Bart, you don't want to play on online mode until ~60'ish or after your first game.
People twink characters and will destroy you in seconds if you do.
Oh, wonderful.
Now I get to be "twinked", "invaded" and possibly "destroyed". Pretty sure I should be paid for these kinds of services. lol
Nah but really, I have ZERO idea what to do in it. I tested it for like 10 minutes for settings and that's about it. No idea bout lore or how anything works.
Okay
You earn "souls" from killing things. Souls are used both as a currency and EXP. If you die you leave a blood stain (green mark), leaving behind both your souls and humanity. If you make it back to your bloodstain and recover it you earn back the souls you lost and the humanity as well. If you die on the way you lose everything you had collected, but just the extra souls and humanity you had stored up.
Humanity is found off of rats, skeletons, humanity ghosts (or w/e their name is), and can be looted from random corpses in the game. You can also invade players to steal a humanity, or kill NPC's for it (but that isn't recommended).
To be invaded you must use a humanity at the bonfire to restore your humanity (turn human). This opens yourself up to invasions, both player and NPC invasions. In offline mode you'll only get NPC invasions of course, but they are important so it is recommended that you wander the game in human form, offline, once you get the hang of the game and are able to survive for long periods of time.
A high humanity counter also gives you benefits, like higher resistance, more def, etc.
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If you need to know more there are a lot of people who play the game now on this forum, so we can help you out :)