# Your First Steps

Every soul wakes alone in the **Dead Forest**, with nothing. The world walks you through the rest, one step at a time.

## The scarecrow

Something stands watching in the trees. Go to it. The **scarecrow** speaks, and later it speaks quietly inside your head. It teaches you the shape of the world.

## Learn the loop

The arrival teaches you the whole loop by making you do it once:

- **Move** with WASD or the arrow keys, and hold **Shift** to run.
- **Gather** from a dead tree with **E**.
- **Craft** your first thing at the bench.

A **quest panel** rides the side of the screen the whole way, always showing your next step. It stays with you in the living world too, where [real quests](/gluebook/gluniverse-quests) fill it.

## Four ways out, and one way back

Every place has four ways out: **north, south, east and west**. Your **companion** is out there, down one of them. Find them and bond.

Bonding is not the last step. The scarecrow sends you back the way you came: **return to where you woke, and cross over**. The crossing is what opens the shared world, and it is the point of no return.

## Nothing carries over

What you gather and make during the arrival stays in the arrival. You step into the living world clean, so the real economy stays honest. From there, everything is yours to build.

Next: [What Keeps You Alive](/gluebook/gluniverse-what-keeps-you-alive).