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The Lark player guide: your first hour in Embermere

Lark is a free browser RPG set in the realm of Embermere — no download, no launcher, no account needed to press Play. This page covers the genuine first hour: waking up in your own cottage, finding the Guide, finishing First Steps, and knowing which parts of the interface actually matter on day one. The six topic pages linked at the bottom go deeper once you're on your feet.

What Lark is

A single-player fantasy RPG that runs entirely inside a browser tab. There is nothing to install and no launcher — the world finishes generating before the front page even appears, which is why pressing Play drops you straight into it. Embermere holds 15 settlements, from the capital of Goldhaven to the frontier gate at Lastwatch; 17 skills that each climb to level 99; and 60 quests worth 83 Quest Points between them.

• Nothing is sold for real money. Titles, cape colours, heads and auras are earned in-game from milestones. There is no cash store, no membership tier, and cosmetics are built so they can never touch your stats.
• The realm is yours alone. No queue for a copper rock, no one else's boss timer — the whole world runs on your machine.
• It saves itself. Your character is written to your browser every 12 seconds from the moment you enter the world.

Minutes one to three: your cottage

Every new character wakes up indoors, in a hand-authored 12×9 cottage. It's one of only two hand-authored interiors in Lark (the Champions' Hall is the other), so every character starts in exactly the same room — though it slowly fills with boss trophies and deed banners as you progress. Four things in the room actually do something:

• The bed, in the north-west nook. Click it once to make it up; from then on you wake here when you're defeated, instead of at the town spawn tile.
• The chest beside it is your bank — the same storage you'll reach from any bank in the realm. There's a Bronze dagger sitting in it already.
• The hearth, north-east, is permanently lit. A free cooking fire you can walk back to at any point, no Firemaking required.
• The letter on the table: a two-page read that tells you about the dagger and points you out the south door.

Your pack holds 28 slots. Vitality — Lark's name for the hit-points skill — starts at level 10 and everything else at 1, so you begin with exactly 10 hit points. Out of combat you regenerate about one hit point every 50 seconds, doubled if you rest beside a fire. That slow trickle is why cooked food is worth more than patience in the first hour.

Out the south door: finding the Guide

The exit is the tile at the bottom of the room; step onto it and you appear at your own front door on the south side of Goldhaven. The Guide is deliberately anchored on a walkable tile right next to that door — worldgen tries the east side first and only spirals outward if the east is blocked — so he should be a few paces away, not across town.

Look for the gold ! floating over his head. In Lark that mark always means this NPC has a new quest for you. A blue ? means a quest is already running and this is the person to report back to. Click him and he opens with:

First Steps, stage by stage

First Steps is three stages long and you report back to the Guide after each one. Nothing about it is hidden — new quests auto-track (up to three at a time), and the current objective stays pinned in the quest tracker at the top-left of the screen.

1. Chop 6 logs. Any ordinary tree outside the walls will do, as long as the Bronze axe is in your pack. Each log is 25 Woodcutting XP.
2. Kill 3 Giant rats by the farm. They have 5 hit points and sit at combat level 2 — but a struck rat fights back, so watch your health bar rather than clicking away.
3. Mine 3 copper. Copper rocks sit in the hills near town, need only Mining level 1 and the Bronze pickaxe, and pay 17.5 XP a swing.

Completing it pays 80 coins, a Bronze sword and 2 cooked beef, plus 2 Quest Points — the currency that gates the main storyline. The Guide then sends you to the Cook, whose The Cook's Feast asks for 3 cows hunted, 3 beef cooked and one raw sardine delivered, and pays 120 coins plus a Bronze platebody, a Bronze full helm and your first clue scroll.

Those two open the main spine: First Steps → The Cook's Feast → The Lamplighter's Warning → The Goblin Tide → The Steward's March → Heart of the Mountain → The Ember Crown. The later links have real gates — The Goblin Tide wants 8 Quest Points, Heart of the Mountain wants 24 plus Mining 15, The Ember Crown wants 33 — so side quests and the Bounty Board in each town are how you keep the spine moving. Full map of it on the quests page.

The controls, in full

Lark is a point-and-click game first; the keyboard is all shortcuts, and none of them are required.

• Left-click does nearly everything: click ground to walk, an enemy to attack, a tree or rock to gather, an NPC to talk, a door to enter, a dropped item to pick it up.
• Right-click opens a context menu on whatever is under the cursor. This is where Eat lives for food in your inventory — the single most useful thing to learn early.
• Click the minimap (top-right) to set a walking route to anywhere visible on it.
• The map button beside the minimap opens the world map and fast travel. Hops only work from a road tile or inside a town, only to a settlement you have already reached on foot, and cost a distance-scaled fee capped at 450 coins. Travelling toward the capital is always free, so you can never be stranded broke on the frontier.
• WASD or the arrow keys take single steps, sliding around a blocker when there's room to go past it.
• + / − (or ] / [) zoom the camera. Q fires your weapon's special attack once you have built 50 adrenaline by landing hits, 1–5 toggle prayers (1/2/3 are the protection wards, 4 Zeal, 5 Steel Skin), and Esc closes any open window.
• On a phone: tap to move, long-press for the context menu, pinch to zoom. Below 760px wide the sidebar becomes a slide-in drawer behind the round button in the bottom-right corner.

The sidebar tabs

Twelve tabs run down the edge of the sidebar. On day one you need three — Inventory, Skills and Quests. The rest fill in as you play:

• Equipment — your ten gear slots: weapon, helm, body, legs, shield, ammo, gloves, boots, cape and amulet.
• Spellbook and Prayers — the interfaces for the Magic and Prayer skills. Magic has a strike spell ready from the start; the Prayers panel stays locked until Prayer 8, when Protect from Melee unlocks.
• Bestiary — a page fills in the first time you kill each creature.
• Collection Log and Achievements — the long-tail chase lists, and where cosmetics are earned from.
• Wardrobe — four cosmetic channels (title, cape colour, head, aura). Cosmetic only, by construction.
• Leaderboards — opt-in and vanity only.
• Settings — audio, accessibility, and everything to do with backing up your save.

How saving works

Lark writes your character into your browser's local storage every 12 seconds while you're in the world, and again when you close the tab. No account, no server round-trip, no save button. The catch is the obvious one: a save that lives only in one browser dies with that browser's site data. Three ways to fix that, all optional:

• Recovery code — Settings → Cloud backup turns your save into a private code with no email and no login attached. Paste it on another device to bring the character across.
• Sign in with Google — from the front page. Your save is linked to the account and pulled down automatically on any device you sign in on; Lark stores your save plus the minimum Google hands over to identify you — your account id, verified email and display name.
• Export / import — Settings → Backup gives you a compressed text code you can paste into a file and keep yourself.

Where to go next

Once First Steps is behind you and there's a Bronze sword in your hand, the game opens up in about six directions at once. Each has its own page:

• Skills — all 17, what trains each one, and the level breakpoints that unlock the next resource up the chain.
• Combat — how the weapon you hold decides what you train (one-handed favours Attack, two-handed favours Strength, and Defence rises only from taking hits), plus the combat triangle and prayers.
• Quests — the full 60, every Quest Point gate, and the Champions' Hall that unlocks in Goldhaven at 50 Quest Points.
• Bestiary — what lives where, what it drops, and which things will genuinely kill you at level 10.
• Equipment — the metal ladder from Bronze, Iron and Steel up through Amethine, Verdite, Solarite and Wyrmsteel, plus rolled and unique gear.
• World — the settlements, the biomes, the caves, and how distance from Goldhaven is the difficulty setting.

Or just go and play — the short version of what Lark is covers the rest in a page.

Common questions

Read next

• SkillsAll 17 skills, what each is for, and how to train it to 99.
• CombatHow a fight resolves, the triangle, prayers, food and dying.
• QuestsHow questing works, Quest Points, and the main story spine.
• BestiaryEvery creature by danger tier, what it drops, and what to fight next.
• EquipmentThe seven-tier gear ladder, unique effects, rolled loot and rarity.
• The worldEmbermere end to end: biomes, towns, caves and the frontier.