Things I wish I knew when I started

A collection of tips and tricks for new players looking for a little extra help (mostly just a collection of reminders for myself honestly)

Don't Rush

There's no real time pressure in the game, for the most part; you don't have to worry about missing story events, losing access to areas, or dealing with a volatile market (aside from the random, occasional shortage/surplus of goods). Even timed contracts (acquired from brokers at the bar) typically give you a generous amount of time to make your deliveries, making them fairly easy to complete even with frequent stops (provided you don't get too sidetracked).

That being said, improving your speed never hurts; as fuel is used at a constant rate regardless of your speed, the ability to move faster translates to higher fuel efficiency, allowing you to carry less fuel (and thus have more space!) for more distance.

Choose Your Crew Carefully

Right as you start a new game, the game will almost immediately give you the mission to go recruit a new crew member. While you may be tempted to walk into a bar and hire the first person you see, you should keep in mind that getting a new member of your crew is a big commitment. Make sure you hire someone with decent stats; if it means that quest has to sit in your backlog for a little while as you look for the right match, so be it.

You may be tempted to immediately pad out your crew with the maximum amount of 4 members, but be careful of how many you recruit, even if they all have decent stats. Each crew member is a huge commitment: it means more food and water consumed, and hiring too many people early in the game can leave you struggling for resources. Make sure that up you're steady on your feet before you weigh yourself down with additional bodies.

Also, be wary of potential traits that could be an issue down the line. Some negative traits are workable, but some can be devastating, especially those that can get you kicked out of certain places in town or significantly contribute to stress gain.

Manage Stress

Of the four needs in the game, stress is easily the hardest to manage. Food and water can automatically be managed, fatigue can be easily dealt with as long as you aren't stopped in a plague zone, but stress isn't so simple. Stress builds up slowly over time, but can also rapidly build up from combat; something you'll be engaging in fairly often when scavenging ruins.

Fortunately, there's also a wide myriad of options for relieving stress. Stopping for a short bit to admire the sun/moon whenever the opportunity arises goes a surprisingly long way to keeping your crew happy, and sleeping in VIP suites knocks a big chunk of stress off as well. Aside from that, you have a variety of other options: you can cook and eat improved meals, characters that like each other can console one another, romantic pairings can “hook up,” and, in case of emergency, characters can consume alcohol to remove a whole lot of stress at the cost of temporarily rendering them useless (Drunk).

As a bonus, while their stress is low, they gain the Happy buff, significantly improving multiple stats! Unlike other needs, where you can wait until they're almost maxed out before addressing them, it's best to keep a lid on your stress levels as much as possible.

Get Cooking

Cooking is a surprisingly important mechanic; by cooking your food before you consume it, you can not only improve the hunger it settles, but it also helps to manage your Stress! Even just cooking your Rations is a major boon, as it entirely removes the stress penalty from eating them raw; ALWAYS cook your Rations before eating them, as it takes a fairly short amount of time, and the stress can build up quickly if you don’t.

You don't necessarily need a good Cooking stat to cook your food, but having one will improve your chances of creating Advanced or Legendary versions of your food, which provide stronger benefits than the regular versions! Note that you only need one decent cook in your crew, as the entire crew's Cooking stat is determined by the highest.

The Market is Static(-ish)

Although prices can rise and fall as you trade with them, a settlement's available goods will never change; they will always have the same surpluses, needs, and supplies. This makes it fairly easy to plan consistent trade routes; for extra profit, you can plan long-distance trips where you can buy and sell multiple goods at various stops from point A to point B. I highly, HIGHLY recommend using the Road Book app (made by Suniver) for planning your deliveries!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3309660636

Don't Buy/Sell Too Much At Once

It may be tempting when you plan a route to buy every last item of a certain good in stock, before dumping the entire inventory at your destination. However, the price of goods changes as you buy/sell in bulk, devaluing the item and affecting your profits. Instead, when buying/selling goods, you can see a calculated "profit vs base price" just above the slider. Always try to keep this number green; if you let it fall into the red, it means you're buying/selling so much of the good that it's now actually less profitable than if you were doing so at its “base” price.

To maximize your profit, you'll want to move the slider until that green number hits its highest value; at that point, you'll have the best ratio between the amount of goods you purchase and the amount of scrap they're worth. This is particularly important when buying; when selling, you may want to go a little beyond this number, just to get all that extra stock out of your truck and stop it from weighing you down.

Also, remember that stores have a limited amount of money to purchase your goods with! Dumping your entire stock on a single little settlement can clean out their scrap and still leave you with a lot of extra weight from all those unsold goods. To remedy this, you can buy from the store to give back some of that scrap...or, if you're not in a hurry, you can always go about your business and come back in a few days, once the store refreshes its inventory and available scrap.

Other Traders

Sometimes, when you attempt to make a transaction, another trader may interrupt you and request to peddle the same goods before you do. The dialog box gives you the option of allowing them to go ahead, or refusing to do so, carrying on with your transaction as usual.

If you allow the trader to go ahead, they will almost certainly clean out whatever it was you were planning to buy/sell, greatly affecting its price/stock and likely robbing you of potential profit. However, you will gain a bit of faction reputation with whatever faction the trader was associated with; this can be useful if you need that little extra bit of relations, for whatever reason.

On the other hand, if you refuse to let them go ahead, the transaction will proceed as normal. There won't be any direct consequences with the faction they're from; you were rightfully there first, after all. However, you should not refuse if the trader is from the same faction that controls the town, as the shopkeeper will let them go ahead anyway; not only will they still steal your profits, but you'll miss out on that faction reputation bonus you could have gotten as well.

(Almost) Always Bargain

When buying/selling goods, you'll have the option to negotiate with the store for a slight discount/upsell. This affects the price of your goods by 10%; a marginal number for small transactions, but a potential boon for larger ones. It's almost always a good idea to do this, as it costs you nothing but a small amount of time; even when your bargaining fails, all it means is that your goods will be sold at the regular price, leaving no real negative consequence.

As a bonus, the more you fail to negotiate, the more your Speech gradually begins to improve! Bargaining is a great way to level your Speech without needing to sacrifice valuable trait points and books that could best be spent elsewhere.

The primary reason you might NOT want to bargain would be if you're trading with the inhabitants of a high-infection settlement, when every minute you spend increases your risk factor; due to the passage of time from bargaining, your risk will go up, and you can even be attacked while attempting to bargain! In these situations, sometimes it's best to just use the normal trade option, as it is instant.

Buy More Books

Books are a crucial resource throughout the game, as they are required for two key mechanics: they are needed to level up characters, and they are needed to learn crafting recipes. People in the Dustlands are awfully clumsy with books, and destroy them whenever they make use of them (they're trying their best, okay?), so you'll need quite a few. You'll want to have at least a hundred or so on hand at all times, as spending trait points is physically impossible without them.

Unfortunately, there's only a small handful of places on the map where Books are sold cheap; in most places, you'll have to settle for buying them at their base price. If you plan on learning recipes or spending trait points in bulk, it just might be worth a trip out to one of those rare few settlements to stock up on your reading material.

Learn to Craft

The game criminally undersells how crucial the crafting system is; it took me several hours of gameplay before I started really paying close attention to it and its benefits. Most equipment in the game won't be handed to you on a plate; you'll have to make almost all of it yourself. It's crucial to make equipment: it can greatly improve your truck and characters, both in and out of combat, and you'll never make through the more dangerous areas of the game without it.

There are two steps to crafting: learning a recipe, and crafting it. Learning must be done at a city with a Library, where you can consume Books to learn a recipe. Learning is dependent on a crew's Intellect (determined by the highest value among members); although they don't necessarily need to meet the Intellect requirement, there is a chance they will fail if below it, wasting half of the books spent. There is no additional benefit to being over the Intellect requirement.

After being learned, the recipe has a Crafting level requirement equal to the Intellect requirement, which will also leave a chance of failure if the crew's Crafting (also equal to the highest value) does not meet it. Unlike learning a recipe, there is no refund for the spent materials whatsoever in the case of failure, potentially resulting in an expensive loss of crafting resources for nothing.

Fortunately, there's a benefit to being over the Crafting requirement for an item: a chance to make an Advanced or Legendary version of the item, improving its stats and value. A high Crafting stat is crucial to making effective endgame equipment!

Get Some Junk In Your Trunk

There's one key issue with crafting in the game: the resources needed for crafting cannot be bought (except from characters at the Bar, but we'll discuss that later). Instead, you'll need to scavenge them from abandoned locations, such as landfills and plague zones. Searching these areas can often result in Infected attacks and high Fatigue/Stress gain, but it's necessary to take that risk if you ever want to improve your gear.

Early on, when you're less-equipped and more skittish around the Infected, it may be better to search an area "hastily" rather than thoroughly; this consumes less time and provides less risk of an attack, but also provides less resources for your effort. Once you're a little more confident, you can begin searching locations thoroughly, providing more resources at the cost of more attacks.

Alternatively, you can trade junk with people at the bar by chatting with them and selecting the option to do so. Unfortunately, most people don't carry much junk around in their pockets, making them a poor choice for buying in bulk; they're also very stingy, and generally won't value your junk very much compared to their own. Still, it's a useful option if you have some scrap to spare or extra resources that are weighing you down.

If you're trading junk, it may be better to craft the stuff you plan to sell into equipment first; traders will typically value it much higher than the sum of its parts. For example, a Blade costs a measly 4 Iron, which are barely valued at a couple Scrap apiece, but when crafted, it becomes worth around 100. Traders may sell valuable equipment themselves, saving you the need to craft it, but it's often exorbitantly expensive; if at all possible, it's far more cost-effective to simply buy the ingredients and craft it yourself.

Combat: Melee Vs. Guns

There are two types of weapons in the game: melee weapons, and guns. They aren't mutually exclusive; as you'll see in a character's inventory, there is room for both a melee weapon AND a gun. There are also two stats linked to these weapons: Attack, for melee weapons, and Focus, for guns.

Attack will ONLY affect melee weapons. Attack is calculated fairly simply: the sum of all your crew's Attack values is equal to the melee damage you'll deal. Having a strong melee build is important, especially early in the game, as melee attacks can typically outrank most early guns for sheer damage, and will never miss. Some melee weapons give a solid Attack value, while others multiply a character's existing Attack (e.g. +4 damage vs +40% damage); characters with higher Attack stats should be prioritized for weapons that multiply.

The primary disadvantage to melee is that, in order to use it, your target must be within melee range—which, of course, means that YOU are within melee range. Enemies are not necessarily guaranteed to hit in melee, but it can take as little as one hit to wound a crew member (or several), taking them out of the remainder of the fight. This can be a death sentence, as you can potentially lose a strong member, or even all of your crew!

On the other hand, Focus affects the ACCURACY of your guns, not the damage; the damage dealt is dependent on the gun itself, and is slightly randomized, as opposed to the solid melee attack value. Thus, guns are less consistent and heavily RNG-dependent, but also give you the luxury of taking an enemy's health down before they get into melee range. Each character is individually dependent on their Focus to determine their accuracy; they can shoot individually, or for convenience, you can order them all to fire at once with “Volley.”

Each gun also consumes a certain amount of ammo per use; each unit of ammo represents a single shot. For example, a gun with an ammo cost of 3 will fire 3 times in a single turn; this makes it more damaging than a gun of equal damage with an ammo cost of 1, but also potentially less efficient if you fire more ammo than you need. Keep an eye on your supply!

Build Your City

Early on in the story, the main quest will direct you towards a city, which you can build up for yourself. While it's not the only player-controlled city on the map, it's likely the first one you'll visit. It's up to you where you want your primary base of operations to be, but once you pick a location, it's best to stick with it until you've built it up to full strength.

Building a city is a costly and time-consuming investment, but it pays off immensely once you have a prosperous, fully populated settlement. Cities can produce resources for yourself, trade with nearby settlements for scrap, and provide a useful refuge where you have access to many of the amenities of a full-sized city. Never pay for your own food or water again!

There are two main ingredients to building a city: Building Materials, and people. Building Materials are expensive, but fortunately, you can find them being produced in a wide number of settlements, making them cheaper to obtain. Hiring people is a little more tricky; people don't simply walk into your town to work for you for free. Instead, you'll have to hire them into your crew, drive them out to the city yourself, and plop them down there to work for you forever, without any additional pay. Remember, it's not slavery if you hired them first!

Most jobs in the city will require Farming (for farms/water), Husbandry (for ranches), Crafting (for production facilities), and Speech (for obtaining Ore; no, I don't know how that one is supposed to work). For all but the last one, you can easily hire a suitable worker by going to a Bar and accessing the Labor Market, where you can hire an appropriate worker into your crew for fairly cheap. These workers will generally have poor stats in everything but the job you hired them for, but that's okay, since that one stat is all you'll ever really need them for.

You’ll also want to invest in decent security, as attacks will grow increasingly dangerous as the city gets stronger. Upgrade your defenses, and hire a few personnel with decent Attack/Focus stats. It’s highly recommended to leave a few Medkits within the city in case of emergency, as attacks can happen while you’re far away from the city and wounded security may die before you can return.

Save Often, Load Often

Although the game autosaves every time you leave a settlement, there's no telling what will happen out on the road. Random events can suddenly throw a wrench in your plans for a peaceful road trip, and some can potentially have disastrous consequences. If you're on a particularly long stretch, it might be a good idea to quicksave every so often in case one of those disasters strike; it could save you from repeating the trip again if you end up in too much trouble.

Although some may consider it to be a little dirty, the quicksave/quickload feature and the short loading times of the game make it quite easy to manipulate random results to go the way you want. If you're having trouble scavenging without getting battered by Infected ambushes, struggling to craft an expensive item, or just afraid of the unknown ahead, don't be afraid to reload as necessary until you get the results you want.

Remember: it's not really cheating if it's an included feature!

[[CB] Pandasama]

Nice guide except last save scumming section

[FactCheckingCuz]

Great guide!

[Supergoober]

Awesome Guide! Thank you +1

[hat_eater]

Thank you! Great advice.

[cloudpie]

Lovely guide! Appreciate it.