Your first night in Warlord: Awaji

The campaign drops you on a shore with an army and an island to take. The first hours are also where day-one players got stuck — on camp items the tutorial never spells out, and on a soft-lock that made one player skip the whole thing. Here's the order that works.

Starter guide Camp · Tutorial · First battle From launch-day threads
Warlord: Awaji official screenshot showing the samurai warlord commanding warriors in feudal Japan

The five-step first night

1. Run the tutorial in order — really

The devs pinned a note about tutorial ordering on the community hub the day the game launched, which tells you how many people it tripped. Steps done out of sequence don't always fail loudly; sometimes the next objective just never arrives. If the tutorial feels dead-ended, back up to the last step you skipped rather than restarting the campaign.

2. Build all three camp items — not just the obvious ones

This is the big one. A camp wants a sleeping roll, a resting mat and a food tray. On launch day, players posted that they'd built what looked like a complete camp and the tutorial still wouldn't close out — the missing piece was one of these three, and it isn't the piece you'd guess first. Before you assume a bug, count the three.

3. Fence and guard before dark

Screens, fences, assigned guards. Camps are where you sleep, rest and eat, and an open camp invites night ambushes. Nothing here is a trap decision: you can pack the entire camp up and relocate it later, which is also how you set up forward camps deeper into the island.

4. Promote leaders to grow the retinue

Every warrior has a name and earns experience. Conquered land is what lets you promote leaders and expand your army's capacity, and formations are arranged with a drag-and-drop menu rather than abstract sliders. Day-one note: several players could not find the promote control at all — it's tied to holding conquered land, so if the option seems missing, check what you've actually captured.

5. Treat shrines as objectives

Capturing a rival clan's shrine boosts your spiritual aura and drains theirs, and hitting the right temples can pull enemy quick-reaction forces away from somewhere else. The island was rebuilt from real heightmap data, and its dozens of real temples and shrines are the strategic layer.

Where players actually got stuck on day one

Darkmatter has pinned an issue-collection thread on the community hub — worth a search before you file a new one.

Day one also brought boot failures and mid-session crash reports. If your problem is technical rather than tutorial, see our day-one bug report and your options.