Tick Rider Safety Briefing
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	Introduction:

Welcome to the wild world of tick riding. No doubt you think you know the humble tick, but until you have tried to ride one, you know nothing! So, we will start from scratch...

First, take a moment to familiarize yourself with the script. The basic use instructions are listed there, but for those of you who are lazy, here are the controls once again:

- Action Key: 
Mount/Dismount Tick. Seems simple? First you have to be aimed in the general direction of a tick, and it has to be close enough (look at the settings in the script as for how close is enough). You may jump past the tick. If this happens, try again, or...

- Microphone Key: 
Pressing and/or holding this will cause the player to produce their best imitation of a Tick mating call, hopefully summoning a flappyboi. The ticks may take their time and can get distracted, so keep doing this until one is close enough to jump on.

- Cycle Weapon Left and Cycle Weapon Right (Simultaneously):
While riding a tick, pressing this combo will cause the player to 'gently persuade' their tick to go somewhere else. This may take repeated application to achieve the desired effect. Bear in mind that ticks are not impervious to your suggestion, and may expire due to too much insistence. Tick abuse is a serious problem, please treat your tick with the appropriate level of love and disrespect!


	Configuration:

Open the lua script in any text editor and look at the settings. Of particular note are 'graspReach' and 'jumpForce'. If you're having a hard time catching ticks, you may want to increase 'graspReach' as it defines the proximity within which the player will grab on to a tick after they leap for  it. Speaking of leaping, 'jumpForce' may be too salty if you're scared of flying. Tone it down for more gentle tick gymnastics, or pump it up to really 'send it'.

If you are finding your ticks are getting stuck in certain parts of the map you want to use, you might try increasing 'exclusionHeight' as this will attempt to prevent them from going into tight spaces by preventing pathing to those areas, and despawning or moving ticks from them if they appear there. If you find yourself bonking your noggin on the ceilings, try tweaking 'downDraft' to increase the force of the Lua spirit which pushes the tick away from places what hurt your head.

If you have too many ticks, and many of them appear to do nothing at all, try reducing 'spareTicks' to something more sane. I find that 7 is a lucky number. If not enough ticks, add as many as you dare.

You can adjust various other settings to suit your play style and life choices at will. There are no wrong answers, just new and exciting questions.


	Problems:

There are some limitations in how Lua can deal with certain situations, at least when I'm writing it. Sometimes your tick may get stuck in a place that is not amenable to carrying your lanky self out from. In this case, sometimes your best bet is to get off and get back  on when it's figured out a way to not be stuck. Sometimes you must find another tick, and let nature do what it will with your defective tick. Alas, such is life.

In some cases, maps will just not produce fun results with Tick Rider. This can be due to zero-area polygons (such as split polygons) and a lack of viable paths with sufficient headroom. There is not much we can do, but try messing with the default settings and see if you can find any luck.

Monsters are able to ride ticks, and if you have monsters enabled, any monster that spawns will be given a tick. If this bothers you in some kind of way, I would remind you that even the player is technically a monster. (look it up)


	Customization:

If you scroll deeper into the bowels of the script, you may notice that some things are programmed to happen depending upon the ._name of a tick. We will not be giving an entire lesson on how Lua works, but if you use the extant functions as a template, you should be able to create new and disgusting expressions of tick individuality. Way down towards the bottom there are some tables of names and adjectives. If nothing else, you should add to these for your own amusement.

Good luck, and as always, 'keep your tick on the ice!'