Surviving the early game **WIP**
The early game is where many people struggle against, and causes them to get very weary of Red Rock very, very fast, forcing them to stop playing before they can see the rest of what Qud has to offer. This is going to be a non exhaustive guide on preparing for the challenges ahead!
This is not the guide to making proper builds, only what you do with them. Because of the nature of this guide, it's going to be spoilery.
Alright, on with it!
TLDR:
You need these to be properly prepared for things outside of the saltmarshes:
- 6+ AV
- studded leather armor (3), leather cap (1), boar-skin gloves (1), leather boots (1)
- A firearm
- musket, borderlands revolver from chests, desert rifle from Issachari rifler
- Lead slugs (bought from village trader)
- Healing items
- Good light source (Warden Ulraig, trading, loot drops)
- Escape strategy (optional, but high priority) (too many sources to list here)
- Recoiler (optional, but HIGHLY recommended) (starting village quest, glowpad merchant)
Note that using a Joppa start makes the glowsphere much easier to get while alternate starts have a more difficult time. Everything else is found relatively the same way. Note that the only thing that is near required to be bought is the lead slugs. Everything else can be easily found off corpses and in chests.
6 AV
Six or greater AV is likely the most important thing to reach in the early game. This is because that when an item's PV is higher than AV, the damage is multiplicative, as in get additional attacks in, causing unprotected bodies to get eviscerated. Critical hits are guaranteed to hit once, so even high dodge builds need some AV to prevent lucky one shots. Why 6? 6 is just an easily achievable number and allows most attacks from early game creatures to not penetrate. Snapjaw scavengers and hunters are killable by most characters as long as you're fighting them one by one. They will be the source of the majority of your early game gear. Just wandering around doing the starting quests will net you lots of gear.
Don't worry if the armor has a DV penalty: the rule of thumb for the early game is that 1 AV = 3 DV (1 AV = 2DV later on). so that studded leather armor (+3AV -2DV) is still a 9 vs some cloth robes, which is 3(+1AV 0DV). Just equipping anything that has an AV bonus will bring you to 6. The basic loadout is:
- Body: studded leather armor (3 AV)
- Hands: boar-skin gloves or leather gloves (1 AV)
- Head: Leather cap or knollworm skull (1 AV)
- Feet: Leather boots or crocassins (1 AV)
Lead slugs and a Missile Weapon
Lead slugs are ammunition for a lot of powerful missile weapons, all of which will likely be the hardest hitting weapon in your arsenal for most of the early game. Missile weapons have static PV, meaning that it does not depend on your character's strength. At point blank range, it's hard to miss too. This is important because this means that with a good missile weapon, near every character can survive the early game given enough ammunition.
Getting lead slugs is the easy part. The village merchant will always sell about 30-60 of them. Be sure to conserve them for enemies with high AV that you couldn't kill otherwise, because it will be hard to get more. The early game is the only time where finding ammunition is difficult. Once your character is able to take on turrets safely or reaches Grit Gate, ammo will be a nonissue.
Some castes/callings start with missile weapons already, making this a non issue. These starts are the Warden, Gunslinger, and Praetorian. If you didn't start as one of these, you can sneak into the desert and take one off of a Issachari rifle. You'll know when the Issachari has a red rifle in their sprite. They only have 4 bullets, so stay far away to cause them to miss (Spry and Acrobatics help here) and melee them once they run out. The desert rifle is a very powerful gun and can hold 6 shots before requiring a reload.