial progress is now read directly from the actual step you're on instead of derived from pool size.
• Fixed the exploring category's own list of biomes redrawing itself on every load. Its random sample wasn't seeded, so the same character could see a different total and a different set of "explored" biomes each time they played, with no way to tell whether that was a bug or a change in the world. The sample is seeded now, so a given save sees the same roughly-62-biome list every time — the list is still a subset of the full registry rather than the true total, which remains a known, unfixed gap rather than something this change addressed.
• The interface-highlighting ring added, described above — after realising the same reasoning that unlocked the on-screen arrow applied here too: a ring around a live control needs only that control's real position, not a frame.
• Fixed a real preferences panel replacing console-only access, described above, plus a genuine math bug in the progress counts: skill-related tasks only ever offer one goal per skill no matter your actual level, but the progress formula used for every other category (total minus what remains) read that single slot as "almost done" regardless — a level-75 character's skill progress displayed as 90% complete when the honestly-counted figure was closer to 9%. Skill progress is now counted per milestone rather than per pool slot.
• Fixed opening your inventory not completing the tutorial's own "open your inventory" step. The inventory moved to a sliding drawer some versions before this, and the tutorial's completion check had never been updated to look for the drawer instead of the older inventory window it still expected — silently stalling every new character at that exact step regardless of how correctly they'd actually opened their bag.

Trivia

• Because every task category is generated from a live registry rather than a fixed list, adding a brand-new creature, item, or questline to the game automatically expands the Endless Guide's pool with zero additional work — nothing about the task system itself has to know a new one exists.
• The world doesn't keep an actual list of its own biomes anywhere — biome identity is calculated from position and height on the fly — so the guide builds its own roster once, by sampling thousands of points across the map and recording what comes back, then caches the result.