This game somehow got a rep of being "Not New player friendly" due to lack of "how-to" in-game and guides are really something that requires here if you don't want to miss out while playing to the current WIP location
That "Not New player friendly" can also be apply to Minecraft or any Open world Survival games out there honestly
And that's the fun of it, you figure things out as you play or you enter a forum such as this one to talk about
If it wasn't for John8r9's collected guides, I would never had known about some tiny details on my own for sure, specially the most recent one on "Elite bigfoot" which requires you to feed Bigfoot "People" instead of normal food
You would think that's just another food taming option but it's not, and that's what surprise me that there is a difference on it.
I would say that compared to, for example, Starbound, Mad Island is, indeed, unusually unfriendly. Even after introduction of controls screen.
And it's not about lack of tutorial. It's mostly these things, in no particular order:
* VN-style quests, with very much not VN time to replay the game.
* Interface going against conventions.
* Language issues in the translation. For example, "Breeding pen" which does not breed anything.
* Villager AI being very dumb and needing workarounds.
* Lack of proper feedback from villagers. If they would, when talked to or otherwise, complain about the lack of water, it would be much easier to figure out they need water to work.
There are also easter eggs, but that is fine.
it's good that john already went thru the issue of joining the discord, all of the game info is there but discord is just a terrible place overall outside quick chatting, i read once that it's where information goes to die and that is hella accurate since searching anything in that damned place is hard, add in the japanese language thing and it gets much worse.
Like anywhere else, it depends on proper organization of information. Pinning of important posts, setting a separate channel for organization documents and another for character sheets... Well, the channels and their contents depend on the topic of your discord.