Thank you for the info. I checked out the wiki and found a bit there. Overall, I'm sticking with it for a bit, but adjusting my expectations. At this point, I'm finding a lot of abandoned cities (eeeeep! Spiders!) and the global chat is pretty brutal as far as asking questions. Solo play seems to be the way to go. I've beta'd a few games now and found that what makes a game for me is the people playing it. I'm going to keep exploring - at some point I'm bound to run into folks that have bandwidth for a newblet. Thanks again for the help - appreciate it.