Starting Gameplay for New Players - Exploration & Experimentation

I've gotten a lot of questions asking how to find different locations, level different skills, and unlock important milestones throughout the game (such as building and stocking your drug warehouses, purchasing the high-rise building, etc). I will make a separate post about my personal strategies involving min maxing, but for this post I want to focus on the intention of the game for new players. This game does not hand hold. There is no tutorial. Originally, there wasn't even a help button, but so many players quit right away that I had to add it just so people could figure out what to do. While I recognize that everybody plays and enjoys games in a different way, I do think there is a lot of fun and value to be had by simply exploring and trying new things. 

The Smuggler operates off of context menus to interact with people and objects in the game. Certain things you may not think are intractable may turn out to be important to the game. This is a style of gameplay that is a throwback to the original, classic RuneScape, or Minecraft where you are thrown into a world without direction or instruction. The path you take is completely up to you. Your progression is permanent and you can't go backwards, there is no class system, so you can't go wrong by leveling. Leveling and gaining EXP in any and all skills is a primary goal of the game, and will benefit you in other areas. All skills are connected, and you need all of them eventually for one reason or another. You need to level boxing to knock out the drug dealer to sell drugs which levels drug dealing which requires drugs which can be obtained by leveling your growing or leveling your drug making or leveling your larceny and stealing the drugs which levels your stealth, and so on and so on. 

Discovering new locations, new items, new skills, and new unlockables is amazing, and I just ask that players try to figure things out on their own first, because I do believe this will prove to be a rewarding experience. However, if you are the type of player who wants to know what's going on and doesn't want to guess and check, then post a comment with any questions you may have, and I will be happy to help you. In the end, we all game differently, and the most important thing is that you have fun with the game. Thanks for playing my game, and I hope you get as many hours of fulfillment as I did. Game on!