Risen

- The game has three main starting paths. Bandit camp, monastery and harbour city. These shape your character class however the game retardedly does not tell you this. If you go the bandit camp path you can choose a melee or ranged type of character. If you get into the monastery path, you become a mage type character. If you go to the city path you become a monk type character.

- A couple of crucial game mechanics for some fucking stupid reason are not ever explained. For example, you can dig for treasure in small areas of cleared ground (need a shovel). You can uncover doors by clicking on some rings in dungeons or clicking on some rock walls with a pickaxe in your inventory (usually look like doorways and will take a slight highlight when you place your cursor on them).

- Get good at dodging and blocking. For real, dodge is key for many animal and beast enemies.

- Keep all the stat boosting herbs. These can be made into potions which make them more effective.

- Alchemy is a must.

- Smithing only lets you make jewelry and swords. Still useful however.

- If you get high enough into the axe or sword mastery tree, you can wield 2H axes/swords in one hand.

- The highest that trainers can train your STR & DEX is 100. You can get above 100 through stat boosting equipment and potions. The cap is 200. Any stat boosting equipment counts towards both these caps. Eg you have 95 strength and wear a +5 ring for 100 total. A strength trainer will not let you add +5 strength until you take the ring off. You can only raise wisdom through reading bookstands and stone tablets. As a corollary, keep all your stat boosting potions until you have trained up to 100 STR/DEX without any +stat items on.

- Only certain weapon trainers can get you to the maximum mastery.

- STR & DEX add directly to your weapon damage. STR for melee, DEX for ranged. Crossbows require STR to equip however get a damage bonus from DEX. Not sure how WIS works.

- Sneak is pretty much only good for stealing things in people's houses or moving undetected through off-limits city zones like warehouses, however there are several points in the game where there are geometric bugs that interrupt your sneak. It has ZERO effect on hostile NPCs (but not neutral NPCs, like the aforementioned warehouse guards) or enemies. You can get a ring that gives it to you in the mid game. On PC, enable sneak with the LCTRL key (not sure what it is on console). Again, for some stupid fucking reason the game doesn't tell you how to do this nor does it list this button in the key config in options.

- Acrobatics doubles the distance before you take fall damage and halves said damage, good for jumping off cliffs to reduce travel time. Again, you can find a ring that gives it to you in the mid game.

- Jumping while you travel generally allows you to move faster than running. Exceptions are traveling up or down sleep slopes.

- When you are lockpicking chests/doors, the number of left/right actions for each lock is always equal. Eg. an easy lock has 4 actions (2L, 2R), medium has 6 (3L, 3R), hard has 8 (4L, 4R). So if you have a hard lock where the first four actions are LLLL, you know that the last four are RRRR.