Usually the person you want to talk to is on your screen. In these cases you can use the 'Say' feature, which makes your message pop up above your character's head. To do this, make sure you have the chat tab selected, and type the letter S into the chat box, followed by a space and what you want to say. Then press Enter to send your message.

To add a bit of spice to your conversation, it's possible to use chat 'emotes'. Emotes will make a message such as *Zugzug laughs* show above your character. You can get at these by typing E, a space, and the emotion you want to show (E laughs, for the above example). There are also numbered emotes, which can be used to have your character sit, laugh, cry, say "Hail!", and many others. These are accompanied with sound and can be quite entertaining in their own right.

When you're thinking of taking an expedition to the Sewers or the Ant Hill, and want to find some party members to go with you, Newbiechat is the chat to use. It lets you chat with everyone else in the game who is in the same fifteen-level bracket as you. So if you're level 4, Newbiechat will let you chat with people who are levels 1-15. Newbiechat is accessible by typing N, a space, and then a message. Once you've created a party, you can talk to fellow party members using Whisper, with the W key.

Talking to specific players can be accomplished using the T key ('tell'). Type T, a space, the name of the player you want to send a message to (if their name has a space in it, replace it with / - a forward slash), another space, and then your message. To save time, you can reply to messages people send you using the R key, a space, and a message. Replying sends a tell back to the last person who sent you a Tell message.

There are a bunch of different chat commands for mass communication. To talk to everyone in your guild (if you're in a guild, of course), you type G, a space, and a message. To talk to everyone in your guild, *and* everyone in allied guilds, type A, a space, and a message.  To talk to everyone on the map, the key to use is Y ('yell'). Broadcast (B, a space, and a message) sends a message to everyone in the game.

A couple more features are worth mentioning. First, ignore. You can ignore another player by typing I, a space, and their name. You can stop ignoring them by doing the same thing. You won't hear any messages from people you are ignoring. Also, they can't open trading windows to you.

Lastly, it's possible to filter out whole categories of chat. To do this, click the little circle to the left of the chat box. A window will pop up, listing numerous kinds of messages. Check all of them that you don't want. These settings will stay with your character between logins.