Getting Started in Cube World – A Beginner’s Guide

There are currently four classes – Warrior (close-combat melee with heavy armour), Ranger (ranged attacks with good stamina regen for dodge), Mage (fire and water (the latter has some healing), mana shield to block damage) and Rogue (fast close-combat melee with good stamina regen). The classes are explained in more detail on the Cube World Wiki so I won’t go into them here.

From the range of races available, there’s no difference to playstyle other than size. There are ‘normal’ sized races, like the humans and elves –

And there are smaller races, like the dwarves and goblins:

The smaller races are physically smaller in the game, and can enter smaller places like pass beneath a one-block space. If you want to thoroughly explore caves, make a small character – but I haven’t found a place I couldn’t explore yet with my normal-sized characters.

The game is like Terraria in that you can create both characters and worlds, and characters are not bound to the worlds they were created with (that is, you can take one character in and out of different worlds freely).

You’ll enter the world you’ve created ‘in the middle of nowhere’. You can move around with WSAD, zoom in and out with the mouse wheel and rotate the camera with the right mouse. To climb, approach a vertical service and hit CTRL and W. Climbing will use up your stamina; putting points in the climbing skill (more below in Skills) will let you climb for longer.

The game will create a region name for you and that’ll show in your minimap on the top-right; for example, “Lands of Garia”. Hit M to bring up your world map:

A few things here to note: you’ll see a town somewhere nearby. You’ll want to make your way there. This will be your first ‘base’ – a friendly pocket of civilisation where you can advance time in Inns (more below) as well as sell your loot. The crossed swords on the map indicate ‘dungeons’ – these come in two forms in Cube World. Structured places like castles, and unstructured places like scattered ruins. Both are packed full of mobs so you’ll want to do some preparation before going there – see Missions below. Also note the colours of these place names, if you can see any on your map – blue is suited to your level, grey is easiest, red is hardest, and all scales in between. This also applies to the mobs you’ll encounter in the game, so let’s move on to this.

Pressing V toggles mob health bars on and off;

Very very useful when you’re out in the wild and start running into creatures – it might save your life to be able to tell from a little distance away whether or not that four-pack of wizards wandering near you is hostile or friendly. Blue is friendly, green is neutral, red is hostile. You can’t attack blue, you CAN attack green but they won’t attack you first, and red will attack you always if you get near enough. As mentioned above, also note the name colour;

If it’s red, you may want to haul ass outta there.

One survival tip: when you’re out in the wild you’ll find camp sites. You can cook food on the fires, but also noteworthy is that you’ll heal if you sleep in the beds. Don’t waste your potions or food if you’re near a camp site 🙂

Your HP (health) and MP (Mana) are displayed at the bottom of your screen, along with your skills, stamina and ‘quick item’;

Mouse 1 is your standard attack. Mouse 2 is your secondary attack and I think usually involves your MP bar. Any extra skills you pick up as you level will be in slots 1 – 4. Your quick item, reserved for potions and noms, is accessed with Q. To change what’s in your quick item slot from the items you’re carrying, hit Tab. This will pull up a wheel selection;

A and D spin the selection and Tab will close the menu again. It’s a bit cumbersome to do during a fight but sometimes you want to switch from food to a potion mid-battle, so it’s worth knowing.

MP works in different ways for different classes. Some classes start with a full bar that slowly regenerates, and others with an empty bar that fills up during combat and empties again out of combat.

You use MP to execute your special moves (I think – not 100% sure on the details) and at least from the classes I’ve played so far, it’s worth waiting until your MP bar is full before using a special move.

Dodging is done with the middle mouse button, in whichever direction you’re moving at the time. This consumes stamina, and the bar will appear after you dodge. Dodging is very important in combat for surviving tougher fights – every time you dodge you’re immune to attacks for 0.6 seconds.

If your fight goes well and you kill your foe, you’ll want to collect all that phat loot. E will pick up items on the ground next to you. This also applies to things like heartflowers, mushrooms and decorations like candles. They’ll go straight into your inventory.

Pressing F1 will bring up the keyboard map;

This outlines every keyboard shortcut. I don’t think there’s currently a way to remap keys.

Pressing Escape will show you the keys for your main interface windows:

F1 is the keyboard map as above. X brings up your skill tree – see the Skills section below for more info.

B brings up your inventory, organised into tabs; equipment, items, ingredients, pets. ‘Special’ is reserved for things like boats and hang-gliders (to glide, press G with your hang glider in the ‘Special’ slot of your inventory, but make sure you’ve unlocked the hang gliding skill by putting points in climbing).

Pressing F will equip your lantern. You don’t need to buy one – you start with it. You can fight normally with it equipped.

C brings up your crafting interface (more on crafting below) – note the separation of recipe types in the tabs across the top:

M is your map as covered, and O is your Options (changing resolution, etc.), Start Menu and Exit;

X brings up your skills for leveling. Note the skill progression; leveling your pet leads to pet mounts, swimming leads to boats, and climbing leads to hang gliding (don’t do what I did and buy a hang glider from the vendor only to run off the nearest, highest cliff and fall with a resounding splat because I didn’t realise hang gliding was a skill only received after leveling climbing…).

The top two icons on your skill tree denote your ‘specialisation’. These are covered more on the Cube World Wiki, but to swap profession, you need to visit your class trainer;

They’re found in towns, and I’ll cover navigating towns below. As you level up you’ll get skill points that you can assign via your X menu; click where you want the points to go, and then click ‘learn’ to assign them permanently. Note though that your specialisation can be swapped for free, without a class trainer, before investing any skill points, so if you don’t want to be the default, do that before getting started. You can also refund the points you’ve spent on a skill by right-clicking that skill while standing at your class trainer.

Your crafting window shows everything you can craft. For most things you’ll need to be standing at the appropriate crafting station (loom, workbench, smelter, etc) but there are some things you can craft ‘on the fly’, like healing potions from water and heart flowers. (Note: to make water bottles, buy some glass bottles from the general goods vendor in town, head to the nearest body of water (you can jump into the wells in town!), stand in the water, bring up your crafting menu, and look for the ‘water bottles’ crafting option).

Note that each class can only craft gear associated with that class. Also, the base material for crafting armour for each glass differs;

• Mage: Crafts silk armour made from cobwebs harvested from scrub;
• Warrior: Crafts iron armour made from iron blocks;
• Rogue: Crafts cotton armour made from cotton buds harvested from cotton plants;
• Ranger: Crafts linen armour made from plant fibers harvested from bushes.

When you reach your first city, open up your world map and zoom in (mouse wheel) until the Inn labels appear. There’ll be several Inns in a city. Inside are inkeepers, and when you speak to them (R), you’ll hear a sound that indicates you slept the night at the Inn and it’s now daytime outside.

Each city is split into districts;

I haven’t found anything unique at the pet district yet, but the others are as follows: your class trainers in the Adventurer District, crafting stations in the Crafting district and shops in the Trade district. The first shop you’ll want to find is what I’m calling the general goods merchant, with the sack on the sign;

As well as selling the glass flasks that are essential for making healing potions, each general goods merchant will sell one kind of pet food;

There’s a list on the Cube World Wiki of the currently known tame-able animals and what food they require, so once you’ve got some pet food, head over to find out what it will let you tame.

Other shops in the Trade District include weapons, armour and an identifier who will identify things called ‘leftovers’ (items labelled ‘leftover’ that you sometimes find from mobs – take them to the identifier, right-click the leftovers to move it into the identifying window,  and for a small charge they’ll clean the gunk off and reveal a shiny item underneath).

If you open your map you’ll see crossed daggers floating over the world. These are Mission spots, and they’re generated daily (so you can talk to an Innkeeper, triggering a new day, to get new missions). Also, some NPCs have speech bubbles over their heads; these are green before you speak to them and white afterwards. Speaking to them, they’ll say ‘Have you explored [area name] yet? Look, I’ve marked the location on your map’.

The mission sites are mostly dungeons. Repeated from above: these come in two forms in Cube World. Structured places like castles, and unstructured places like scattered ruins. Both are packed full of mobs so you’ll want to do some preparation before going there. Also note the colours of these place names, if you can see any on your map – blue is suited to your level, grey is easiest, red is hardest, and all scales in between. When you enter a Mission area on your map, you’ll get a bubble pop up on the right-hand side of your screen that tasks you with killing the ‘leader’ of that area. Boss mobs are easily recognisable by their large size, reddish tint and purple name. Killing the leader of a Mission site will get you a lot of XP, some nice gear, and platinum coins that you can use at the Mission Master. The Mission Master is in the blue-roofed Tower building in the city, and will charge you platinum coins to upgrade a gear item to your current level (so if you find a nice, but low level, item, take it to the Mission Master for an upgrade).

Gear is class-specific and each class can only craft, and wear, gear appropriate to their class. There’s another stat you’ll see crop up on gear called ‘power’ – you begin with 0 and gain up to 5 power every time you level (the number seems to vary at different levels, and I’m not sure if it depends on your class either, so I’m keeping this vague), and you can’t equip any item that requires more power than you currently have. There are a few other stats you’ll find on equipment –

• HP awards you hit points,
• Crit determines your crit chance,
• Tempo is your rate of attack,
• Regen  regenerates your stamina, and
• Res is your magic resistance.

The armour and weapon vendors in cities sell gear for all classes, but I found I couldn’t use anything they had until I was about level 3 or so. As with other recipies, you’ll learn to craft new gear as you level up, so check your crafting window (C) every time you level.

There’s a really fun way of modifying your weapons in Cube World – you do it with blocks on a per-voxel basis. Essentially, you expand your weapon by building on to it. Head over to the blacksmith in the crafting district and open (R) the workbench. Right-click your weapon for it to appear in the modification window;

You’ll need cubes to build onto your weapon. Iron cubes are made from mined iron in the furnace, and wood cubes are made from logs at the carpenter via the saw. Now that you’ve got your weapon open in the customisation window, click your cube in the top left so that the number turns blue. The cube, minified, is now attached to your mouse cursor. Rotate your weapon in the view with the middle mouse button (click and drag), and move the cube to where you want to add it to your weapon. It’ll ‘snap’ into place. Each weapon has a number of cubes it can accommodate – in the bottom of the screenie above you can see for my bow it says ‘upgrades 22/32’. Every cube you add to your weapon increases the damage of that weapon.

You’ll also find special spirit cubes from killing rare mobs and bosses. Fire cubes (from normal and rare mobs) increase damage, ice cubes (from rare mobs and bosses) slow enemy attack and movement speed, unholy cubes (from bosses) drain enemy health and wind cubes (from rare mobs and bosses) increase your own attack and movement speed. Each cube has a power number associated with it and can only be used on a weapon of the corresponding power. If you have a stack of same-power cubes you can middle-click the stack to combine them into one more powerful cube; two +1 cubes combined, for example, make one +5 cube.

You can move placed cubes to other positions on the weapon, but you can’t take them off one weapon to use on another weapon.
When you’re done, just walk away from the crafting station and the window will close. 🙂

Pets come in three flavours; melee, ranged and tank.  Tank pets generate more ‘aggro’ which means that mobs will (mostly) attack them instead of you. Some pets offer healing to their masters, too, which is nice. Your pet will always target whichever mob has taken the most damage from you. You can have a plethora of tamed pets in your inventory, but only one active at a time.

When you find pet food, a specific kind of food only used to tame various creatures, it will automatically go into the Pet tab of your inventory.

You’ll need to move the food to the Pet slot, bottom right, and approach the relevant beastie with it equipped in order to tame that animal (note: all creatures have specific foods to tame them).

Some pets act as mounts (it says which on the Cube World Wiki), but not until you’ve unlocked the Mount skill by assigning skill points to the Pet Master skill tree when you level.

The blue blobs beneath your pet’s HP and MP bars are its thirst – once you’re able to ride your pet as a mount you’ll notice these blobs gradually decreasing. You can quench your pets’ thirst by standing in some water, and the blobs will quickly refill. 🙂

The most important thing you’ll need to know about pets, though? Hit Enter to bring up the chat window and type /namepet <name>. The game won’t let you have spaces in your pet names, but you can get around this; type the first word, hit SPACE, then press CTRL and BACKSPACE – the game things the space has gone, but it’s still there – type the second word 🙂

Another very important thing about your pets – you can recall your pet to you by pressing T. Very handy in fights if they go wandering off or if they otherwise get stuck somewhere. If this doesn’t work, open your inventory and remove and replace the pet from the Pet slot.