Skautfold: Moonless Knight – Beginners Guide: Basic Controls and Game Mechanics

There are some vague mechanics the game don’t tell you about as well as some boss specific tricks.

Controls

Сrеdit gоеs to Hollowriller !

You can rebind these in settings, I recommend you change the “Attack direction Lock” right away, it locks the direction you attack in… Most of the time you want to keep moving and this way you can more easily plan your attacks.

Also increase the value next to text speed, it’s way to low by default

Utility:

• Wasd: movement
• E: Use, Opens doors, chests, familiar boxes and talks to people.
• F: Heal, you only have 3 heals at most, you can find injured soldiers in some rooms, these vials are needed to heal them, they will die if you talk to them without vials available so be careful. They help with a late game boss and act as cheerleaders for it.
• M: Opens map
• Change Weapons/Relics: arrow keys, middle mouse up/down changes relics.
• Tab: changes target, needed for use with ex the grappling hook relics but also designates a target for your familiar to focus on.

Combat:

• Left mouse: Attack, there is weapon dependent windup so timing is important
• Right Mouse: Kick, can be used to gain distance from enemies by sending them far away, can be used to push them into pits.
• Both left and right mouse: Ultimate attack, need focus to use. You can focus by landing attacks, dodging, blocking and parrying, perfect versions of the last three builds more focus.
• Control: Taunt, lures enemies towards you

For all these, you can more Focus with perfect timing/ In the menu there is a tutorial you can read for more info:

• Shift: Dodge, if you time it right as the enemy would hit it makes them vulnerable and any damage done during this short moment goes straight to Hp.
• Space: Block, takes Guard to use but lowers damage from enemies, well timed you won’t take any and return damage as Guard damage to enemies.
• R button: Feint/parry: When you attack by pressing this button you cancel your strike and parries instead. (also works for animation cancel Relic slowdown, really speeds up the dark area)

If you time it right as an enemy would hit you it becomes a perfect parry stunning them + returns all their damage to them as hp damage, also instantly defeats boss atop mansion (Floor 3)

Can be activated anytime in the weapon windup animation, even after you have attacked, doing so will skip the movement reduction the animation has so you can move right away, also increases dps for all weapons if you need to constantly attack (really good for daggers)

Ex: Attack, it hits, parry, start attacking right away again, it hit, parry etc. lowers daggers cooldown from ~1-1.5s too almost nothing as Daggers has really short windup but large cooldown after.

To get the most out of it you need to time your button presses, can be tricky but with a bit of practice it should be doable.

Less useful for ex greatsword but you can avoid retaliation as you can move normaly right after you hit anything.

But it can get even dumber, the only attack with lower windup than daggers are Kicking, timing is also not very important so you can stunlock enemies by repeatedly kicking them into walls, though it deals fairly low damage and won’t gain any weapon proficiency. If you could somehow bind kick and Parry to a wheel it might be possible to insta kill bosses.

But even with how it is, kicking and parry cancel can fill your focus bar in one or two enemies (kills them too quickly) bosses should be possible to fill it in seconds.

Here i’ll show you the difference:

Against a boss this time, beware of spoilers for floor -3 boss:

Stats

You don’t level up as most games, here any stat you use gets experience and level up individually.

These are:

• Hp: Is gained from taking damaged, can be farmed by just standing around an enemy, heal when low and when you have no healing left just die and go back.
• Guard: Used both for defence and offence, are spent when enemies hit you, when you block or dodge and when you attack. If your Guard gets lower than 0 all damage goes to your hp, doesn’t hinder you from attacking or dodging so not very important to keep full.
• Block: Block attacks to lower the guard cost on use
• Syringes: Increases the amount of Guard and hp they give.
• Weapon Level: Pay the monster to the left of blacksmith in hideout Yth stones and Vitae to upgrade weapons, increases by 5% each time and changes how weapons look at intervals of 5 (+5/10/15/20)

Costs 1 Yth stone for each upgrade and 0+x*100 Zen ex +1 only Yth stone, +2 Yth stone and 100 Zen all the way to +20 with 1 Yth stone and 1900 Zen.

Ex Great Sword level 0, 5, 10, 15, 20 forms:

• Weapon Proficiency: Each level slightly lowers Guard cost per attack and adds +2 damage. Gained by attacking enemies. Guard cost reduction caps out at 20, damage keeps increasing past 20.
• Familiar Proficiency: Gained from any damage done by you familiar, increases as you go along passively.
• Curse: Increases drop rates and enemy damage, can be reset by drinking tea (table near merchant and blacksmith in hideout, tea also increases exp gain for 30min). Allows you to see more of the world (Primarily pugs). The damage increase isn’t much of an issue, you should not get hit at all until some bosses if you are careful.

Will also add some flavour visuals to maps, (eyes opening midair, ghosts etc)

Items Use and Ways to Get Them

Money (Zen)

Doesn’t have many uses here. The shop only sells one of each item but you will need a decent sum for upgrading weapons as you progress.

You get money from defeated enemies, most of the time only around 10 coins but they sometimes drop money bags worth ~10-20 each on early Floor but will give more later on as your curse builds up.

You can get money bags from destroying objects (crates, barrels, hay bales etc) or from chests (can only be opened once each). You can unlock fast travel points next to save crystals as well by paying a fee.

Yth Stones

Are your upgrade resource.

Can be found on the ground in some rooms, but not many of them just lay around. Most of them can be found in chests though sometimes they only contain money or paper slips. One can be bought from the merchant in your hideout.

Paper Slips

Upgrades one stat at random, each stat governs you hp, block, weapon proficiency etc. Gained from Chests and destructible boxes.

Vitae injectors (Syringes)

You can heal 3 times per game instance, they get refiled when you interact with a save crystal or die.

Familiars

Can be found rarely around the map in set locations, check my other guide for locations. You change these by the librarian in Hideout (the dude whose documents you keep knocking over)

Traps

Found on the floor, will damage anything that walks over them. Ex Spike traps, explosive mines. Also in the purple dark area, the Blue Gems on the floor summons Monoliths, tough enemies that deal a ton of damage.