Welcome to our New World Tips and Tricks guide. New World can be an exceptionally easy game to learn if you follow a few simple steps to get used to it. Here, we’ve laid out everything a brand new player should learn in their first 10 levels.
New World Tips and Tricks
Things To Do In the First 10 Levels of New World
Learn the Controls
The very first thing you need to learn is New World’s control scheme! You’re walked through this by New World’s tutorial, but in case you forget the basics:
- WASD to move
- X to sheathe/unsheathe your weapon
- Right-click to light attack, hold right-click to heavy attack
- Hold left-click to block
- K to enter the Character menu, Tab to enter the Inventory screen, M to open the Map
- Left shift to roll/evade/sidestep
- Space to jump and W + Space to mantle over or climb objects
- = to autorun
- 1 or 2 to switch between weapons
- Food and potions can be mapped to 3, 4, 5, and 6
- Special attack moves can be mapped to Q, R, and F
- Hold E to interact with NPCs and objects, or to harvest resources
- Comfortable with the controls
Familiarize yourself with The Interface – New World Tips and Tricks
You should absolutely take this time to poke around in the different menus and get a feel for what each one does. For more information on different systems and menus, be sure to take a look at Beginner’s Guide: Combat, Camping, and Important Features!
- Familiar with the interface
Get Used to the Map – New World Tips and Tricks
New World’s map is quite large, boasting over 14 different zones to explore as you level from 1 to 60. To get a scope of Aeternum, press M to open your map and scroll your mouse’s scroll wheel toward you until you’re zoomed out. Now try zooming back in by scrolling your mouse’s scroll wheel forward, then holding the left mouse button and dragging the map around a bit.
You may also see little question marks on the map (and on your compass) as you approach undiscovered locations. These are worth searching out, as they can hide important secrets and treasures, and are often centric to different quests. At the very least, these map locations often feature a lot of enemies to fight if you’re looking for a new hunting ground!
- Comfortable with the map
Customize Your Settings – Especially Voice Chat
It’s a good idea to press the Esc key and make sure each of your settings is looking good. You should tweak your graphics settings until you get the framerates you’d like, but you should also make sure that your voice chat is set up properly as well, or turned completely off if that’s what you’d prefer.
In order to do this, navigate to the Settings menu, then to the Communications tab on the left. Here, you can play with a few settings, including whether voice chat is enabled (meaning others around your character can hear you speaking), enabled just for your group members, or turned all the way off.
- Settings configured the way I like
Make your Way over to the Watchtower
When you first spawn on the beach, you’re not too far off from civilization, sort of. There’s a watchtower nearby, which is where you’ll pick up your first quests and find your first safe haven – a warm, crackling campfire among other player characters. It’s also where you’ll find some useful resource caches!
Simply follow your compass or your map to get there.
- I’ve been acquainted with the watchtower
Craft Each of your Basic Crafting Tools
Collect flint from nearby flintstones on the ground and collect green wood from nearby bushes. You can go back to the campfire at the watchtower at any time to create basic crafting tools. There, you’ll want to craft a Flint Mining Pick, a Flint Sickle, a Flint Skinning Knife, and a Flint Logging Axe. You should only need about 1 Flint and 1 Green Wood for each tool.
Make sure to equip all of these as you craft them!
- I’ve got all of my Flint crafting tools ready and equipped
Collect Plenty of Herbs and Water – for Potions!
Healing potions are exceptionally useful to have equipped during combat, since they’re your primary form of healing if you’re traveling without a Life Staff wielder in your party.
You can find herbs growing around the beach and you can collect water from inland streams and any body of fresh water. It’s exceptionally handy to have these resources ready since there’s no way to buy healing potions off of any NPC!
- Collected plenty of herbs and water for healing potions
Try Out Different Weapons – New World Tips and Tricks
Your starting sword and shield combo is only one of 11 possible weapon types to find and use. As you explore the starting zones, you’ll inevitably find different types of weapons that are each worth leveling up and building mastery in – especially early on, when enemies aren’t that difficult to fight while playing solo.
Learn more about the various weapon types in New World on the Weapon Mastery page!
- Tried out a few weapon types
Spend your Territory Standing Points
As you complete quests, kill monsters, harvest resources, and craft goods, you earn something called Territory Standing. As your Territory Standing levels in a zone increase, you also get special buffs that apply when you’re in that specific zone.
You can choose those by pressing M, then Territory Standings on the left panel.
- Understand Territory Standing points
Build up your Attributes
As you level up, you earn Attributes points that make you stronger in specific areas. Don’t worry about how you allocate these just yet – for now, you can press that Respec button on the bottom of the menu and get all your points back, to spend and rearrange however you like until you’re comfortable with your character’s playstyle
Remember to spend these points as you gain them! You can always press K to navigate to the Character page.
- Put all my points into my attribute(s) of choosing
Specialize your Weapon Skills
As you use a weapon type, you gain weapon mastery points as well. Each time you level up a weapon’s mastery level, you can choose another perk or active ability from that weapon’s skill tree. Note that you can’t earn these points by leveling up regularly – you have to train and practice with that specific weapon type!
Once again, you can Respec for free for the time being if you decide you’d like to specialize in a different skill tree.
- Spent my weapon mastery points wisely
Follow the Main Quest Path – New World Tips and Tricks
Main quests will carry you to the local settlement and beyond, where you’ll be acquainted with PVP, New World’s overarching storyline, and Factions. For more information, check out How to Choose a Faction and Faction Benefits.
- Followed the main quest path to level 10
