New here - what should I know?

Hey everyone, just joined today and wanted to say

Welcome! The modding scene is awesome — just download something that catches your eye and try it out. Don't worry about breaking anything, you can always go back to vanilla if a mod doesn't work for you. Also the community here is super helpful so don't hesitate to ask questions when things get confusing!

hi i just joined and am really lost — is there like a beginner's guide or something? i see lots of acronyms in other threads but dont know what any of them mean. also how do people get to be senior level here, does it take years or can you learn the basics quickly. sorry for asking so many questions at once im just nervous about posting stuff and being wrong. thanks for helping me out

Welcome to the community and honestly I'm glad you asked because there are so many things people never mention that actually make this place usable for new members and generally it helps to know that everyone here has been a complete novice at some point which is what makes the vibe less intimidating than on other platforms where everybody acts like they've known everything since birth but what I really want to tell you before anything else because it keeps coming up in my head and I feel bad not sharing it is that there was this one time about three years ago when I joined a completely different community — totally unrelated to this one actually, we're talking Discord servers for historical wargaming which sounds like it has nothing to do with whatever you came here looking for but bear with me because the principle is identical — and on that server the first month was brutal. Not in a mean way. Just in an overwhelming way because there were so many channels and everyone had their own shorthand slang and I spent about three weeks just reading without posting anything at all which is what you should do here too. Three weeks of silent lurking to learn how people talk and what questions are actually worth asking versus the ones that've been asked a thousand times. And then one night this person replied to something I posted — it was only five words long, super encouraging, said 'this is exactly what we needed to hear today' and honestly that changed everything for me because it made the community feel human instead of like an encyclopedia with people attached to it. So my advice: lurk first. Maybe for a week or two. Then start small. Ask one question at a time. Don't worry about sounding dumb because everyone does in this thread — I know, probably too many words but this is what this board feels like to me and I wanted you to have the honest version instead of some sanitized five-sentence answer.