After you install worldcraft/hammer version 3.4, you will most likely be wanting to dive right into is, but you must first set up the configuration for waorldcraft/hammer to work correctly. This can be confusing for many people who have not worked with Half-Life or worldcraft before. Thats what tutorials are for. The configuration that is shown in the pictures is for Half-Life only, not any other mods, but the configs for other mods will be just about the same.

When you first start worldcraft/hammer, you should be prompted to begin the setup of the program, which is what you are supposed to do. If this promp does not appear. Go to the toolbar at the top of the screen, bring down tools, then click on options. After you have done this, a new window should appear on the screen and this window has several tabs. Click on the "Game Configurations" tab first. It should look something like this...

After you click on this tab, click on the uppermost edit button. Once the new window pops up, click on add. It will prompt you for the name of the configuration, name this the name of the game that you are creating the config for. Once done, click on Ok then close. You should now be back on the game config tab. Now we need to add a .fgd file. Worldcraft/Hammer v3.4 should come with3 or 4 of these files for Half-Life, TFC, CS and possibly some other mod. You should add the one whose name corresponds with the came that the config is for. For example, the halflife.fgd goes with the half-life configuration. Once this is set and done, you dont need to worry about the Texture format, map type or entity class boxes. We need to set the Game Executable Directory, this is the directory in which the game exe is located, you are selecting the directory, not the exe file. To do this, click on browse to find the directory. After this is the Mod Directory this is the directory in which the mod is located, for example, half-life's folder is half-life/valve and Counter-Strike is half-life/cstrike. As before, click on browse to find the file. Continuing, is the Game Directory. This is the folder where the half-life game files are stored. This folder is the half-life/valve directory. Lastly is the RMF Directory. A rmf is the map file that worldcraft/hammer uses. These are the non-compiled map files that you will be producing with worldcraft/hammer. Put these files in a place where you will not forget, since you will be constantly accessing these files. I personally use the maps folder that is within the wc/hammer directory. You should now be done with the Game Configurations tab. ***Make sure you hit apply*** It will look something like this...

Now that we've accomplished this, we need to configure the Build Programs tab. You should see something like this....

For the Game Executable field, you need to select the .exe file for HL, which is usually HL.exe (simple) For the next 4 fields, CSG, BSP, VIS and RAD, you should select the coordinating executable. You can use the ones that come with Hammer, but I reccemend the ZHLT Compiliers tools. After you are done with the 4 fields, you need to specify where hammer is to place your saved .rmf files. These are the uncompilied and editable versions of your map.(important) When you are all done, it should look something like this...

Alsmost there. The last thing you need to do is specify what texture packets you want to use for your map. Click on the Textures tab, then click on "Add WAD" The most used and largest texture package is halflife.wad and is located in the valve directory. And it should look like this...

Thats it, you are now ready to begin creating your first map! Good luck.