Duskmere drops you on a beach with almost no explanation. This guide covers the first hour: the controls, the opening quest chain, and the four skills it quietly teaches you before letting you off the island.
Nothing here is missable and nothing here costs money. If you would rather work it out yourself, stop reading — the game is designed to be figured out. If you would rather not spend ten minutes clicking the ground and wondering why your character won't move, read the next section at least.
How do you move? (Read this one)
WASD. That's it.
W/S— forward and backA/D— strafe left and rightQ/E— turn the cameraSpace— jump, and vault over low things like fences and crates- Mouse wheel — zoom
- Middle-mouse drag — orbit the camera around yourself
Clicking the ground does nothing. Duskmere has no click-to-move, and that catches out nearly everyone arriving from Old School RuneScape or a similar game. You drive the character directly, like an action game. Once it clicks, it makes combat positioning possible in a way tile-clicking never did — but the first thirty seconds can be baffling if nobody tells you.
Your abilities sit on a hotbar along the bottom, bound to the number keys 1 through 9. You will
not have much to put on it yet. That comes with levels.
Where are you?
Stormfen: a small island of palms, banana trees and shell-strewn sand, with a village, a pier, a handful of moored boats and a wrecked ship. It is deliberately gentle. The only things living here are crabs, frogs and rabbits, and none of them will hunt you down.
There is one road through it, in the sense that there is one obvious direction. Follow it.
The opening quest: A Wizardly Introduction
The whole first hour is one quest chain, and it is structured as a loop: the Wizard sends you to someone, that someone teaches you a skill and gives you the tool for it, you do a small job, and you come back. Four times. Then you leave.
Step 1 — Talk to the Wizard
He is standing near where you wake up and he is not subtle about wanting your attention. He will tell you he was expecting you, get flustered about having said so, and send you to the village.
He is worth talking to properly. The quest advances on conversation, so if nothing seems to be happening, you have probably walked away mid-sentence.
Step 2 — The villager, and your first axe
Find the villager by the house. They will ask you for five logs for their fire, and hand you a bronze axe to get them with.
To chop: walk up to any tree and use it. Trees are everywhere on Stormfen — you will not have to look. Each log gives Woodcutting experience, and felled trees grow back within a few seconds, so you can stand in one spot and work through a small grove.
Early swings miss a lot. That is not you doing it wrong; the odds of a successful chop improve as your Woodcutting level rises. At level 1 you fail more often than you would like. It gets better quickly.
Take the five logs back for 50 coins — your first money.
Step 3 — The fisherman, and your first rod
Back to the Wizard, who sends you to the fisherman down at the water. He gives you a fishing rod and asks for five raw fish.
Fishing spots are marked on the water's edge around the island — look for the disturbed patches near the pier. Use one with the rod equipped and you will start pulling up fish.
This is a good moment to notice that gathering in Duskmere is not a minigame. There is no timing bar and no rhythm to learn. You use the thing, you wait, you get the item, your level goes up. The depth is in what you do with the materials later.
Step 4 — The guard, a tinderbox, and your first fight
The Wizard sends you on again, this time to the guard. He hands you a tinderbox and asks for five frog legs.
Which means killing frogs. They are hopping around the island's wetter patches and they are the gentlest enemy in the game — this is the fight the tutorial has been building to, and it is deliberately not much of a fight.
Walk up to a frog and attack. Combat is real-time: your character swings on a timer, and everything that matters — whether you hit, how hard, when your cooldowns come back — is decided by the world rather than by your computer. You have nothing to manage yet beyond standing in range.
The tinderbox is for Firemaking: use it on logs to light a fire. You are not required to for this step, but you have an axe and there are trees, so it costs you nothing to pick up the skill now.
Hand in the five frog legs and the guard pays you properly:
- a bronze sword
- a wooden shield
- an iron helm
- a solid lump of combat experience
That is your first real kit. Equip all three — Duskmere has thirteen equipment slots and you have just filled three of them.
Step 5 — The pirate, and the boat out
One more trip to the Wizard, who points you at the pirate by the water. Talk to him and he will take you off Stormfen to the mainland.
That is the end of the tutorial. It is also the point of no hand-holding.
What you should have when you leave
| Thing | Where it came from |
|---|---|
| Bronze axe | The villager |
| Fishing rod | The fisherman |
| Tinderbox | The guard |
| Bronze sword, wooden shield, iron helm | Finishing the frog job |
| ~50+ coins | The log delivery |
| Levels in Woodcutting, Fishing, Firemaking and Character | Doing all of the above |
Four skills started, a weapon, a full starter kit and pocket money, in about an hour.
What to do next
You will land near Lightshire, the mainland's hub city. It has the things you now need: a general store, a blacksmith, a bank, the Grand Exchange, a tavern, stables, and a bounty board.
Three things worth doing in your first session there:
- Take a bounty. The board gives you three contracts a day, matched to your level. They pay roughly double what killing the same things unprompted would, so there is no reason not to have one active whenever you are fighting.
- Go to the Heartlands, not the woods. The farm country around the city is levels 1–10 and nothing in it is hostile. Mirkwood — the dead grey forest — is also flagged 1–10 but has skeletons and spiders in it. Heartlands first.
- Don't sell your materials yet. You will want logs, ore, leather and fish for Smithing, Tailoring, Cooking and Alchemy later. The Grand Exchange will still be there.
The thing that most often goes wrong at this stage is wandering into a region you are not ready for. The world does not gate you — you can walk into the volcano at level 5 if you insist. The level bands go roughly: Heartlands and Mirkwood 1–10, the Peaks of Elir 10–15, the Swamp 15–20, the Old Wood 20–30, and the Cinderfell 30–45. A few elite creatures sit deliberately above their region's band as a warning; if something is a much higher level than everything around it, that is the point.
And if you get stuck, ask. The Discord is where most of the answers live, and new-player questions get answered fastest of all.