You will begin your adventure in the Training Facilities for your faction. These facilities are instanced, with a cap on the number of players before it spins up a new one. The instancing was a new feature for Alpha 3, so please let us know if you run into any issues.

The purpose of the Training Facilities is to get players acquainted with the basics of the game. The first two part mission series (The Awakening) is required to leave the facilities. It covers basic topics such as speaking to NPCs, movement, and basic combat. Be sure to pay attention to the tips on your first session, as they do provide you with valuable information. You can later disable the tips interface if you wish through the Interface Options.

Upon completing the second part of the Awakening series you will be awarded with 2 Training Chits. You can use these chits to receive free training in two areas of your choice. From this point onward the game has no real linearity to it. You can leave at any point by speaking to an NPC at the landing pad near the training grounds, or you can move past him into the other sections of the area which include a slew of trainers. Some of these trainers will offer you training for free, and others will require you to expend one of your two training chits to receive the training. It should be noted that the vast majority of these tutorials can also later be completed in the world, but the trainers are not as conveniently located as they are in the Training Facilities so we recommend you take advantage of them before leaving the area (via the landing pad).

We recommend that before leaving the facilities you first visit a number of trainers. Take the free training options and then decide on what you wish to spend your two chits on. Remember that most special abilities are tied to your weapon line, so it may be a bad choice to spend both of your chits on a weapon skill. You'll already have handgun training for free from the Awakening tutorial. If you prefer a different weapon then you can train using a chit from the combat training area. But it's unlikely that you should need a third combat weapon just yet. You can always train additional weapons later by spending 100 credits in many cities to train.

The trainers are batched together based on what they train. For example the combat trainers are all in one place. You can learn entertainer abilities at the bars. If you wish to learn medical skills you should visit the medical building at the far corners (inside of the mountain).

You can do a simple crafting tutorial at the Workshop section of the tutorial which teaches you how to purify water, along with the basics of crafting. That is the extent of the crafting tutorials for the time being. You can buy other training manuals from vendors which teach you recipes for those skills. It should be noted that you can only purchase basic recipes. There are more advanced recipes that are only available through advanced training manuals. Those manuals can be obtained as mob drops, through missions, engagements, or by trading with other players

Once you have used both of your training chits and are ready to move on to the real world, hop the shuttle to your faction's city. In the future we'll allow you to select between a few cities but currently you are just taken to either Plymouth City (OWON) or Freedomtown (FPR). From here on out, there are no rails. It is a completely open ended experience, that will be foreign to a lot of players, and will require an adjustment in playing mentality over a lot of other games. We'll try to guide you through the basics for now.

It should be noted that you can find a FAQ which answers a lot of common questions here: The Repopulation FAQ[therepopulation.com]. It covers more specific things than our covered here, where this tries to cover more broad subjects.

Over the past ten years, missions have driven MMO content. While you don't need to complete missions to advance in Repop, they are an activity that many players will use to drive the action. Mission are an easy source of special abilities and there are mission styles for all playing types. But missions work far differently in Repop than in other games, and require a bit of explanation.

First off there are two main types of missions in Repop: Static and Generated. There are also other specialty types such as Timed, Inquired or One Time, but the most important things you need to know are the difference between Static and Generated missions. a minute though to discuss Static vs. Generated missions though.

Static Missions in Repop come in several varieties. There are collections which are repeatable missions that ask you to obtain a certain item. Collections have a green icon, and often give decent rewards for your efforts. The items they ask for though are rare, so your best bet with these types of missions is to simply turn in the items when you come across them. There are also trainer/tutorial missions which have a blue icon. These can only be completed once, and allow you to pay a fee (or a chit) to learn the basic starting abilities for a certain skill. Last but not least are traditional static missions, which have a yellow icon. These are similar to the static missions in most other games, except there are far less of them in Repop. You've done these before, they don't require a ton of explanation.

Our Generated mission system though is something new to the genre. Generated missions come to players in the form of mailed Job Offers. These missions will be generated from you from pretty much anyplace in the world. When you receive mail a flashing mail icon will appear near your minimap. Click on it to open up your mailbox. When you read a generated job offer it will give you a basic description of the task at hand, and the option to accept the mission or deny it.

IT IS VERY IMPORTANT to note that you do not need to do all of these missions. A common mistake by new players is to accept every offer that comes in, and then spend a lot of time trying to figure out a mission or waiting for the NPC they need to spawn (some NPCs only arrive at certain times of day and some are in random positions). Unless the mission is flagged as Epic, you probably have very little to lose from simply denying it or aborting it. And here is why... Missions are generated based on how many missions you already have open. Meaning if you have no missions currently, it's going to generate you missions more quickly than if you already have 5 open. Once you cross 10 open missions it stops generating them. So if you have open missions and leave the area, or if you don't plan on being around at night time and the mission tells you this NPC shows up at the bar at night, then simply abort the mission. This will benefit you in the long run.

You can filter your generated missions, or if you simply hate running missions you can disable them entirely. To do this you should open up your Mission window and click on the Settings tab. From there you will see a list of mission filtering options, and a checkbox that allows you to enable or disable mission creation.

Another thing to note is that generated missions are tailored for your character. So while every character can receive simple generic missions, there are many skill, trait, reputation or role specific abilities that will only be available to players who are an appropriate match. This means that if you perform activities, you'll start seeing shadier job offers. If you have shown some skill in removing traps, you'll start receiving missions to clear out traps in some areas. If you want to start receiving higher end combat missions, you'll need to work on your combat skills, etc. We track a lot of data on your choices in missions, and we can use that data to tailor missions to your playing style. So your choices do make a difference.

As you likely already know, The Repopulation is a skills based game. Your character will begin with all of the unhidden skills in the game, though each of those skills begins as Unskilled and will not be very effective.

You can increase your skill levels in several ways. The easiest and most obvious way is simply through use. If you want to increase your Rifle Tactics, go out and attack dangerous enemies with a rifle. If you wish to increase your Firearms Crafting, then go out and craft Firearms, etc. Another common means of increasing skill levels is through the Skill Imprinting system. You will receive Skill Imprinting points. You can acquire these by completing missions, engagements or harvesting. Skill Imprints are categorized by the type of activity you completed. You can spend those points by visiting Skill Imprinting Stations which are available in most medical centers. You can also gain skill points by exploring new areas. New areas will often reward you with points for a skill related to that area. Skills can be increased by performing skill checks during missions. Some mission branches will have options which check against a certain skill, and those branches have a chance to increase that skill through the check. Last but not least you can gain skills by reading certain books.

As your skills increase you will qualify to learn new special abilities. Unlike most MMORPGs you don't automatically gain abilities in The Repopulation. You must instead collect them. Ability cards are generated rewards from Missions, Engagements, and as loot from mobs. If you open your abilities window you will notice that there is a tab for Learnable abilities. These are the abilities that you qualify for but do not yet know. When you complete missions or engagements you will be given a choice of up to three abilities to choose from. The abilities chosen will be based on the type of mission. Generic missions might reward you with most types of abilities. Combat missions would generally reward combat rewards, where Medical missions are your best chances to get medical rewards, etc. If you want to gain abilities for the shadier skills (Thivery, Assassination, etc) you will likely need to do Underworld missions.

You can feasibly learn hundreds of skills in The Repopulation if you played for years. So it is important to know how to open up additional ability bars. You can do so in two ways. First you can right click on the left hand portion of your ability bar and select to Open New Bar from the pop up menu. The second is by hitting escape and then going into the Interface Options and then selecting which bars to open from the options there. You can currently have two vertical and four horizontal ability bars open at any given time. The pop up menu also allows you to scale the size of your ability bars up or down, and to lock or unlock their positions

There are three types of harvesting in Repop: Manual, Automated, and Extracted. Let's discuss how each works.

Manual harvesting refers to finding the orange resource nodes on the map and then equipping a crafting tool (such as a Speargun for fishing resources) and clicking on the object to harvest them. This style of crafting has a chance to receive rare harvests and is much more involved. Resources are limited in quantity in these areas, though the locations that resources spawn is in static locations (though in random spots inside of those locations). This means overharvested areas will produce less resources. So there is some merit in finding more remote resource locations because they will be richer in resources.

The second type of harvesting is Automated using harvesters. Harvesting devices come in various forms. These nodes are generally larger than the other nodes, and each has slots for four different players harvesters. These last longer but harvest slower. You must return to them to collect your harvester and the resources. The advantage of these is that they can yield high numbers of resources, and allow for a greater variety of resources. They appear in random locations throughout the world though, so the key to these resources is finding them. There is a Survey skill which aids you in tracking them and your success is based on your skill with that node type.

Extraction takes place on the corpses of opponents. There are various forms that will be automatically selected when you right click a corpse that can be extracted but has no other loot. This is how you obtain resources from many species.

Each of these systems become more effective as your Subsistence Knowledge (subject to a name change when we come up with a better description) or mastery level of that resource type increases. This means the more you harvest a certain type the more effective you will become at harvesting it.

Our economy is built largely around crafting. You can craft the best items in the game, and most of the items in the game will be craftable. The system itself though is a very detailed system. The basics are covered in the crafting tutorial from the Workshop Supervisor. But there are a few things we want to reitirate here.

- Recipes are obtained through training manuals. You can purchase some of these on vendors, but the more advanced ones must be acquired from missions, engagements, mob drops, or by buying/trading for them with other players.
- Recipes can often create many types of items by substituting the component types. For example if a recipe requires an Acid ingredient you may be able to get different results by using different acids. Some types of acids may not produce any result.
- You can often get different results by creating higher grades or difficulty tiers of items. This is particularly true for things like shells, pets, or furniture items.
- Each recipe has it's own Subsistence Knowledge entry (mastery level). The more you create certain types of recipes, the better results you will receive.
- The grade of your components will affect the grade of the result.

You can find (generally up to date) details on recipes and crafting components at this page: TR Game Database[www.therepopulation.com]

Combat is an obviously important feature. The core of combat works similar to most MMORPGs, so we will focus instead on the areas that are different in The Repopulation.

The most obvious difference is the split between RPG Mode (what you generally use in MMOs) and Action Mode (a simpler wrapper around it which allows more of a shooter style feel). As you likely all know by know both of these modes work the same under the hood. In our case Action Mode simply allows you to control the game like you would a shooter. It converts your actions into special abilities, but you still must have acquired those abilities already. You can switch between modes by using the CTRL-A key or whatever options you have mapped your action mode settings to. These can be remapped through the Key Bindings. To edit Key Bindings hit the escape Key and then select the Key Bindings option.

Whenever a window opens Action Mode will automatically switch to interface mode which allows you to move around items, or interact with the interface. You can hit escape to close the window, or use the close button and it will then switch back into Action Mode automatically.

When in action mode any mouse movement will control the direction you are facing, similar to a first or third person shooter. To interact with a friendly NPC or attack a hostile one you simply aim the target reticle at them and then click the Left Mouse Button to perform an action, or the Right Mouse Button to perform a Momentum based action. If you hold CTRL and hit the left or right mouse button it will perform a Defensive Action. It will automatically pick an ability from whatever you know that is not on a timer that best matches that action. You can enter zoom mode by using the mousewheel while in First Person Mode (CTRL-F to toggle first person by default). You can then exit it by using the mousewheel to zoom out.

What is the difference between a normal action and a Momentum based action? Momentum is a vital type in The Repopulation and is displayed on your character's status bar. As positive things happen to your character you gain Momentum. As negative events occur (and slowly over time) you lose it. You can consume Momentum to perform more powerful special abilities. If you select to perform a Momentum based action in Action Mode and lack Momentum to perform any it will fall back to a normal action.

Players have two other vital resources that are used in combat: Endurance and Energy. Endurance is your physical stamina. Perform physical activities will drain it. Energy is a powered statistic that is determined by your armor. Heavier Armors regain energy more slowly than lighter ones. Energy can be used to both power weapons, and energy shields. If you hit the C key to open your character sheet you will see a slider which allows you to distribute the percentage of energy reserved for each. Your breastplate will determine the limits that you can place on each.

Energy shields are a vital component in Repop as they can absorb a percentage of incoming energy based damage. This makes them very effective against ranged weapons. Melee weapons do physical types of damage though which can not be absorbed by these shields.

Repop also allows for three distinct postures: Standing, Crouching or Lying Prone. When you are standing you are the most mobile, and the least vulnerable to melee attacks. Crouching or Lying Prone will increase your ranged weapon effectiveness, but makes you less mobile and more vulnerable to melee attacks. Some abilities will require you to be in a specific posture to be used. You can raise your posture by hitting the F key (by default) and lower it by using the V key.

Another important concept in Repop combat is the openings system. There are many openings including things like Off Balance, Knocked Down, Motivated, Dazed, Discouraged, Bleeding, etc. Many of these abilities affect other incoming attacks by other players. For example, if an opponent is Off Balance they are more susceptible to Knockdowns or Knockbacks, and certain other abilities will be more effective against them by gaining bonus effects. Coordinating your abilities with other players will make your group more effective.

Melee types may wish to use the /stick command. This command will attempt to follow your target within melee range, and helps against jousting opponents or running mobs.

Cover is another key aspect to combat. If you find a cover area you can use it to create a defensive bonus. The bonus will be larger if you line prone or crouch.

Repop is designed to be very soloable, but encourage grouping. There really isn't any reason that you shouldn't want to group. All players gain skills individually and have personalized loot, but there are bonuses to make it beneficial to group. The entire group will gain a bonus to loot, mission and engagement rewards, as well as their skill up rates. Groups are limited to 8 players max and there are no skill level restrictions.

Don't worry though, grouping up is very easy. By default Auto-grouping is enabled. You can disable it or alter your auto-group settings by hitting escape and selecting to modify your Game Options. The Auto-grouping options are in this window. Auto-grouping will automatically group players together when they are ungrouped and in an active engagement area.

To use group chat you should click on the chat channel area of your chat box (to the left of the chat input box) and select Party as the channel or type /party <chat> or /group <chat>.

In addition to auto-grouping and the interface based group control you also have the following grouping commands:

/invite Invites players into your group.
/join Accepts a group invitation.
/decline Declines a group invitation.
/leave Leaves your group.
/disband Disbands your group if you are the leader. Can only be used by the leader.
/promote Promotes a member to group leader. Can only be used by the leader.

There are many forms of dynamic content in The Repopulation, and this means that you'll often get a different experience when you go to certain areas... at least that's the intended effect. Each of these has a varying degree of control over other things occurring in the area. To help you identify the various types for bug reporting purposes we want to describe them all here:

Engagements are the easiest of the types to identify as they create an Orange titled entry on your mission helper window. If the title is in orange then it is an engagement, which is our version of public quests. Engagements can range from static often occurring things, to permanent activities (wide area events often have at least one engagement going at all times, and are generally longer term), or rare opportunities (things that may be spawned from other events taking place, or very rarely). Engagements can have an array of options such as collection goals, harvesting goals, turn ins, kill goals, protect goals, escorts, and long-term tracking goals (such as don't kill too many of X or something bad will happen). They can also scale in difficulty based on the number of players in the area, or have opposing sides of the engagement for each faction. You can often inquire with NPCs about what is happening in the local area, or what is happening in ___ area to find out what events are currently ongoing or what ones have happened recently. Not all areas support this, but we'll keep adding more support for this as we go. It should be noted that we plan on having many more engagements than are currently available. Once we get all of the basic generated content into the world we'll be giving second or third passes to areas and adding in a greater number of these. Unlike the other systems here, engagemetns are unique in that they automatically assign rewards to players at the end of the engagement based on their contribution.

Dens are the second most common type of dynamic content. Dens are basically our way of spawning mobs which can despawn when there are no players in an area, and spawn when necessary. They can choose themed mobs so the mobs can change, have varying rules to advance or defeat the den (including waves), sometimes they will also require you to destroy a camp or den in order to stop the mobs from spawning. The rules can vary signficantly by the den type. But in the majority of mob spawns in the Repopulation are controlled through dens. Dens don't reward players specifically, the rewards are generally in the bosses which spawn through the dens. A typical camp style den might have a camp which grows in power if it is left unchecked, with each wave of spawns growing tougher and spawning different bosses. A "ring event" style den would be a camp which doesn't automatically grow in size, it stays stable or gets easier, but if players defeat the bosses, new waves start appearing in response and it gets tougher. A den spawning type might continually spit out more and more difficult mobs until you kill the spawner object itself, etc. Dens can have day/night alternatives, and can randomize between different types of mobs after they are destroyed. The key concept that makes dens unique though is that if there are no players inside of the den space for a period of time, the den will close and then restart later when players enter into the area, and the fact that they can scale up spawn rates based on the number of players inside of them. Another interesting feature of dens is that they interact well with the mission system and will sometimes give Timed Missions that players automatically receive when a den reaches a certain stage. For example, a Lesoo Scout Den will generally give players a timed mission to destroy the camp when they go near it.

Adversarial Camps are a new edition and were one of our Kickstarter goals. In many ways these work like dens with the exception of a few features. Dens can sometimes be stretched over large areas, camps are generally condensed to smaller areas, and have more random spawn locations. Dens generally only choose from a 1-3 types of mobs (though they support more) where adversarial camps often include a wide variety of different mobs. Adversarial Camps always include a spawner object which much be destroyed to stop if from advancing. The most important distinction though is that adversarial camps will grow in size and difficulty automatically, and WILL NOT despawn when there are no players in the area. Where dens are intended to provide constant content to an area which adjusts based on the player counts, camps provide infestation style content which will grow in size when there is nobody around to trim it. When left unchecked most camps will eventually spawn raid level content.

World Events are the least common of the dynamic content styles, but can activate or deactivate all of the other types. What makes world events very different from other things is that they adjust based on player or NPC balance world wide. We create trigger spaces throughout the world and tell them to monitor certain activities. So we might tell a certain area to watch for how many wealthy players pass through it. Another might look for the highest amount of Prey NPCs, or the most lowly skilled players. World events then occur based on those variables. There is a simple hidden skill in the game which relies on you finding a Hermit who will spawn in more remote areas of the world. He will only spawn in areas that have a low player count though, and can only be in one location at a time. He changes location every 15 minutes. Another example are the Lesoo Murderers who sometimes appear on roads. They are looking for low level characters, the areas that have the higher concentrations of them will sometimes see these appear on the road.

The entertainment system is still on it's first phase of polish and hasn't had a ton of testing due to not having high enough player accounts to make it useful. So please give us as much feedback as you can on this area. Entertainment abilities can only be performed in areas marked as rest areas, such as pubs, and player created camps for the most part. There are some exceptions to that rule, for example Interactive Music can be played from anyplace.

There are various forms of entertainment lines including Dances, Tales, Songs, and Motivations. What is universally true among them all is that they create buffs for nearby players. These buffs grow in potency and/or duration the more times they stack, and new buffs can be created when certain criteria is matched. For example, some of the higher end buffs might require that a player have numerous other buffs active. Some lines also require players to continue along the same path or it resets back to the beginning, this is true for Tales. Some twists are compatible with one another, and others are not. These are shared with other storytellers in the area.

It should be noted that we are missing instrument models and a number of animations which will be needed to finish this feature off visually. This will improve over the course of testing.

PvP is an important aspect of the Repopulation. Alpha 3 was our first real test of world PvP as the majority of PvP to date has been in controlled settings, or siege testing. We would appreciate as much feedback as we can get on PvP.

In order to PvP you should venture out into the contested regions. There is a Sept Falls/PvP Travel Agent at the landing pad in both Freedomtown and Plymouth City, and a travel agent who can later return you home. Sept Falls is a neutral city, think of it as Switzerland. Once you pass too far from it's walls though you will notice the message that you have entered into a contested region and PvP is enabled.

You can turn in the collectible items you receive from other players to Bounty Collectors for your faction. These are available in many areas including Sept Falls. These help you gain military rank, which in turn provides you with new titles and perks which can be purchased from military vendors. These include new abilities, special items, and charged pets or consumables.

Instanced Housing is a common form of housing which you can gain pretty quickly. You can receive information on the system and travel to the instanced housing area by speaking with the Housing Travel Agent in Plymouth City or Freedomtown. They are located at the landing pad. You'll need to purchase a plot and then travel into the instanced housing area. Once there you must travel to your plot, which will be randomly assigned based on the type of plot you purchased. When you are in the right location you will notice a structure window appears on the left hand corner of your screen. This window is used to place objects.

While we continue to work on building and furniture recipes we are allowing players to purchase blueprints for housing and player created cities from vendors in the housing area or by using the nation window and purchasing structures from there. When you click to use these blueprints to add them to your structure list. This is the list that appears in the window that pops up when you enter into your housing plot. From there you simply click on which object you wish to place to try placing it.

Josh will expand on this tutorial in the future, but this is the basics.

In order to create a player created city you need to place a Control Center on an unclaimed city plot. These plots are found throughout the contested areas, and currently look like a large flat space with concrete painted on the bottom. When you walk onto it a structure window will appear, very similar to what happens in instanced housing. In the future we will be changing the way the plots look when unclaimed.

Once a control center is claimed, the city is formed and will appear in your nations cities tab. If you have the appropriate permissions you will be able to place new structures or units, modify them, etc. Underground levels of cities are not yet supported, and they will include personalized spaces. The top level portion of the city is owned by the nation itself and you will need to have proper permissions (set by your nation's leadership or officers) to be able to place or modify structures.

Josh will expand on this section in the future, but this covers the basics.

There are numerous types of pets in the Repopulation and they will be covered in the sections below. This section will just cover some general pet basics.

All characters can have pets in The Repopulation. Some pets are tougher to control than others, and some have a skill requirement in order to use. Pets also have different roles. There are pets who are suited for support roles, and others who specialize in combat. Deployed Turrets (not the city unit variety) are also considered pets.

You can control up to three pets at any given time, though you are restricted on the types of pets in some cases. Each pet that you have out though will require you to expend some concentration on it which will reduce your ability to perform other tasks. It means you will be less effective in combat, and will gain skills at a slower rate when you have a pet out. This gets significantly worse for each additional pet. We don't want players to feel that they always need to have pets out in order to compete, which makes these types of penalties a necessity.

Concentration is a newer feature, and could use as much feedback as possible on its balance.

There is a pet taming tutorial in each of the Training Facilities and also in some other parts of the world. You can also obtain the abilities as random rewards when completing missions, killing mobs or performing well in engagements.

To Tame a pet you use the Tame ability on an appropriate target. Most species require the animal to be a Baby in order to tame them, but some more docile types of animals can be tamed while mature. It will often take multiple attempts to tame an animal. If an animal is hostile there are Calm and Unthreatening Approach abilities which aid you in getting closer to the mob before being attacked.

Once an animal is tamed you will receive a leash in your inventory which allows you to call that animal at any point. Mousing over this item will give you a clue on the pets health, age and well being. It is important to Feed your pets using the Feed Animal ability. Pet Food can be purchased from pet stores or crafted. If you never feed your pets they will eventually begin starving and lose health. It is also important to use Veterinary medicine skills on your pets after they have died or starved. This will restore their durability and keep them alive. Failing to do so will make your pet eventually die. Properly fed pets will grow and become more powerful with age, so it is important to take care of them.

Skilled animal handlers will also be able convert certain types of pets (Calrpates and Rocharus currently) into Mounts which can be ridden.

Unlike Robotic and Tamed Pets (which are both permanent with the exception of some forms of robots) genetically engineered pets are single use. They are the easiest types of pets to control for general users though, and feature the widest variety of pet types. They are produced through the trade skill of Genetic Engineering which involves splicing DNA and Tissue of various species. It is far easier to produce normal species though than it is to produce hybrids.

Robotic Pets are unique in that they can be upgraded using a socket system that works similar to fittings. It allows you to upgrade robotic pets to make them more potent. They include both traditional style robots and turrets.

The bulk of robot pets are crafted. There are some store bought varieties though and some available through military perks. Those, however are single use, where crafted robotic pets have a much longer lifespan.

There is a growing number of vehicles and mounts in The Repopulation. These can both be single passenger or multi-passenger, combat combat oriented or travel based. You can purchase some low quality vehicles from vendors, but the best vehicles are crafted through the Vehicle Engineering skill.

When you first purchase or obtain a vehicle you can double click it to add it to your vehicle or mount list. You can later call it out using the Vehicle Window, which looks like a steering wheel on your menu bar. to mount a vehicle simply double click it, or target it and type /vehicle mount. You can dismount by CTRL-clicking on it, or typing /vehicle dismount.

It should be noted that all vehicles currently use the same icon and do not yet have proper portraits in the target bar. This will change in the future.

The thievery skill can be used to Pick the Pocket of NPCs or steal from shops. It should be noted that doing so will cause you to lose reputation and could eventually cause you to be removed from your starting faction. They will email you warnings before evicting you, however. So why would you want to steal? Well for one it's free stuff. And for two, there are certain unique opportunities that are only available through this system. There are missions that also revolve around it. So there are some benefits to stealing, but it does come at a price.

To steal from shops you need to find objects which can be stolen. You can do this by mousing over objects in shops. If you notice the object highlight in red then that is indicating it can be stolen. You will receive a warning when you steal the item and if you are caught you may be attacked by guards and will certainly lose reputation.

To Pick Pocket NPCs you must first obtain the Pick Pocket skill. You then simply click on the NPC you wish to steal from and attempt to use the ability.

A common question is how you obtain Fitting points. You will notice that different items have a certain number of points and you expend points when you attach a fitting. The number of points available is determined by the skill level that you have with that item type. So for example a rifle will have more points available as your Rifle Tactics raises, and a heavy armor piece will increase the number of points as your Heavy Armor skill rises.