System mechanic — not covered elsewhere

The Tutorial

Sixteen steps, watched passively in the background. It never takes control, and it never grants anything

Offered once, on a fresh character, as a small "WELCOME TO BLISTER" prompt the player can accept or decline. Taking it opens a HUD checklist that quietly watches what the player does and ticks itself forward — there's no camera lock, no forced pause, and no modal that blocks play. The game's own development notes describe a deliberate split with the separate in-game Guidebook: the tutorial teaches the verbs — the things you actually do with your hands — while the Guidebook covers the nouns, the systems and vocabulary the tutorial doesn't have time for. The tutorial's final step is opening the Guidebook itself, which is how "every single mechanic" gets covered without gating the game behind an hour of forced instruction.

The sixteen steps

The last two steps were added later, at a direct request to also teach resizing the interface and founding a town. Resizing is placed second rather than last — it's the one step that makes every later panel easier to read, so it comes before the player has to squint through the rest. Founding a town is placed dead last, deliberately, for the opposite reason: a Charter Stake and the ground it's planted on together cost 24 Iron Bar, 6 Gold Bar, 40 Plank, 60 Stone and ¤5,000 — far more than a player who's just crafted their first sword out of three iron bars can afford. Placed anywhere earlier it wouldn't teach anything, it would simply stall the whole sequence behind an unaffordable goal; placed last, it stands as a goal to grow into rather than an errand blocking the rest of the walkthrough. The Guidebook handoff still happens immediately before it, so "every single mechanic" is still covered without gating that behind a goal measured in real playtime.

Step 7 makes the player actually craft their first sword rather than handing one over for free — a deliberate choice, consistent with the game's principle that gear should be earned rather than given, even in the tutorial. Every single completion check reads something the game was already tracking anyway (items held, skill level, lifetime kills, lifetime goods sold, quest progress) rather than inventing new state just for the walkthrough, so nothing about the tutorial itself can be gamed or cheesed into completing early.

Skipping it

A SKIP control sits in the panel's header at all times. Declining the initial offer, or skipping partway through, ends the checklist immediately with a toast reminding the player they can still open the Guidebook manually any time. Finishing all sixteen steps naturally does the same — there's no reward beyond that reminder, since the tutorial is designed purely to teach, never to pay out.

Version history

• The Tutorial added, directly from the request "add a game to the tutorial, which introduces the player to every single mechanic and thing there is to do in the game... but they have an option to skip it," specced out alongside the Guidebook as its verbs-versus-nouns counterpart.
• Repeated wording fixes across many later versions — the walkthrough's hints have needed correcting several times as other systems changed under it: outdated key names (the inventory and menu keys were reassigned more than once since launch), a mining hint that told players to look for "dark veins" that don't actually exist in this game's ore rendering, and a step that told players to press [TAB] to "open" the inventory when the bag was already open by default and that key actually closed it. Each fix changed only the sentence shown to the player — never a floor, a roll, or a completion test.
• A step-numbering mismatch fixed — the toast announcing a newly-reached step and the panel's own counter briefly disagreed with each other by exactly one on every single step advance, which the game's own notes call out as "the worst possible place for the player to start doubting the instructions," since it happened in the first five minutes of a new character's life.
• Two steps added, taking the walkthrough from fourteen steps to sixteen: resizing the interface (placed second, since it makes every later step easier to actually read) and founding a town (placed dead last, since its real cost is far beyond what a player has this early — see above).
• A real stall fixed — crafting the tutorial's iron sword in one uninterrupted trip to the crafting panel could leave a player with zero bars and zero spare iron, exactly what the tutorial's own numbers add up to, while an earlier step still required holding a bar and a plank that no longer existed — permanently blocking progress without another trip back to the mines. That step now checks that the crafting actually happened rather than checking current inventory, the same approach already used elsewhere in the walkthrough for this exact class of problem.

Trivia

• The "mine six iron" step has been rewritten three separate times purely to add facts a new player couldn't otherwise know — what ore actually looks like, that it's well outside the starting city walls, and that a single rock never runs out and doesn't need to be abandoned for another once it stops giving iron on a given attempt.
• Skipping or finishing the tutorial are treated identically by the game's own save state — both simply stop the checklist for good, on that character, with no difference in what's unlocked afterward.
• The panel deliberately never grants any item, cash, or XP on its own — every single one of its sixteen steps is satisfied only by the player actually doing the thing in the live game world.