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This video tutorial has a male speaker who shows screen caps numerous times during it...this tutorial was recommended to be watched before you started the game, but man...is this really the best tutorial for the game there is?

[I discovered 54, not actually the name of the game…it’s like twelve digits or something, but it ends and starts with 54, a few months ago.

Rumors about the game followed the release of FDR, Full Dive Rigs, and the legislation around them. This game, which was supposedly on the dark web, ignored the legislation. It gave you the full spectrum of sensations as if it were real and it boasted extremely realistic AI. I was naturally curious about such a thing.

Normally...well...legally, FD games leave out the sense of smell and almost leave out the sense of touch to the point it basically doesn't exist. 54/Eternal Soul/The Game doesn't leave out those senses. It seems almost entirely real, although the game is kind enough to warn you that if you launch the game, you do void the warranty on your FDR.

The NPC AI is advanced, scarily so. When the game launched, things like quests weren't even a thing, it took someone an in-game month to convince the King of the starting area that it was a better idea to keep the eternal souls preoccupied with even menial tasks than it was to just let them have free reign. They have nations, and laws, and politics, and even strange things like plumbing and gardening as options to do. Though a lot of people do complain that the game requires you to learn how to do things...like, there is no 'slash' skill, you have to figure out how to use a sword yourself. There is no 'blacksmithing' talent, you have to know how to do it. It's useful for building real-world skills, but its not the most fun decision. Especially since the languages in the game are likewise something players don't just get translated for them. That is usually was prevents people from playing the game after checking it out. I started this with something in mind...right, the AI is difficult to distinguish. So, the only way to tell a player from an NPC is through an injury. Players, with our characters 'made of stone sculpted by the gods', naturally don't bleed. But the NPCs, being normal Humans, do. Well, that is speaking a real language, logging out, or leveling up. Though some NPC scholars have begun to learn some of the more prevalent languages of the player base: English, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Hindi.

The next thing I guess to mention is that the game has some weird time-dilation thing going on. In-game time is roughly 10 times real-world time. That is to say, for every day that passes for you outside of the game, ten passes inside of the game. The game itself recommends that players stop playing for an hour to three for every 10 hours they are in-game. There have been some rumors of some people who will just keep playing after that and getting some sort of cognitive issues, so I recommend following that advice personally. Besides, who could play a game for that long and not want a break?

Okay, so next on this tutorial, now that we've gotten the weirdness of the game out of the way, is character creation. So, when you login...I forgot something, right, so this is a hardcore game, obviously. If the senses and lack of player-aiding systems were anything to go by, but what I mean is that this game can only be downloaded onto each FDR once, and each character is associated with the FDR (though there is a process to transfer your account to another machine by contacting the game support team, I've never done it personally but they are apparently pretty quick about it), and if your character dies, the game will brick your FDR after safely logging you out. Unless you've got a lot of money, you only have one life in this game.

Okay, now, character creation. So, when you load into the game, it will ask you a bunch of standard settings questions; 'Do you want your vision corrected/normalized?', 'Do you want limbs restored?', 'Would you like to turn off colorblindness?', etc. But it also has a few more unique questions; 'Would you like Anhydrosis repaired?', 'Would you like Ansomia fixed?'. You know, fixing the senses which normally aren't in FD games. I never encountered those, as I don't have those issues, but apparently, it was very interesting for the people who do.

So, then, you sculpt your character! You sort of carve them out of stone or clay, atleast that's what it felt analogous for to me, and there is an option to use your real world face. Which doesn't always seem to work, so interesting theory there, some players did a volunteer study and they think it doesn't create what you look like, but rather how you see yourself. Some people's will look better or worse than they actually are, some will be spot on, others will be minorly off in some way, etc. Others who have played this game with multiple characters, and the 'sculptor', recommends using that as the baseline, since you actually feel your body, it can be majorly disorientating if you aren't actually in something similar to how you are in real life. That and the fact that you have to be human-like. Though, if that is not your cup of tea, you can change colorations; like you can have black sclera with crimson eyes like my edgelord friend. You can change some features; like pointed ears and fangs like my edgelord friend. You can also create more fur if you get cold easily or give yourself claws. Supposedly the 'sculptor', someone who gets paid to make characters for people, they don't play the game to my knowledge, has created characters with extra eyes, fingers, gills, one with a tail, and supposedly one with wings. (They have ignored all of my messages for statements on those allegations)

During this time you will see yourself in a void, in-game, other players and NPCs will see you in front of a stone pillar under the castle of what used to be the capital of Thalassia (They moved because the players were unruly) as a small golden light floating around your pillar. Fun fact, the light roughly corresponds to where your spleen should be, some weird math went on to figure that out.

Anyways, once your character is made, you should see a cutscene, which should show your true environment. Your little light floats into the stone pillar, which then has the parts that are not a part of your avatar disintegrating into dust leaving behind your stony form (which has generously been auto-applied basic clothing) that begins to spread out color and 'not-stoniness' from the point your light entered. As the cutscene ends, you take on the first-person POV, sorta clipping through the back of the head. Your senses will begin to exist properly over the next few minutes.

Now, you get this fantastic HUD, which includes only a timer counting down in the top left (when the game was released, supposedly it started at the time for 30 in-game years) under which is a logout button which you can 'press', and an invisible-to-everyone-else attribute screen. It should have a 1 in everything and you should feel like you are extremely vulnerable, because you are. You can 'touch' that screen to move it, though I recommend getting used to the thought based interactions with it and placing it into your HUD proper. I place mine in the top right.

So, there are a number of HUD settings I recommend changing immediately, but first, exit from the cellar. Find a guard, and then logout in front of them. That is because all of the settings are in the main menu. I personally think that was a god-awful design decision, but I also have not created an FD game with realistic sense, graphics, and AI, so who am I to judge?

I recommend 'thought commands' being toggled on. I bound my logout button to the thought 'logout1' so I don't accidentally do that when I just consider logging out, but you should bind it to whatever you want. Next, I recommend adding in the souls bar (the xp bar) somewhere on your hud as an element, not a display. The floating screens are displays and I just hate having to interact with them.

Anyways, next enabling your health bar is useful, again, I would make it an element. You can, through that setting here, enable various floating numbers. As you can see here, I prefer to just have a number over my entire bar denoting total and max, as well as a warning that I am dealing 0 damage.

Now, you will notice that there are a few locked options for you, this game does have some microtransactions, but they are solidly useful and cheap. 25¢ a pop, the most frustrating thing about the microtransactions is actually paying them. This game is not exactly legal, so you have to pay using some dark web currency bs, but it is worth it.

The options are Clock (Real-World), Clock (In-Game), Clock (Day-Night), Health Bar (Ally), Health Bar (Neutral), Health Bar (Enemy), and Compass. Those are essential, at least in my humble opinion. The Clocks have a variety of customizations to them, you can have them as displays bound to your wrist like a watch, or you can have them as elements. These are the one thing that I think works better as a display than an element (one of the few things that you are given the choice of). The various health bar options will simply just be a health bar, next to, above, or wrapped around their heads. You can have it set so that it only appears based on proximity or if damage was dealt from one to the other. The compass is just useful, being able to walk in a straight line is always nice, it is magnetic north, but it isn't fooled by nearby magnets.

There are a few other options that change the game to a degree; Mini-map, Awareness (Sound), Awareness (Vision), Senses (Visual), Senses (Auditory), Senses (Tactile), Senses (Olfactory). The first one is...well it just disorients me personally, I know others that will swear by its usefulness, just not me. It does allow you to integrate other elements into it, such as wrapping the compass around it or having a clock in its corner. Though I do have to admit, if you don't know where you are going, it can be very useful. It has a maximum range of something like a 110m radius and a minimum of like 15. It does have some weird height settings which I don't get quite yet. As for the awareness ones, they indicate if you are detectable by sound or by sight by anyone around you. It has a number of ways of doing that, such as showing lines of sight (a bad idea in cities) or by a simple little element on your HUD. I haven't tried playing stealth enough to regularly use this, one element at a time you know? Senses, I've avoided using actively, it feels like my real-world life would be affected a little in a jarring way. But, they enhance your senses, it can either be an element or a data-stream. This is the only one which has the 'data-stream' option. Apparently, the data-stream does something similar to 'correcting colorblindness' in that it just changes how you are processing the sense in the game. The elements can get a little confusing...overwhelming, at times. But they basically allow you to see better (for visual (more lets you mitigate bright lights and darkness on your vision)) and to 'see without seeing' for the others. Each with its own unique brands of limitations.

And there are two that I don't really get why you would want to access them regularly; Level and Self-Portrait. Trust me, level is not useful to know for yourself and it is either visible as an element or display, or it isn't. This is closer to throwing away a quarter to the devs more than something useful. The Self-Portrait is apparently very good for people who need to look at themselves in the mirror to display proper facial expressions since all it does is show your face as if you were looking at it through a camera. There is a way to make it function more as a camera than as a Self-Portrait, which requires using the only exploit I've heard of besides whatever the 'sculptor' is doing. I could see that being useful, but the exploit requires many hours to do properly per portrait…I guess I should mention, you can have up to twelve of them, normally they would only display another angle of your head/bust, but as mentioned, the exploit would do something different. I'm not sure I could go through that exploit more than once honestly.]