Getting Started

This page is the orientation guide for new Lord of Mysteries players. The game is live in Mainland China, having launched on August 21, 2026, so everything below describes the shipped client rather than a test build. If you have just installed the game and want to know what to press first, start with the two sections directly below, then work down the numbered steps.

How to Start Playing

Lord of Mysteries runs on PC, Android, iOS and HarmonyOS. It is a Mainland China service: creating an account requires a Mainland China mobile number and real-name verification, the client is Simplified Chinese only, and there is no official release anywhere else. See CN vs Global before you spend money on hardware for it.

Where the client comes from. On PC the official site hands you a small launcher (around 150 MB) which then downloads the full client; budget at least 80 GB of free space, on an SSD. On Android you install either the official package or a channel build. On iOS and HarmonyOS you install from the Mainland China storefront listing; the initial iOS download is around 2 GB, with a much larger in-client download afterwards. Cloud gaming is also available inside Mainland China through the official site and partner cloud services, which covers Windows, macOS, Android and iOS without a local install.

Pick your account type before you start, because you cannot change it later. There are two separate systems and they do not talk to each other:

The practical reading: if you want to play on your phone and your desktop with the same character, use the official account. If your friends are on a channel build, you have to be on the same channel as them.

Coming from a closed test? Test progress does not carry over. The historical Crimson Test and Gray Fog Test install packages will not run against the live service. Uninstall the old client and clear its leftover files before installing the launch build, or the launcher may misbehave.

Naming rules. Character names must be unique on their server, must use more than one Chinese character, and cannot contain numbers or Latin letters. Names are reserved per server, so if you want a specific one, create early on a quieter server.

Choosing a server. Server tiles are labelled with their load: 火爆 means busy, 已满 means full and closed to new characters. There is no published character-transfer policy, so pick the server your friends are on before you invest hours. Twenty server groups were open by the end of launch week after two rounds of emergency expansion.

Hardware requirements, install sizes and the official crash-and-launch troubleshooting steps all live on System Requirements.

Step 1: Character Creation

New players begin at character creation. The creator covers face, build, hair, clothing, and a batch of distinguishing features such as scars, tattoos and piercings, with fine-grained face controls plus share and import options for people who would rather start from someone else's preset. Finishing creation permanently grants a free outfit set (焕然衣新) with no pull and no payment involved.

The character you make is your own original Beyonder. You are not Klein Moretti. Klein appears in the campaign as a separate NPC, and his history is layered over your own experience as Mr. Fool's visions. See Player Character for the broader scope of what you control, and Character Creation for the creator in detail.

Step 2: Pick a Pathway

After character creation you pick one of the six Pathways in the launch build. All six are free, and none is locked behind payment or progression.

Two things to know before you commit. The Spectator is female-only at launch, which the studio has described as a temporary content gap with a male version to be added later rather than a permanent design rule; the other Pathways are not gender-locked. And switching Pathway after creation is not available in the launch build, so this choice sticks for now. The Hunter and Assassin Pathways are not playable at all. See Pathways and Pathway Roles.

Every Pathway benefits from Mr. Fool's Grafting, which lends you weakened copies of higher-Sequence abilities from the very start.

Step 3: The Opening Hours

The game opens inside a death-loop nightmare. Your character is born carrying evil-god contamination and dies twenty times over before escaping the loop through a sacrificial ritual. During that sequence the Fool personally hands you a tarot card that grafts abilities from your own future onto you, which is why a brand-new Sequence 9 character already has spirit vision and divination that other Beyonders would spend years learning. The game calls you the 愚选之子, the Fool-chosen child.

You wake in Tingen. The first character you meet is Audrey Hall, who talks you down from the contamination nightmare in what the game frames as a one-to-one therapy session. Shortly afterwards Leonard Mitchell gets you hired straight into Blackthorn Security Company as a night watcher, with no interview, which the story is openly amused about.

Step 4: Tingen Orientation

Tingen is your home city for the campaign's first act. Three landmarks anchor the early game:

• Iron Cross Street Market: low-tier and mid-tier ingredient vendors plus the brewing tutorial.

• Gandren Department Store: civilian-side cosmetic shopping and the Acting Method social-stealth tutorial.

• Evildoers' Tavern: Sequence 9 underworld contacts and the introductory dungeon encounter.

Your introductory residence is in West Borough, and most early quest-givers stand in Central Tingen or West Borough. The Nighthawks branch in Tingen, run by Captain Dunn Smith, recruits you into early supernatural law-enforcement work. A darker mirror of the city, 罪恶廷根, opens as a main-line event area and is one of the better early gear sources.

Step 5: Acting Method Basics

The Acting Method is the central character-progression loop. It covers four mechanics:

• Cover identities: you adopt a Beyonder cover identity (a Tingen tailor, a freelance investigator, a clerk) and live a mundane life through it. Time spent in cover stabilises the strain from using your Sequence's abilities.

• Performance practice: acting practice fills a gauge that, when full, accelerates your next potion's digestion.

• Sanity discipline: watch the sanity bar and apply counter-measures before reading occult texts or drinking potions. See Sanity System.

• Sequence digestion: after drinking a Sequence 9 potion you must spend in-game time digesting the new abilities. Acting is the primary accelerator, and digestion is capped at 20 percent on your first day.

Step 6: Your First Day

Day one has a specific checklist, and doing it in roughly this order is what the studio's own opening plan recommends:

1. Take the Sequence 9 promotion (序列晋升) as soon as it unlocks. The promotion also hands you an item that upgrades both Mystic Puppet skills and combat skills, so it feeds two systems at once.

2. Unlock your first Beyonder Awakening (非凡觉醒) skill point. This is a separate system from Sequence promotion and offers two awakening branches to choose between.

3. Wish for a Mystic Puppet (秘偶) targeted at a skill that suits your Pathway rather than pulling blind.

4. Run World Adventure (世界冒险) and War Feeds War (以战养战). Both drop 非凡馈赠 chests containing item-level 35 gold gear, which is a very large jump over anything the campaign hands you.

5. Complete the 罪恶廷根 city-dark-side main event. Completing it, not just visiting, awards item-level 35 gold gear of the same tier.

6. Explore the 秩序世界 maps. First-tier exploration on each map pays 绑定金镑 (bound pounds) and 非凡馈赠 chests; the 灵体之线 activity yields 金纺线, and 往日瞬间 yields 历史明灯, the currency used for Connections draws.

7. Clear the day's short side stories. Day one opens 厨王之王, 送你一朵塞维亚菊 and 魔女与野兽.

Step 7: The First Ten Days

The published opening plan runs ten days and sets clear level milestones. Days nine and ten shift to PvP rather than levelling.

Anomalous items (异象之物) picked up while exploring can be handed to Leonard in Tingen for large amounts of bound pounds, which is the single easiest early-money habit to build. Bounty value has a weekly acquisition cap, so spend it before the reset rather than hoarding it.

Step 8: First Group Content

Group content opens once you finish the introductory tutorial line. The Tingen introductory dungeon surfaces the tank, healer and damage loop; full dungeons run at six players and raids at twelve, with open-world bosses uncapped. AI companions fill empty slots when you cannot find a human group, and an AI friend system lets solo players enter activities that would normally require a party. See Multiplayer and Co-Op, Dungeons and Raids and Combat System.

Step 9: Sanity Management

Sanity is a permanent character resource and the most common cause of avoidable group wipes. Watch for these behaviours:

• Reading a sealed-tier text without preparation can spike sanity loss.

• Casting a Sequence 9 ritual at full sanity is fine; casting at low sanity escalates the failure consequences sharply.

• Sanity recovers slowly through cover-identity time, Tingen civilian content, and the tea-brewing rituals taught in the Mysticism and Rituals tutorial.

• Group content has shared consequences when the party reads shared occult texts. Agree a reading order first.

• At the deepest tier sanity loss is not a setback but an exit: a character whose sanity reaches zero in the wrong circumstances is deleted from the account.

Step 10: What Comes Next

• Mid-act content extends the Sequence 9 ladder toward Sequence 8 advancement, then toward Sequence 7.

• Pathway-specific quests open the higher advancement candidates. The studio has not published a launch Sequence cap; the documented ten-day plan tops out at Sequence 9 and character level 63, although Sequence 8 is reachable in the live game as of September 27, 2026.

• Faction reputation with the Seven Orthodox Churches, the Tarot Club and the supernatural law-enforcement bodies opens secondary quest lines.

• Backlund, the Five Seas and the West Continent are staged future content rather than places you can walk to today.

Systems Beyond the Main Story

Several long-tail systems run in parallel with the campaign. None of them is compulsory, and you can ignore all of them without locking yourself out of the rest of the game.

• Sealed-artifact cultivation: collect and upgrade sealed supernatural objects as their own progression track. Upgrading them uses a currency called 历史回响 and opens at character level 46. See Sealed Artifacts.

• Connections (人脉): a relationship network of figures from the setting. A named sealed artifact, 历史回廊, lets you borrow their abilities and step outside your own Pathway and Sequence limits. This is also a randomised draw system, so read Monetization before spending.

• Homestead management: a personal estate, reported to unlock at character level 19, which you build from placed components, a generated building on a marked plot, or a design template bought from another player.

• Railway Tycoon (铁路大亨): a commerce loop that moves goods along the world's rail network for profit. The studio's own strategy hub carries two walkthroughs for it, both framing it as the route to the kind of private wealth Audrey Hall takes for granted.

• Club activities: events and shared goals run by your Divination Club.

• Oath partnerships: a friendship-based partnership system, reported to form at 1,000 friendship points, with couple photos, shared progression rewards and paid dissolution rules.

• Weapon reforging (装备重塑): opens on day five of the launch schedule, from the Reforge tab of the equipment screen. Reforging rerolls a weapon's affixes, and landing two Extraordinary affixes on the same weapon unlocks a bonus layer called Grace (恩赐). Only weapons can be reforged at launch. Every other equipment slot is closed to it. Affixes on Sealed Artifacts work through a separate system, covered under Extraordinary Substances.

Solo Mode and AI Teammates

A one-click Solo Mode toggle hides all other players from your local render, leaving only campaign NPCs, AI teammates and you. The toggle is reversible: switching back re-renders other players on the next zone transition. Solo Mode supports the complete main campaign and the instanced group encounters, with AI teammates filling any open tank, healer or damage slot.

AI competence sits between a solo-clear pace and a human-party pace, so players aiming at the hardest instance tiers are still better served by a real group. Solo Mode is positioned as a first-class playstyle rather than a stripped fallback, and it is the recommended frame for players arriving from single-player RPGs who want the story, the Acting Method loop and sanity discipline at their own pace before joining the open-world MMO traffic.

Six Playstyles to Choose From

The studio lines out six first-class playstyles the game is built to support. Picking one, or a mix, before you min-max is a reasonable way to decide what to do with an evening:

1. Main story focus: pursue the campaign and your own storyline, and uncover how the Evil Gods are corrupting the world.

2. Pathway and Sequence progression: focus on climbing the ladder and becoming a genuine power in the Beyonder world.

3. Exploration: drink coffee in Tingen's cafes, listen to discussions of Roselle's poetry at the university, watch carriages roll under the gas lamps. In-world dice checks add tabletop-style consequence to wandering. See Quests and Story.

4. Classic MMO content: dungeons, world bosses, the arena ladder and faction warfare. See Faction Warfare and PvP.

5. Fashion: spend two hours on the face and a full day on the outfit, and become the most fashionable Beyonder on the server.

6. Sociable or solitary: clubs, large raids, world bosses and faction battlefields for extroverts; full Solo Mode with AI teammates for everyone else.

The framing the studio uses is that there are no obligations and no restrictions. Mixing modes between sessions is supported, and changing focus does not lock out anything you previously reached.

Common New-Player Questions

Do I need to have read the novel? No. The campaign explains its own world for newcomers and offers Pathway recommendations, and the optional character quests are where the deeper source-material context sits. See Source Material.

Is there gacha? Yes. The app's own storefront content advisories disclose loot boxes, and two randomised draw systems ship at launch: Connections (人脉) and Mystic Puppets (秘偶). Both have published pity rules. You never pull for your own character, which you create, but you do pull for the Connections whose abilities you borrow. See Monetization.

Do I have to pay to progress? No. The campaign, all six Pathways, dungeons, raids and faction content are reachable without payment, and Sequence advancement is gameplay-gated. That said, the draw systems do feed combat power rather than cosmetics alone, so the model is not purely decorative.

Can I switch Pathway later? Not in the launch build. Choose carefully at creation.

Can I play from outside Mainland China? Not officially. Registration requires a Mainland China mobile number and real-name verification, the client is Simplified Chinese only, and no release elsewhere has been announced. See CN vs Global.

Will my closed-test progress come back? No. Both tests were wiped, and the studio asked test participants to uninstall the old clients entirely. See Crimson Test and Gray Fog Test for what those builds contained.

Related

Lord of Mysteries, Frequently Asked Questions, Release and Platforms, System Requirements, Player Character, Character Creation, Pathways, Acting Method, Sanity System, Monetization.