Escape from Tarkov Beginner’s Guide: Essential Tips to Survive

Hello, guys, Librarian Husky here. Tarkov is a survival shooter where any one moment can be your last, so going into raids with the right knowledge is very important. If you are new to escape from tarkov, welcome! In this article, I will explain everything you need to know to get right into a raid and start having fun.

Getting Started with Tarkov

The first decision you’ll make when starting the game is whether you want to play as a bear or USEC PMC. Depending on your character choice, there are minor starting Loadout differences and clothing options. The main distinction currently exists on the map Lighthouse, where Bears face challenges dealing with the Rogues and Elite AI, which we’ll discuss later. Ensure you are content with your character selection as it can’t be altered until the game wipes, typically every six months.

The game operates in white Cycles similar to Rust or DayZ, where everyone gets reset after some time to start anew. After selecting your character, head to your inventory screen to gear up your PMC. The tabs on the top left showcase various information. The overall tab displays your stats and tarkov for the current wife, excluding the hours metric, which reflects your total playtime.

The medical tab indicates your PMC Health, crucial for post-raid healing. The skills tab shows your PMC skills that accumulate during raids. The maps tab is less vital, but the task tab displays your current quests, essential for character progression. Lastly, the Gear tab represents your inventory in the stash, where you can sort items using buttons and manage weight, health, hydration, and energy levels. Remember to maintain hydration and energy levels during raids by carrying food and water.

Now that we are familiar with the inventory screen, let’s delve into loadouts.

Understanding Loadouts in Tarkov

Loadouts are a critical aspect of Tarkov gameplay, determining your equipment and gear for raids. It’s essential to optimize your loadout for different scenarios to increase your chances of survival and success. A well-prepared loadout can significantly impact your performance in raids.

When creating a loadout, consider factors such as weapon choice, Ammunition, armor, and medical supplies. Your loadout should align with your playstyle and objectives for the raid. Weapons play a crucial role in engagements, with different firearms suited for varying ranges and combat situations. Ammunition selection is equally important, as using the right ammo type can make a significant difference in combat effectiveness.

Armor provides protection against enemy fire, reducing damage taken during engagements. It’s essential to choose armor that balances protection and mobility based on your preferred playstyle. Medical supplies are vital for sustaining your PMC’s health during raids. Bandages, painkillers, and other medical items can help you recover from injuries sustained in combat.

Optimizing your loadout involves balancing offensive capabilities, defensive measures, and support items to ensure you are well-prepared for any situation. Experiment with different loadouts to find what works best for your playstyle and adapt as needed based on your experiences in raids. Remember, preparation is key in Tarkov, so invest time in creating effective loadouts before heading into raids.

Understanding Loadout Essentials in Escape From Tarkov

The core components of a loadout in Escape From Tarkov revolve around ammunition selection and armor choices. Armor pieces come with varying armor values, while bullets possess penetration and damage values. A simple rule of thumb is that for every 10 penetration points a bullet has, it can penetrate one armor class. This means bullets with higher penetration values are more effective against tougher armor.

Unfortunately, the game currently lacks an in-game display for these values, requiring players to refer to online ammo charts. Opting for the best available armor is advisable for enhanced survivability. Additionally, selecting higher caliber weapons can aid in armor penetration, although headshots remain a reliable way to neutralize targets, except when facing well-protected foes. Early-game loadouts play a crucial role until players reach Level 15, unlocking access to the player-driven flea market for equipment procurement.

Before delving into the medical system, it’s essential to address the secure container, serving as a safeguard for crucial items upon death. Quest items stored in this container must retain their “find in raid” status to be valid for completion, emphasizing the importance of survival. The insurance feature offers a chance to reclaim lost items post-death, albeit with recent changes affecting its effectiveness, especially for solo players. It’s a strategic decision whether to invest in insurance based on risk assessment and playstyle preferences.

Mastering the Medical Dynamics in Escape From Tarkov

Escape From Tarkov boasts an intricate medical system, with individual body parts possessing distinct HP pools. Injuries to specific body parts result in corresponding penalties; for instance, losing an arm impacts aiming precision, while a damaged leg restricts mobility. Severe injuries lead to blacked-out limbs, necessitating timely treatment to prevent adverse effects.

Notably, head or thorax injuries prove fatal instantly, emphasizing the significance of protective gear. Bleeds, categorized as light or heavy, demand tailored treatments like Armory bandages or Catalog B to prevent excessive med kit consumption. Fractures require specialized care using splints, surgery kits, or Grizzly Med kits to restore functionality. Swift medical attention is crucial to mitigate escalating damage and ensure sustained combat effectiveness in the unforgiving landscapes of Tarkov.

Understanding the Medical System

A fracture behaves the same way a blacked out limb does, in that if you have a fractured arm, you will have an aim penalty, or a fractured leg will slow you down. Although that complicated stuff is now out of the way, most of the med kits in the game work the same way. They heal your body where one damage point equals one charge from the med kit. Unless you are fixing a bleed or fracture, as I’ve stated before, it’s a good idea to right-click and inspect a medical item if you aren’t familiar with it, as it will tell you exactly what it does. It’s important to have all your medical bases covered when raiding, as the last thing you want is to slowly bleed out with a quest item on hand with nothing you can do about it.

Now that we hopefully understand the medical system a little bit better, it’s time to talk about progression through the trader and task system. The Traders is where you’ll buy most of your gear, and each one comes with a reputation value and money spent value, which you can see in the top right in the trader UI.

Buying and selling items to a Trader will affect the money spent value, and the quests are how you increase your rep with a specific Trader, as each Trader will have quests for you to do throughout the game. The max Trader level is level four, and this will allow you to buy most of the items in the game for a much better price than the flea market, so it’s a very solid goal to work towards. As each share of Trader will unlock more gear.

Sometimes quests themselves will unlock specific item awards, meaning even if you have level 4 Traders, you still won’t be able to buy Every item unless you do the quests that unlock specific gear. The only exception to this is Fence, which works completely different than the other Traders. Fence sells whatever gear players sell to him or unclaimed Insurance items. The only way to increase rep on Fence is through your Scav, which is a randomly generated Loadout that you can use for free off cooldown.

More on that though in a minute. Traders will pay a different price for different items, and a quick breakdown of how to get the most value out of the Traders is this: Therapists will pay the most for medical items and valuables like gold items or Hideout supplies, Mechanic will pay the most for weapons and weapon parts, Peacekeeper will pay the most for Intel-related items, Jaeger will pay as much as Therapist for some medical items and hunting gear, Skier and Prapor buy hybrid items for a tad less than Mechanic, and Fence will buy everything but for the least value, even completely ruined gear.

Now I know that I mentioned Hideout supplies, so let’s talk a little bit about The Hideout. The Hideout can be accessed from the main menu, and you’ll want to upgrade the facilities found there as you play through the game. If you have the standard edition of the game and suffer from the smaller stash base, you can find your stash upgrade module here, which will help you store many more items.

You can also build facilities like the workbench, which will allow you to make weapon presets when you inevitably get into weapon modding, a feature the game is known for. Other bonuses include a med station for Med crafting, a gym to level up endurance and strength, a Bitcoin farm for money, and lastly, I want to shout out the workbench one more time as the tier 2 and 3 workbench will provide good ammo crafts in a late game, so some modules have to be upgraded more than one time.

Now I know this is a lot of information, so hopefully you have a pristine cup of coffee with you as it’s time to talk about your PMC versus your Scav. Anytime you go to enter a raid, you can use your PMC and your gear or your Scav. If you select your PMC, you will enter a raid as normal, but your Scav plays a bit differently.

Your Scav enters a raid that has already started, and the main purpose of your Scav is to loot what’s left on the map, like dead players or any items that haven’t been picked up, or to fight PMCs with your Scav brethren. You are friendly to other AI Scavs around the map, and it’s implied that you should be friendly towards other player Scavs that you see as well.

Every Scav raid you extract from will give you more rep towards Fence, and as you level up your rep further, your Scavs start to spawn with better gear, have a shorter cooldown, and if you manage to reach 6.0 Scav Karma and above, you will even become friendly with the elite AI like Scav bosses, which would normally shoot you as a Scav.

Anytime you kill a Scav or a Scav boss as a Scav, you will take a significant penalty to your Scav karma, so it’s not recommended you do this unless you love the chaos. However, if you kill Another Scav that’s gone Rogue or a PMC as a Scav, you will earn a slight bonus to your Fence rep, even if you don’t survive the raid.

Another thing that your Scav has that I find quite interesting is the fact that your Scav actually has skills. Like your PMC, your Scav will level its skills while you’re doing Scav raids, and even though you get a different Scav every time, you still keep the skills when you play your Scav. And speaking of skills, let’s talk a little bit more about the skills tab. You can hover your mouse over each of the skills to see what bonuses you get from leveling them, but the most impactful ones are your strength and endurance. A higher endurance will allow you to run longer and recharge stamina faster, and a higher strength will allow you to run and walk faster and jump higher.

Skills and Skill Leveling

Some skills are required for quests like the sniper skills, so it could be a good idea to use a sniper early to level this skill, but for the most part, you should get your skills naturally. The skill leveling in raid has diminishing returns, meaning you can’t just power level your skills in raid, as there is a heavy XP drop off once you’ve earned enough skill points in that skill. The diminishing returns timer is five minutes, so let’s say you haven’t eaten in five minutes. When you do eat your food, you will gain more XP than normal for that short period of time.

Speaking of in-raid, these last three topics are going to help you while you’re actually raiding. We are done with all the technical stuff that the game menu brings. Starting with maps and extraction, currently there are nine maps in Escape from Tarkov, and as a new player, this can seem a bit overwhelming. My best advice would be to focus on one or two maps you like and learn how to fight and loot on those.

I learned this game playing Interchange because I really enjoy indoor combat, and there’s good Tech loot for you to find. There is an offline mode even with settings you can configure that will allow you to play any of these maps in a vacuum so you can learn them. You can do things like enable bosses or turn off scavs completely so you can explore the map safely. No Items will be gained or lost with offline mode, so feel free to have some fun with it.

Another great thing offline mode is good for is learning the extracts on the map. To leave a raid and survive with your hard-earned loot, you have to head to an extraction zone, which will always be across the map from where you spawn. I would, at the very least, learn a map’s extractions Before you go to it, otherwise you won’t know how to exit the raids. I speak from experience there, when Streets came out, I just played it and died a few times because I didn’t know how to leave. It’s a good idea to have the game maps on another monitor or maybe your phone to reference while you’re still learning where everything is.

Depending on what map you are playing, you may come across Elite enemies such as Scav bosses, the Goons, Rogues, and Raiders. These enemies are extremely dangerous, and until the AI rework happens, you need to be very careful when fighting them. Most of these enemies have aimbot-like aim, little reaction time, and extremely far aggro ranges, meaning most long-range firefights with them will probably result in your death.

Because of this, players typically use cheesy strats to fight them, like holding doorways or short-range angles, or sniping them in specific locations where they know they are safe. The AI in Tarkov definitely needs some work, and if you are playing on a map where Elite enemies spawn, it’s good to know where these spawns are so you don’t catch a bullet seemingly from nowhere. A good example of this are the Rogues or the Scav boss I can spawn that skeletal on Customs.

If you are walking around there and die from nowhere, that’s probably because the boss spawned. Just ask the players of Tarkov, pretty much all of us have been one-papped by one of these Elite enemies from Mars. They seemingly have homing bullet technology that we just don’t possess yet.

Before I send you off to the dangerous lands of Tarkov, I also quickly wanted to talk about money-making. Now I do have a bunch of money-making guides on my channel, but there are a few tips I would like to share here if money is your goal. Streets of Tarkov and Lighthouse are currently the most densely populated maps in terms of loot in Tarkov. A lot of the valuable loot are small gold items, Hideout materials, and Military Tech items.

Items need the find in raid tag to be sold on the flea market, so engaging in PvP isn’t as profitable as one may think because the items you get off players, like armor and a gun, will not be found in raid and instead will have to be sold to the Traders for significantly less value. I’m hoping this has changed in the future, but this is just the way it works now.

Maximizing Profits in the Flea Market

Currently, the flea market is where most of your money will come from, no matter what, and attachments and quest items people will need sell for good value. So it’s good to check the flea market before you sell an item you’re not familiar with to the Traders because the item price may surprise you.

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