a somewhat cheesy interaction with salt dune villages

[Bwixie]

salt dune villages will usually have issachari living in them, meaning they're not aggressive, and should you explore the outskirts of the village you can easily kill many riflers and raiders for exp and loot without much danger.

starting in one usually earns 4 or 5 levels quite easily. maybe the villagers need spectacles.

[glass zebra]

Yeah the issachari are probably the best to kill early on. Mostly low defenses, easy to kill on surprise, good loot and xp. Doing the dune quest often sends you to a lair of them too and just puts you to level 3 on entering the map tile.

Fighting a lot of aggressive ones at the same time is a problem on that level though, at least as a lowly equipped mutant.

[I blame Earthshaker]

Plus, the riflers drop the best early game gun. But arguably getting the skill desert villages teach for 50 rep with it is equally cheesy! But starting there still results in some sacrifices, so it's arguably not as cheesy as one thinks.

On the other hand, Joppa comes with a built-in dungeon...

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by I blame Earthshaker:

Plus, the riflers drop the best early game gun. But arguably getting the skill desert villages teach for 50 rep with it is equally cheesy! But starting there still results in some sacrifices, so it's arguably not as cheesy as one thinks.

On the other hand, Joppa comes with a built-in dungeon...

The dungeon is still there if you don't start at Joppa though. I frankly often go into Red Rock too when starting in the desert and both quests are like "go deep into some issachari lair", because that just death in early game if you don't find the 2nd piece of issachari gear early and Red Rock grants really good gear for early mutants.

[I blame Earthshaker]

Originally posted by glass zebra:

The dungeon is still there if you don't start at Joppa though.

I know that, I was just referring to the fact that you don't have to leave Joppa's parasang to earn xp (between Argyve's quests and the tunnel). Although I guess you could go murder all the watervine farmers in the 8 other squares, though there usually aren't many and they usually don't carry anything useful.

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by I blame Earthshaker:

Originally posted by glass zebra:

The dungeon is still there if you don't start at Joppa though.

I know that, I was just referring to the fact that you don't have to leave Joppa's parasang to earn xp (between Argyve's quests and the tunnel). Although I guess you could go murder all the watervine farmers in the 8 other squares, though there usually aren't many and they usually don't carry anything useful.

I think they are also grant 25 base xp instead of 200. I think the desert start has the best people to murder for stuff, though I guess you can get lucky with random village generation otherwise.

[I blame Earthshaker]

Originally posted by glass zebra:

I think they are also grant 25 base xp instead of 200. I think the desert start has the best people to murder for stuff, though I guess you can get lucky with random village generation otherwise.

That will cease to be the case as soon as the riflers stop spawning with like 6 ammo. It's a little absurd that they run out of ammo so fast. Only reason I can think of is that they would be too hard otherwise, since the rifle is so accurate and does decent damage.