The heart of the Earth throbs with a lack of blood and vigor, not unlike the dying elderly. It yearns for conflict and to be fed by those which have stripped and abused it for its resources for centuries, the same species responsible for choking it through burning its skin and polluting the air.

The Earth grumbles and snarls with the ferocity of a feral canine, and begins to crack and split open to let loose the madness and fearsome wardens of each circle contained within the vestibule of Hell. It takes on a new form deprived of order, peace, and all which encompasses modern civilization. It takes on a form twisted and corrupted with the dangers of industry and unchecked capitalism, the same weapons employed by humanity at one point with diplomacy, dress suits, and penmanship, abandoned in favor of torture, body armor, and guns.

It rewards those who follow its rules, ensuring that the mad and warmongering reign supreme as they did in the first few millenia of its conception.

Industrial Hell is a post-apocalyptic roleplaying game with themes of Lovecraftian horror, business, war, religion, and survival. The world's undergone an overwhelming change at the hands of the spirit of the poisoned Earth, both long dormant and yet still far more powerful than any possible stretch of human comprehension. The twisted land harbors advanced technology for civilized society to once again return, though the environmental circumstances are too powerful to overcome, and even then, those that've adjusted to the living Hell on Earth are likely to want to put a stop to any efforts of the sort -- whether out of greed, power struggle, or simply wishing destruction on all that was, that is, and all that will be. The Earth is alive, and it hates you.

The first person you meet may be a helpful fellow survivor, wishing to assist you in your journey so that the harm of living isn't as painful.
The first person you meet could be a deranged psychopath, firing shots at you either to harvest your delicious flesh, or because they don't take kindly to the fact that you exist.
The first person you meet may be a kind scientist, seeking to understand the mysteries of the strange new world.
The first person you meet may be a disfigured being, cursed by the planet.
The first person may be the spirit of the planet personified.
The first person may be the spirit of another planet personified.

The idea of the Promised Land had died to many people, though to some, Nekralia was exactly what they'd waited their whole life for. It is up to you to determine whether it resembles Heaven or Hell, and to decide who to form an alliance with so as to beat the odds and find your lot in this new life.

But all choices must be carefully made, for Nekralia does not forgive mistakes.

Oddities are an extremely important concept, as they are what define your character beyond statistics. For instance: just because you know advanced chemistry in real life doesn't mean your character does.

Oddities control mental, physical, or emotional traits of your character. Think Project Zomboid. These can control if your character is tired, drunk, whether they're even subject to being hungry or not, their mood, and more. However, oddities also control traits. For instance, if you don't have the 'hackerman' oddity, your character won't know where to even begin hacking computer systems.

Oddities also control diseases, injuries such as broken limbs, mental disorders such as PTSD from prolonged traumatic exposure, or even a dooming Eldritch curse.

Finally, oddities can control mutations. All that radiation and occult exposure won't be very good for you unless you get lucky.

You can gain oddities lots of ways, most of which I won't spoil, but Joe (the OOC helper at the spawn who also serves as a FAQ guy) will help set your character up with their background (what they were good at prior to the End of Days, starting oddities, etc.).

Do not make unwise decisions, though, for most choices can not be reversed.

Survival is what you'll be more worried about in Industrial Hell than anything else.



Survival includes not dying. Well, no ♥♥♥♥, you say. But there are a lot of factors to not dying that are more than "don't take damage".

The following are things you must keep up with: hunger, thirst, stress, stamina, and anything that might be stunting either those or your health directly (such as broken limbs). That's a lot to keep up with.

For one to solve their hunger problems, they must find food. Scavenging around in piles of garbage or old cars to get a can of expired vegetables works well... as far as hunger by itself goes. One risks diseases through doing this but it doesn't require deeper steps, plus, you get an empty can! Empty cans are good for lots of things like grenades, but more on that later.

It's often that you'll have to get your hands on things you can process into better food. If you manage to find some, and you can access the facility with the appropriate machinery, you can use such machinery to can the meat into a palatable, easier to stomach form. This is safer and more nutritious, and also stressful. That red meat could be human, that green meat's probably spoiled, and you don't know what the hell black meat might be.

Solving thirst is a little bit simpler. In some areas throughout the map you may find water pumps, which guarantee clean water if you have a container. And they're expensive to use. The alternative is cheaper, faster, and the machines to do so are condensed in one building so as to permit mass production, and this same alternative assumes you have access to such devices. To this end, you need simply get your hands on dirty water and another container (the plastic bottles that water were once held in would break apart in the process, you see) and utilize them at the water purification plant.
Indeed, you could also drink booze, if you happened to have the health to spare, for drinking alcohol is bad for you, for no brewers in Nekralia know how to dilute liquor, or how to tell the difference between ethanol and methanol.

Stress is what happens when you just can't take it anymore. The worse it is, the more you bleed (higher heart rate and blood pressure), the less you heal and regenerate stamina, it directly affects your ability to handle firearms accurately, and at higher levels, it'll make you pass out and make your vision waver and be hard to keep straight. It also makes your stats drop passively if it's at a considerable level. Stress is a bad thing. Ways to get it include taking damage, witnessing death, causing death, consuming questionable comestibles, certain diseases, and more. How do you get rid of it? Through the same escape methods people undergo in real life: suicide, alcoholism, or sleeping. Suicide isn't recommended as you drop a number of your items when you die in addition to losing 2 in every stat. Alcoholism works, if you can manage to stay healthy while doing so. Sleeping is free and you can not only do it anywhere, but doing it near a bed (found in apartments) will nearly completely reduce stress from the maximum point. It works, as long as nobody's able to get to you in your sleep, because you're helpless until you wake up.

Stamina is simple. Really simple. If you run, you'll get tired. If you run too much, you'll get too tired. If you get too tired, you'll pass out, and that's no good, especially when you're running from somebody that wants to kill you. Stay well fed, quenched, and destressed, and your stamina'll recover enough to let you run a lot. Otherwise, you'll find yourself taking a lot of breathers.

Now for broken limbs, or anything else of a permanent scale. For starters, common physical maladies such as bleeding or having a broken leg go away when you die -- but dying means losing 2 in every stat, dropping things, etcetera. Your other option is getting some medical supplies and a friend that knows how to use them, because you can't perform surgery on yourself. From that point, that friend should hold C while aimed at you, and treat the specific problem you're having. If they're perceptive enough they'll fix the problem, while if not, they'll affect nothing and waste the supplies at best, and end up seriously hurting you at worst (possibly killing you). Note that this is the required method for dealing with issues such as collapsed lungs or diseases, death will not get rid of those.

Very often you'll deal with the problem of having a lot of cool stuff and nowhere to put it because you can't carry that much.

There are two ways to deal with this.

Your first option entails getting to be able to carry more on your person. How much you can carry is affected by your Strength stat. In addition, certain armors such as trench coats can provide more carry weight when worn, and things like suitcases and backpacks work wonders for flat additions to carry capacity (these don't stack).

The second option is more permanent and doesn't compromise your stuff when you die, as one could guess the first option would do.



Quantum storage is a permanent storage method and you can access your quantum storage from anywhere you find a quantum box. There's a limit of 40 items you can put in your quantum storage at the time of this guide's authorship. If somehow you can't carry everything you need in that space, try convincing a friend to store stuff for you in their storage. In any case, there is nothing anyone can do to steal from your personal quantum storage, and it will be safe until you take something out of it and get killed.

Stats are very important. Serious roleplay on Industrial Hell is valued, but often, players cannot make decisions themselves without starting an OOC fight, nor can they be trusted to determine the outcome themselves. To this end, stats basically determine the chances of winning. In short, you yourself do not decide how strong your character is, your character's strength stat does.

There are, as of now, 6 different stats.

Strength


Strength is what determines your character's ability to physically manipulate things. It affects how hard they can swing melee weapons, how hard their fists hit, and how far they can throw objects such as grenades or bottles. Strength also affects how much your character can carry.

Strength is a very important stat for people who favor melee over guns, and for people who want to lob grenades significant distances. It's also great for hoarders and scavengers, as they can carry more at a time.

You can increase your Strength by attacking other objects with melee weapons, hitting them with your fists, or throwing weapons such as grenades or bottles.




Toughness

Toughness is one's innate damage resistance. Not much to explain here.

Toughness can be increased by taking damage.




Speed

Speed is how fast one can do things. Running, stealing, using locksmith mechanisms (reversing locks, practically picking them or locking somebody in a place) and more depend on the Speed stat.

One becomes speedier by doing speedy things, such as stealing player deployables or running.




Agility

Agility affects jump height and chance of dodging attacks (a hit won't damage you and you'll be forced a random direction).

You can increase your agility by jumping and dodging successfully.




Perception

Perception is a character's senses and intelligence in one. More perceptive characters have a higher chance of being able to repair broken equipment, hacking terminals, and can utilize their skill in medical fields. Perception also affects how far away one can detect another person.

You can raise your perception by doing the things listed above.




Aim

Unfortunately for some folks, how accurate they are depends more on their character's aim stat, NOT how good they are at Counter-Strike.

You can increase your aim by hitting targets at a considerable range accurately.

If you've played Phase Four, DarkRP, or other gamemodes along those lines before, you may have tried to play it solo. And this can work, if your aim is good enough, because all it's about is worrying about your printers.

This is not the case in Industrial Hell. Playing solo will get you killed often at best, and make it impossible for you to progress at worst. And it's typically worst case scenario that happens.
You're going to make enemies. Eventually you're going to make so many enemies that you won't be able to deal with them all. You'll need to either make friends, or have enough money/resources to make people act like they're your friends.

But, even then, you may need friends anyway, even if no immediate threat presents itself. Many things in Industrial Hell need doing. From start to finish, the process of creating an M16 involves scavenging or chopping the wood you need, mining to obtain the ore for metal, smelting the metal, bringing some of the metal to the munitions assembly factory to shape them into parts, getting the schematic for an M16 in the first place, and then getting a workbench to assemble it on.

And that's assuming nothing is stopping you, such as the refinery or munitions factory being controlled by someone who either won't let you use it or someone who demands you pay a fee that you can't afford, or bandits roaming around the good scavenging areas ready to put a few 5.56 rounds in your head before you have a chance to say 'wait'.

Industry is a very important concept in Industrial Hell. Most items cannot simply be bought from a trader (some can, for newbies, though not the good stuff) and you can't just find them, either. Most items must be crafted.

And those may only come to fruition through the polluted smoke stacks of industry and painful living conditions.

Throughout Nekralia are multiple factories, all of which serve unique purposes. I won't spoil them all, but some examples include the Refinery (where ore is smelted and gems are refined), the Meat Facility (where meat is preserved and canned/bottled -- you can't eat it by itself, after all), and the Recycling Facility (where junk is scrapped for cash, and things like broken televisions or cans are scrapped for parts).

Factory machines have multiple properties -- how much they cost to use, a list of procedures they can understand and interpret, and what building they belong to.

Using a machine is as simple as putting the items you want to process near it and hitting E on the machine. For example, to create a Reclaimed Gun Trigger, you would place some Reclaimed Metal near a trigger assembly machine, and hit E on the machine.

As previously stated, it costs credits (money) to begin a machine's processes. The money used gets sent straight to the factory's building control terminal (more on those in the next section), which allows the factory's owners to effectively use the machines for free, and to make a profit off of anyone they allow to enter. Of course, they'll want to guard their control terminal to ensure their profits aren't hijacked.

The main way for a clan to make money is by utilizing entities throughout the map to obtain them. Terminals exist that generate revenue over time, and if that terminal happens to be linked to a factory building, revenue generated by the factory machines is sent to the terminal for collection. These kinds of terminals can be 'owned' by people, and don't require any hacking to collect money from as long as the person who owns it is using it.

Ownership of territorial control terminals, however, can be stolen. If you try to use one while it doesn't belong to you, and your Perception is above a certain threshold, you will either get shocked from a bad Perception roll or initiate a hacking procedure. This is basically just waiting on a bar to fill up, but you cannot move at all during this time lest you cancel it, and that gives anyone nearby time to find you. How fast the bar fills up depends on your Perception as well.

Terminals that don't control the ownerships of buildings, however, always require hacking in order to collect money from them and cannot be owned in any sense. You'll find these in places that aren't buildings, such as alleys or streets, which gives factions something to guard should they expand their turf.

Did this guide help? No? You ungrateful motherfuc-

If you found that this guide did not answer specific questions of yours, please alert me to this in the comments.