Things I wish i'd knew

[[CP]Benjymen [fr]]

Hello ! This intend to be a list of things i wish i was aware of when I first started the game.
Feel free to add some stuff !

- Every starting distinction where you lose carrying capacity is a bad one. Pick others if you absolutely must.

- Do not invest your precious points on xp gain ( top left in the screen). Rather, invest in the top right to cancel the penalties of armor and then in your weapon of choice. You won't regret it.

- Shields are only used with one handed weapon. Don't bother with them if you intend to use rifles or Auto.

- Read every books. One will give you a perk in the starting village. Others will get you xp, or clues, or even points to some skills.

- Skills go up to 199.
The more important are Speechcraft, Stealth ( to steal stuff), Pickpocket (even with 199 prepare to have to reload a lot, but it is the main source of money in the game. And of wastepapers), And your main type of weapon.
Have one companion invest in Technology to repair stuff, and another in Lockpicking to open stuff for you and you are golden.

-Having very high luck unlock some ridiculous way to avoid a few dangerous situations. Having very high Attention, Personality and Intellect is better however, since you get to see them in actions a lot more often in dialogues.

- If you don't mind saving often and need a dup stat, Endurance is here for you. Don't dump Strenght since you will spend a lot of the game carrying a lot of stuff around. You can't take the car everywhere ! (Mountain pass/ Dead city)

- You can choose your ammo between AP/HP by dragging it over to the weapon. AP > HP for armored ennemies.

- How does defense works ? Dodge is affecting your chance to get hit. Damage thresold reduce brut incoming damage, and damage resistance reduce % of it.
Exemple : You have 5 damage thresold and are hit by a 10 damage round. You get 5 damage.
You have 10 damage resistance and are hit by a 10 damage round. You get 9 damage.
Since the heaviest source of damage are multiples (pellets or bursts), Damage thresold is more important.

- Melee is a losing proposition. You will get hit from afar by guys with rifle, destroyed in ♥♥♥ by big animals, and lets not talk of what a burst or a shotgun will do to you. Get on with medium range weapons and the game will be much, much easier.

- Diversify your companions weapons. There are a lot of different ammos types, try to have each companion using a different one. If you don't and have no ammo in the middle of a fight, you will regret it.

- Traders restock very often. Try to pass by the weapon and the armor trader in the big city as often as you can. Look up for those rare weapons/armor/helmet/shields. You will only get them here or with luck in a random trader.

- There are two types of fuel. The Diesel is almost useless. The other (Gasoline) is used by your car. (obtainable in the scrapyard).

- There are five companions. One is a nutcase who makes two of you others companions leave so don't bother with her.
The others are Fidel ( Bar in the big city), The dog ( random encounter DO NOT SAVE HIS MASTER OR YOU WONT RECRUIT HIM), Hexogen ( Crazy dude in red fighter), and Alex who comes by once you repair your rest area in Red fighter.

- On random travels there will sometimes be a house with a cellar or a cavern. Explore them each time because they spawn different things. More xp/loot.

- When you plan to go to Mountain Pass / Dead city you really should plan money for the return. It's less expensive to return by about half, but you could still risk getting stranded ...

- If you ever see a 100% gas mask BUY IT. The 50% ones are somewhat frequent. The 100% one is very, very rare.

- You can get 3 points of Stats And one point of luck. One is by fishing the lucky fish (use special bait made from corn + nails + mushroom), one is a syringe in dead city with an enigma to solve (the cube + the key to pickpocket) and the last is a syringe in the tunnels under the roaring forest. You can get the luck from the Idol in the roaring forest by feeding it three meat.

- The Secretary in the Hospital in KZM got Perfume and Cologne to Trade (1Per and 10 Spechcraft Female/Male)
She got no Barteroption in the Talkmenu so you must use the Button,but she refreshes her Inventar like any other Trader.

- What you always should have on you :
2 grenades (makes every big fight a LOT easier)
One bottle of vodka (Multiple characters an be gifted with it)
One condom
A few radx / antidotes / anti radiation pills
10 raw meat to heal the dog
20 kaspamid to heal your pals
20 food or so for yourself.
A shovel
A knife

- What you shouldn't sell because it's needed in quests:
Mushrooms (need 50)
Wastepapers (need 500)
Scrap metal (need 17)
Wires (need 8)
Spider brain (need 20)
Gunpowder (need 20)
Fangs (need 30)
Lymph nodes (need 10)

-What to repair first :
You get a list of what to repair in your house in red fighter. The rest Area i the priority since it makes Alex recruitable. The kitchen will allow you to cook ... yay. The personel area unlock a shower (-75 radiation), the crafting area allows you to craft ammo ... at the cost of gunpowder, scrap metal and wastepapers.

- Kaerius advice : Don't dump endurance, dump luck. Keep at least 4, but preferably 6+ endurance. You won't always get the opportunity to buff it before a fight, and it's a bit tedious to carry a bunch of heavy buffing foods. Personality can be dumped, but you'll again be reliant on buffs, which can get a bit tedious. Pro-tip, if you're doing that, go female, more personality buffs available, and the receptionist at the hospital has both types of female-only perfume available to barter. If you go this route you only need 2 personality, but it's probably better to have 3+ so you don't have to be stoned/perfumed for almost every conversation.

[Wanderer862]

Thoughts on feeling like you are getting nowhere
I'm level 22 at the moment on my first playthrough on easy (sadly not enough free time for a real challenge) and am just about to enter the final area. Equipment wise, all of my team have bulletproof vests and Altyn special forces helmets, with either grenades or, more commonly, Soviet Army Knives in offhand (for the +5 sequence bonus only - the frying pan is also a good offhand item for the damage reduction bonus) along with a huge range of mainhand unique Rifles and Automatic Weapons (VER, PKM, Vintorez, PTRD, etc.). Supplimentary gear is around 20 grenades, endless super-stims, buffs and 50,000 rubles still available. You'll hit a point somewhere around level 15 where decent gear becomes easier to find in shops and encounters, and having more companions and more accessible areas to explore at a higher level means more looting opportunities but good team positioning, weapon choice, item management and strategy will never stop being necessary.. Also keep all the cigarettes (and materials to craft of toilet paper and tobacco) along with scrap metal, waste paper and gunpowder you find (as custom ammo crafting at Red Fighter and "tactical cigarette weapons" are very handy).

Things like condensed milk and onions (for endurance), sweet rolls (for dexterity), BSF-12 (for AP and strength) and painkillers (for damage reduction) should be hoarded as a pre-buff for hard battles as they can give you +4 endurance (around +40HP), +2 dexterity (+2AP), +4 strength and +2 AP (on top of the +2 Dex AP) respectively which can give you up to 14 AP which will give you almost 50% more attacks in a round which will break some battles. Condensed milk is comparatively plentiful (and prevents your more fragile characters from dying in 2 rounds) as I have about 75 of them in storage but the rest of them items are much rarer and I have about 15 sweet rolls, 10 painkillers and 5 BSF-12. All this stuff is heavy so either use a pack mule or have a few depots in each corner of the map.

Alcohol can be used as a Luck pre-buff (for fishing or for those events where you "hope for something lucky to happen") but I found it to be too hard to manage due to weight for much of the game (excluding the golden fish event) and I preferred having 8 personality for the sheer amount of conversation rolls that were based on the stat (beyond speech checks). I had to buff personality to 10 only a couple of times but having it at a decent level was much less frustrating compared to my low-charisma run.

For info on all the weapons in the game look here:
https://atom-rpg.fandom.com/wiki/Ranged_Weapons_(List)

For info on all the crafting recipes look here:
https://atom-rpg.fandom.com/wiki/Crafting

Exhaustive walkthroughs are basically non-existent for current content but for 95% of the issues you encounter you'll find answers at one of these sources (and most other things will be via a Google search in Steamcommunity sites):
https://www.neoseeker.com/atom-rpg/walkthrough
https://guides.gamepressure.com/atom-rpg/guide.asp?ID=48189

[Wanderer862]

On a side note, if you go under Settings > Game > Special Code and type "atom" you'll unlock a couple of new character background options with special hats (Veteran hat gets a +1 Strength beret (i.e. more carry weight and easier strength checks when needed), Ranger gets a feathered Panama hat (+10 Survival) and a free Perk (haven't tried it yet) and Chosen One gets a special Perk that affects game events and a 100% gas mask that doesn't affect attention (which is amazing so go the Chosen One since the Face of Death replaces the Black Beret and the Ranger hat is fairly standard and you can change backgrounds/perks at Red Fighter). Doing the Veteran background there was also a 2AP knife, a +9 speech dog tag and light-weight canteen which are VERY welcome additions in the beginning of the game and are all found in the tent after the prologue. There is also a helicopter location with +50 stealth Camo kit area which I understand is not otherwise there and when combined with a +10 stealth headwear will let you raid most containers regardless of where people are which is also game-changing (or game-breaking depending on your view).

Thanks for your patience with this wall of text. I don't post often but ATOM is an enjoyable homage to some very good RPGs and this original post was a major help to me as a new player so I thought I'd share my findings for anyone out there who was unsure where to start and what to focus on in the game as there isn't as big a support database out there compared to the Fallout series.

Update: Also, as I just discovered - if you kill approx. 5 caravan teams you will be locked into a nighttime event, when you are next travelling on the world map, with no exit. Your options are: a) fight 99% unwinnable odds against an uber party, b) give them 15,000 rubles cash - immediately, or, c) if you don't have 15,000 rubles then dig your own grave and if you don't fight back then you lose everything your team are carrying. On the plus side I found out that all my non-equipped gear stash was still at Red Fighter so this means if you kill 5 caravan teams and then dump all your stuff at Red Fighter (travel only during the day) and then try to spawn this encounter at night you'll get off without any issue. You could also argue that the 15,000 fine is actually cheaper than some of the stuff you raid if you only go for high-end suppliers as I got about 50,000 rubles worth of gear between the guards and vendors by being picky.

It is possible to beat the mercenaries but unless you are higher than level 20 and supremely well-equipped and organised I wouldn't recommend trying. It basically required a stupid amount of pre-buffing, cheese tactics and then trying to spawn the event before the drugs wore off along with a mix of Dragunov snipers and RPK-74 machine guns on all of my team members (sniper rifles were to avoid friendly fire) along with a lot of position changing, using painkillers and super stems in my off-hand strategically and a lot of good luck. I failed 10 times in a row before getting a run where I only lost Gyulchatai (I am at end game so I was planning on leaving her and Dzhulbars at Red Fighter before this event happened so it was not an intolerable outcome, practically speaking).

[bunny de fluff]

Messaggio originale di Wanderer862:

Thoughts on feeling like you are getting nowhere
I'm level 22 at the moment on my first playthrough on easy (sadly not enough free time for a real challenge) and am just about to enter the final area. Equipment wise, all of my team have bulletproof vests and Altyn special forces helmets, with either grenades or, more commonly, Soviet Army Knives in offhand (for the +5 sequence bonus only - the frying pan is also a good offhand item for the damage reduction bonus) along with a huge range of mainhand unique Rifles and Automatic Weapons (VER, PKM, Vintorez, PTRD, etc.). Supplimentary gear is around 20 grenades, endless super-stims, buffs and 50,000 rubles still available. You'll hit a point somewhere around level 15 where decent gear becomes easier to find in shops and encounters, and having more companions and more accessible areas to explore at a higher level means more looting opportunities but good team positioning, weapon choice, item management and strategy will never stop being necessary.. Also keep all the cigarettes (and materials to craft of toilet paper and tobacco) along with scrap metal, waste paper and gunpowder you find (as custom ammo crafting at Red Fighter and "tactical cigarette weapons" are very handy).

Things like condensed milk and onions (for endurance), sweet rolls (for dexterity), BSF-12 (for AP and strength) and painkillers (for damage reduction) should be hoarded as a pre-buff for hard battles as they can give you +4 endurance (around +40HP), +2 dexterity (+2AP), +4 strength and +2 AP (on top of the +2 Dex AP) respectively which can give you up to 14 AP which will give you almost 50% more attacks in a round which will break some battles. Condensed milk is comparatively plentiful (and prevents your more fragile characters from dying in 2 rounds) as I have about 75 of them in storage but the rest of them items are much rarer and I have about 15 sweet rolls, 10 painkillers and 5 BSF-12. All this stuff is heavy so either use a pack mule or have a few depots in each corner of the map.

Alcohol can be used as a Luck pre-buff (for fishing or for those events where you "hope for something lucky to happen") but I found it to be too hard to manage due to weight for much of the game (excluding the golden fish event) and I preferred having 8 personality for the sheer amount of conversation rolls that were based on the stat (beyond speech checks). I had to buff personality to 10 only a couple of times but having it at a decent level was much less frustrating compared to my low-charisma run.

For info on all the weapons in the game look here:
https://atom-rpg.fandom.com/wiki/Ranged_Weapons_(List)

For info on all the crafting recipes look here:
https://atom-rpg.fandom.com/wiki/Crafting

Exhaustive walkthroughs are basically non-existent for current content but for 95% of the issues you encounter you'll find answers at one of these sources (and most other things will be via a Google search in Steamcommunity sites):
https://www.neoseeker.com/atom-rpg/walkthrough
https://guides.gamepressure.com/atom-rpg/guide.asp?ID=48189

This helped me a lot , thanks.

[DavidBurnsideZF]

Messaggio originale di Wanderer862:

([...] and you can change backgrounds/perks at Red Fighter).

How and when is it possible to do that?

[AjSweet]

I know I’m way late to playing this game. I was level 12, Fidel level 9 and the dog level 8 when I made it to red fighter. Hexagon was level 8 when I recruited him. His skill points are f-ing wack. He has a rifle that requires 75 and only 55 points in rifles. No main skill basically all 8 levels were randomly assigned. Wish I wasn’t so far in the game or is it always like that ?

[Exec]

i would add
vendor prices which they buy stuff from you varies depends on what they are selling. For example the gunsmith in the KMZ buys weapons from you much cheaper than any other kind of merchants which is unlogical but it is how it is.
also dont sell the 30-50 gas you find early game at the fuel station, you will need it later.
+1
there is a mod (you can find it easily on nexus) that allows you to control your companions in combat, it makes the game much less annoying and more fun however it makes easier a bit too, also this same mod enables the slave girl to use weapons too.

[Shortylax]

Messaggio originale di Exec:

i would add
vendor prices which they buy stuff from you varies depends on what they are selling. For example the gunsmith in the KMZ buys weapons from you much cheaper than any other kind of merchants which is unlogical but it is how it is.
also dont sell the 30-50 gas you find early game at the fuel station, you will need it later.
+1
there is a mod (you can find it easily on nexus) that allows you to control your companions in combat, it makes the game much less annoying and more fun however it makes easier a bit too, also this same mod enables the slave girl to use weapons too.

No. Vendor prices depends on barter skill. Both yours and vendors. KRZ vendors have high barter skill.