Beginner Character Build Tips

If you are playing game for the first time, you're probably looking to create a character. Here's some advice on decent beginner-character builds.

Choosing stats

You have four primary character characteristics: Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence & Perception. Bear in mind that these are impractical to raise once you're in-game, so for long-term characters, most of your development points should go here.

1. If you plan on fighting in melee, you should set a reasonable Strength (10 will do, but 11 helps avoid being unable to recover stuck weapons): it affects your melee combat damage-output, your maximum health, and your maximum safe carry-weight.

1. Dexterity is a universal stat which affects both melee and ranged to-hit chance, increases your dodging chance and improves your trap detecting and avoiding skill. 8-10 pts should work.

1. Intelligence affects your social abilities (currently negligible, given that NPCs are disabled by default). However, it also affects your ability to learn and is the base stat for nifty things like hacking computers and implanting bionics. If you don't want to do those things now, consider that you might change your mind once you're in the game. Setting intelligence to 10-12 will probably suffice; 14 is only needed for one or two rare, high-end skill books.

1. Perception improves your ranged combat to-hit chance and helps your character to detect and disarm traps. 10 points will enable you to see any trap in the game, provided that your eyes aren't encumbered. If you're OK with not being able to reliably spot land mines, 8-9 will suffice.

Choosing traits

There are positive and negative traits: positive traits cost development points, whilst negative traits provide more points.

If you're a beginner, choose these traits:

Positive: Quick (Smaller bonus than Fleet-Footed, but applies to everything. Sometimes retreat is better than combat); Light Step (Noise attracts critters, so less of it is a Good Thing); Parkour Expert (Quickly navigate difficult terrain, then turn around and take a few swings at the clumsy zeds who need 2-3 times as long.); you might consider a protective or reparative trait like Poison Resistant or Fast Healing; Night Vision can greatly help after dark.

Negative: Ugly, Truth Teller (no one minds your appearance after the Apocalypse. Chances are nobody's around to notice!); Insomniac (It makes your character have difficulty getting to sleep, but the effect is fairly minor. A (makeshift) bed and being at least Tired will generally suffice.)

Martial Arts Training can greatly simplify your early-game inventory needs, and is always a useful backup (again, with the disabled NPCs, there's no other legitimate way to gain the skills. Feel free to check Choosing Martial Arts Styles if you're curious.

More advanced traits

• Android: The bionics you get may or may not be useful, but if you wonder what the fuss is, here's one way to try them out.

• Robust Genetics: Don't mutate without it!

• Trigger Happy, Schizophrenic: Trigger Happy makes military rifles less-controllable, ut if you're not planning on using them that's not a problem. While hallucinating from schizophrenia all terrain is displayed in an odd manner, and certain critters show up purely in your head.

• Self-Defense Classes/Shaolin Adept/Venom Mob Protege: These are stopgaps for the buggy NPC martial-art trainers. Don't over-rely on them, but if you want a nifty advanced style, they're the way to go right now.

Professions

These provide a little different starting inventory, and sometimes character traits (such as the nicotine addiction from Chain Smoker). You can probably get along well enough without them, but feel free to experiment.

Skills

Spending a development point here translates into two levels of skill. Since much of the game involves building skills, spending irreplaceable dev points on them may seem wasteful--and in many cases it is--but a small investment at the start may make the difference between survival and early-game death. Useful skills to start with may include Archery, Survival, Dodge, and Mechanics.