Your first hour in Britain

TIS is an idle game wearing Ultima Online's clothes. You do not steer a character around a map — you pick something to be doing, and it keeps doing it. A gathering activity resolves one attempt every 14.3 seconds, and each attempt is a roll at the material, a roll at the skill, and a roll at a stat point. Then it does it again.

Progress does not stop when you close the tab. Up to 8 hours of whatever you left running is simulated and handed to you when you come back — see Offline Progress for exactly which activities count.

Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence. Each one caps at 100 on its own, but the three together can never exceed 225. That second number is the one that matters: you cannot have all three at 100, and choosing where the missing 75 points come from is the first real decision you will make.

How they actually go up

You do not spend points. A stat rises on its own while you use it, on a roll that gets steadily meaner as the number climbs — about 9% per attempt at 10, down to 1% at 90, which is the floor. The early points come quickly and the last ones take real time.

There are 38 skills. Any one of them can reach 100 — Grandmaster — and they all train the same way stats do: by being used, on a roll that thins out as the number climbs.

The catch is the second ceiling. Your character has a total skill cap, and it starts at 1,000 — every skill you own, added together, may not exceed it. That is 10 Grandmaster skills' worth and no more. When the total is full, every skill stops gaining at once.

Every gathering and crafting skill in the game requires an active tool. No pickaxe, no mining. The good news is that your first full set is free.

The Provisioner's welcome kit — free, once

Walk into any town, open the Provisioner, and accept the welcome. You are handed a bag holding one Iron-tier copy of all 10 tools. They are blessed, which in this game means one specific thing: they do not drop when you die. Every other tool you ever own will.

Pickaxe

Hatchet

Fishing Pole

Skinning Knife

Blacksmith Hammer

Carpenter's Saw

Tinker's Tools

Mortar and Pestle

Tailor's Kit

Writer's Quill

If you break your last one

Tools wear out and vanish, and the game will not let that strand you. The Provisioner also gives away makeshift tools — Makeshift Pickaxe, Makeshift Hatchet, Makeshift Carpenter's Saw, Makeshift Tinker's Tools — one of each every 1 hour, free. They work exactly like an Iron tool but last only 35 uses: enough to gather the materials for a real one, never enough to live on.

You can also just buy an Iron Skinning Knife or a set of Tinker's Tools outright, and gold is easy enough to come by. But the intended answer is the next chapter.

Tools are made by Tinkering, out of ingots and planks. Which means the whole opening of the game is one loop, and it closes on itself:

1. 1
   Mine Iron Orein the Britain Mines or Minoc Mines
2. 2
   Smelt it into Iron Ingotsright-click the ore — smelting trains Mining too
3. 3
   Chop Woodin Yew Forest
4. 4
   Carve it into Wood Planksright-click the wood — that is Carpentry
5. 5
   Tinker the toolingots + planks, at the Tinkering bench

What each tool costs at the base tier — and note that a tool's own recipe is what makes Tinkering the skill you cannot skip:

Tool	Serves	Ingots	Planks
Pickaxe	Mining	5	4
Hatchet	Lumberjacking	3	4
Fishing Pole	Fishing	1	8
Skinning Knife	Camping	2	—
Blacksmith Hammer	Blacksmithing	4	2
Carpenter's Saw	Carpentry	3	2
Tinker's Tools	Tinkering	3	—
Mortar and Pestle	Alchemy	1	—
Tailor's Kit	Tailoring	2	—
Writer's Quill	Inscription	1	1

The ladder that follows

Nine materials, and the tool you hold decides how far its skill can climb. This is the table to come back to when a skill stalls.

Full detail, including the skill bonus each tier carries while you hold it, is on the Tools page.

There are 30 places on the map, and moving between them takes real time — between 2 and 10 minutes, scaled by how far apart they actually are on the map you are looking at. Britain to the mines is about 2 minutes; Britain out to the Yew Forest is nearer 4.

Where you stand decides what you can do, and for the two skills a new player leans on hardest, that is a real gate:

Mining

Only in a mine — Britain Mines, Minoc Mines. Not in town.

Lumberjacking

Only in a forest — Yew Forest.

Fishing

Anywhere. All 3 towns work their own water.

Vendors

Every real town has a Provisioner, Healer, Blacksmith, Mage and Stable Master. The Foreign Exchange is Britain only.

Type /journal in Local chat to open your Quest Log. Inside are 7 lines, one per thing a new character ought to try, and they are the single best-paying activity available to you in your first few hours — not for the gold, but for the Cap Stones.

Every line runs in tiers. Each tier you turn in pays gold, Virtue XP, a weapon, and tier × 10 Cap Stones — so a Tier 3 turn-in alone is worth 30 points of permanent skill cap. Nothing else in the early game comes close.

Miner's Bounty and Woodsman's Due carry a fourth, refined-material tier the others do not — one more reason those two are the ones to open with. Full reward detail is on the Quests page.

It will happen, and it is worth knowing exactly what it costs before it does. The short version: you keep your skills and your stats. Death takes your things, not your progress.

Getting back up

Say Res in Local chat

You stand up where your body is, healed to full. This is the one you want — you are already next to your things.

Teleport to Town

Hops your ghost to Britain instantly. It does not resurrect you, and it leaves your pile behind. A last resort.

An Ankh at home

Takes you back to your house and resurrects you in one step, once you own one.

Everything above is about earning a living. This is about surviving the thing that interrupts it — and you do not have to find a monster to start. Every town keeps a Training Hall: a townhouse with a straw practice post inside, a Combat Trainer who will call you over if you look like you need it, and a chest of makeshift weapons by the door.

Start at the chest. It holds one crude weapon for each weapon skill — a makeshift sword, shiv, club and bow — free to take, one of each at a time, and the chest restocks the moment yours is gone. They deal a single point of damage, which does not matter here at all: skills climb on swings, not on wounds, and the post has no opinion about being hit softly. (Wrestling needs nothing from the chest. Your hands came with the character.)

Then walk up to the post and hit it. It never hits back, it never dies, and it trains your fighting skills for real — up to 30, and then it stops paying. That ceiling is the point rather than a limitation: the hall exists to get you to the bottom of five ladders and then send you off them.

Reach 30 in any of them and the trainer hands over a starter kit, once per skill. Take all five and you walk away with 250 bandages, 250 cooked fish and four weapons, without having fought a single thing that could hurt you.

Two skills climb quietly while you do it — Tactics and Anatomy ride along on every swing, and Parrying trains too if you are holding a shield. None of the three earns a kit of its own; they simply come with the practice.

After 30 the post has nothing left to teach you, and that is the moment to go and use what it gave you — the Britain Sewers are the shallowest water in the game, and Sewer Slayer in your Quest Journal pays you for going there. Further along, an Attack Dummy of your own (Carpentry, in a house you own) picks the ladder back up and carries it to 75 — but that is a long way off, and the square you are standing in is free.

1. Open the Provisioner in Britain and take the free tool kit.
2. Type /journal and read the quest lines. Pick Miner's Bounty.
3. Travel to the Britain Mines — about 2 minutes — and start Mining. Go and do something else.
4. Come back to a pile of Iron Ore, a chunk of Mining skill, and Strength and Dexterity you did not have to think about.
5. Smelt the ore into ingots. Turn 25 of the ore in for Tier 1 and pocket 10 Cap Stones.
6. Chop wood, carve planks, and tinker yourself a Dull Copper pickaxe the moment you can — Iron stops training you at 75.
7. When something kills you, take a makeshift weapon from the chest in any town's Training Hall and hit the Training Post until a fighting skill reads 30, then see the Combat Trainer for bandages, food and a real weapon.
8. Everything after that is your business.