Guide: how to make money early-mid game (fair and legit)

[Serpiko82]

Before the usual smartaxxes come in boasting about how they swim in millions of coupons: this guide is obviously addressed to those who don't, and struggle to earn enough to pay for better gear and upgrades, or just to break even.


A) BASICS ABOUT GAME ECONOMY

1- LOOT AND EXPLORE. Doing quests pays off a bit, but most of your earnings will come from selling your loot. Explore every place you visit. Look for hidden stashes, especially in "dungeons" or on elevated places. This way, you will also occasionally find rare items and upgrade blueprints.

2- ARTIFACTS HUNTING. Those are one of the pillars of the game. ALWAYS carry a detector, and equip it every time you approach a particularly anomaly-rich area. The Hilka detector doesn't show where artifacts are, but it can detect them very far away, useful when exploring new areas.

Also, when diving into an anomaly field: UNEQUIP ALL YOUR GUNS and put them in the backpack. That way, they WON'T suffer durability damage from anomalies, saving up on repair costs.

For the same reason, don't be ashamed to save scum. If you fall into anomalies thrice to get a low value artifact, the revenue won't be worth the costs. Hit that quickload button and try again for a "clean" catch.

Most low and medium value artifacts can be sold without regrets, they're not that useful anyway. You may perhaps want to keep at least one sample of each artifact, in case some trader offers a very high reward for finding a specific one once in a while.

3- WEIGHT MANAGEMENT. Besides the effects on your character's mobility, weight sets the limit for your max income from a looting sortie. In order to maximise your efficiency, you want to:
-Pack light when you leave. You don't need to bring an arsenal, nor food for weeks (you'll find plenty of food pretty much everywhere). Leave as much room as possible for loot.
-Increase your max weight limit. Use artifacts, upgrade your suits. "Hercules" drug is only for emergencies.
-Consider the value/weight ratio of what you pick up. Food and drinks are abundant, but cheap and relatively heavy. Healing consumables, instead, are more valuable and you'll usually find many more than you need. Guns look valuable but they are VERY heavy, some low tier ones are not really worth carrying back. Do your math.

4- FRIENDLY TRADERS HAVE BETTER PRICES. Doing side quests for a faction or a trader will turn him friendly (green icon).

5- NOT ALL TRADERS ARE THE SAME. Bartenders will offer jobs, but they pay LESS for your loot than other traders, even if they turn green. Random wandering stalkers have few coupons, offer terrible prices, and will only buy consumables from you; those are only useful if you want to get rid of an excess of low value, high weight consumables that you'd otherwise throw away.

6- CAN'T KEEP UP WITH REPAIR COSTS? Plain and simple, switch to cheaper gear until you are able to consistently increase your earnings rate. These hints are meant for EARLY-MID game, where you don't need to be going around in exoskeleton wielding Dnipro and Saiga all the time.


B) COUPONS FARMING STRATEGIES (VERY MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD)

In order to set up a reliable coupons farming routine, you'd better have unlocked at least a bunch of main hubs in "low threat" locations, regardless of main story progression. Since for some reason there's a cooldown for bartenders' quests after completing one, and artifacts take a few days to respawn, in order to farm efficiently you want to go to a location, raid all artifacts nearby, do a quest, then go to another hub; rinse and repleat. Once you've done that in 4-5 areas, artifacts and quests will be available again in the first one, and so on.

Almost forgot: DO NOT take quests about killing mutants. Those are a waste of resources. By killing people, instead, you can profit from their loot in addition to the reward.

As soon as you can leave the Lesser Zone, you may want to take a detour and reach the Rookie Village in Cordon before going to the Garbage, since it's a relatively easy trip if you can handle (or sneak past) a few soldiers. Cordon is an easy location, bar a few encounters in very specific places.

Either way, once in Garbage, set camp in Slag Heap asap. There are no less than 4 anomaly fields nearby, one of which can also spawn 2 artifacts sometimes. A raid around the Garbage gives 4 guaranteed artifacts, up to 6 if you're lucky and/or bother going further south too.

Besides, from Slag Heap, you can easily reach Rostok (west) and the Duty base in Cement Factory (east), thus easily unlocking 2 more hubs.

That should be enough for you to set up your farming routine. Plus, at that point, you'll have a further opinion if you want to spice it up a bit:

North of the Duty base in Cement Factory, crossing the bridge, you'll step into an area that you're probably supposed to reach quite later. (WARNING: if you go there too soon, what you'll see will spoil you a detail of the story.)

A pair of locations in that area are a damn battlefield, because (at least up to version 1.03) groups of opposing factions will keep spawning VERY frequently, leading to near-continuous bloodsheds. It's a gold mine to easily loot dozens of corpses, and often you don't even need to do the dirty work yourself. Then you just go back to Duty base and sell everything.


I hope someone finds this helpful.

[Serpiko82]

Aaand, it turns out I posted this literal minutes before 1.1 came out, possibly making all of the above obsolete. RIP. 💀