Time
Time is the main factor in this guide, since we are running against a clock. Remember that your 24 hour account timer begins immediately and will continues while you are both on the Welcome Island and Egypt, so you may want to simply make a 2nd or separate account in the beginning to enjoy time learning.
The count down is located in your personal menu, under utility/billing/account Info. If you really want to, you can pin this, but I just check it when I log off each session.
Here's a few tips on saving time on Welcome Island in general:
- Write down your materials list for a specific purpose. I use Notepad and copy/paste from Wiki.
- Pin common menus. I pin most skills and projects that I know I will be using many times. For starters, I pin the following:
- make a stone blade
- build a brick rack
- plant/OldEgypt.
- If you ever get stuck or don't know what to do next, log off. You can think and plan off line, then make the most of the next session.
Foraging
- When starting out, make sure to forage from the trees near your starting area. Any trees near the road are a good choice because of the small cross-country travel required.
- When you are gathering things, gather them in groups. For example, when gathering near water, gather mud and sand only when you stop to gather the slate, then you can queue the tasks and minimize the stalling between actions.
- Only gather wood at the clusters of good gathering trees with 4 or 5 wood each, don't waste time with the 1 or 2 wood yielding trees. You'll recognize which trees those are pretty quickly.
Flax
- When planting flax, plan ahead for how many you will need for tuitions, rope, etc. Then plan backwards and only plant enough for the task.
- When planting flax, there is no minimum distance from schools, so you can plant right away.
- When rotting flax, the bundle gets thrown out into the water randomly, so zoom out the camera to make sure you see it land. The color of the flag also changes and can be seen from a distance, so you can check on it during your other projects.
Buildings
- Most buildings have some sort of timer, either graphic/internal, or endurance. For the wood plane, it is the former, so you can build multiples for maximum speed of planing. I find that with hot keys, five planes is as much as I can keep up with. This does require more overhead to build and maintain, but with hot keys, you can plane wood really fast! You can transport boards to the mainland and use them for your first compound test, so it is worth putting in more effort now instead of twice.
- Distaffs are another internal timer. Since you'll want rope, you need twine, but it takes a while. Make two or more distaffs, then divide up the load between them. This will work twice as fast at the small cost of building.
- Bricks are similar, and are cheap to setup. Making eight brick racks directly around you on the ground is a great start for maximum brick efficiency. You can expand beyond that and create a circle of brick racks around you two or more deep, but they become less efficient when you run out of materials and waste time anyway. Do what is comfortable for you, but make sure you are using your hot keys to gather the bricks; it saves half the clicking. but don't pin the menu, since the menu is specific to each rack, it won't work on any others.
travel
- Because we just started, your character has free jump points for the first 24 hours. You can jump to any starting point or jump to any friend's location. I love that second one!
- The CS requires good timing to catch, or else you have to accumulate offline time, which you won't have when you just start, so the CS really doesn't help.
- Keep to the path, there is a 20% penalty in speed due to off-road conditions. When you plan to travel on the diagonal across an "L" shaped road, it is still faster to cut the corner across the terrain as long as the angle is wider than about 30 degrees. (45 degrees being best, at only 10% faster than the long way around the road.)