How to play Scartown

Your first hour in the city

Making a character takes about a minute: a name, a gender and an email address so a lost password has somewhere to go. You land in the Old Quarter at level 1 with $5,000, two Field Dressings and a Stim-Pack already on your belt.

The first thing on your Home page is a mission, and for a new character it is Pawn Row Lockup. Go in. It is tuned so that a fresh level 1 with the starting belt clears it about nine times in ten, and if it goes badly under level 4 you lose three minutes in hospital rather than your evening.

After that, follow First Steps down the sidebar. It walks you through the gym, a crime, the shops and the Workshop without making you guess what the city expects.

PvM missions, and the loot that comes out of them

A mission is the heart of Scartown. There are nineteen sites across six districts, three to a district, each one worse than the one before. Clear the first to open the second; the third needs a keycard.

Going in

Missions do not cost energy. You get one every three hours, and the clock starts the moment you step through the door, so a run is worth preparing for rather than spamming. What you carry is your belt: four slots to start, one item in each, loaded on the Mission Board before you go. Nothing in your main bag can be reached from inside, and no shop will serve anybody on a run.

Floors and the choice at the end of them

A site is a stack of floors. Each floor is rooms, and each room is a fight, a check against one of your attributes, or something worse. Your health carries from floor to floor and nothing heals it but what is on your belt.

At the end of every floor the site asks you one question: extract, and walk out with everything you are holding, or go deeper, toward the boss and the clear bonus. Get carried out instead and you keep the experience and lose the bag. That is the whole tension of the game in one button.

What you actually find

A mission hands over about four or five things. Most of it is salvage and components, which is the raw material the Workshop eats. On top of that the site rolls for the interesting drops, and it is deliberately stingy: roughly half of all missions end with nothing rare in them at all.

• Salvage and scrap - never capped. Sells, or feeds the Workshop.
• Components - every elite gives one up. The better grades only appear in the deeper districts.
• Rare consumables - a lieutenant is a chance at one, not a guarantee.
• Attribute mods - about one mission in four.
• Keycards - only ever off a district boss, about one mission in nine. There are six keyed sites in the whole game.
• Boosters - the only source of energy and action point refills anywhere. No pharmacy sells them.
• Relic fragments - about one boss kill in a hundred.

The rare budget is spent as you descend, and once it is gone the site simply stops turning up rares rather than showing you one and taking it away. A lieutenant always pays, and the district boss on the last floor is never held back by anything you picked up on the way down.

Attributes, and what each one does

Five battle attributes. They mean exactly what they say, whatever you happen to be holding.

• Accuracy - how often you land a hit, and how well you land it.
• Strength - how hard it lands, with every weapon in the city.
• Dexterity - how hard you are to hit.
• Resistance - armor, and health.
• Endurance - health, and how fast the gym trains everything else. Endurance is the attribute that pays you back on every other one, and missions build it whether you are chasing it or not.

Whatever you are holding, an attribute does the same job. Training accuracy is worth the same to a rifle as it is to an axe, so changing weapons never throws away what you built.

Critical hits belong to the weapon

Crit is not an attribute and never will be. It belongs to the weapon: an axe opens people up far more often than a sub-machine gun does, in anybody's hands, and nothing you train will move either one. Axes and blunt weapons crit hardest, blades and shotguns sit in the middle, and the fast automatic weapons trade crit for the number of shots they land. Pick the weapon whose behavior you want and it behaves the same for everyone carrying it.

Work attributes

Intelligence, Reputation and Work Experience are earned by playing rather than trained at a gym. Missions build them: Endurance for every floor, Intelligence for every check you pass, Reputation for every boss you put down. Contracts build Work Experience.

The Workshop: crafting, tuning and mods

Under the pharmacy, and the reason to keep salvage. The Workshop does five things.

• Crafting - turns salvage into consumables, keycards and higher grades of scrap.
• Tuning - up to five levels of damage and five of accuracy on a weapon, one percent a level.
• Elements - welds one Fire, Electric or Venom line onto a weapon, built from components.
• Fitting - drops an attribute mod into a socket. Every weapon and every piece of armor has one.
• Belts - four slots up to eight.

Mods are the thing worth hunting

There are no unique weapons and no unique armor in Scartown. Every piece is ordinary and takes one mod, and the mod is what makes it yours. Thirty of them exist, one for every battle attribute in every district, and they run in a plain ladder: +1 in the Old Quarter up to +6 under Vantar Spire.

They fit any socket, weapon or armor, and the points count everywhere a rating does: in a mission, in a street fight, against what an item asks of you, and in what you can carry. With four sockets on the gear that counts, a full Spire set is worth having.

Crime, careers and training at the gym

Four crime groups, each with its own shape. Con Games pay the best and jail you the longest. Burglary finds twice as many keycards as anything else. Robbery usually leaves you holding something the Workshop can use. Surveillance pays a little less and almost never puts you in a cell.

Each group has its own 0-100 skill bar. Working the cheap end of a group is what opens the expensive end, and skill lifts your payout, nudges your odds and cuts your bust chance.

Crimes are a real check

The number beside a crime is the attribute rating at which it becomes worth attempting, not a promise that it works. Meeting it leaves you failing often enough to notice, and you have to get some way past it before a crime becomes routine. Fail and you might walk away clean, or you might spend the next hour in a cell. The odds are never printed, and working them out for yourself is part of the job.

Careers and the gym

Four careers, each mapped to what it does for a mission: Corporate Security trains accuracy and cuts Workshop fitting fees, Salvage Crew trains strength and sells salvage for more, Med-Tech trains intelligence and makes every consumable hit harder, Logistics is the fastest work experience in the city and puts fifteen more kilos on your back.

The gym trains everything you have selected. Energy spent there is its own currency, and the equipment gets better as you put hours in. Three things multiply what an hour is worth: your endurance, how happy you are, and where you live, since an address carries its own training bonus and the property ladder runs a long way up.

Player-versus-player, and your first three days

Scartown is open. Anybody can attack anybody, and there is nothing to switch on and nothing to switch off. If somebody is standing in your district and is not in your gang, they can mug you, hospitalize you and take the experience for it, and you can do exactly the same to them.

The one shelter

For your first three days nobody can lay a finger on you. Not a player, not a gang, not a squad. The window is worked out from when your account was made, so there is nothing to claim and nothing to lose by using it.

It is deliberately one-sided. A brand new character can still attack anybody from the first hour. That is there so somebody who wants a fight on day one can have one, rather than sitting behind a wall waiting to be allowed to play. It also means the first three days are the right time to work out how fighting behaves before it costs you anything.

What else puts somebody out of reach

• A hospital bed or a cell, for as long as it lasts.
• The hour after a Rumble, so a squad cannot come back around.
• Being in your own gang, permanently.
• Standing in another district. Travel there first.

Residents are the exception to the window. All fifty-nine of them were made on the same afternoon, so a shelter would put the entire city out of reach at once. They are fair game from your first minute, and they are what a new character fights.

Fighting is the fastest experience in the game: 35 points plus 18 per level of whoever you beat. Combat leads and crime pays.

Gangs and gang wars

Joining a gang is an application, and whoever runs the gang accepts or declines it. A gang nobody runs adopts its longest-standing member, so there is always somebody to answer.

A gang has a public page with its roster, respect, points and hideout on it, a noticeboard, and a vault. Members pay cash, credits and items into the vault; whoever holds the vault permission hands them back out, and every movement is on the gang log with a name against it.

War

Declare war on a rival gang and there are two ways to hurt them: raid their hideout with action points, or beat their members in the street. Points taken off a member come out of their gang's own pile rather than out of nowhere, scaled to how uneven the fight was: 1 for somebody outmatched, up to 10 if they were well above your weight. Break the hideout open and the war is over.

Gang points buy hideout upgrades: Reinforced Walls, Lookouts, an Armory, Fixers and Quarters, plus repairs at 25 hit points a point.

Rising through the ranks

Levelling never stops. Each band of levels costs roughly twice the one before it, so the first few go by in an afternoon and the ones after that do not, and there is no ceiling waiting for you at the end of it.

Your rank is not one grind either. Missions, crime, the gym and the street each pay a different kind of progress, so nobody gets to the top of the city by doing a single thing over and over.

The Deep Tunnels run under everything and do not end. They get harder every few floors and they will eventually stop you, which is the point of them. Six relics sit at the very top of the game, forged ten fragments at a time from what district bosses give up, and a relic in its own slot changes how a mission goes rather than adding a number to it.