You’re done with your starter area quests and you’ll finally get to explore the world. You visit the teleporter and gets sent to the hub where you’ll spend the majority of your downtime for the duration of the game. Welcome to Freedom Harbor!
Freedom Harbor is your main hub for just about everything in Forsaken World. Here is where every main questline in the game starts, you’ll find your bank, skill trainers, job trainers and auctioneers here and this is where every guild in Forsaken World starts out.
First step off the platform
A good first step when you get to Freedom Harbor is to familiarize yourself with your surroundings. The city is large, with many pathways, nooks and crannies. Right as you step off the teleporter platform (and pick up the quests that awaits you there), you’ll head through the Library. To your right, in the corner of the ground floor, you’ll see a scary looking fella with a staff adorned with several skulls. This is Buckray, he will provide you with one of the many daily quests that will award you some social points, experience and most of all help you get used to the layout of Freedom Harbor. He won’t be able to give you the quest right away, there are a few things you need to do first, but don’t worry, this is something you’ll do a lot. Some people even do it 50 times a day. You need to do the quests given to you by Henry, an inconspicuous looking man that stands next to the grand stairs leading out of Freedom Harbor. You can easily spot him by the massive crowd of other players standing around him. In fact, you’ll see the crowd all the way from the Library.
Henry’s quests ‘Life In The Harbor’ are repeatable daily quests where he’ll ask you to fetch something or do something around the Harbor. For this you will get one dedication per completed quest and you can do 50 of these every day. He also has the quest ‘Dedication’ which will award you bonus experience and some money for every 20 dedication you get in a week. Henry’s quests aren’t the only ones giving dedication, but they are by far the best source for it as they are all easy to do, but can become tedious after some time.
Also, Henry will award you once a day with items, a token, experience and money, just for checking in. I recommend you to log in once a day, at least just to do the check-in quest, to get the token Attendance Card. These cards can be exchanged for goodies at Otis the Shard Collector. The check-in quest is in addition to the daily and consecutive rewards you’ll get from Shylia Market.
One of the things he’ll ask you to do is talk to Buckray. When you’ve completed a few rounds of Life In The Harbor, you’ll eventually get the task to talk to him and he’ll then give you the quest. To do the quest, look in your inventory. You’ll see a photograph and a locator. By right-clicking the photograph you’ll see the location you need to find and by right-clicking the locator you’ll get a chat message telling you which direction the location is in. When you think you’re in the right area, look for a small crystal on the ground, stand near it and right-click the locator once again to “lock in” your position. Then return to Buckray for some dedication, social points and experience.
The dedication can unlock certain items in Shylia Market, such as Elixir of Legends that will help you defeat your foes in multiplayer instances or even soul leaves that can be used in the VIP market. The VIP market usually requires you to purchase leaves for ZEN (Perfect Worlds token money that you purchase on their website), but a few quests and Shylia Market awards will net you these leaves as well.
Where to next?
Well, a good thing to do next is to visit your skill trainer. He is almost guaranteed to have news skills for you. You can locate your skill trainer in your factions area. There are three main factions in the game, each with their own area in Freedom Harbor:
Lionheart: The noble military force of this world. This is the faction that governs all men and dwarves.
Union of the Woods: This faction isn’t in tune with nature, it is nature itself. This is the faction that governs elves and stonemen.
Sanguine Circle: These dwellers of the dark are, despite their appearance, quite noble. This is the faction that governs Lycans and the Kindred.
Your faction will offer you rewards when you reach certain levels or reputation with them. These rewards can be accessed through the Faction Exchange that you will find at each of the three faction leaders. Most rewards are race specific, so I highly recommend you to focus on your own faction from the start.
There are several different ways to get reputation with your faction. You can do quests for them, you can hand in certain emblems that you get from Henry’s quests (or buy from the Auction House) and from level 30 you’ll be able to “train” with your faction.
Training with your faction is done by talking to your faction leader and ask him or her about entering the training grounds. Then you simply stand there with the level appropriate “memory fruit” in your inventory and once a minute, one fruit will be consumed and you’ll get experience and reputation. This is a good way to sneak up some extra reputation and experience when you are AFK and this can be done for up to 12 hours each day. When you reach higher levels of reputation, you can buy boosts for both experience and reputation for training at the faction exchange.
You mentioned jobs!
Yes, I did. There are many jobs to choose from and they all have different level requirements. There are no “right” or “wrong” jobs to choose, but you are limited to the number of job points you have acquired through completion of main quests. Jobs can be devided into two categories, crafting and gathering. Each crafting job have a corresponding gathering job, but each gathering job has several corresponding crafting jobs. For example, both Fishing and Botany are used by both Cooking and Alchemy. Each job trainer can give you detailed information about each job and most of them have tutorial daily quests that will teach you how to perform these jobs.
A word of warning: Crafting jobs will at certain levels require you to have items dropped by level-appropriate monsters, but due to how drops in Forsaken World works, you won’t be able to gather these materials if your character level is too high. You can still buy them off the Auction House, but that can be expensive and there’s no guarantee that anyone is selling what you need and considering at higher job levels you’ll need upwards to 200 of these items, the cost can be much more than you can handle. Check what jobs are available for your level and choose the ones you feel you’ll get the most out of and start working your way up right away. Unlike many other games, it is near impossible to get a low level job at max character level and just train it up to max job level.
Another warning: Gathering requires energy, crafting requires vigor. These two stats will replenish with time, but it takes a long time to replenish and you might find yourself too stretched out if you are levelling up several jobs at once, so again, do these jobs whenever you can, because it is hard to do everything in retrospect.
One last note
This has nothing to do with Freedom Harbor, but is a valuable lesson that I learned way too late. If you go into your system menu (press F12), you can sometimes see the button labelled ‘Unfreeze’ shining blue. This means you haven’t gotten much experience lately and are eligible for an experience aid, if you have enough money for it. Simply drag the slider to the desired amount of aid you want and click the unfreeze button and you’ll notice part of your experience bar turning green. Until you reach the end of that green line, you’ll get bonus experience whenever you receive experience. At higher levels you can convert Gods Trials and other high-end quests into XP aid, but that’s a lesson for another day.
Until then, we’ll see you in the Harbor!