Tips and tricks

Skills and Advancement

Skill Tree

In order to gain XP, you must kill animals (and possibly people). To kill things, you must hit them. Therefore, it stands to reason that you should buy skills that help you more efficiently kill things before you buy other skills. The three combat skills are close quarter combat, advanced close quarter combat, and body building. You must have CQC before you can acquire ACQC.

It's pretty easy to find a machete, and some classes already start with a melee weapon. Let's use the machete as a case study, charting its effectiveness with various skills:

Skill	Base damage	Hit percentage	Damage per AP
none	2	20%	0.4
close quarter combat	2	30%	0.6
body building	3	20%	0.6
CQC + BB	3	30%	0.9
advanced close quarter combat (without body building)	2	45%	0.9
ACQC + BB	3	45%	1.35

What this table shows us is that it doesn't matter what order you acquire the three combat skills in; you'll get a 0.2 damage per AP boost on the first one, another 0.3 for the second, and a 0.45 boost for the third.

Improving your rate of experience gain is achieved by improving your AP efficiency. After purchasing the three combat skills, you are probably best served by obtaining trekking, which reduces almost all your movement costs by half. Unfortunately, you have to buy exploration as a prerequisite. Exploration does have the benefit of giving you a cool map to use.

Warriors and soldiers might consider buying blowpipe training and firearms training / advanced firearms training as well. Healer types should probably add triage and then first aid or natural medicine. These skills are useful at improving your rate of experience growth.

Optionally, now buy stamina so you'll last longer in a fight (whether or not you bought any skills in the previous section). The tracking skill tree isn't too bad at finding prey, although often you are better off simply wandering through heavy jungle.

Now you're pretty far into the game, and you can add the rest of the skills at your leisure and in any order. You've maxed out your XP-gathering ability as early as possible (even healers should probably kill animals for XP in the early stages of the game, since you get such a boost when the sucker dies).

However, Body Building is superior to the CQC and ACQC when forced to use inferior weapons such as a knife or fist. --LouisB3 20:47, 18 May 2006 (BST)

Combat: Don't start what you cannot finish

Most animals encountered in Shartak 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've returned the favor while you were gone, even if you've moved a few squares away from them. Make sure you'll have enough AP to finish the job, and if the attack isn't going your way, leave yourself enough AP to put some distance between you and your prey.

• On the other hand, if you've loaded up with fruits, water, and/or medical supplies, you can allow the creature to attack you back and then heal yourself for XP. Maybe don't try this with an elephant or tiger (or if you're near hostile players).

Gaining more XP in dense jungle

This information is possibly out of date or inaccurate. The XP bonus for clearing brush now applies to all jungle, not just d10. Also, jungle grows back. --LouisB3 20:49, 18 May 2006 (BST)

When surrounded by a number of blocks that have a "Chop" button instead of "Move" button, you can click each Chop button in turn and possibly gain some XP from the chop action (as per XP Gains) but without actually moving. Once all Chop buttons are clicked, pick another place to move to and repeat.

That sounds incredibly labour-intensive (i.e. AP-inefficient) to me, not to mention quite boring (and environmentally unsound). Much better, and more fun, to save your AP for hunting animals (which isn't environmentally unsound, by the way: my Wiksik ancestors have been practising sustainable hunting methods for centuries). - Viveca Lindfors

Poison Berries

Another very slow and steady way to gain experience is to load up with poisonous berries and with healing items (from a medical hut or a banana/mango tree). At a rough guess, searches at a tree are about 1 in 3, so if we do the math:

300 AP = 75 poisonberry searches + 25 munchings (-50hp) 
       + 150 banana tree searches + 50 munchings (+50hp) = 100 XP

That's about 1/3 XP per AP, which is huge compared to Chopping Jungle (about 1/10 at best). Killing animals (or people) is still more productive (at earning experience).

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.