I was frustrated by the first hour of Doors of Trithius - until I discovered how to combine skills to escape sticky situations.

The druid is a great start when you play the game for the first time.

Become a killer spinach dancer!

Use your Nature Magic's killer spinach plants, both as distractions and for killing enemies. It may pay to just reposition yourself if that means that one of your sprouts will get the chance to attack - and get the opponent out of combat for a few rounds.

I soon found, if you start as a Driud and stay the melee fighter you start as, you die with your summons. So, I switched to ranged combat, to be farther from the enemy melees, once my summons got defeated. You can do this by just equipping a bow and a crossbow once you find one - or buy the cheapest one. General merchants often carry the crappyer ones.

Another venue is to stay meelee with good armor (and Atletics, Survival, and Warrapt) and use your pets for diversion mostly.

Then go adventuring on your own terms, in a tile just beside a town. When using a keyboard, just press E to enter the wilderness of a tile. While you still might find a wolf or two, combined pet and ranged use is the charm for such weak opponents. Plus, you will exit the tile with your bag full of herbs and fruits. If not, exit the tile with a B and enter the next one.

You do not have to experiment to find cooking and baking recipes, you can buy them from general merchants or bakers. See if you can bake or cook anything with what you found, either at a fire in the wilds, or at a cooking station in town. The moment you cook anything, you get the Cooking skill. For bread, buy flour and yeast from bakers or other smaller dealers.

As with Cooking, the alchemy recipes can be found at alchemists or herb shops. Both will likely have an alchemy station in their house. Find out if any of the herbs you found combine to some potion. Those remedies you can create with the ingredients you have on you will be shown as green.

It pays not to sell cooking or alchemy ingredients, unless you are strapped for cash.

If you start at a town that does not have a cooking or alchemy station, use the roads to find other towns that have them. Often you find that all the vendors you need will be distributed over two or three towns that are close to each other. Choose one of the towns as your main base, or buy a campfire kit and make your own permanent base in the wilderness, near of all these towns.

Get a room at an inn and use the chest there to store everything you do not need at the moment. The innkeeper will keep all of your stuff safe even when your rent runs out; just rent the room for another day, even after weeks.

Even cheaper than renting is to set up a camp site with a campsite kit in the wilds. This campsite will be there for you forever. You store the stuff you do not immediately use or sell in town in the campsite's chest and cook or bake at the campsite's fire. Plus, you can sleep there to rest (remove weariness) or to level up. Late in the Quartermastery tree, you can also disassemble cheap equipment or repair weapons and armor there.

Spend your focus point immediately when you level during sleep so early in the game. When you are offered the option to rest for a level-up, exit with ESC, i.e. do not deep-sleep right away, and look through your skills and magics to decide where you want to invest that point.

The question is always: Which ability do I want next? And do I need one, two, or more points to get that?

WARNING! Due to all magic skills now requiring a certain level of attunement to the specific magic school, you cannot start as a druid who summone falcons, even though you have enough focus points. Falcons require two attunement points to Nature Magic, and you will not get the second one in the tutorial dungeon yet. So, do yourself a favor and do not invest in Falcon summons this early - you cannot use that spell yet.

Instead start as a militant veggie-lover. Start with Call To Nature sprouts. Make them more durable with the Persisting Summon spell. Who needs orchids? Become the gardener of Venus Fly Traps as big as a dog.

If you place enough sprouts, no enemy can reach you. Sprouts aggro as much as later ýour summoned animals will. So, move around with the grace of a dancer and always keep as many sprouts as possible between you and your opponents. You may have been raised as a druid to abhor violence, but if someone who wants to kill you is strangled by vines, because they are too dumb to avoid them, that is not your fault, right?

A bandit might be able to cut down a sprout or two, but enough tentacles from a few sprouts nearby will be lethal, as all your enemies keep attacking the sprouts instead of you, as long as the sprouts are closer to them. Even archers will.

In cramped spaces, especially in narrow corridors, if you are unlucky in where exactly the game puts a new sprout, you can corner yourself in. Still, when opponents approach from both sides of a corridor, you will want to frantically call one sprout after the other, to keep the opponents at bay. Being stuck between your own sprouts, unable to move for a few dozen turns, is better than getting clobbered because you did not call enough sprouts when you could have.

This is why you pick up each carrot or cabbage and never throw food away, early in the game. Nothing more embarrassing than starving from being cornered by your own sprouts. Or running out of energy because you get hungry while frantically calling sprouts. Food keeps you alive.

Brambles do have some use, but more to inflict a few superficial scratches to opponents moving towards you. Never summon brambles when you could summon a sprout instead. Also consider that brambles will scratch you, too, if you move through them.

To upgrade yourelf to falcons, look if you can find or buy an item that raises your Nature Magic attunement by one or even two points. Such items will have the attunement point symbol in their stats display. Talk with weapon and armor dealers. Get to know other people, especially wood dwellers.

Do not worry about getting additional skills.

All weapon masteries are granted to you the first time you ready a weapon of that type, no matter how crappy it may be. So, the first time you loot a shiv, ready it to learn Daggers; it is even worth carrying your first cracked shiv to town and repairing it if you do not have the Daggers' weapons mastery yet. Then salvage it; while it is a crappy weapon, you can still use the scrap metal and cloth it gives for recycling.

Other skills are usually granted to you as soon as you pick a plant (Botany), buy a recipe and learn it (Cooking, Alchemy), or just use it (salvaging a broken weapon or armor with Quartermastery).

Verry few skills have to be bought as a cheap scroll from vendors - Chivalry or Warrapt, for example. But only if you do not get these anyway with the class, right at the start.

The areas immediately around your first few towns, connected by roads, are pretty safe. If you use a keyboard, go to one of these tiles and press E to enter the wilderness there. Count yourself lucky if you meet a spider or a scorpion; their fangs and stingers can be used to create antivenom. Just bring an antivenom, a splint, and a bandage. Or if you are broke, reload.

If mushrooms explode in your face, watch the space above your health bar to see if you bleed. Apply a bandage if you do. You can create these yourself with the Medicine skill from cloth. How do you get the cloth? EIther buy it in town or salvage some already broken cheap armor piece. Which ones? Mostly those that are called anything with Peasant, Worker, or Improvised in the name.

You have broken bones? Use a splint.

If you are poisoned, use an antivenom. Either you start with one, or you buy it in town, or you craft it with Medicine at a normal crafting table, one that is not on fire (that is a stove and oven), and that has no bubbling glass pots (that would be an alchemy station).

But most important of all, load your last save if you die.

Combat masteries will get better automatically by using the weapons.

So do skills when you use the active perks, like Build Fire in the Survival skill or Blade Rush in the Chivalry tree. Or when on-trigger perks activate, like Tumbling in the Athletics skill tree, where you may evade a melee attack by automatically tumbling to an adjacent tile.

I found that I did not have to invest focus points in most skills or combat masteries - they went up nicely on their own.

You may want to use a few focus points in Alchemy to get a faster start. Later, when you find a Scroll of Warrapt at a trader, keep investing focus points in that skill, as it has few active perks. Its passive skills are often a life-saver, but those will not cause the skill to level up.

Abilities and skills you continuously use as a ranged fighter are:

• Nature Magic, obviously, as a Driud. Four falcons for distraction and a single bound bear for distraction and damage dealing. In my experince, four falcons keep more opponents off me than a second bear.
  
• All Archery passives
  
• All Ranged passives
  
• Blade Rush (Chivalry, learned from a scroll) you will keep always on, twice stacked, as long as you are in combat or in danger of getting assaulted.
  
• Ranger's Lethality (Ranged)
  
• Mark Prey (Ranged)
  
• Between the Eyes (Ranged)
  
• Tumbling (Athletics) as soon as a melee opponent comes near me.

... and for situations where you want to get out as fast as you can ...

• Kerepi Peelback (Ranged), combined with ...
  
• Sprint (Athletics)

... but when you are nailed down by opponents you use ...

• Second Wind (Survival) and
  
• Overcome the Odds (Chivalry).

Perks I personally only use once in a lifetime, or which have limited use are ...

• Animal Companion (Nature Magic) drew attention away from me two times, and it sometimes gets me rare herbs.
  
• Maintain Uniform (Quartermastery) is useful, but I usually forget to refresh it because it is on my secondary bar.

Plus, all kinds of abilities from the crafting skills:

Botany to find the herbs for Alchemy potions. Pick any flower and you learn it.

Medicine to craft remedies when you ran out of bandages, splints, antidotes, first aid kits, and special drinks in the middle of a fortress. Do not skimp on healing your bound bear after each battle. As a ranged fighter, healing your pet might improve your Medicine skill faster than applying the remedies to yourself. You do not need medicine often, as nothing gets near you.

Cooking to bake bread to satisfy your hunger and cook a mushroom omelette for faster healing. To see which abilities you need for baking bread, hover your mouse cursor over the bread icon at the bottom of the cooking skill tree. It also tells you: two parts flour and one part yeast. Buy both from a general trader or a baker.

Enchanting to make the special weapons you get through weapon crafter quests even better. Nothing like a adding lightning damage to a bow with a reach of 9. Hi, Boss of the castle! Aww, leaving so soon?

Do not neglect Reading. It is a slow skill, but it will get you additional perks for skills. And it is essentially free.

Travel is extremely useful, as well, once you go off-road or start a campaign to get rid of bandit castles and Gremlin fortresses, to cut down on marauding hordes who set your towns on fire faster than you can quench the flames.

Survival for general bonuses. Look at the abilities it offers and which would be useful for the way you play.

Trithius may seem daunting at the start. It has become my go-to cozy game after the first week. Especially when I started playing a character without perma-death, i.e. I reloaded when I died. Then I only reloaded for convenience, when a mushroom exploded in my face. After two weeks, I no longer needed to reload.

PS: Thanks to Kief Grin go, whose review inspired me to write this guide.