What is Furality?

Furality Online Xperience is a furry convention taking place in VRChat that celebrates the furry community and also raises money for SaveAFox Rescue. Our aim is to provide a way for furries to come together online, meet new friends, learn about the furry VRChat community, and have a weekend filled with fun, friends, and fantastic experiences!

What is VRChat?

VRChat is a social platform that enables users to create and share virtual worlds, avatars, and fully-interactive experiences with other users around the world! It is completely free and available to download on PC through Steam, the Oculus Store, and VivePort.

Is a VR Headset Required?

Despite the name, a virtual reality headset is NOT required! As long as you have a Windows PC capable of running VRChat, you’re good to go. VRChat is all about the community and socializing; the virtual reality aspect is just icing on the cake!

Getting Oriented

The first time you log in to VRChat, you will be presented with a short tutorial. We recommend that you go through this, as it teaches the basics of movement and interaction. The controls are pretty approachable:

• For desktop mode, movement is done via WASD while your mouse controls the camera. A full list of Keyboard and Mouse controls can be found here.
• On VR headsets, movement is controlled by the left hand controller while turning is handled on the right hand.

The Quick Menu

Once inside VRChat, the Quick Menu will be the primary way that you interact with VRChat’s systems, from friends lists, changing your avatar, and adjusting user settings. It’s essentially your gateway to all the menus and functions of VRChat. On Desktop you can quickly access this menu by pressing the ESC key, and in VR you’ll want to tap the corresponding “menu” button on your controller of choice.

A common action you may find yourself doing is wanting to select other people around you so that you could send them a friend invite, examine their avatar, or mute/block them if they’re being a nuisance. To access these types of actions, bring up the quick menu and then point at the person in question (either with your mouse or with your VR controller). If you click on them, you’ll notice that they will be surrounded by a transparent blue capsule and their name will appear in the top left of the menu. If you then click on their name you’ll find sub options that relate specifically to that player.

Controlling Your Experience

While it’s our goal to make sure everyone has a great and fun time in Furality, if you find yourself in an uncomfortable situation VRChat as a whole it’s useful to know what options you have available.

When you use the quick menu to select another player, you’ll be presented with a player specific menu that looks like this:

There are four major options available to you inside VRChat to help you navigate tough situations:

Hide Avatar

If someone is using an avatar that is causing serious performance issues for you, has loud and/or obnoxious sound effects, or is just generally a visual nuisance, this option will completely hide their avatar and replace them with a default VRChat mannequin.
The other player will not be informed you did this.

Voice Off

Conversely, if you problem is instead with the things the other player is saying, this option will mute that player.
The other player can see that you have muted them.

Blocked

If the above two options aren’t sufficient, blocking serves as a final moderation step you can take. When someone is blocked, that player is completely removed from your game - you won’t see or hear them, nor will you be able to see any friend or world invites they send. You can remove blocks on people through the VRChat web portal if you want to later.
Note that when you block someone you will also disappear from their game as well.

Report User

If you ever run into someone who is violating the terms of service for VRChat, you can use this button to report them to the VRChat moderation staff (which is separate from the Furality moderation staff).

Accepting Invites

When you receive an invite from another player, either to become their friend or to join them in a world, a notification symbol will appear on the bottom left of your HUD next to the microphone icon:

If you open your quick menu, the invites you’ve received will appear in the top left. You can then click on each of these invites to either accept or decline.

The Settings Menu

When you open the quick menu, in the middle row on the far right you’ll find the settings menu. This is where you can control your audio settings, comfort options for VR users, and other functions of VRChat.

Take an opportunity to make sure that the correct microphone for your computer is selected in the bottom right. While you should adjust these as you are most comfortable with, there are a few that we'd like to specifically make mention of:

Comfort and Safety

Holoport (3P Locomotion): If you’re a VR user and not prone to motion sickness, we’d recommend turning this feature off. When off, you’ll directly move around the world when you move your analog stick/tough pad on your VR controller.

Comfort Turning: If you’re a VR user, this feature will control whether turning with your controller is done in large increments or in a 1:1 manner. Set this feature on or off to your preference.

Personal Space: This is a safety feature that will prevent other players from getting too close to you. When this feature is on, anyone that gets within roughly 1 ft of your avatar will cease to render. This is handy as it can prevent unwanted interactions and also prevents you from clipping into other players. However, if you find yourself wanting to give someone a friendly hug in greeting, you’ll want to turn this off.

Voice Options

Toggle Voice: When on, instead of needing to hold down a button to speak you’ll be able to press a button to turn on and off your mic. Given that a lot of VRChat is being social with others, if you are not in a noisy environment we recommend turning this setting on.

Mic Defaults On: When you have Toggle Voice set to on, this setting controls whether or not your mic will default to on when you enter a new world. As long as you are playing in a relatively quiet space, we recommend changing this setting to on.

Other Options

Skip Go On Load: By default, when you are about to load into a new world, VRChat waits for you to confirm that you want to join. You may find you’ll want to skip this, and we recommend changing this setting to on.

The Safety Menu

Some of the most powerful settings are located in the Safety menu, which allows you to control how you see other players in VRChat. An avatar with a lot of particle effects and shaders can be disruptive or affect your framerate, the safety menu allows you to limit who can display these effects to you or automatically block avatars that have a large impact on your performance.

This menu lets you use three default “shield” levels - Maximum, Normal, and None - or to create your own custom settings. Each of these options will set what things are visible/audible from other players based on their trust level - a measure of how long the player has been playing VRChat. We recommend using a custom setting with the following settings:

• For the Friends category, set all categories to “on”.
• For all other categories (Visitor, New User, User, etc.) turn Voice, Avatar and audio on, but disable lights, shaders, and custom animations.

These settings tend to strike the best balance when you are exploring worlds with people you don’t know, though it does occasionally mean that certain avatars won’t appear properly unless you manually select the player and enable them via the “Show Avatar” button.

The Avatar Menu

The avatar menu is where you can find your favorite and uploaded avatars, as well as some public avatars for you to use to get started. Many freely available avatars can be found in “Avatar worlds” found in the worlds menu; explore and find an avatar that you like, then use the Favorite button so you always have it around! Any avatar you favorite you will be able to switch back to later, though all accounts only allow for a max of 16 favorited avatars at a time.

The Worlds Menu

Before we continue, there are two terms that are worth being familiar with:

Worlds

Worlds are the “levels” of VRChat, most of which have been created and uploaded by the community. The world defines the look, feel, and functionality of the place you are visiting.

Instance

Whenever players join a world, they join a specific “instance” of that world. This “instance” is a unique copy of the world with its own crowd of players.

With that out of the way, the worlds menu is the way to browse and visit the many worlds of VRChat. Trying to find a new avatar? Looking to socialize? Want to play a game? There’s a world for that and so much more; much of the appeal of VRChat is going and exploring all of these worlds with your new friends.

When you open the worlds menu, you’ll be presented with a large list of worlds curated by VRChat. You can scroll through these lists or use the search menu in the top right to look for things you are particularly interested in.

Once you’ve found a world that is interesting in the list, you can select it to shift to another screen that will give you more information:

From here you have a few notable options:

Favorite

Similar to avatars, you can save this world to a list for access later.

Go

This option will take you immediately to the currently selected instance of the world (by default VRChat tends to select the most populated “public” version of an instance).

Drop Portal

This will drop a temporary portal roughly 5 feet in front of you that can serve as a doorway to the currently selected instance. At this point then you or anyone else in the instance you are currently in can walk through the portal to go to that instance - this is the main way that groups of players tend to explore worlds together.

Other Instances

This scrollbar at the bottom will let you select different accessible instances of the world, in the case that there’s either a specific one you want to go to or you’re looking for a less populated space.

New Instance

If you’d like to create a new instance, either because you want to go somewhere by yourself or you want an experience that’s a little more private, this button will let you create that instance with the rules you want.

After you select the permissions for the instance you want to create, that instance will be the new selected instance, and if you hit either “go” or “drop portal” it will connect you there.

The Social Menu

The social menu is where you can find a list of everyone in the room with you, as well as all of your friends! Clicking on a friend will allow you to join them in the world they’re in, or send a request to join them if they’re in a private world. This is a great way to meet up with people you know!

Would you like to know more?

Looking for a little more help, to meet with other Furality attendees and staff, or get more information about the convention? We encourage you to visit our Discord server and attend our upcoming VRChat Newbie Nights!

Furality Registration Opens Soon

Before the convention starts, join the Furality Online Xperience Discord server to share avatars, meet fellow attendees, and keep up to date with the latest news!