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.

Getting started

Welcome to Shartak. Perhaps you're wondering how you should spend your first day. You can begin by visiting one of the resource buildings in your camp. Depending on how you like to play, you may seek out the medical supplies or the weapons and ammunition. Once you feel that you are well-equipped, you can begin your adventure.

Move through the jungle and hunt for animals or even other players. While attacking members of the same side is generally not appreciated, there is nothing necessarily wrong with doing so. Just don't be surprised when your victims treat you the same way in return!

Try to reach one of the friendly or hostile camps. Explore some of the natural landmarks. Deforest the landscape. Spend some time haunting the island as a spirit. You might be interested in joining a clan that has similar goals to your own.

Have fun.

Beginner's guide to skills and advancement

As you become more skilled at combat or healing or spirit-wails, you become more effective with your action points (AP). In turn, this enables you to gain experience points (XP) and earn skills more quickly. Since each skill requires progressively more XP to learn than the previous ones, characters who sidetrack themselves early on by choosing weak and/or non-reinforcing skills will have difficulty advancing throughout their entire career. In contrast, quickly learning the XP-returning skills in your favored career path gives you some guarantee of steady advancement.

The fastest methods of gaining experience are (in roughly descending order of popularity):

1. Combat
2. Healing
3. Haunting
4. Exploration

Combat skills

The most straightforward way to gain experience points is to attack and kill animals and other players, so it is sensible to invest first in the three melee combat skills (body building, close quarter combat, and advanced close quarter combat, in that order) before you buy others.

Healing skills

Healing is a rapid method of earning experience points, so many players learn first aid or natural medicine quite early so that first aid kits or healing herbs can heal more HP (and thus give more XP) when they're used. Triage is a necessary prerequisite skill, and it enables you to maximize your XP gains by healing the most heavily wounded targets.

Haunting skills (wailers)

Some players have ignored the combat tree and moved directly up the haunting tree toward banshee wail, since wailing is potentially the fastest way to gain experience in the game. However, the early stages of haunting yield low XP returns and the entire tree has received some well-deserved power reductions (to about 1.25 XP-per-AP with ideal banshee wails). New players might find this long experience path to be arduous (and boring, since almost no interaction with other characters is possible).

Exploration skills

Whether you are a fighter, a healer, or an explorer, trekking is always an important skill, since it reduces many of your movement costs by half. This leaves you more AP for other things, which in turn results in more XP per AP. You do have to buy exploration as a prerequisite to trekking, but that will give you a nice map and keep you from being lost (thanks to the Shartak Map Overlay). Since recovery from death requires 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. Stamina is particularly crucial for characters who travel far from home into hostile territory.

Other important skills

Settlers and villagers should probably buy scavenging, since this is believed to reduce the AP spent searching by as much as one-third.

Soldiers might consider buying firearms training and advanced firearms training, since the rifle has advantages over a machete that offset the opportunity cost of searching for bullets (see the talk page).

Similarly, warriors should consider blowpipe training and advanced blowpipe training. The blowpipe yields an average of 2.4 XP per AP ignoring reload time and ammo acquisition. (Reload time reduces this to 1.2 XP per AP, and including ammo search undoubtedly reduces the gain to less than 0.8 XP per AP. For comparison, a machete yields 1.35 XP per AP when used by a player with all three melee skills.) Warriors should keep their blowpipes loaded so that they can spend less time reloading in combat.

Keep in mind that darts deal delayed damage from poison. (The effects of poison are felt gradually as the target character acts.) When looking at damage throughput rather than experience gains, the warrior's blowpipe is very potent. Because of poison damage, blowpipes inflict roughly 5 HP per combat-AP -- more powerful than the heavy sword. When ammo & reload costs are included, damages is roughly 1.6 HP damage per AP.

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

Beginner's guide to 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. Certain animals (such as elephants, tigers, and alligators) should be treated with caution, because they can easily kill an unwary sleeper.

Now that animals attack reactively during combat, you should expect to take damage while hunting big game. Not only do you need to carry more first aid kits (or other consumables), remember that this also reduces your damage throughput in 72 AP -- some of your time has to be spent healing yourself. As long as you are carrying enough healing items, this is an opportunity for you to gain experience through healing yourself as well as attacking.

It is no longer wise for self-healers to sleep next to an animal in the hopes of being hurt -- it is probably more efficient and it is certainly much safer to use poisonberries or sharkbites to self-inflict damage. Players with combat skills are better off attacking the animal directly, and siphoning self-healing from the animal's reactive attacks.

Beginner's guide to self-poisoning

A steady way to gain experience is to load up with harmful items and healing items, and to alternately poison and heal yourself.

Mango and banana trees have poor efficiency. Berry bushes provide a reasonably fast way to accumulate healing and harming items. Fresh & salt water (using refillable containers) yield an an even more reliable way to steadily gain XP.

Poison Berries: You can collect and eat poisonous berries at a poisonberry bush. Tree searches have about a 55% chance of success (see Locations#Trees and bushes), and there are often poisonberry and tasty berry bushes located within 12 AP of each other. Using poisonberries to hurt yourself and tasty berries to heal yourself:

210 AP = + 60 poison bush searches + 33 munchings (-66 HP)
         + 12 AP trekking
         + 60 tasty bush searches + 33 munchings (+66 HP) = 132 XP

Salt Water: It is faster and more reliable to drink salt water from an empty bottle at river mouth:

133 AP = + 33 fill empty bottle with salt water + 33 drink salt (-66 HP)
         + 1 AP trek between ocean and river
         + 33 fill with fresh water + 33 drink fresh (+66 HP) = 132 XP

This is essentially 1 XP per 1 AP, which is extremely solid XP advancement (equivalent to Haunting Scream). Killing animals and people can still be faster for gaining experience.

By searching the medical hut for first aid kits / healing herbs, you can earn XP even more efficiently once you have advanced medicine skill (since the find rate appears to be better than the break-even 1 per 9 AP).

Also, you can trade any non-healing items you find for poison berries, empty bottles, and healing items.

General Gameplay Advice

Spending the night in an opposing side's camp is generally not wise. Though the majority of the population is usually not immediately hostile to the other side, in a populated area your chance of encountering a violent character are significantly higher.

Other players can view a statistical, personal history via your profile. If you have killed members of your own or the opposing side, don't expect the relevant group to be hospitable.

Be cautious about going to sleep with low hit points — even in your own camp. Ghosts may frequent and and finish you off in your sleep.

Take advantage of the forum and wiki to find out about pre-announced conflicts and raids.

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.