Overview of the basic mechanics of STRAFE.
Health
As you start a game of STRAFE your scrapper has 100 hit points. Lost hit points are recovered by collecting food tins, most commonly found in wall-mounted dispensers around the world or, less commonly, in wooden crates and other destructables.
One food tin will restore 10 hit points.
Food tins collected while at full health will add pips to a meter below the health indicator. When this meter fills up, the scrapper’s max health is increased by 10. There are compounding returns on this, as food tins will add more pips to the meter as max health increases, meaning fewer and fewer tins are required to increase max health as max health increases.
At 120 and 150 max hit points the pips-per-tin increase to 2 and 3, respectively, thus to take the scrapper’s max health from 100 to 120 requires 10 tins, but to increase max health from 120 to 140 only requires an additional 4 tins.
There seems to be no hard ceiling on max hit points beyond the limits of the total number of food tins found in the world, which averages around 36. This puts the practical cap around 260, however luck can push this upwards of 300.
Armor
Armor is indicated by the blue number in the lower left of the player’s HUD. Armor is capped at a maximum of 100 at the start of the game, and there is no way to raise this maximum.
Armor in STRAFE® acts as an ablative layer. Damage taken is subtracted first from the scrapper’s armor, rolling over to hit points once the armor has been depleted.
Armor is restored primarily through work benches, which allow scrap to be converted into armor modules. Rarely armor modules can be found in destructables through the world. At the workbench two options are available, with the higher cost option being a greater value than the cheaper option, providing 50 armor for 6000 scrap, where the same would cost 7000 scrap by taking the cheaper option. As there is a finite amount of scrap in the game, there is equally a finite amount of armor that can be bought, thus efficiency becomes a factor over the course of an entire run.
In MURDERZONE.EXE the costs at the workbench are linear, 3000 scrap per 25, thus there is no gain from saving scrap for higher cost purchases.
Armor takes twice as much damage as hit points. The standard Glutton, for example, does 8 points of damage with each attack, 16 points of damage to armor. A shot from the Turret robots does 4 points of damage, 8 to armor. This includes ground acid, which damages hit points at a rate of 10 damage-per-second and armor at a rate of 20 damage-per-second.
The only additional modifier to armour is the Shield upgrade bought from shops, which negates one hit before going onto a long (45 second) cooldown.
Ammo
Ammo in STRAFE® is is indicated by two numbers in the lower right of the HUD, the larger number indicating the number of shots remaining in the current clip, and the smaller number (x##) indicating the number of clips in the scrapper’s inventory.
Because ammo is measured in clips, rather than total rounds, reloading mid-clip discards the remaining ammo in that clip. Equally, Clip Size upgrades from bonus chests and the Gun Duchess increase the capacity of all clips the scrapper already has, automatically increasing the total number of shots at the player’s disposal. The scrapper is capped at 99 clips of ammo for their primary weapon.
Secondary weapons come loaded with a single clip of ammo and, at the time of writing, picking up duplicates of a specific secondary weapon does not add extra clips or refill the current clip.
Ammo is refilled with ammo packs that can be bought from the workbench in a small pack (8 clips for 850 scrap) or standard pack (18 clips for 1500 scrap). Standard ammo packs are also commonly found in monster closets and destructables. Additionally, dead scrappers will occasionally have an ammo pack instead of, or in addition to, a secondary weapon.
Because ammo is rather common, and because crafting ammo at the workbench costs scrap that could otherwise be spent on armor, crafting ammo isn’t recommended unless the player has a surplus of both scrap and armor.
Written by FoldableHuman.
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