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Getting Started as a Player

See Player/README.md for the verification-debt caveat this whole section carries — nothing here has been confirmed by actually playing the game yet.

What you'll have at the end: a character, a sense of what's actually built versus what's still legacy-only, and where to go next for the system you care about.

1. What you need

Applejack is an S&box addon, not a standalone game — you need S&box installed and a server to connect to. There is no official public server yet; this is pre-alpha, forkable software (see the root README.md's status line), so "joining a server" today means a fork operator's own server, run per Guides/04_SERVER_ADMIN_GUIDE.md.

2. Connecting and your character

Connecting identifies you by your Steam identity (SteamId) — this is your account, not your character. An account can hold characters; the game tracks at most one active character per connection at a time (ICharacterService.GetActive, Code/Characters/README.md).

If your account has no character yet, one is created by name: CharacterNetworkComponent.RequestCreateCharacter(string name) is the real entry point — the name is re-validated on the host regardless of what a client sends. What isn't confirmed: whether a character-creation screen exists to call this for you, or what it looks like. The code's own comment says a client UI "is expected to grey out the create button once a character exists," which describes an assumption about a UI, not a built and verified one. If you connect and don't see a name-entry step, that gap — not a missing feature on your end — is almost certainly why.

Once created, your character has a Name, and two purely cosmetic fields, Details and Gender, that you set yourself with /details and /gender or from the player menu's Character tab — see 05_USER_INTERFACE.md. Nothing else is part of "your character" as a single record: your money, inventory, needs, and job are each owned by a separate system and reached through it, not stored on the character itself (08_DATA_MODEL.md §1).

3. What's actually playable right now

This matters more here than it would for a finished game. Applejack is built module by module, and whether something works is a fact about which milestone landed it, not a given. As of this page, built and reachable in some form:

Not built at all, even though the original game had it: moving your character in any way the game itself understands. No code anywhere reads or writes a player's world position yet (ADR-0007) beyond the reference binding Milestone 11 is landing — walking, driving, and physical proximity-based systems (yelling, whispering, emotes, local OOC) don't exist yet, named explicitly in 19_CHAT_FRAMEWORK.md §1. If you remember these from the original GMod Applejack, they're not a bug here — they're scoped, future work.

4. Where to go next

Pick the system you want to understand and read that page — each one names, plainly, what's built versus what's legacy-only aspiration. If you hit something that doesn't match this documentation, see Player/README.md's note on raising it.