In the tutorial at the beginning, I'm told to equip my fists with F1 and go lay a beat down on some Sabbat mook. Problem is, hitting F1 never shows my fists, so I can't fight, and I can't proceed.

Am I doing something wrong?

I'm playing this on Linux through Wine, so I understand that this might be an incompatibility due to that.

F1 is supposed to pause the game and show you a menu of all of the melee weapons you have available. F2 does the same thing for missile weapons.

These are critical features, so if you aren't getting the menus then you need to figure out what's wrong with your game. Wish I could help you with that, but I have no clue about Linux.

F1 shows an icon in the top-left corner. I'm not entirely sure what it is, maybe a crowbar and another melee weapon? F2 shows a gun, and F3 shows body armor. That's all though. Is it supposed to show a list of available items of that type underneath?

Yes, it shows a list of all items that you have collected and have not sold (not counting fists which you cannot sell - they are always on the list). You use the mouse wheel to move the current selection in that list, and click to make your choice. When you click/select, the game is unpaused and the menu disappears.

The weapon that you selected most recently, stays selected, even if you have holstered it (using 'h' key). Then you don't need to go back to the menu unless you want to change to a different weapon. If you click, you take a swing (or shot) at something (or nothing) with whatever weapon you selected last.

It sounds like you are seeing the menu but have not figured out how to use it? Or there is some malfunction preventing you from using it. I can't tell. At that stage in the tutorial you might have a crowbar plus your fists available. You should not yet have a gun (but I don't remember what that menu looks like before you acquire any guns). On F3 you should see your starter clothes because you haven't found anything else to wear yet.

At least, this is how it's supposed to work.

I created a new character and skipped the tutorial. When showing up in my safehouse, the fists now show up when I hit F1. Shame though, as I've never played this game, and would have liked to have gone through the tutorial.

I think you just got a random no-fists-bug, restart again and chances are high you will get the fists in the tutorial too! It should have been fixed in the UP, so if you are not using this, prepare for similar issues later on...

I'll give it a try again. I did restart the tutorial twice, and encountered the bug both times, although the second time I checked for my fists the moment I had the chance (where you are supposed to drink blood for the first time), so maybe the game hasn't put that item in my inventory yet?

The install I did was a standard one, no special options.

Probably your Linux is the cause ot the problem. Did you use the bloodlines_loader script in the Extras/Player Mods folder?

Same issue here. I am running the game through Wine too (1.9.14), so it seems indeed Wine-related.

I could work around the fists issue by giving myself item_g_fists (and item_g_wallet) through the console. But I eventually run into more serious bugs and I cannot finish the game (specifically, the mini-boss in Hallowbrook Hotel never shows up and I am stuck there).

I tried re-installing the game in a different wine prefix, tried with and without the + patch, but I still get the fists issue every time I start a new game. I am running "wine Vampire.exe -game Unofficial_Patch" directly.

Any idea what is going wrong, or from where I should start to investigate it?

Are you using the script mentioned above?

Got it. I overlooked the
export WINEDLLOVERRIDES="dbghelp=n,b"
line in the script.
Now that I added this DLL override, everything works fine, I got all startup items and the + patch works as expected too.

Thanks Wesp, and kudos for your work on the Unofficial patch!