Arete Landing

Arete Landing is the current Playfield where new players arrive, added in Patch 18.7 which was released on April 21, 2015. Because of the extensive work done in the previous starting area, it is recommended to read the ICC Shuttleport article for tips about starting out; the facts that are not specific to the area are generally still valid, for example the Health and Nano Kits section.

Low Level Challenge

You want a level 1 character on Rubi-Ka and outtahere. Then you can run Missions for QL1 YES Support 1010 SMGs with +5 Sense, QL1 Second-Hand Old English Trading Co. pistols with +5 Intelligence, QL1 Cheap Soft Pepper Pistols with +2 BM, MM, and MC, or QL1 Tsakachumi PTO-HV Counter-Sniper Rifles with +4 Agility. You may or may not care about any of the XP or items here; just turn off XP when crafting if you do want things and when getting money for crafting them. But how to skip through the main quest? Well, there is no main quest. There is a quest to get an ID card, but that is only one of two ways out. The other is to pay Vaughn Hammond 15,000 credits. For a quick, if not easy 15K, run to the reclaim terminal if you want, otherwise straight to the Underground, where the Fleas and Thief are. At coordinates 3448, 889, you will find the Credit Card. AO Universe: "If you are looking to bypass Arete Landing and get right into ICC HQ, right click on the Credit Card in your Inventory, and say Yes at the pop up. You will be given 15k Credits. You can then go straight to Vaughn Hammond and bribe him to let you leave. Or of course, you can pocket the credits."

Quests

Quests are always little complicated by the question of "where?" due to the orange indicator on the Compass. The Compass, like most everything else on the screen, can be moved as desired. The Landing area is probably one of the more complicated, due to the vertical element of the map and a maze of walls at the ground level and a few invisible textures on scaffolding that looks as though you should be able to walk through it when you can't. AO is a game where you are rewarded extravagantly for taking your time and thinking things through, so this is as good a time as any to get in that groove. The AO Universe walkthrough linked to below should be sufficient if you find yourself stuck on the main quests or want to be sure of getting all of the side quests, but there are some Notes below here too. The Vendors section of the AOU guide has info on quests and crafting, including our old friend Antonio Stacklund, who has like us moved on from ICC Shuttleport; not just what you can see for yourself in the vendors' inventory.

• Quick checklist of NPCs with side missions: Marcus Stone, Alex Gibbs, Patrick Sun, Antonio Stacklund, Greedy Desert Reet, Leet King, Shady Guy, Leonora Marty (unless you pocket the money) and the alien Karli Cappelleri. Remi Gallois gives a quest inaccessible by free-to-play players (Froobs).

Notes

• Marcus Stone has a sidequest not noted by AOU; helping his wounded workers. The quest says to right click instead of left clicking as with the extinguisher, but you must place the icon on your quickbar and target the wounded worker. If in a team, one person will talk to Marcus Stone and get the firefighting quest. The other must wait until they put out the fire to talk to Marcus.
• Personalized Basic Robot Brain, which adds to Sense, is not increased in effectiveness every Quality Level. So AOU's "higher is better" advice, given the low levels of Robot Junk available, is pretty misleading. In general, higher QL is better, but certain quality levels, where the requirements are as low as they can be and the bonuses are as high as they can be, are better still. These are called Breakpoints and there is a whole article here, with a list of Breakpoints on some of the more useful items in AO. The levels of Robot Junk you want to watch for, for the foreseeable future, are 1, 10 and 26, unless you are making Junkmetal Armor and that is more fun than it is effective. Note that the level of the MasterComm is irrelevant to the quality of the finished product but VERY relevant to the total cost, and that this is your first opportunity to attempt that time-honored AO skill of Waiting Until The Right QL Is For Sale (in this case, QL 1). There will be plenty of MasterComms available later anywhere on Rubi-Ka if that does not work out.
• Most likely you will waltz in and pick the lock on the Storekeeper's strongbox without even thinking about it, just like all the other insanely dangerous things that have gone before. But in the unlikely event that the guard dog is not busy fighting the ICC Peacekeeper, you will have to wait for that or arrange it.
• If combat did not become real with the guard dog, it will on the way to Find the Thief. The monsters aren't just around every corner, they spawn incessantly and leap at you. Get the Newcomer's armor and level it, and be prepared at any time to fight at least two fleas. Stacklund's stuff might help but is expensive.
• Either Marco Spida or Sarah Greene is a sidequest, or you must do one but don't have to do the other, or you have to do both but they are triggered in parallel rather than in series. Marco's is triggered first, and is probably optional. But you probably don't want to miss out on those nanos.
• "The Credit Card": If you have played before, you probably roughly know your priorities on the choice of 15K credits or the valuable full Omni-Med Suit. If not, note that you will want the suit anyway so you can have better Implants, ten thousand is not that much money later on, and taking the suit now will save a lot of time. Clanners would have to make an Omni character, transfer money at Borealis or somesuch to buy the suit, traipse around Omni-1 and market etc to buy all the pieces, and go transfer again. That's why you can still make a bit of money selling suits in Clan cities: suits, even at inflated prices, cost next to nothing in intermediate and late game terms, but obtaining them takes a fair bit of time.

Mini Toolbar and Specials

Lower left hand side, top button: Commands. Choose Help/Settings. Choose Settings. (Preferences tab, default) Expand GUI. Click on the red dot next to Control Center. Scroll down to the bottom; activate the empty dot called, "Mini Toolbar". Look up the top right of the screen, and you will see a very thin bar with icons: this is your new best friend, and you could do worse than have the Wear tab up all the time for hot-swapping equipment for your entire career; this only becomes more rewarding as the challenges increase, whereas you will be changing gear more often at lower levels, so there is really no bad time to start learning it. The other windows should be opened and closed as needed.

Special Attacks such as Fast Attack, Fling Shot, or Burst fire can be found on the Mini Toolbar under Commands, but otherwise are hidden away much more than they were before. There are dedicated hotkeys by default for these actions, and you can find what they are by navigating the same as for the Mini Toolbar, except instead of the Preferences tab, you look at the Fixed Keys and Key Bindings tabs. Or you can take a route that is easier to implement, but builds up habits that lead away from the quickest, most efficient gameplay, and add icons to your quickbar. The icons can be found at Commands > Control Panel, which toggles a window of icons including Specials.

Windows

They are best taken off of the chain. To do this, right click on the top of each window; it will now be stuck to your cursor, and you can place it back anywhere on the screen by left clicking. A tab will appear at the top of the window. Do this again with the tab, dropping it onto the top of another window, and they will now be stuck together, and you can tab between them. Combining the windows saves some space, obviously, and if the windows are not too dissimilar in size and shape, there will be no downside. You can even use the "Programs" window as an alternative to the Quickbars for nanos that are cast less often and out of combat. Same goes for the "Inventory" window that is not found on the Mini Toolbar, but on the lower left: you can click on meds here instead of using them from the quickbar, if desired, and managing backpacks of loot is a lot easier if the inventory is always up somewhere. Conversely, there are a lot of popup windows you may wish to reduce in size or move to places other than covering up where your character is fighting, especially if you are a melee fighter. And there is nothing wrong with making the chat window a little less intrusive; the rows of buttons on the left and right can be partially covered and still function, so chat on one side, inventory on the other may be an option. Even loot windows can be resized and moved, and they are not a single generic location, but there is actually a Loot Window 1, 2, etc, and if you get a pile of dead enemies, as can happen sometimes, you can adjust a reasonable number of them to overlap less, be smaller, or whatever and thus be easier to manage.

Leveling

Note that Anarchy Online is a game that rewards players of lower levels with opportunities specific to those levels: most common is Quests to level higher, like other games, but there are also three reasons to care less about experience than other elements, or even turn off experience gains altogether (Help/Settings > Settings > Preferences > Behaviour > )

1. AO gives you the opportunity to gain power by going up levels, of course, but also grants wide scope to gaining as much power as you can at any given level
2. Money-making opportunities are often level-specific (see Clicksaver and Buff Weapons); players will create Mission bots to run specific levels of missions for specific levels of item rewards
3. More rarely, players will make characters of a specific level to compete in Notum Wars battles

XP can be turned off if you want to be sure of not going over a cap and have no plans on leveling higher, or you can save that XP as, effectively, an XP bonus for later levels. Just die. The "lost" XP goes into a pool which is drained to add XP each time you make XP thereafter.

Tradeskills

When it says, "Reward: Nothing" for these, that is not entirely true. You ALWAYS get XP for crafting, puny though it is.

There are some tradeskills possible without Antonio's Adaptation Factory, most of them in quests, so look in the AOU quest guide for those if there are not notes on them here. Most are combinations of ingredients and Antonio's Adaptation Factory (we will refer to as AAF), or combinations of ingredients converted by the Factory. With ingredients in inventory, pick one up, and hit shift + right click on the other. If there are any combinations that make the wrong result if you use a Source in place of the Target, they will be noted.

• Screwdriver + Worn Shotgun = Polished Eliminator.
• Rings can be combined: Ring tradeskills introduced in 18.7 patch

Starting weapon upgrades using AAF:

• Assault Rifle. Antontonio's Adaptation Factory (AAF), pick up, shift + right click on Fluid Sample from Garbage Flea or Waste Collector. Result with starting weapon.
• Wailing Bat (1HB). AAF + Reet Beak from Reet. Result with starting weapon.
• Surge Baseball Bat(Melee Energy). AAF + Power Supply from 32-V Docker droids. Result with starting weapon.
• Grip Blade (Two Hand Edged-2HE) and/or Strong Oak Bo (Two Hand Blunt-2HB). AAF + Leather Hide from Angry Minibull. Result with starting weapon.
• Shaolin Sporting Bow. AAF + Rollerrat Intestines from Rollerrat. Result with starting weapon.
• Electrical Surge Pistol. AAF + Power Supply from 32-V Docker droids. Result with starting weapon.
• Injector Dagger. AAF + Venom Sample from Fleas. Common in any case. Result with starting weapon.
• Wave Heated Plasma Gun. AAF + Fuel Chamber from Waste Collector. Result with starting weapon.
• Nizno's Bomb Thrower. AAF + Compression Chamber from Waste Collector. Result with starting weapon.
• Balanced War Hammer. AAF + Large Skull from Angry Minibull. Result with starting weapon.
• Cerzet Zapper Rifle. AAF + Optical Enhancer from 32-V Docker droids. Result with starting weapon.
• Stabilized Silent Spitter. AAF + Bone Plate from Angry Minibull. Result with starting weapon.
• Spine Sword. AAF + Spinal Section from Leet. Result with starting weapon.

Additional items:

• Hand Staff of Naja (Summoned Metaphysicist 1HB weapon). AAF + Venom Sample from..Fleas? Common in any case. Result with summoned Damaged Staff of Naja.
• Poison Injector Bracelet (Adds Poison damage. The ICC Shuttleport ones were a crash course in how damage adds work in AO. Damage adds give a bonus to existing damage, and the damage types must match: if your weapon does Energy and you try to add Poison, nothing happens. However, assuming the "Damage override type to PoisonAC" code works, these also convert existing damage to Poison type. Even better than a Poison damage source, since you can just take them off for something strong to Poison. Unknown how many mobs are weak to Poison AC damage. AAF + Venom Sample from Fleas. AAF + Compression Chamber from Waste Collector. Combine these results. Result with starting weapon.
• Leather Vest. AAF + Rollerrat Intestines from Rollerrat. Result with Hide from Angry Minibull. Result with starting weapon. This is best obtained early, since the Newcomer Armor rises above its main ACs before level 10. However note its extremely high Chemical and Disease ACs: Fire, Cold, Melee and Projectile 40. Chemical and Disease 120. Nano Pool 40. Run Speed 20. First Aid 10. Max Health 40. Newcomer at level 10: ACs 68, except for Radiation Chemical and Disease 41. NCU 2, Health and Nano 7, First Aid 4. So get it and pop it on whenever attacked by Chemical or Disease. In the middle of combat, you ask? Drag the Leather Vest to the quickbar. However, the Newcomer's Armor wants to activate its leveling mechanic when used on the quickbar, instead of equip.
• Range Meter. AAF + Optical Enhancer. AAF + Power Supply. Both are from 32-V Docker droids. Combine these results. Result with starting weapon. Invaluable.

• Ring tradeskills introduced in 18.7 patch

Links

• AO Universe - recommended - a very detailed walkthrough complete with dialogue. Possibly missing one sidequest.
• Keyboard Shortcuts
• Anarchy Online - Arete Guide & Tutorial Part 1 (New starting area). Starting guide, with an overview of professions and skills, by a WoW player.
• Anarchy Online : Arete Starting Area complete playthrough. No intro, straight to efficient quest completion
• Anarchy Online - 2016 - Episode 1. First in a series