Tips and tricks

These tips and tricks will help you get the most out of your life on the island once you're familiar with the user interface and gameplay.

Skills and advancement

Skill tree

The more you are able to do with your action points (AP), the faster you will gain experience points (XP) and earn skills. Since the fastest way to gain experience points is to attack and kill animals and other players, it stands to reason that you should invest in the three melee combat skills (Body Building, Close Quarter Combat, and Advanced Close Quarter Combat, in that order) before you buy others.

Trekking is an important skill, since it reduces almost all of your movement costs by half, leaving you more AP for other things. You do have to buy Exploration as a prerequisite, but that will give you a nice map and keep you from being lost (thanks to the Shartak Map Overlay). Since recovery from death uses a considerable number of AP, Stamina is also a useful skill, since it lets you have more HP and thus makes you harder to kill.

Warriors and soldiers might consider buying Blowpipe Training and Advanced Blowpipe Training or Firearms Training and Advanced Firearms Training. Healer types should probably add Triage and then First Aid or Natural Medicine. These skills are useful at improving your rate of experience growth.

After your first several skills your XP-gathering ability will be great enough that the rest of the skills can be at your leisure and in any order.

Animal combat

Most animals on the island are fairly benign if left alone. However, if you attack them and run out of AP before killing them, don't be surprised if they retaliate while you are gone, even if you've moved a few squares away. If you don't think you'll be able to kill an animal, leave yourself enough AP to put some distance between it and you.

On the other hand, if you have healing items, you can allow the creature to attack you back and then heal yourself for XP. Be careful if you do this, and be especially careful if the animal in question is an elephant, tiger, or alligator, or if you're near hostile players.

Self-poisoning

A very slow but steady way to gain experience is to load up with poisonous berries and healing items (from a medical hut or a fruit tree). Searches at a tree or bush have about a 50% chance of success (see Locations#Trees and bushes), so if we do the math:

150 AP = 50 poison bush searches + 25 munchings (-50 HP)
       + 50 banana tree searches + 50 munchings (+50 HP) = 100 XP

That's 2/3 XP per AP, which is huge compared to chopping jungle (about 1/10 at best). But killing animals and people is still a faster way of gaining experience.

Note that it's more efficient to search medical huts for healing items than to search fruit trees, and you can trade the non-healing items you find for poison berries and healing items.

Efficient exploration

Maximizing mapped squares per AP

Here's a little animation of getting the most mapped squares for your AP, starting from an ideal position in the corner of 4 map-squares and moving in an overall straight line. This does not take into account chopping jungle and other obstacles. A similar technique can be used to turn corners as well, or even start off in a spiral pattern instead of linear. If there's a more efficient pattern, let us know!

For no loss in vertical efficiency, you can "widen" the column of the search above. Instead of mapping a 3-square-wide rectangle north to south, you'll be mapping a two column wide rectangle north to south with two-square "teeth" on each side. See the following diagrams.

Walking pattern
1|2    |     |
---------------
3|4    |     |
 | 5   |     |
 |  6  |     |
 |   7 |     |
 |    8|0    |
---------------
 |    9|1    |
 |     | 2   |
 |     |  3  |
 |     |   4 |
 |     |    5|7
---------------
 |     |    8|6
 |     |   9 |

Mapped Squares pattern (after 39 moves)
##..
###.
.###
.###
###.
###.
.##.

Profiles

Profile descriptions with blank lines

To add a completely blank line in your description, simply press enter once, type a single space, and press enter again. The space in the middle prevents the double enter from being shrunk to a single <br> tag.

Images for profiles

I'm not all that good with graphics, so I used the South Park Studio to make a simple picture to go on my profile. It lacks a 'Save' function so you have to take a screenshot and crop the image to suit.

When you enter the url of an image, make sure the picture isn't too wide as it looks rather squashed on the page unless you're using a rather high resolution monitor.

• South Park characters feel out of place in Shartak ,I used Hero Machine for my awsome character.(some people suggest Gaia Character Creator, but personally I hate it) -Grigoriy

Using multiple characters easily

If you wish to play with a couple of characters it can be annoying having to keep logging out and back in as the other one. To simplify things, you could create a small html file on your computer containing something like this:

<form action="http://www.shartak.com/index.cgi" method="POST">

<input type="submit" name="username" value="NameHere">

<input type="hidden" name="password" value="Password">

</form>

Repeat the block for each character you have, remembering to change the value="" parts to the appropriate values. Bookmark this html file (use Open File from the browser to get the file:// url) and to login, simply click the button for the character you want to use.