starting a game

[momopirou]

Hi,

i'm here to ask for advice. i'm really struggling to start a game, especially now with hunger. (exept for the builder's start, which i've almost alawys played untill now)
so how do you make money when starting? considering that the slightest piece of food costs 300c?
so let's consider we play the default start, what should i do?

thanks in advance.

[B0sc02]

So I've started two games under the experimental build; one as recently as tonight. The best way I'd recommend making money and surviving early game is to do either of these two things: mine or hunt. Mining is by far the easiest. I would suggest starting with the wanderer start so you can get $1000 and start near the city (I think you'll start near the same city each time). I would buy a traders back pack and find the nearest iron mine outside of the city and just collect a dozen iron ore. Sell, buy food, mine and repeat. Soon, you can hire additional people for $700 and have them mine the same vein. Make one person the runner while the other continues to mine.

The other option is to pick fights with the wildlife and run back to town so the guards kill the animals. You can loot their bodies and if they are harder animals, you can get raw meat. With the animal skin and teeth, you can make a little money. You can build a campfire to turn the raw meat into dry meat for about 40 nutrition. you can also mine while one person does this tactic, benefiting from both options. I find the sweet spot for early game squads is about 5-6.

[momopirou]

hi, and thanks for your reply.

ok, that seems to make sense. altough i've tried the animals technic, but it seemed to me that it would be too slow, but if you asy it's not.
and yes i discovered that in the exp build there are ore boulders on the map. i wonder if you can build mines anywhere now, i'll see...
can't wait for a quest system though, with more NPC interractions. especially now that the map is more varied .

well thanks again .

[B0sc02]

No problem. I really recommend using the mining technique when starting out. Also, if you limit yourself to hiring just $700 NPCs, you can resell the medkit they come with to recoup a majority of the costs. I think the best balance is to have six NPCs that mine the two iron deposits outside of Blister Hill (I think that is the name).

You can mine iron and copper at veins where ever they are on the map. You have to prospect the land to find suitable ground for a stone mine. I was surveying the land last night, trying to find a good place to set up camp. I settled for a small outpost near Blister Hill where I had everything but copper and carbon.

[swillo]

Mining is the easiest way to start. Using the wander start I tend to use my 1000 credits to hire someone and get some dried meat to start with then head out and mine some ore.
Iron is generally faster but cheaper. Still you can mine 3x more iron then copper unless you can find a 100% copper source, then I would mine that.

Note that meat wraps and Gohan are your best NU return for you money. You are better off buy them then anything else at the inn keeper.

And taking down an animal is great as well. I use a PETA mod that adds 2 meat to dogs, and 12 to beak things. So if I survive the fight I can at least get even by eating them.

With out that look for a lone bull. 10 meat on those, even the little ones.

[momopirou]

thanks guys for your replies.
it seems so much comre complicated now. before you just had to lure some bandtis into a city guards trap.

but i think i'll stick to RTS start for now. seems like a RPG start is just a painful way to RTS anyway
but i can't wait to play RPG when there will be consistent quests, storylines and more background driving you through this wonderful world.
and by then the playable characters cap will be way over 30 i hope. going from one to an army, that's gonna be awesome.

[haunter12a]

To get the cap over 30 you need to go into forgotten construction kit and change it.

[momopirou]

really i can do that?
do i have to do that before i start a game? i have no idea what it is you're talking about.

[Berzerker Jay]

I've been playtesting the starts pretty heavily. I've also thrown in some of my own starts.

I find that in general the best way to get a starting character off the ground tends to be mining, as has already been suggested. Instead of focusing on that I'll focus on another alternative -- prison. If you go the criminal route in the early-game, you tend to skill up very fast. You're going to become very tough, quickly.

Basically go and steal something pathetic to start with. The point here is to not do anything too drastic so you won't get too high of a bounty. Otherwise you've got a lot of waiting to do. Make sure you've got your character set to block only, generally speaking, and make sure you're in a town with a proper jail. If you get away with it, fine, but what you're looking to have happen is that you get caught for some petty theft and stuffed in a cage. While you're there, pick the lock, along with any locks of nearby cages. This gets your thievery skill up. Next, practice sneaking while you're in there. You won't always get good chances to do this, but I've been able to skill up a character pretty well while they were stuck in jail for about two weeks. Your character will be kept fed, but only to the point that they're not actually going hungry. Your hunger will go to 199 and then back to 200 automatically, so you won't have to worry about keeping fed while in prison -- focus on skilling up.

If your bounty is low, under 1000 ideally, try and break out. Go fight the guards and get tossed back in. Your toughness will go up every time you get beat, and they will heal you, so you won't have to worry about dying for the most part. If you leave block on, your melee defense skill will increase. I don't worry so much about melee attack because it's easily trained up on dummies.

Now you should be looking at double-digit stats for thievery and stealth skills, and more than likely your toughness will be in double-digits as well. From there you've got a pretty good start as a thief working the town, and it's possible to keep going this way, getting pretty tough in the process.

My advice would be to eventually transition toward something more profitable in the long-term, like copper-mining. A good place for that is around Hive territory, although you generally can't get too crazy with your capacity there. Mongrel is a tougher place to mine copper, but you can sell pretty well as much as you want. You have to go far enough outside of Mongrel, however, that death becomes a fairly plausible outcome.

[Berzerker Jay]

By the way, the best mining set-up I've found so far deals with six miners and a bull equipped with a pack to carry the loot away. With this set-up you can mine two ore deposits while using the bull to go back and forth and collect the ore.

[Espa]

See. . My idea of a start up is. . Steal valuable things, sell it to a different vendor, increase my stats until I can murder outside of towns, reap my rewards by slaying the unfortunate.

[Berzerker Jay]

You can do it. It's just difficult.

I have a game where I'm operating a sort of theives guild. They're pretty well unstoppable, and not so much fun to play since they can basically steal everything. I started it when it was still relatively easy to rob the armories, so I don't know if it's still so easy. I imagine it's more of a challenge now, and I find it's a lot more difficult to get away with stealing until your skill is well up there.