Beginners Guide

Many people have tried at making beginners guides, and many of them try to tell you how to play an FPS game. Which some people need, but most don’t. I’ll go over three main categories of interest which are: Looting, shooting, trading.

LOOTING

Looting is one of the most important aspects of the game first, I’ll go over basic hotkeys. Alt + Left Click: Quick Equip ^ Instantly equips selected item Ctrl + Left Click: Quick pickup ^ Instantly picks up selected item Hover Over Item + Delete: Quick discard ^ Instantly discards selected item Every single one of these keys can be polarizing in practice. Looting quickly is super important, as it makes noise, and every second spent looking in a container and making noise is another second that you can’t hear or see any players or scavs looking to wring your neck.

I will now talk about general locations and important keys. If you’ve played for more than 30 seconds you probably know about labs. The lab is a place where these aimbot scavs with gear just as good as any decked player roam about looking to kill some baby boys. There are a few tactics you can use against these guys to get stacked.

Incremental Lean: Alt + A/D ^ Used to peak scavs around the corner Sidestep: Alt + Q/E ^ Raider scavs can’t see you when you do this (it says it’s been patched but it hasn’t) Blind fire: Alt + W/S ^ Really useful when used properly, used to peek scavs around corners while not even being in danger

Now, I’ll talk about what the Lab has going as loot you can pick up. The best places to go for a beginner are:

Server Room: Tons of 10k-60k RUB attachments you can pick up (Silencers and sniper scopes are very profitable) Possible LED-X spawn, LED-X’s are worth about 1m RUB (there is a spawn by the printer located on the far left of the computer desk) also, in server room, you’ll find your first lab key if you’re lucky, don’t sell the first one you get, they go for about 80k RUB, but your early runs to the lab will be solely to go to this key location, the key is for the weapons testing room on the main floor of the lab. The key spawns on the wet bar countertop in the server room office. Other than that, there isn’t too much loot in server room, besides the gun box that’s right by the door. Possible to get an AS VAL or VSS in there, maybe even something better if you’re lucky, it’s always worth a check.

Golden Dome: The golden dome spawns a LED-X and some other little valuables worth some decent shekels. It’s hard to miss, it’s located in the medical area in the bottom floor, if you know where weapons testing is, it’s the opposite side of that same main area. I advise looting server room office over this place but it’s alright.

Weapons testing: Spawns about the same loot as server office + one item box and a gun rack that can have up to 3 high value weapons (full decked M4’s etc) many people write off weapons testing but you can get anywhere from 30k-400k RUB. Honestly, it’s worth checking on any run.

Arsenal Key: The arsenal is a nice place to go even if you don’t have the insanely rare and overpriced arsenal security key. There’s a green box in the office area before arsenal and inside of arsenal tons of expensive attachments and ammo spawn

I’m not going to talk about any of the garbage keys or arsenal security because of how expensive that key is

If you’re gonna axe run or go low gear, there’s no better place than labs, that’s backed up by the millions in my stash from doing that so many times.

Now I’ll talk about my favorite map, Shoreline.

Shoreline is a hard map to play and is really confusing early on. It’s a massive map with multiple different “biomes” and the flow of the map doesn’t make much sense at first. As a newer player, you’ll probably find yourself getting shot from nowhere every five seconds. It can be frustrating and frankly really hard to get the hang of. The player spawns aren’t far from eachother, and the loot doesn’t seem worth.

This is because you don’t know the map yet. First you need to get used to the open-ness of parts of the map and realize that you can traverse the map without going in the open.

That’s just half of it though, next you need keys. The keys you’re looking for are the “San.” Keys and you should keep your eyes out for those and after you’ve amassed a couple of them you should head out for the health resort. The health resort is the central part of the map.

Here are the best “San.” keys you’re looking for: 216, 218, 220-222, 226, 306, 308

Every one of these keys has at least 1 rare item spawn and 2-5 gun boxes + rare gun spawns in a lot of these rooms (M1A, M4, etc)

Factory and Woods don’t really need much of an explanation, there are 3 keys for factory and 2 keys in woods

Factory: Factory Key- Opens a small room with a gun spawn (pretty much useless)

Pumping Station- Opens another useless room, could be good for ambushing players coming out from the tunnels below or the two spawns near the pumping station

Admin Key- Opens an optional extract

Woods: ZB-014- Opens a small bunker with an extract and a little tiny bit of loot

Yotota- totally useless Key, Opens a car door with little to no loot in it

Next is customs, I don’t run customs much and I don’t advise it for new players unless you’re there to kill scavs, I’ll list the hot places to kill scavs:

Construction- plenty of scavs here, go wild

Dorms- Couple of scavs here and there, plenty of keys that go to doors with some goodies, I’ll list those keys soon

Bus Station- 2-3 scavs here might as well go there

Old gas- 2-5 scavs here nice little loot inside the gas station too

Keys for customs that are super nice, I’ll start with three story dorms, then 2 story, then Miscellaneous customs keys:

Three story dorms:

MARKED KEY

So many people say marked key sucks and that it’s near worthless, this is so wrong, plenty of high value guns found in here MP7’s, VAL’s, M4’s you can find some nice trading items and there is always a stack of 20k-50k RUB

218: Very common weapon spawn, totally worth looting

303: Green crate and weapon spawn this is a nice little loot spot too

Two story dorms: Dorm Gaurds Desk: I love this room, two ammo crates, weapon box, weapon rack, and a key box that can spawn almost any key in the game (key for this room very commonly spawns on the dead scav in two story’s first floor bathroom so check there every raid if you can)

Room 114: Safe, PC, medical crate, nice little goodie room (key spawns in the trunk of a car near UN checkpoint)

Now I’ll go onto Interchange and where the best loot is and how you should go about navigating it.

First I’m gonna say, I don’t advise running interchange honestly, the keys for the good looting locations are super rare and often very expensive, and also, you’ll most likely die over and over and over again until you finally figure interchange out.

Register Keys: There are 3 keys for the three main stores that open up the massive line of registers in front of the three main department stores, they are, the OLI register key, IDEA register key, and Goshan register key. I don’t bother with these but if you have the will power to stand and loot registers for 30 minutes you can net a sweet 100k-145k RUB

KIBA 1 and 2 keys: These are both crazy expensive if you’re new to the game, so I don’t recommend trying to buy these or get the loot from this place. You have to have both keys to enter the actual KIBA area. KIBA 1 opens 1 door KIBA 2 opens the other. KIBA 1 is lootable, but KIBA 2 is a quest reward from gunsmith part 11 from mechanic. Inside KIBA, there are so many good things that it’s hard to write this Key off. Many rare items spawns, you can find bitcoins, Tetriz, so many good things in there. Multiple weapons spawns and tons of high value lootable attachments.

That concludes the Looting section, the next two are super short because they’re both very basic and won’t be too in depth.

SHOOTING

In this section, I’ll explain the basics of combat and how I maximize the amount of gunfights I win and the profit I turn.

Tip number 1, no “mid-gear” runs. So many players early on want to take in middle tier gear, as in, maybe a ZHUK press and an unmodded sks or unmodded AK, these are the least profitable runs, bringing this gear is going to make killing players who bring low gear seem like overkill and give almost no profit. This is the worst situation you can be in. It’ll make killing geared players slightly easier, but still, if not every single thing works perfect for you in a situation you’ll probably get rocked by any geared guy.

Tip 2, bring friends. This is super important early game, 5 guys shooting is much stronger than 1. If you don’t already have a team to roll with try here

Tip 3, memorize the map and how you can use it to your advantage

Tip 4, bring grenades!! Nades are super useful, even if they don’t hit their target they can still do damage or flush somebody out of a position, they’re essential

Tip 5, learn how to mod your guns and get familiar with them.

That concludes most of my tips for combat, there’s not much to learn besides just getting experience anyways.

TRADERS/TRADING

Honestly, since the flea markets release, there’s no real need to stress over trader levels, I keep mine at 2-3 but I advise doing all of the quests and getting traders to high levels. I’m mainly going to talk about benchmarks and good things to go after early game.

I advise going straight for level 2 prapor which isn’t that hard, I know how bad it is to sell items to him because the prices are so low, but you’re going to want to sell stuff to him for a while until you’re at your money spent for lvl 2,

once you’ve gotten Praporto level 2, go level up ragman as high as you can possibly get him. I recommend this because armor is so expensive on the flea market, don’t worry about mechanic, mods are cheap.

Skier deals in more “high end merchandise” after you have ragman at lvl 2-3 and prapor level 2-3, gear should be pretty cheap and easy to come by, so you should be able to get skiers tasks done quick and easy.

By the time you start to level up Peacekeeper, you should have all traders level 3 and you have to have friend to the west completed, after you have peacekeeper level 3, go for therapist, you’ll lose a lot of skier reputation that you’re going to have to quest for, so be ready for that.

This concludes my guide, thank you all for listening to my ideas, see you in tarkov!