Beginner questions not answered in tutorials/guides

[John Boote]

I have a couple of questions that's not covered in hunting tutorials. I've been through tutorials and guides, had picked up some good info; such as no blades unless you want that skill and only shot at one target until it's down.

Using a Sollomate Opalo, I targeted a mature Berycled. When I started clicking it's status bar my avatar moved forward until it was in range. I went through 20 or so rounds with all causing damage except for two rounds. When my health points hit 0, the Berycled's status bar was orange and slowly going up. How can I determine for a particular weapon the type of prey or its characteristics can one person take down? Would this be one of the main reason reasons for team hunting?

Is the amount of loot or prey value showing in the chat window random or is it effected by the location,time, number of people in a region, or the species and it's age?

I've been to TTs in four locations, none list vehicles, who carries aircraft?

[JSeven]

When starting out hunting you might want to stick with puny mobs for a while until you gain more skills. The mob level (the L number next to the name) can give you a rough idea how difficult to kill. Basically you learn by doing, but start with lower level mobs until you can kill them quickly with relatively few shots. If you can't kill the mob you just wasted all your ammo for nothing.

Loot is 'dynamic'. It varies by many different factors. Generally, the more peds you cycle the better loot will be. However, there seem to be cycles where loot will be good and many where loot is bad. If its very bad, it can be a good idea to try some other activity for a while.

Vehicles are not bought at TT but can be found on auction or offered for sale directly by other players. You can also craft vehicles but that is generally not a good option at the start.

[Neil Stockton]

I'm curious why you say no blades. One of the fastest ways to "upgrade" your avatar as a brand new player is to grab a knife and start hacking away at punies. You'll gain tons of strength which will increase your carrying capacity from 150kg up to 300kg in no time (past 320kg it's much slower). That will give you longer hunts, mining, and less time wasted walking around over weight.

Blades aren't as flexible in terms of amping and SIB ladders, so most people focus on ranged weapons. But I don't see any drawbacks to using blades (or powerfist) at first to get your strength up, as it's such a convenience for all your other in game activities.

[Meric]

In addition, strength is the second biggest contributor to your maximum health, which helps to avoid being killed so often!

I would advise doing *some* melee. (shortblades, longblades, powerfist, clubs)

[Cly]

...
How can I determine for a particular weapon the type of prey or its characteristics can one person take down?
...
Would this be one of the main reason reasons for team hunting?
...
Is the amount of loot or prey value showing in the chat window random or is it effected by the location,time, number of people in a region, or the species and it's age?

You have good answers so far, but wanted to add some more specifics as I understand them...

Specifically for creature assessment, I recommend you consider doing one of two things...
A) use this site: Entropedia
It has loads of information about creature Hitpoints, damage potential, damage types and attack speeds.
B) invest in / buy a "Lifescanner" sort of tool if you are too lazy to check Entropedia out each time. Use the Lifescanner to see how tough something is.
Specifically you should find that if you can get a value for it's Stamina, then that x10 are it's hitpoints.

Different types of Armour offer different types of protections as well - not all armours cover all damage types. So it is possible to be wearing armour that will FULLY PROTECT you from one L4 creature but offer NO DEFENCE against another L4 creature. Use Entropedia to understand your "normal targets" and choose a good armour against them.

In general, I have found that the following sequence of beginner armour works pretty well on Calypso:
1) Goblin
2) Shogun
And as soon as you graduate your discipleship (and that system is restored) you should get another decent set of armour (Adjusted Pixie).

So yes: team hunting's primary advantage is that it allows groups of people with weaker weapons to take on creatures that either regenerate too fast or do too much damage for a single hunter with those weapons to usefully take on.

Teams also enable some of the damage to be shared around rather than it necessarily all going to a single target.

Finally, as JSeven indicates, loot is "apparently random" in that there are very definitely algorithms which determine all sorts of parameters regarding it... there are also loads of pet theories which work X percentage of the time for Y percentage of the player base...usually where X and Y are pretty small numbers though

There is some guidance from MA on how to try and maximise it - although there are also a number of ways of reading what they said in any case. In short, the usual advice sort of boils down to:
- hunt to your capability level
- have patience and don't try to rush things as rushing costs money
- understand that eventually you will outgrow any given mob and need to move on.

Other than that, keep asking questions and have fun out there!

[Neil Stockton]

Teams also enable some of the damage to be shared around rather than it necessarily all going to a single target.

This effect of this can be dramatic. If you have two hunters doing equal damage, each one will receive on average 1/4 of the normal armor decay from each mob. Why? Because you only get half the hits and each mob is killed in half the time.

Another, unrelated suggestion I have is to use maxed tools whenever possible (they will say "not anymore" in item info window).

[John Boote]

How do I determine my capacity? Right now without armor I can take down a lvl 1 without damage and a lvl 3 with medium damage to myself, 5s are still fatal. I was going without armor to let some skills build up. At what point should I start using armor?

I switched to a long sword, but only strength has been increased. What do I need to do to increase endurance?

[Neil Stockton]

How do I determine my capacity? Right now without armor I can take down a lvl 1 without damage and a lvl 3 with medium damage to myself, 5s are still fatal. I was going without armor to let some skills build up. At what point should I start using armor?

I switched to a long sword, but only strength has been increased. What do I need to do to increase endurance?

If you mean how to increase your health points, it is based on your levels in various different skills. You can see which skills affect health on entropedia.info.

[Cly]

... you're already making the right calculations.

You know how you stand against L1-5 mobs.

However, to get a feel for what you might need to survive against L5/6s on a regular basis, what I suggest you do is start paying attention to why you survive against L1s.

Is it because they hit you less?
Is it because they hit you for less damage per strike than the others?
Is it simply because you kill them faster?

There are a number of key factors in fighting monsters, and it's important to slowly come to understand all of them... But it's not an easy thing to grasp in one go.

For instance:
- Some mobs regenerate hitpoints as you're fighting. This feature alone can change the outcome of some fights. In short, it will lengthen the fight depending on how fast you are doing damage.
- Some monsters do low damage but have high attack speeds, and so if you Evade one attack, you'll likely get hit next attack - the faster it attacks, the less significant each evade you make is. Conversely, with slow attackers a single evade on your part may make a bigger difference.

The speed with which you use a healing tool can also affect the fight if you pause to heal.

So there's loads of factors, really. My usual best advice is:
- Pick an area
- Check out the mobs you find there on Entropia
- See how many HP they have, and roughly how many successful attacks it's going to take for you to kill one.
- Check out how much damage it can do, and how fast it attacks. Make yourself a rough estimate of how much damage you can expect to take in the fight.

And then decide if you want in or not.

Let's make a worked example briefly. You're out and about and come across a Berycled young.

Site says this has 100 hp, does 14 damage, and attacks 20 times a minute.
We'll say for instance you have a Sollomate Opalo in hand. That does max 8 damage and fires 44 per second. You get an advantage in that you can start things off from 55 m... But Berycled tend to hop quite fast, so I wouldn't expect more than 2-3 shots before it's up close and personal.

You're not going to get max damage, and you're not going to hit every shot, so let's go for averages and expect 4 damage a hit and only hitting say 80% of the time.

Extrapolating that out, you need 25 hits (page shows no regen for Bery) and firing at 44 shots a minute you should reach that with your miss rate in about
32 shots, or 45 seconds.

So in that time, average damage from the creature would be 15 attacks at 7 each... 105 damage. Ouch. You will heal back in combat, and you may Evade some of it's strikes if you're lucky... But it might be a touch and go proposition if you get crit.

Your options are
- Get a stronger gun or attach a damage amplifier to boost your kill rate
- heal in the fight, and plan for a longer event - but remember you will be potentially taking up to 14 damage every 3 seconds so make sure your healing tool is strong enough to save you against this.
- wear armour to reduce the damage. In this case you would need an armour set that gave you some sort of IMPACT protection which is all Berycled do as damage.

While this is not rocket science, and in time you will be able to eyeball a creature's description in Entropedia and know if it will work for you or not, this is a suggestion on how to go about figuring out your capacity.

[laipsnis]

For the future, after you skill up a bit, I would suggest looking for monster that drops something with markup. Here are some monsters that along crappy loot they drop something valuable, fast sell-able in auctions:
Fouls (L.4) - they drop bones, refined they go to auctions for 450% or more.
Agronauts (L.7) - they drop Iron, refined it's something 108%.
Molisks (L.7) - they drop molisks tooth, refined teeth can be sold for 350% or more.

Out of those 3, only molisks drop stable their thing. From almost every 30ped ammo run, I gather like 1ped of teeth. Meanwhile hunting Fouls and Agronauts you need some luck. However, I would suggest go hunting Fouls, they are easy to kill (I was using some Isis pistol with 8-16damage and could hunt them naked with just few heals). Besides their Iron Quest has good reward for beginner.