Beginners Guide

The Beginners Guide is a set of tutorials meant for people entirely unfamiliar with Space Station 13 as a game. This guide will cover the most basic concepts of the game to get you started using the BYOND engine and the game's interface.

A wise man once said, "If you can figure out the interface, you can figure out anything."

What even is Shiptest?

Shiptest is a variant of Space Station 13, a multiplayer roleplaying sandbox developed using the BYOND engine. As opposed to typical Space Station 13 which takes place on an immobile station, players of Shiptest take the role of astronauts on various space ships, all flying through space. There are many different jobs and roles available, and each player chooses and plays a role on the ship.

Rules

Yes, there are rules here, to ensure a positive experience for new players such as you. Please take a moment and read them (they aren't that long).

Joining the Server

To join the server, there are a couple steps involved...

1. Download the BYOND client from here. You'll need it to start playing
2. Register for a BYOND account here.
3. Open BYOND, log in with your account, click the cogwheel on the top right and choose "Open Location"
4. Add this server to your bookmarks, or just join manually with copy & paste: byond://join.shiptest.ga:41372

When you first join the server, the menu might not appear or you will not be able to click anything for a few seconds up to a minute or two due to BYOND downloading resources. You will know when it's completed by seeing the menu and the background splash image.

Other than that, you should be in! Before you can start playing though, you need to create a character first.

Create your Character

Character Setup

Here's where you'll set up your character's characteristics, name, and other miscellaneous attributes, such as their handicaps or abilities.

• You can have a typical first name/last name, but no one should bother you if you only have one name. You WILL be bothered if you choose some overtly annoying and immersion breaking name on purpose, so think of something a bit smarter than the N-word.
• You can write a flavor text of varying length that people can read when they examine you (only if they can identify you though)
• Gender has no impact on the gameplay mostly.
• Age has no impact at all on the gameplay. It's what appears in the medical and security records, which are pre-generated for your character when you join the game.

There are currently 13 selectable species to play as in the character setup screen. Remember, race and species are two different things.

1. Human: Your typical spacefaring action movie protagonist.
2. Felinid: Gifted with racism climbing onto high areas but highly allergic to chocolate.
3. IPC: Beep boop toaster joke
4. Lizard people: They may seem vicious but are generally well behaved and most of them don't even fight all that well.
5. Moth people: After thousands of years of selective breeding, Chinese silk moth farmers have finally bred the perfect 'dumb labor' force for menial tasks, and as such are astoundingly common wherever you go.
6. Dwarf: A subspecies of the common North American Canadian, these squat yet sturdy creatures have an unnatural fondness for alcohol and industry.
7. Plasma people: Horrific undead mutants that are created from huffing too much plasma gasoline, they have grown a dependency to breathing it and catch fire when exposed to clean air like a vampire.
8. Fly people: When moth people were introduced to the high sugar and fat diet of North America, their bodies began to undergo some unforeseen changes...
9. Ethereal: Ethereal blood has electric properties, and require electricity to survive rather than food. They also glow in the dark!
10. Arachi: Spider man web swing!!!!! Swoosh!!
11. Yuggolith: Squids that can change their skin pigmentation as well as eat human grey matter highly allergic to salt.
12. Jelly people: Jello. It's relatively common for science staff to transform themselves into this to feel different. The properties of poisons and poison healing medicines are flipped for them.
13. Teshari: The ship's chicken that we keep around to throw in the deep fryer for a quick meal when we inevitably run out of food.

There are more playable species other than the ones you can select from the character creator, such as slime people and golems, entirely different genus's such as slimes and xenomorphs, and subspecies such as monkeys. Many of these other species are also valid to kill with impunity, so don't try to become one on purpose.

Quirks allow you to modify the gameplay of your character in ways ranging from impossible to detect to game-ruiningly difficult. For example, you can require prescription glasses, not produce enough blood to survive, or be deaf. Medbay can easily cure these negative quirks, but if you pick them you probably want to keep them right?

Occupation Preferences

This is an important option and will be covered in more detail below.

Character Appearance

This menu lets you set the race, appearance, species, and underclothing of your character.

Preferences

In this menu you'll find various settings that you can change later on in game, such as whether or not listen to admin-triggered MIDIs or hear the lobby music. You can enable "Runechat" by changing the chat on map for mobs/objects settings. This will display certain messages over mobs and objects instead of just in the chat window on the right.

On the right are the special role settings. Special roles are players with certain side-jobs and some extra degree of freedom from the rules whose end goal is to "spice up" the round and make it more interesting. At the start of every round and during a round the game might pick players to become a special role, if they have the corresponding special role set to "Enabled".

It is highly recommended to set all special roles to "Disabled", since people expect some degree of competency from special roles. If you feel robust enough you can read the Special Roles page and see if you want to play as some. Traitor is the easiest special to play, since they have no real objectives except to cause chaos and no team to worry about.

Remember to click the Save Setup button to save your settings.

Everything else is currently not important and can be changed later when you are more comfortable with the game.