STALCRAFT – Ultimate Game Mechanics Guide

This comprehensive guide explain most of the in-game mechanics.

Definitive Guide to Explain Mechanics

All credit goes to GoblinLootLord!

Controls Tips

While your character in Stalcraft is by no means as complicated as in games like Tarkov or Arma and can be picked up by anyone who used K&M before even once it does have some things that can be missed or are poorly explained.

• High jump – by holding Spacebar you can charge your jump to reach greater heights. This used to be explained in the tutorial but the line was randomly cut for some reason. Combining high jump with grabbing a ledge (Q) will make your traversal easier.
• Stamina bar – your stamina bar is divided into 3 sections: red, yellow and green. If your stamina is in the Red section you can only sprint but not jump, Yellow section allows you to perform a regular jump and when you stamina is in the Green section you can charge your jump.
• Radial menu – you can assign numbers 1-9 to items like medicine, consumables and even weapons. By holding C to open the radial menu, you can either press 1-9 or hover over an item to use/equip it. So even though Stalcraft only has only one slot for a primary weapon this system allows you to quickly swap between several weapons.
• Buying ammo/meds/consumable presets (trade packs) – you can create presets of consumables to buy them inside a base without going to a merchant every time. To create one you need to go to a merchant (shopping cart icon) at a base, in the shop menu click “Manage packs”, add items to your inventory on the right and click “Save pack”. You can create up to 9 packs by switching through 1-9 in the top part of the merchant’s inventory and give each one a name. To buy a pack, you need to be inside a base and press T. From this menu you can buy or delete packs and if you don’t want to buy a certain item from your pack, you can click on it to temporarily remove it from the pack.
• Hold R to change ammo type – by holding down the reload key you can choose what ammo you want to load into your gun if you have different types in your inventory. This actually works the same for grenades with G key.
• F1 – hides/shows UI.
• F2 – takes screenshot.
• Shift+F3 – shows/hides additional info like FPS and ping.
• F5 – 3rd person camera in safe zones.
• F8 – drunk camera.
• F11 – toggle fullscreen;

Dropped on Death/Bound Gear & Items

Stalcraft is not a full-loot MMO but that doesn’t mean that death comes with no punishment. So what do you keep and lose on death? You keep items that have lock or shield icons, this generally includes your gear, quest items, artifacts that you’ve bound to you and bags of ammo and med kits. You lose items that don’t have any icons such as sellable junk, stacks of ammo and meds as well as most consumables and barter resources (chain icon). On death barter resources go into a special bag, this bag can be opened only by its owner. If you have somebody’s bag you can put it up for sale on the auction for that player to buy back, send it to them via mail for free if you’re a nice guy or just sell it to a fence (please don’t do that).

Items that come from quests or barter are bound to you and cannot be sold on the auction or traded to players.

At this point in time I don’t yet know how monetization will work for EU/NA servers but on RU servers all gear that comes from microtransactions comes bound-on-equip meaning it can be sold on the auction or traded directly to a player, this also includes battlepass during events meaning you can actually get any gear without spending money. Barter resources cannot be traded as well however you can get special purple items as rare drops during farming and these items can either be converted into 20 pieces of the corresponding barter resource or can be sold or traded.

Reputation

Each base has 5-7 reputation levels that unlock different features, give discounts at the supplier as well as allow you to barter better gear. You get reputation points by farming camps, doing dailies and completing quests. However to get higher reputation levels you need to go to tougher zones. For example, to get rep levels 4 and 5 for the Cordon base you need to farm stuff on Dumpyard or for levels 6 and 7 of the Bar you need to venture to Army Warehouses or Fool’s Path.

To check your reputation with each base and see what each level unlocks you can double click on the base icon on the map.

Emissions

Emission is something akin to a world event which happens randomly every 2-4 hours when the sky turns red and the camera starts shaking. After about 1-2 minutes after an Emission starts all players start to take damage. To survive an Emission you must take shelter, unfortunately the game does a rather poor job of explaining what counts as a shelter and what doesn’t.

Also after an emission artifacts spawn at drastically increased rate from anomalies for 45 minutes. You can check when was the last emission in #emissions channel in the official discord server for your region.

*Note that Psy-emission resistance stat on artifacts does not reduce damage from Emissions!

Player Separation System

Instead of traditional levels, your progression in Stalcraft is determined by your gear that has 5 levels of rarity: Lockpick, Newbie, Stalker, Veteran and Master (technically speaking Legendary tier also exists but it is currently only used for one armor and extremely rare artifacts). As gear becomes stronger with each rarity players are separated from each other in order to prevent old players dunking on new ones. Players are separated by being sent to different servers of that map (basically layering). Community has outlined 5 types of server:

1. Newbie servers (players with gray and green gear).
2. Stalker servers (blue gear).
3. Veteran servers (purple gear or blue with high improvement level).
4. Semi-Master servers (purple gear mixed with red or purple with high improvement level).
5. Master servers (red gear).

However the system doesn’t only count your gear. While at this point it feels like not even sEXBO themselves know everything that affects the system there are several things that are known for sure, such as:

• Rarity of your weapons and armor.
• Rarity of your container.
• Rarity of your artifacts.
• Improvement (honing) level of your gear (don’t go beyond +5 until you’re at semi-master) and artifacts.
• K/D in the open world.

After reaching higher division servers you aren’t supposed to go back by equipping weaker gear but sometimes it works although sometimes it doesn’t. Don’t know. It’s weird.

Also the system takes some time to adjust so if you’re playing on Stalker tier servers and are killed by a guy in purple gear, don’t freak out. He will be sent to appropriate servers soon.

If you want to play with a player who is in a different gear division, you will be playing in the higher one.

Fast Travel

There is no fast travel in Stalcraft however if you are stuck or want to quickly return to the last visited base and don’t have loot you care about, you can type /suicide in chat.

Additionally each subfaction has a tunnel leading to its base from the Bar which is honestly more of a “safe” travel than “quick” one.

Claiming/Sending Mail

To claim and send mail you need a courier. He can be found at any base starting from Cordon. To claim mail simply go to a courier and click on Mail. To claim/delete multiple messages at once you can tick the box on the right side of the menu. To send mail you need to fill in the name of another player (can be other characters on your account) and type at least one character in the message box, you don’t need to attach any items, money or fill the theme box.

Teaming Up with Other Players

To play with your friends or 4 other people you need a squad. If you already have a person in your friend list, you can just select this player and invite him to your squad at the bottom right corner of the menu, this will create a squad automatically. You can also manually create a squad from Squad section in your PDA. In this section you can make your squad cross-faction but this only works in safe zones and is designed for trading. You can also search for other squads or make yours appear in the search apparently. After 1.5k hours I’ve just discovered this while writing this guide and it appears that barely anyone uses it, so you’d be better off LFGing in chat.

To join a squad you need to accept the invite that would appear as a notification pop-up at the left corner of your screen above the chat. If you are in different layers either the player who is invited or the one with worse gear will receive a second notification to change servers.

*If you are using Streamer mode or missed a notification you need to manually go to the Notifications tab in your PDA and accept it there!

Food

Most food you’ll encounter in the game like bread and beans is useless and only used in a couple sidequests so don’t hoard it. However there are types of food that are quite useful such as MREs and different event food but the buffs it gives are always clearly stated so it’s easy to distinguish useful and useless food.

Note: there is also achievement for drinking 1000 bottles of vodka.

Exchange Vendor

At this vendor you can exchange special coins earned primarily from the premium tier of the battlepass during events for barter resources. The exchange rates however are awful so I urge you not to use this unless you only need a couple of resources and you really don’t feel like going farming. I’d recommend saving up these coins as sometimes additional uses for them are added during events. There is also a second page for this vendor where players can redeem special tokens that devs occasionally gift to select few individuals. Vast majority of players will only use this page to craft Catalysts needed to improve your artifacts. You can exchange 30rnd 7.62 mag for NATO guns for 30rnd AK-308 mag as well if you even need it.

After you join a clan 3rd page will appear where you can spend currency earned from clan wars.

Player Counter & Beep Noises

In the top left corner of your minimap you have a player counter that counts both friendlies and enemies in a certain radius (I think it’s around 50m, maybe more). When someone enters or leaves your vicinity you will hear a beep. If you’re alone the counter will show 1.

Auction House

Only items that don’t have a lock or a shield icon can be sold on the auction. To sell an item you need to approach the NPC with a house with 3 pillars icon who can be found at any base starting with Cordon. Then you need to drag (or shift+lmb) an item to the inventory window on the left, put in the starting bid price, buyout price and choose how long do you want your item to be up on the auction. Your starting price must be at least 1 ruble less than buyout price. There’s also a fee for putting items on the auction which is determined by your starting price and the timer. This fee is returned when your item is sold. Additionally there’s the auction tax that will be automatically deducted from the price of an item when it’s sold so if you’re planning on selling an expensive item you will earn quite a bit more if you trade it directly to another player.

You can buy items on the auction directly from your PDA. To claim them you need to go to the courier at a base.

Linking in Chat

To link an item in chat you need to open it first (Enter) and hold TAB. Unfortunately you can’t link items that are currently equipped. If you’re a squad leader you can also link a squad invite to chat.