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Astromechs, Friday Features & Other Stuff (2003-2005)
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Friday Feature Stat Migration
From the time you create your character you are immediately given the opportunity to change your stats and secondary pools. If you're like many, myself included you were so interested in jumping in-game that you only really paid attention to the primary stats and got a general idea of what they were about and made a decision as to what you would like them to be at. As the game progressed you learned a little more and wanted to change them. This article will help you understand what the stats do and how to change them.
Lets start with the basics
What are the minimum and maximum stats that your specific race can have? Below is a table listing the race and stat pool minimums and maximums.
Points Avail
What do the stats do for me?
There are three primary stats, Health, Action, and Mind. Each of these are the "How much of it I have" number. Each primary stat has two sub categories. The first is how efficient this stat is for me, the second is how fast will I get it back. These are described in further detail below:
Health is a primary stat; it is directly represented in your HAM (health, action, mind) bars and is the amount of physical damage your character can take before becoming incapacitated.
Strength refers to the ability to exercise brute force in physical activity, it is your efficiency stat. This effects how expensive any action requiring Health cost you. The higher this stat, the cheaper, point wise, your actions are.
Constitution is the measure of your ability to recover from damage, your regeneration stat, or how fast you will recover health. The larger this number the faster you regenerate.
The other 2 stats are very similar
Action is a measure of how rested your character is. As you grow tired, you will see your Action points being depleted. It is a primary stat directly represented in your ham bar and is the amount of Action damage you can take before you become incapacitated.
Quickness is the measure of your characters fitness; it is the stat that effects how much of the action pool you use for abilities requiring action.
Stamina is how quickly characters recover from intense physical activity, this is the Action bars regeneration stat.
Mind is a measure of your alertness and mental capacity. A player with a higher Mind is better able to tackle complex technical tasks. It is the stat directly represented in your ham bar and is the amount of Mental damage you can take before being incapacitated.
Focus is your character's effectiveness in concentrating on mental activity. It is the stat that determines how much of the mind pool you use for abilities that require Mind expenditure.
Willpower helps you recover from expenditure of mind. It is the regeneration stat for the mind pool.
Where to put my stats?
There are several things to consider when deciding how you want to distribute your stat points. There are things that can alter your stats, such as armor encumbrance. So if you are planning on wearing heavy armor you will want to make the appropriate adjustments in your secondary stats, which is where the encumbrance is taken from. You can also get buffs, which enhance the values of your stat pools. Doctors can enhance your Health and Action pools, Dancers your Mind and Musicians your Willpower and Focus. Chef foods can also alter all of the above but to a slightly lesser degree than the other professions.
Next you want to consider what profession you will be playing. If you are going to be an entertainer of some sort, high action would benefit you the most since the flourishes use action. Likewise you would probably want high quickness and stamina so you can regenerate these faster. If you plan on playing a medical profession you will want high mind (and mind regeneration) since this is the primary stat used to perform your procedures (Image design uses mind as well for alterations). For combat the choices are more dependent on how you plan to play. If you do not plan on getting hit much but using a lot of special attacks you may wish to have a high mind or action pools.
Stat Migration
Fortunately the system is built with a way to change these stats when you get more experience with the game and have a better idea of the specific distribution you want to have.
Based out of the need and desire of people to mold and change their bodies Image Designers are granted the ability to change stats for players. Image designers not only specialize in altering the body shape, color, markings, hair and alien special features, they excel at changing your physical condition (stats) as well. Generally it's a pretty easy process.
First you will want to find an Image designer. The first place to look if you are in Coronet, Theed or Bestine, is at the image designer tents located in these cities. The one in Coronet is on the outside of the Shuttle Port Park only a short walk from the star port. In Theed it is near the cantina, and likewise in Bestine. Alternatively you can find an image designer by using the community search function in-game and Choosing Image Designer from the search options to see if any are near you.
Once you are with an Image Designer you must group with them and the process takes at least 10 minutes. First you will negotiate with the Image Designer over the cost. Once you have agreed on the cost using the ID service window, you should open up your character sheet window (Ctrl-C) and click on the "Stat Migration Button". The stat migration window will open up and you will see all of your stats and they will have corresponding sliders. Move the slider back and forth to adjust your stats. The numbers will rise and fall based on the position of the slider. At the end of 10 minutes, the session will end and your stats will be adjusted to the levels you set them at. Be careful not to accidentally close the window. If you do, the Image Designer will have to start the session over from the beginning and it will require a full 10 minute session.
It should be noted that this is a general guide intended to help those that do not have experience with stats or are new to the game. Your experience and personal play style will have a great effect on your decisions as to what stats you want.
Badges Earned on Bria
Live Server Report Date: July 2004
Badges may be earned in the game by visiting locations, completing theme parks, mastering professions and other sorts of in-game activities. While testing the Jedi system, we were able to do a database query of the Bria server while it was copied onto TC2 and find out just how many badges players have earned. The list is broken down by the type of badge and how many of each badge has been acquired by players.
Lady Luck
Star Wars Galaxies is pleased to announce the first veteran reward for longtime players! Veteran players are those players who have subscribed for at least 6 consecutive months. These players will receive the deed for the multi-passenger ship model SoroSuub Personal Luxury Yacht 3000 the day Star Wars Galaxies: Jump to Lightspeed launches. This starship model has been popularized in Star Wars fiction by Lando Calrissian's personal vessel, the Lady Luck. Non-veteran players will receive the reward once they become veteran players. Similar to the Special Edition goggles, this item will not be tradable.
Jedi Archives 4
I'm not looking for a friend, I'm looking for a Jedi Master.
Jedi Conversion Point Conversions
One of the elements of the Jedi Revamp is existing Jedi's to the new System. Because of the major changes to rank, structure and powers, the system is not an easy "one for one" conversion. Credit needs to be given for certain accomplishments in the old system that can then be spent on the new system.
Below is a list of how points are credited in the old system as well as an explanation of why specific points were chosen.
In the old system of Jedi, you were given one Padawan box that cost 250 skill points, and everything else above that cost nothing. In the new system, skill points are spent on 5 different trees, in any combination up to about two and a half trees full of points.
Assuming in the new system, two and a half trees would equal the completed old system Jedi, we need to devise point values for the levels in between.
We came up with the following chart:
Now, looking at the data, a ton of questions spring to mind, we'll start at the bottom and work our way up trying to explain why points were set on various boxes. Since the Novice boxes and beginning boxes cost a good deal of skill points in the new system, we wanted to shift some points down to the starting levels to allow a bit more leeway in skill purchase. In order to do this, we moved some skill points down from the top line of Padawan skills. The net effect of doing this is that those that already have those skill or higher are unaffected by the change, those below get a sooner bump in skill points, allowing them to purchase the lower level 8 points boxes.
Jedi Initiate: Why 32?
o 32 is a nice base number to start with because it gives you the 24 points needed for the Prerequisite 6 lines of Force Sensitive skills, along with 1 Novice box of your choice.
Lightsaber 1-4: Why points there?
o This decision may not make sense to many, as these boxes are very easy to get, but they are a useful place to put points in for later on.
Healing 1: only 3 points?
o This box costs less than half of the other two same level boxes, however when combined with the Lightsaber boxes, we felt that giving 1 Novice and 1 Box was a good reward for getting the Lightsaber and one other box.
Powers/Manipulation 1: Why 6?
o These skills cost more experience than Healing, so we felt should be give a bit more points. One of these boxes, when combined with Lightsaber gives the 1 box + 1 novice, and when combined with Healing gives yet another box, and when the entire first row is filled, allows for a full line in the new system. While a full line was a bit more than we wanted to give for that first row, we decided this was acceptable.
Healing/Powers/Manipulation 2: Why 5?
o As all of these cost the same amount of experience, we felt they should be worth the same amount of points. While having only 1 of the skills does not help, giving one line is close to where we felt this power level should be. When purchasing all 3, this gives the ability to purchase a line and a half in the same skill box set.
Healing/Powers/Manipulation 3: Why 4?
o Again since they cost the same, we felt the points should be the same. One box allows the completion of two lines in one skill trees, while all of the boxes allowed for 2 lines in one OR two skill trees. We felt the flexibility of deciding what trees to take the lines in made this the correct choice.
Healing/Powers/Manipulation 4: Why 3?
o This point set is probably where most do not like the conversion numbers. This is the line where most of the points were moved down from, and when looking individually at this spot alone it looks out of place with other values, however the end result of being able to get 2 and a half lines is about where we wanted this to be. While technically nothing was lost, since this is the total number of skill points where this line would have been if we had not shifted the points down, there is a perception of this since an individual boxes are worth less. We apologize if you feel upset about this decision, however it is what we felt was the right thing to do.
Jedi Padawan: why 12?
o The total point value of a Jedi Padawan allows for 3 full lines, in one or two different skill trees. This is about where we felt this power should be.
Jedi Apprentice: why 24?
o With this skill being over double the experience cost of the Padawan box, it should be worth more than the Padawan box. This allows a master and a novice box, or multiple lines in multiple trees, depending on personal choice.
After this point, the cycle starts again. We did not move any skill points down to compensate for the increased cost of starting skills this time, since at this point so many options on how to spend the skill points are now available to the Jedi. You may also notice this totals up to 257, not 250. We felt a small surplus of points would be a good idea in case someone happened to lose a skill box right before the servers go down for the Publish 9 update.
While we know not everyone will be happy with the conversion numbers, we feel this gives the best form of flexibility to start and balance after to convert from the old system to the new system.
May the Force Be With You.
Dev
Posts: 1356
Registered: 07-21-2003
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06-24-2004 01:59 PM
Holonet News Alert
Imperial security forces broke a galaxy-wide smuggling ring today; arresting over two hundred beings. Those in custody are accused of smuggling rare and violent creatures to various planets for use in underground fighting tournaments.
A number of rare Gorax, bipedal giants indigenous to Endor, were released by the smugglers in an effort to slow down approaching security forces. Luckily the releases have been limited to planets without a large presence of privately controlled cities or housing. Travelers are asked to be cautious if journeying to remote regions of the galaxy.
Greetings everyone!
As you may know this weekend marks the one year anniversary of Star Wars Galaxies! In celebration the Event Team is spawning Gorax on the four adventure planets. The Gorax is one of the rarest creatures in Star Wars Galaxies. Throughout this weekend (starting Friday afternoon), we will spawn several of them on each of the following planets: Lok, Endor, Dathomir and Yavin 4. They will be placed far away from civilization (starports) and are extremely dangerous. They are fun to fight (if you like being dizzy and stepped on), so bring friends on this hunting party...lots of them!
Have a great weekend and thank you to all the players who help make the game great!
SOE Events Manager
Advanced Guide Bio Engineer
So you say you can't wait to poke Rancors and other ferocious creatures with needles and then clone them like a mad scientist, eh? Well, if you like the danger of sneaking up on wily intergalactic beasts and the hum of laboratory equipment, then maybe the Bio-Engineer profession is for you!
What is a Bio-Engineer?
A Bio-Engineer is a science-based profession that is 1 part fieldwork and 3 parts crafting. Part Scout, part Doctor; the fieldwork is an adventurous activity where by the lucky scientist travels out into the field, sneaks up on various creatures around the galaxy and tries to gather DNA samples. These samples contain the blueprint for the creatures they were taken from with all their inherent abilities and defenses (as well as weaknesses). Once those DNA samples are acquired, the bio-engineer heads back to his or her laboratory to first turn those samples into DNA Templates and then into clones of the creatures! These bio-engineered creatures made from DNA samples are then combined to produce more effective creatures for Creature Handlers and pet owners to use. By mixing samples from different creatures, a Bio-Engineer can create pets with abilities that cannot be found in the wild. Bio-Engineers can also create bio-engineered tissues that tailors and chefs can use during their crafting to create enhanced products. Another type of product bio-engineers can make is focused on pet health and well-being; pet stims and vitality packs. All in all, the Bio-Engineer profession can be quite lucrative, but it is a difficult profession to master.
Chapter 1: Getting from here to there: Mastering the Profession
Approaching the Bio-Engineer profession starts out by requiring organic chemistry from the Novice Medic Profession, Hunting from Scout and 10,000 additional medicine crafting XP. Once the novice Bio-Engineer Profession is acquired, a player will have to start thinking about their laboratory, their tools and their trade.
The first thing a BE needs is a Food and Chemical Crafting Tool. With this tool, you will be able to begin crafting. You will be able to craft this tool with the Novice Medic skill and this schematic is also granted with Engineering I: Tinkering. Once you have this tool, it will gain you access to Food and Chemical Crafting Stations. These crafting stations, which have both public and private versions, are passive components to the process. Use your food and chemical crafting tool near these stations to be granted more and more crafting schematics as you progress through the profession. You must be in close proximity to the station to benefit from the effect of working with the equipment. Public crafting stations will get you started, but you will soon find yourself wanting your own private station, as higher-level schematics will not work with public stations. Private crafting stations of a high quality will also produce much better results than a public crafting station. Another "must have" tool to the process is a droid crafting station. Ever useful in the field, these little droids make a Bio-Engineer's life much easier since they function as a private crafting station.
Another angle to consider is that, as a hybrid profession, a Bio-Engineer can take other skills outside the profession to customize the experience and make it their own. Some considerations are creature handling, so you can make and use your own high level pets. The Ranger tracking line can be helpful for locating specific creatures. Many Bio-Engineer's also take Exploration IV as it's indispensable for sneaking up on an aggressive creature in the wild.
Chapter 2: Novice Bio-Engineer
Skill Modifiers
Commands and Abilities Granted
The basic skill modifiers that will accrue over the course of learning the profession is Bio-Engineer assembly and experimentation which relate to the Bio-Engineering crafting requirements and DNA harvesting which plays into the field science portion of the experience.
Once a player acquires the novice BE skill box, they will have to turn their attention to Bio-Engineering crafting experience and DNA sampling experience. The command to sample DNA is /sampledna and some of your first sampling experiences will be amusing as you head just outside of the city limits and start poking creatures to swipe some of their DNA. Start out by approaching until you get within 15 meters of a creature and using the sampling command. Remember not to get farther than 15 meters away before the process is complete or you will lose your sample. If the creature starts moving, do your best to stay within range until the process is complete. Also remember that DNA sampling is level based. You will not be able to sample from creatures higher than your current Sampling level allows. On the crafting side of things, a novice BE can work their way to the crafting skill trees by working on constrictor cloths. Working with the constrictor cloths is a good way to gain Bio-Engineering experience and will take many players up through at least a couple of skill boxes. Remember that if you don't intend to sell the items, you can also choose to use the "practice" mode for the extra 5% experience bonus. Once you reach Tissue Engineering you can also make Micronutrient Supplement. This is a very cost effective way to advance through the crafting levels as it requires very little meat. While you are gaining your sampling experience, don't forget that you can make clones with the samples and sell them on the bazaar. These initial clones will not be very good, but can still be sold for use as decorations in people's homes.
Chapter 3: Breeding
The Breeding skill tree represents a Bio-Engineer's ability to create cloned creatures. The Clone Engineering skill tree grants a Bio-Engineer the ability to clone diverse and dangerous creatures and requires Bio-Engineering Crafting Experience.
Clone Engineering 1
Clone Engineering 2
Clone Engineering 3
Clone Engineering 4
Bio-Engineering cloned creatures starts with understanding the schematics and the ingredients. Creature clones are schematics with three basic slots: Generic DNA Template, A Protein Base and Organic Nutrition Materials. The Generic DNA Template is a component that is required for every creature and looks like a disk and a data reader. As you progress up the Clone Engineering tree, you will be granted additional creature skins. These templates all look exactly the same, except for their corresponding creature names (Squall, Bantha etc.). The "Protein Base" is basically creature food and that means meat, eggs and milk; though, generally it's a good idea to stick to the meat. Meat is harvested from creatures with the Scout skills, but remember that if a creature keels over because you've "sampled" it, you cannot harvest the meat. Organic Nutrition is fulfilled with flora components and that is basically any organic that sounds edible; wheat, beans, berries, flowers and all things vegetable fall into this category. Depending on your chosen skill set, you can either forage and survey for them or shop for them on the bazaar. Another great place to find good deals on these kinds of resources is by using the Trade Forums.
Creature Cloning
Creating Bio-Engineered pets is the science of crafting creature clones. In practice, creature cloning is the process of taking the DNA that you gather in the field and using it to create a Generic DNA Template. This DNA Template is what determines the characteristics of the final clone; i.e., HAM, armor, attack resistances, damage, attack speed, chance to hit, special attacks, ranged attacks, and the creature's "creature level". The DNA template is then combined with the Flora and Meat resources in a clone schematic. Additional Clone schematics are granted as the bio-engineer develops his craft and progresses up the skill trees. In every case, you will have to sample at least 5 units of DNA. These proverbial knobs a bio-engineer can turn to experiment with are the 5 DNA sample slots in the creature schematic. The quality of the sample is an important factor as well as how you spend your experimentation points in the process. 5 DNA samples, 5 slots and many potential possibilities.
Cloning Experimentation
Creature experimentation is a complex process of making decisions about what kind of creature you want to create. Experimentation is part of the process and can be quite a challenge, so belly up to your Food and Chemical crafting station and put your thinking cap on. This guide will go over some of the basic elements to the experimentation process without spoiling the potential fun of discovery along the way.
The elements of this part of the process are your samples and your experimentation points. You must take your DNA samples and place them in the 5 slots of your crafting schematic. Each of these slots represents a characteristic of the creature, and every template has five profile slots: Aggression, Mental, Physique, Prowess and Psychological. Each of these profiles represents aspects of a creature's pool of characteristics and will ultimately make up the nature of the beast. Creature experimentation represents a very challenging crafting experience with many possibilities. Each of the five profiles are interrelated and depending on how you experiment with them will effect the outcome of a creature's attributes, HAM pools, damage and to-hit, etc. Experimentation will have very little effect on resists, but it can make the difference in whether or not your clone gets, for example, armor. You accomplish this by experimenting with the 5 experimentation attributes corresponding to the 5 profile slots. Your choice of skin will determine a creature's base movement speed, minimum creature level and aggressiveness. This is an especially important aspect to consider because it will effect who can potentially be a user/buyer for the beast. Anything CL10 and under can be used by any player as long as it is non-aggressive. Any result over CL10 will require creature-handling skills for it to be used and this includes the Bio-Engineer that creates the creature.
A good thing to watch while you are choosing where to place your experimentation points is the little percentage number in the lower right hand side of the crafting window. This number will increase and decrease depending on how you place your experimentation points and represents your chance at a critical failure. Notice which combinations and concentrations of points will put you at risk and which will not. It should also be said that the quality of your crafting station is key at this point in the process. Once you have chosen your experimentation variables, you will get the option to choose a customized color for your creature and the option to customize the name of your creature.
The next horizon is "Generational Creation". Bio-Engineers can even take DNA samples from creatures that they have cloned and that other Bio-Engineers have cloned. Just remember that, with each generation, a sample has a reduction in its maximum potential. Generational cloning can be used to breed out undesirable traits or recycle failed experiments where the creature level was higher than desired.
When you truly begin to master the profession, you will be able to control creature characteristics and cause some interesting and powerful results to your experiments. A master using good DNA and placing it properly with quality resources can routinely get increased results over wild versions and can be made with higher damage, and all sorts of variations depending on your choices throughout the process.
The Tissue Engineering skill tree grants a Bio-Engineer the ability to create more specialized organic components and is based on Bio-Engineering Crafting Experience. These organic components are used in the creation of biologically based commodity products that can be sold to other professions and tools to maintain creatures over the course of their lifespan.
Tissue Engineering 1
Tissue Engineering 2
Tissue Engineering 3
Tissue Engineering 4
Tissue Engineering has a core focus of crafting tissues that can be used in food and clothing products, and making pet stim packs and pet vitality packs. Bio-Engineered food tissues can be used by chefs during the food crafting process to create excellent food buffs and Bio-Engineered cloths can be used by tailors to create enhanced clothing. These "Bio-Engineered" clothes will grant bonuses to the wearers up to +25 per outfit.
Bio-Engineered Tissues for Food
Food bio components such as Micronutrient supplement, Multisaccharide Tetramate, and Edible Nano Constructors are components that chefs can use to give large bonuses to a foods buff size, duration, stack size, or reduce its stomach filling. These tissues are used by the chef to make a Food Additive component. This additive can then be used to fill an optional additive slot available in almost all foods.
There are four different categories of food tissues, each category having three different levels. The lowest level is used in the chef's Light Food Additive, the second level in a Medium Food Additive, and the highest in a Heavy Food Additive. The four categories correspond to a chef's four experimentation categories.
Filling (determines how much stomach space the food takes up)
Flavor (determines how long the food's effect lasts)
Nutrition (determines how large the food's effect is)
Quantity (determines how many doses are available in the final stack of food)
Each tissue can only be used in an additive of the same size. Each food schematic has a maximum additive size it will accept, but the chef does have the option of using a smaller one: so a light additive can be used in a food with a medium additive slot, and any size additive can be used in a food with a Heavy additive slot. These additives are not required to make the food, but do give a noticeable bonus.
The bonus displayed on the tissue is the percentage change to the affected category. For Flavor, Nutrition, and Quantity this is a percentage increase. For example, a medium additive with "Nutrition bonus: 80" (made from a Micronutrient Supplement) will make the food's buff 180% of what it would be without the additive. For the Filling tissues, the displayed bonus is a percentage decrease. A large additive made from a Carbocaloric Eliminator with "Filling bonus: 40" will make a food's filling 60% (100 - 40) what it would be without the additive, leaving more stomach space empty for more foods.
The bonus from the Bio-Engineer's food tissues stacks on top of the chef's experimentation in the affected category. In addition, Quantity additives stack on top of any container multiplier when crafting drinks. Notes for chefs:
Bio-Engineered Tissues for Clothing
Clothing Tissues such as Confidence Cloth or Toughened Fibers are crafting components that can be used in the creation of clothing by Tailors (but not added after the item has been crafted). During the Tailor's crafting process, many clothes require crafting components called Synthetic Cloth and Reinforced Fiberplast Panel for the final product. Instead, these two professions can rely on their crafting interdependencies as a source of optional components. It should be noted that these tissues are used during the crafting process and not after, as is with the case of "sockets" that can be added to a finished product. Each tissue type will only work in one of the two possible component slots. These are Synthetic Cloths and Reinforced Fiber Panels as labeled on the tissues description. Some clothes use one tissue type or the other and some even use both types.
Synthetic Cloths are Entertainer Enhancements (Dancer / Musician wound healing), Medic Enhancements (Injury and Wound Treatment) and Creature Handler Enhancements (taming wild and vicious creatures).
Reinforced Fiber Panels can be used to craft clothing that will give the wearer a bleeding defense, confidence cloth which will augment intimidation and warcry, melee resists that will increase stun and melee defense, sniper enhancements which give a bonus to cover and scout enhancements which give bonuses to /maskscent and /camouflage.
There are 8 different types of tissues that can be used to make Bio-Engineered clothing and each has a higher level and a lower level version. Each tissue works in a specific cloth, which dictates which clothing and skill types that can be enhanced. With respect to each type of tissue, the higher and lower level versions offer the same skill modifiers but with greater and lesser potency available at its respective tier.
Pet Stimpacks and Pet Vitality Medpacks
The other type of commodity product that can be crafted by bio-engineers are Pet Stimpacks and Pet Vitality Medpacks:
Pet Stims
Pet stims are useful for anyone who owns a creature pet whether it's a mount or creature companion. These pet stims don't require the player to have medicine use skill points as in the case of non-creature stims (regular stim packs) and they also heal the Mind Pool of the creature.
Vitality Medpacks
Vitality Medpacks are vital to the long-term survival of creature pets. They require a private crafting station or personal medical crafting droid and you can find the schematic under the Pharmaceutical tab of your datapad. If you are a crafting oriented player, you may have many tabs and have to use the arrows to side-scroll to the tab. There are three types of Vitality packs (A, B, and C) which represent their power ranges. Each type has a specific range of power and that potency has a direct influence on their restorative potency.
If you examine a creature pet on your datapad, you will see an ability statistic called "Vitality". New pets will have a 100/100 rating and as a player uses his pet in combat, the pet will take damage. When a pet is incapacitated and "death-blowed" in some cases, the pet will suffer a reduction in vitality. As a pet continually suffers in its vitality rating, its ability to be restored will gradually diminish. Vitality Packs will restore a pet's vitality rating. In essence, Vitality Medpacks are like armor or weapon repair kits. The higher the quality of the vitality pack, the lower a reduction of a pet's maximum vitality.
To use a Vitality Medpack, you can either activate the "Use Vitality Pack" radial menu option on your datapad (select the pet in the datapad, target it and call up the radial menu) or by targeting your pet after it has been called into the world and double-clicking the vitality pack in your inventory. Please note that if you have a variety of packs on you and you need a specific potency rating, you should probably choose the pack yourself. If you don't select it yourself, the game will choose it for you and you may not get one with an optimal rating. One tip you should keep in mind is that while the type of the pack doesn't matter, the power of a vitality pack does. If a vitality pack is lower than a pet's current lost vitality then the pet will be restored to a new permanent vitality but with a penalty. Don't use 2 vitality packs to restore more than 50 or more vitality points. Your pet will suffer an overall vitality loss.
A key tip to keep in mind is during the crafting of vitality medpacks: the only gas viable for vitality pack B's is in the "Known Reactive Gas" category. Take note to avoid using unknown reactive gasses or inert gasses of any type. These gasses are not replacements for known reactive gasses and will corrupt your experiments (Reactive gas is fairly common and can be found on all planets). Another two points to remember while crafting these packs are that the possible range of experimentation (as with most crafted items) relies very heavily upon the resources you use and that unlike stimpacks, liquid suspension and bio-controllers do not have an impact on the final product.
Chapter 5: Field Science
DNA Harvesting is the ability to successfully collect DNA samples with reduced trauma to the donor creature. This activity gains a player DNA Sampling Experience
DNA Sampling 1
DNA Sampling 2
DNA Sampling 3
DNA Sampling 4
DNA Sampling
"What do I do in the field?" You will ask yourself at the beginning of your bio-scientific journey. Well, DNA sampling is the art of sneaking up on creatures and poking them with your DNA sampling tool. There isn't a specific tool per se. It's actually a command and you will be given an icon for it when you take Novice Bio-engineer. You will find this icon by pressing ctrl-A and looking on the "other" tab of the command browser and it is very handy to have on your "hot-bar". The next thing you are going to want to do is give some thought to migrating your stats a bit (via the "migrate stats button" on your character sheet; ctrl-C) and maybe even purchasing some spice or food buffs for your Mind. The reason for this is that sampling DNA is a considerable drain on your MIND bar and taking these early steps can help you sample at a more continuous rate of progress. Another precaution you will want to take is to think about armor for protection and maybe a friend with combat skills to help out if one of the critters you start pokin' gets angry and starts chasing you.
Once you've mentally and physically prepared for your fieldwork by fiddling with your stat migration and suiting up with your field gear, head just outside of a city that has some critters and start sampling. This is when you should start developing your approach techniques. Learn to use your "examine" window to find out the general attributes of a creature and how to identify the ornery ones and the more passive types. As a practice, approaching creatures without them noticing makes your task much easier and is even a lot of fun. Some things to keep in mind is that samples do not stack because of all the unique data they possess so managing your inventory is key, especially at more advanced levels and when chasing extremely dangerous creatures in remote adventurous locations. Remember your friendly Droid Engineer too. When you are out in the field, having a crafting droid with you will allow you to convert 5 DNA samples into a single template and save on inventory space. Juggling inventory is an intended challenge. Another thing to consider is that this isn't crafting and has no practice mode. How you deal with any of these variables will add to the flavor of game play. Cautious folk can stay around cities, sampling creatures with a place to retreat to and slowly work their way up to running creature missions or head off to adventure planets with groups of adventurers and explorers and take advantage of a larger group. The truly bold Bio-Engineers may even try their hand at sampling DNA on adventure planets by themselves. In all of these cases, the scout skill /maskscent is a powerful ally indeed.
Knowing any given territory and scouting out creatures ahead of time is also a very good technique. Spend some time in a given area and learn about the indigenous creatures. Determine which ones will "deathblow" you and which will not. If you don't have a mount or vehicle, another thing to always plan out are your possible escape routes. Sometimes the best way to escape is "through", so keep an eye on where the pack animals are. If a fierce creature starts chasing you, a good dodge is often to run through a herd of pack animals and hope your predator gets hungry for something tastier than you.
This skill tree can be a lot of fun and there are many tricks of the trade to learn. Turn your attention to your posture while sampling (standing, kneeling, crawling) and how best to use /maskscent. Interact with other professions and find good mind buffs of scent-neutralizing clothing. Take the time to examine a creature's speed and the nearby terrain to see if you can escape with a handy /burstrun up a steep hill.
Engineering techniques teaches a Bio-Engineer advanced ways to manipulate genetics and develops a player's Bio-Engineering Crafting Experience. Taking the Genetics or "Engineering" tree can be helpful to take first since it will allow you greater experimentation possibilities on your path to mastery.
Engineering Techniques 1
Engineering Techniques 2
Engineering Techniques 3
Engineering Techniques 4
Chapter 7: Master Bio Engineer
Skill Mods
Commands and Abilities Granted
Who do Bio-Engineers need and interact with mostly? Your most obvious interactions will be with all your potential customers - creature handlers, pet owners, tailors and chefs. In addition, you will need suppliers for your resources. When buying resources, don't forget that the best pet medicines will be made using subcomponents from a Doctor. Your best bet is to either cooperate with them to make schematics for you or find someone that is willing to sell them to you in bulk if you don't have the doctor skills yourself. In the field, you may find you need someone for protection. A Ranger is a valuable ally for tracking down that hard to find DNA.
Where your money comes from and where it goes... A Bio-Engineer has a variety of potential income sources. In the cloning line, clones can be sold to creature handlers and non-aggressive clones can be sold to anyone. A pet owner who is not a creature handler will need the services of a creature handler to train their new pets the commands. In addition, clones can be placed in deed form in houses as statues. Generally, DNA from easily sampled weak creatures is used to make these statues.
The tissue line has even more variety for income. Pet stims and vitality packs can be sold to any pet owner to heal and care for their pet. Tailors will buy bulk tissues, although people will often buy small quantities to take to their favorite tailor. Finally, Chefs will buy crates of the chef additives.
A Bio-Engineer's biggest expense will be in resources. Bulk runs of chef additives and tailor tissues take large amounts of flora and creature resources. Pet medicines will also take several types of inorganic resources. You will need either to maintain harvesters for the flora and inorganic resources or you will need purchase them from others. In addition, if you don't buy your creature resources from others, you will need to hunt for them yourself. You will also need to head into the field if you want to make clones. Both these activities will, of course, require the equipment you will need to survive in the field as well as travel costs to reach the far corners of the galaxy.
Armor Fundamentals:
(August 1th 2003 (Updated: Feb 2004)
Part I - Armor Attributes
Part II - Examples of Armor Attributes in Action
Part III - Damage Types
Friday Feature Chef Revamp
Chef Foods
Want to try some piping hot Blood Chowder?
The new Chef food redesign is coming in the next game update and it brings with it a large selection of new buffs for players of all professions. From stat modifiers to skill modifiers to entirely new effects, there is a lot to discover and learn about the new food system.
In this feature, we'll look at some of the different types of food, talk about buff terminology, and look at how Chefs can maximize their foods to get the most powerful buffs.
Stat Mod Food
You should already be familiar with stat mod food. All food in the game up to this point have been stat mod based. Stat mod food applies a statistic bonus to one or more of your HAM bars (ex: +100 health).
Stat mod food effects stack with other stat mod foods and other stat mod buffs, so you can eat more than one to get a combined effect...as long as your stomach has room.
Breath of Heaven is a good example of a stat mod food that has improved. With max experimentation in every category and no bio-engineer tissue, the old (pre-patch) item looked something like this:
Breath of Heaven (Max Experimentation)
Strength, Quickness, Focus
+450 for 12 minutes
Yield 10, Filling 60
The new Breath of Heaven has better average results from the very start, without maxing experimentation:
New Breath of Heaven (Average Experimentation)
Strength, Quickness, Focus
+500 for 10 minutes
Yield 3, Filling 60
Experimentation can add an additional +100 to the buffs power.
While this doesn't look like much of a change, the insightful Chef will notice that each food recipe now has a slot for an optional additive.
Additives allow you to boost one of the experimental food attributes by a significant amount. You can add an additive to boost the buff's power (nutrition), boost the duration (flavor), increase the yield (quantity), or decrease the stomach filling (filling).
There are three classes of additive: light, medium, and heavy. Each food has a slot for an additive class. Large slots can take a smaller additive, if need be (enabling you to use a light additive in a medium or heavy slot).
Good additives can be difficult to make, but the results are well worth it. Breath of Heaven has a slot for a "heavy" additive. The heavy nutrition tissue is called "Intelligent Nanonutrients," made by a Bio-Engineer. Using an additive made with this tissue in Breath of Heaven will result in a +1200 buff, instead of +500! That's without maxing out experimentation.
Skill Mod Food
Skill mod food gives a temporary boost to one of your skill mods. You can use a skill mod food even if you don't normally have the skill mod the food grants.
You can have multiple skill mod buffs at one time, but skill mod buffs of the same skill don't stack.
Thakitillo is an example of a powerful Master Chef skill mod food.
Thakitillo
+40 Knockdown Defense for 15 minutes
Yield 3, Filling 40
Thakitillo offers significant protection from enemies who use knockdown attacks in combat. A knockdown attack will always have at least a 10% chance of succeeding, so this food won't give you absolute protection, but it will definitely tip the odds in your favor. A properly crafted food additive can make this knockdown defense even stronger.
There are also skill mod foods to enhance camouflage, taming, and other key abilities.
Special Effect Food
Some foods have effects that aren't related to stats or skills. These foods offer a wide range of abnormal rule bending effects.
Smuggler's Delight will be a favorite of anyone who likes to use spices.
Smuggler's Delight
Yield 2, Filling 25
Flameout can be used to protect oneself from surprise attacks or instant kills from more powerful opponents.
Flameout
Reduce damage taken from the next 5 attacks by 90%
Yield 3, Filling 60
Entertainers will find T'ssolok useful for selling buffs to clients.
T'ssolok
Increase the speed at which performance buffs are applied by 20% for 10 minutes
Yield 5, Filling 40
All of those numbers can be increased through experimentation or the use of bio-engineered additives.
Conclusion
Chefs are now capable of creating a very wide range of foods for combatant and non-combatant players alike. Working with a Bio-Engineer, a Chef can more than double the effects of their food. Finding the best foods will definitely take experimentation and creativity, but there are some very powerful combinations waiting to be found.
If you weren't a food user before the revamp, you should try it out now. There's probably a food out there to complement your playstyle.
Good luck and don't forget to clean your plate!
Imperial Crackdown
Major Publish Features:
Imperial Crackdown: The Empire will be a more active part of the Galaxy now, hunting down Rebels, making sure Imperials are abiding by the law and searching for contraband. If a player has contraband, the Imperial Troopers may or may not be able to find it. Depending how much a player has and what they have will effect it, but when they do, there will be consequences for Rebels, Imperials and Neutrals. As a result, Rebel recruiters have taken their faction terminals and gone into hiding. They are no longer flagrantly out in the open and the Empire is looking for them. Word on the streets say that some have gone into hiding into Cantinas and that's where the Empire has gone to shakedown people for information.
The Emperor has decreed that sliced weapons, spice, Rebel faction equipment and (of course) Rebels are what his troops should be focusing their crackdown efforts on as they pursue his mandate of eliminating the Rebel Alliance. The biggest obstacle they face are the smugglers. It has been rumored that smugglers can help cloak Rebels and contraband from Imperial searches in Cantinas and can escape the ever-searching sensors of wilderness probots and have made hefty profits in smuggling contraband.
Bestine: City Redesign: In the future, other static cities in the galaxy may get upgraded to have a accentuated Star Wars feel about it. The first one has been completed with this publish. This static city (not player cities) will have characters familiar to the Star Wars universe and its history.
As part of this, players can get involved in the political struggle by voting for either of two governors aids. As each cycle passes and one or the other Aide gains power, the ambience of the city will change depending on the successes and fails of the Military and Commerce politicians. Sometimes the Empire's strength may show and other times it will wane and Tusken Raiders will raid the city.
Advanced Guide Skill Mods
Having a working understanding of skill modifiers, attachments and enhancements begins by understanding the terminology and by going back to the basics of the Skill Sheet.
First, let's start by covering the basics of the Skill Window. In-game, players can pull up the skill window by using the Data Screen toolbar or by pressing CTRL-S. This opens a player's skill window. On the right hand side is the Skill Onion, Skill Mods, and Commands and Abilities Granted windows. The Skill Onion displays the 4 skill trees that make up each profession. Each skill tree has 4 skill boxes. As players choose their skill paths and earn experience points, they earn the option to purchase more skill boxes by spending experience points (XP) and Skill Points. Each profession skill box grants a player skills, Skill Mods and Commands and Abilities. Underneath the profession's skill window are two boxes. One is titled "Skill Mods" and the other is "Commands and Abilities Granted".
On the top left hand side of the skills window are two tabs. One says "My Character" and the other says "All professions". Whenever you want to see the professions, experience, skill mods and weapon certifications, be sure to click the My Character tab in the top left hand side of the skill window.
Next, let's go over the basic terminology. For example, with 15 skill points, a player can acquire Novice Marksman as a profession. The Novice Marksman box grants two categories of character abilities: Commands and Abilities and Skill Modifiers.
Each of the Commands and Abilities allows a character to use each of these weapons, and the Skill Modifiers represent the initial skill mods granted by the Novice Box. Using Pistol Accuracy as an example, when our character purchases the Novice Marksman box, he or she can now use the D18 Pistol with no penalty. The basic skill mod for speed and accuracy at Novice Marksman is Pistol Accuracy +10 and Pistol Speed +5.
Once a player gains enough experience points by using the D18 Pistol and also has enough available experience points, they can purchase "Pistols I: Short Range Combat". By purchasing a skill box, a player earns more skills, skill mods and abilities. This next skill box on the Pistol Skill tree grants a player:
Each Skill Mod listed under the skills onion displays the skill mods, commands and abilities listed for that box and that box alone. A player can see what their Total skill mod is by looking on the left hand side of the skills window, under the My Character tab in the window labeled "My Skill Mods". This is the total amount of skill mods for each skill a character possesses.
There are two key points to remember about the My Skill Mods window:
Now that we have a clear understanding of the skills windows and terminology, we can take a closer look at Skill Enhancement Attachments or SEAs. The types of skill enhancement attachments that players will come across in the game are Skill Tapes and Armor Enhancements. Skill Tapes and Armor Enhancements are looted items (only) that can be placed into sockets. By placing these SEAs into armor or clothing sockets, they enhance the skill modifier and raise the skill value. Skill Tapes are for clothing only, and Armor Enhancements are for Armor only.
To take advantage of these types of SEAs, the first thing you should do is to make sure your piece of clothing or armor has sockets. Players can verify if a piece of clothing or armor has sockets by using the radial menu and selecting "Examine". Examine the item you want to attach an enhancement to and make sure it has sockets. On the left hand side of the examine window in the description box there will be a listed descriptions that says "Sockets available". This value is the remaining amount of sockets that will accept an SEA.
Adding a skill enhancing attachment to a piece of clothing or armor is a one way process, so it is a good idea to take a moment and think through what you are trying to accomplish. Once you have confirmed your clothing/armor item of choice has an open of socket and you have decided on a Skill Tape or Armor Enhancement to install into the socket, simply "drag and drop" the SEA onto the item, and voila! Your item now has a skill enhancing attachment.
Just above where an item's number of available sockets is listed is the total Skill Mods the item of clothing or armor gives a player while wearing the item. In the clothing item above, the current Skill Mods the shirt gives is a Melee Defense of 4 and a Defense Vs. Stun of 17. These values can be further increased by adding additional Skill Tapes, or a player may choose to add skill tapes to the existing sockets for different types of Skill Mods.
Some very important Skill Tapes and Armor Enhancement tips are:
Throughout this process, you can check your total skill mod value by pressing CTRL-S and opening up your skill window. The window labeled "My Skill Mods" will show you the total amount of skill mods on from your skill tree and the enhancements of the clothing you are wearing. Under the My Skill Mods section, each skill is listed and the modifiers are displayed. The total base value is listed on the left and the total value while wearing the item is displayed just to the right of the base value after a slash, like this: Pistol Accuracy +60 / +80.
In this example the +60 is the total base value of the skill modifier from the bonuses granted by the profession and the skill boxes in the tree. The +20 is coming from the SEAs imbedded into the clothing or armor. Another way you could read the My Skill Mods values would be like this:
[Skill Mod] total value without any items / total value while wearing items
Crafted Enhanced Items
Another method to enhance skill mods is to craft them. Players can either pursue crafting professions or work with crafters to have enhanced items crafted for them. Tailors and Bioengineers can craft "enhanced components" that can be added to clothing. Tailors can also craft finished clothing items made of synthetic cloths and reinforced fiber panels. Bioengineers can craft tissues that can then be crafted into clothing by tailors. Armorsmiths and Weaponsmiths can craft enhanced components and enhanced segments. In both cases, Armorsmiths and Weaponsmiths can craft these items with both crafted components or looted items. There are lootable items that may be crafted into weapons. Weaponsmiths can also craft weapon enhancements such as scopes and grips, but those items are Power-Ups and work differently.
Below is how an armorsmith might take a looted item, craft an enhanced armor component, and then craft it into an armor segment:
First, brave the galaxy's creatures and/or auctioneers and acquire the raw materials. This is a looted Krayt scale that can be used to enhance armor. There are also segments that can be crafted that work similarly, though as a general rule, looted items are more valuable than crafted items.
The armorsmith can then take this material component and use this to enhance armor by crafting it into an armor segment (these items CANNOT be used in sockets):
The armor segment is then used during the crafting process by placing it in a materials slot along with the basic material components to make the armor segment. What results is an enhanced piece of armor:
The final product will be a piece of armor with enhanced skill modifiers which can be viewed by using the radial menu to "Examine" the item. Again, the total value for all skill mods (base and with worn items) may be found in the skill mods window in the box titled "My Skill Mods"; the total value without any items is listed on the left side of the skill mod and the total value while wearing items appears after the slash.
There are a wide variety of crafted and looted items that can be used to create enhanced components, and an even wider variety of crafted enhanced clothing, armor and weapons. Be sure to get out and mingle with your crafters and adventurers to find and barter for looted components, skill enhanced segments and items. Good luck!
Combat Upgrade: Armor System Enhancements - Faction Armor
Both Rebel and Imperial Factions will be getting two new sets of armor with the Combat Upgrade for a total of 6 sets of Faction armor in the game. The previous Imperial Stormtrooper and Rebel Marine armor will also be incorporated into the upgrade armor system.
Scout Trooper armor has always been a big desire with the fans and it is coming with the Combat Upgrade! Scout Trooper armor and Rebel Marine armor represents the first tier of armor class called, "Reconnaissance Armor".
This Marine Rebel Armor will be improved to fit into the new combat upgrade armor scheme as Rebel Reconnaissance Armor. This armor will be for fast paced movement and light combat skirmishes.
The second tier of armor is "Battle Armor". This is a new type of rebel armor developed specifically for the Combat Upgrade. Instead of being given out by faction recruiters, Armorsmiths will be able to earn faction points to purchase faction armor schematics and craft them.
Different professions will be able to utilize different sets of armor to their advantage. This is to make sure that all sets of armor are not only in the game and available for use, but also useful in both PvE and PvP combat. Seen here is the Second tier of "Battle" armor which for Imperials will be the much loved familiar Stormtrooper armor.
This Imperial Shock Trooper Armor and it is at the third armor tier called, "Assault Armor". This is also a new set of armor developed for the Combat Upgrade.
Last but not least, yet another Combat Upgrade special design: Rebel Assault Armor!
Faction Standings
If you open your Character Sheet (CTRL+ C key), you will see 3 tabs: Status, Personal and Factions. This feature focuses on the Factions standings tab. If you look at your Factions tab, it will give you a list of all the factions you have affected and your standings with that faction.
Your faction standing will be a number ranging from 5000 to -5000 and this number represents how NPC's will react to you depend on the number rating in your Factions standing window. The lower the number, the more hostile they will be towards you. The higher the number, the more they consider you to be an ally. To raise or lower your Faction standings with any faction group ("Faction Name" column), you must kill faction enemies to gain their support (the factions listed in the "Faction Enemy" column).
Faction Standings
This is the NPC's faction. If you have very high faction standing with this faction, then NPC's won't attack you even if they are normally aggressive. If you have very low faction standing in this column, most NPC's will attack you even if they are not normally aggressive.
How to fight unbuffed (By Fodder650) 02-01-2005 08:11 AM
So you've decided that part of being a Ranger is surviving in the woods without a buff. Or you have gotten bored with the same old
button smashing grind. Lets talk about the basics for all professions fighting unbuffed
Camo and Mask Scent - You are rangers or scouts this your primary way of staying alive. If your a ranger with at least wayfaring 1 get a master to make you some kits for each planet or make it yourself if you have the ability. If you dont have wayfaring 1 keep that mask scent going. Just remember that movement speed effects these. You will usually read about people complaining that it breaks easiy. Thats because they are riding on a swoop and think its supposed to be the end all to protections. This not the case. If your in a field of aggros with mask scent on WALK!!! let me say this again WALK!!! or go prone if its a field of really high level creatures. Remember that one small benefit of Ranger TN? Its crawl speed dont forget this. But our burst run is also better then anyone elses. For a rifleman conceal is there key to survivability.
Armor -
Think lightweight low HAM. Sure you can do the fighting in full comp but you will highly limit your specials and lower your HAM to almost
unsafe levels Think about what protections you need. Since your likely just fighting creatures don't bring more to the fight then you need
Armor is a matter of personal preference. As a brawler character I use Mabari armor for most of the fighting I do. Even though you are only
looking at 10-14% kinectic resists the fact its light armor will keep you alive longer in battle.
I have started to experiment with Chitin and even lowly bone armor. The AP1 of any armor will provide you with a loss of 50% to damage off the top no matter what the protections are (assuming your fighting a creature whos hitting AP0). The key to armor is low ham costs dont forget this part. Chitin made with Kliknik shells can in the 25-30% kinectic range with very low HAM costs. Most armorsmiths will usually be looking for an excuse to make anything thats not comp or ubese. If you want to assist your friendly Armorsmith find bone and hide with high OQ/Mall which is what control HAM costs add in good SR for good protections. OQ/Ut is the combo for hitpoints but this isnt as important as HAM costs.
Also get your hands on a Personal Shield Generator 3 or Imperial test prototype. These carry no HAM costs and will help you for those times when some NPC's sneak up on you.
Food -
Food is the key to survival, food is your life. Your usual brandy/canape/ahrissa combo will only work if your a riflemen
unbuffed. For all other classes think about
Garrmorl - Health/Str/Con - drink 300+ 36min+
Accargm - Action/quick/stamina - drink 300+ 36min+
Scrimpi - Quickness - food 350+ 40min
Ahrissa - Focus - food 350+ 40 min
Gruuvan Shaal - Strength - food 350+ 40 min
Exo-wafers - 20% damage reduction for 20 attacks/low filling
Synthsteak - 45% damage reduction for 20 attacks/high filling
Air Cake - increase base def (listed as dodge)
Look also at Vercupti as an emergency food. This will boost your H/A/M by 500-1000 for 6 minutes depending on filling. In the case of the unbuffed fighter go find very high OQ/DR insect meat and trade a stack of it to your chef in exchange for some. To go further gather some milk thats high OQ/DR if possible to get some 33 filling Vercupti made up. Strangely you will find that you have stomach space open even with all these combos of foods and drinks. When the battle isnting going your way down a 33% (BE ONLY for this kind of filling requires milk for the right additive) and a pixie and you will be able to put up with that battle for another 6 minutes.
http://www.gamekast.com/swg/foodtables.html complete menu
The numbers are averages for BE versions. If you dont have a BE Chef friend look for 50% less bonus for non BE foods. A secondary benefit of keeping your drink/food stomach full is lowered incap times. When facing that deathblowing creature a lowered time looking at the sky can save you.
As an example when i was a fencer using a low HAM vibroblade all i used was Accargm + garrmorl both with 49 filling. Using a Gaffi stick because of increased health and action costs. I added 1 scrimpi and 1 gruuvan shaal to the mix.
Droid/Pet - A droid or pet is really one of the lesser used things in game anymore. These are needed by the unbuffed fighter either non-CH or CH. If you can afford the 6 points get novice creature handler and then having one of each type out at your side. We are currently working with wildly overpowered CL10's that have been blessed by the devs as not being exploits until fixed (love the logic). So if you have the cash run out to your local BE and pick up a CL10 with at least 6k/4k/2k HAM. I have seen them as high as 11k/8k/6k in HAM. If you have the options of having one made get it in the form of a mount so you can take care of both of your needs.
You will need a few things to go with your new friendly pet. One is to get some fish meat together and see if you can trade it with a BE for some pet stims to keep he/she alive. Second is talk to your local chef about felbar. Which is one of the more powerful pet foods thats unused. In all of these broken CL10's there mind is the weakness. Felbar will increase your pets mind by 1500-1800 (BE made) for 40 minutes. To feed your pet its a drag and drop with these kinds of foods. You will recieve a "yummy" when its done right.
As for your new Droid tank. You have many options and all of these will impact your life as an unbuffed fighter. One is to go for utility by having a droid with a stim a launcher, trap launcher and combat or a full on R3 combat tank. 4300 HAM on an R3 or 3100 HAM on a probot may not sound like much but when your only walking around with 1100 ham yourself remember the damage is some that you didnt take yourself. Option 3 is a LE Repair Droid which can have over 5k HAM. The downside to the LE is it is slow but it will keep you laughing while it taunts its target in combat ex "What are you doing maggot" (actually heard on my wifes LE Repair today).
Droids are limited to 20% protections (the 40% you see is a bug) so remember to have some droid stims or get your droid setup with built in repair abilities. A combat droid in the field will be one that can do a lot of damage as well. So that 1 point damage droid you got for leveling may seem like a good companion but he will just likely cause you more heartache then hes worth.
The Droid Stim A Launcher is a useful tool for the unbuffed fighter. It needs to be loaded by a medic with Pharm 4 but it can be used by anyone even if they do not have medic. That little shot of 97 HAM may not seem that useful until your fighting for that last bit of life from your target. A stim launcher droid can fire once per 2 seconds as well. Target the droid and do /requeststimpack. I have this setup on my toolbar on my dedicated stim droid. I leave him parked 40m from a lair and let him launch those needles at me.I have chosen a Probot for this use because it wont run when being attacke
The droid trap launcher is still up to debate on its usefullness. In every class i've been except for TK i have used my droid stim launchers quite often. As a TK im finding that im just as good at applying the stats and doing knockdowns so its not useful. As a rifleman having a droid that can launch repeated adhesive meshs from 60m away (there max range look for an aim symbol when it fires) and this doesnt cost its user a combat turn.
Spices - This is no different then buffed. So keep Pixie and Muon ready for those last ditch efforts
Weapons - HAM cost is life learn the foods that lower your ham costs. These can be more improtant then regeneration stats.Think about HAM cost of the weapon versus of your target. For aSwordsman this means putting away the scythe and powerhammer in favor of a curved sword. A rifleman will be looking an unstocked/unscoped
rifle. Fencers will be living with the vibroblade. And Tera Kasi artists can put away there knucklers and truly fight unarmed. If you really want to use your high end weapons look at scrimp, ahrissa, andgruvvan shaal to lower your specials cost to allow you to stick with your favorite weapon type.
Traps - Excluding TK you will find all those traps you ground to get to ranger or to master ranger now have a use. Everyone has different favored traps.
Adhesive Mesh, P-Dart, Wire Mesh - Slows down or stops your target
Bone Spur - Blind state (lowers accuracy)
Glow-wire - drops ranged, melee defenses
Flash Bomb - area of effect blind
Sonic Pulse - Area of effect stun/dizzy (dizzy does nothing to a creature but AoE Stun can be useful)
Stink bomb, noise maker - stuns target
This may be a case where you will talk to your friendly neighborhood artisan friend about HAM powerups instead of max damage. Find the stat on your favorite weapon and have powerups that match the cost. Since you can lose 32% on any HAM stat with no downside to the weapon why not use them to your advantage.
A couple final thoughts (thank you Jerry Springer)
As Rangers we have the benefit of getting the resources for a lot of professions you will need services from in this guide. Even the artisan needs hide, meat and bone for there profession. Learn to barter and work out a deal in exchange for free or lowered cost items. The secondary benefit is that you will have made a friend who will go to you when they need something. If you want that lower HAM armor bring the hides needed for the AS. If you want that lowererd cost weapon? Well not much you can do there except for trading loot from NPCs.
Ranger Profession
Welcome to Ranger profession!
By: Calculus_Entropy
The Ranger profession consists of skills that allow a Ranger to stay in the wilderness for extended periods of time, assist in the killing of creatures, and increase the yield of resources gained from those creatures. What follows is a synopsis of the skills a Ranger possesses.
Novice Ranger (title granted: Novice Ranger)
Novice Ranger is available once you have mastered the Scout profession and have acquired 15,000 Scouting experience (xp). This xp is gained by using your Scout skills to harvest creatures and by successfully sneaking past aggressive creatures (red on the radar) while you are using /maskscent.
Once you train in Novice Ranger, you receive increased modifiers to many of the skills gained in the Scout profession. You also receive the schematic for the High Quality Camp Kit, and the /areatrack skill. At this level, /areatrack can only track creatures and only gives a general compass direction towards nearby creatures.
The Wayfaring line (title granted: Wayfarer)
Scouting xp is necessary to level in this line. Scouting xp in gained by harvesting resources off of creatures and also by using /maskscent or /conceal to successfully sneak past aggressive creatures.
The Wayfaring line contains three skill modifiers and many schematics that will be explained momentarily. The Skill modifiers are Camouflage (related to the /conceal ability), Burst Run Efficiency, and Terrain Negotiation. The /conceal skill is very similar in function to the /maskscent skill gained in Scout. This skill uses the Camouflage modifier to see if you can successfully pass an aggressive creature or NPC without drawing its attention.
The fundamental differences between /conceal and /maskscent are that /conceal uses Camo Kits and can be applied to people that do not have this skill. Camo Kits are crafted from planet specific components and are only useable on the planet for which they are intended. For example, the resources to make a kit for use on Dantooine, and only on Dantooine, are Dantooine herbivore meat and Dantooine scaley hide. Schematics for these kits are granted throughout the Wayfaring line, and the master box. While you can't craft all of the kits until you reach Master Ranger, anyone who has the /conceal ability can apply any kit to themselves or others. These kits are made with a Weapon, Droid, and Generic crafting tool and only the number of charges per kit may be experimented on. Experimentation points are based on your Camouflage modifier.
The /conceal skill is generally more successful against creatures than /maskscent. There are also certain NPCs that you can sneak past if you are concealed. These are generally factional (Rebel and Imperial) NPCs.
The Burst Run Efficiency modifier has the effect of lowering the HAM (Health, Action, and Mind) cost of using /burstrun.
The Terrain Negotiation modifier gives added speed to crawling. Terrain Negotiation for running and walking caps at +50, which is attained at Master Scout, therefore all of the Terrain Negotiation a Ranger receives is applied to crawling speed.
The Frontiering line (title granted: Frontiersman)
Wilderness Survival xp is necessary to level in this line. It can be gained through the use of camps, crafting camps and traps, and successfully catching fish.
The Frontiering line gives modifiers and schematics that apply to camping and foraging. As you progress through the line, more camps become available via schematics. Camps negate the 15 second "call time" associated with calling vehicles, pets, and droids. Camps are also able to auto-heal wounds in a similar fashion to a Medical Center (the largest camp, the High Tech Field Base, has the same healing modifier as Medical Center). Note that camps cannot be experimented on.
This line also increases the modifier for the /forage ability. This ability is used to acquire bait and food buff items. The food buff items are usually small buffs with very short durations.
The Tracking line (title granted: Tracker)
Scouting xp is necessary to level in this line. Scouting xp in gained by harvesting resources off of creatures and also by using /maskscent or /conceal to successfully sneak past aggressive creatures.
The Tracking line has 3 modifiers in it. The first is Creature Knowledge. As this modifier increases, it allows you to see more information, about a creature, such as special attacks and creature levels, when you examine the creature.
The next modifier is Creature Harvesting. This modifier simply allows the Ranger to harvest a larger quantity of a resource from a creature as the modifier increases.
The final modifier is the Creature-to-hit modifier. This modifier improves your accuracy versus creatures.
This line also contains improvements to the /areatrack ability. As you train in the line, more options become available. Some improvements to the ability include:
Special Notes on Tracking:
Tracking is a useful skill, but it is not foolproof. The most important thing to note when trying to understand the /areatrack ability is that a Ranger cannot track what isn't there! This means that if a creature hasn't spawned yet, we can't track it. It also means that one could theoretically move 10m, and have the creature spawn on them. The next thing to take note of is that Rangers cannot make things spawn. Rangers are at the mercy of the spawning system like everyone else.
The Trapping line (title granted: Master Trapper)
Trapping xp is used to level in this line. Trapping xp is gained by successfully trapping a creature.
The Trapping line contains modifiers for the Trapping and Rescue abilities. The trapping modifier allows you to trap bigger prey as you increase in skill, and applies to Scout traps as well. Rangers are also granted 2 new schematics for traps. The Flash Bomb trap administers an area effect Blind state and the Sonic Pulse trap administers an area effect Stun and Dizzy state. Note that traps cannot be experimented on.
The other modifier gained throughout the Trapping line is the Rescue modifier. As this modifier increases, a Ranger has more success at using the /rescue ability. The /rescue ability is similar in function to the /taunt skill in the Brawler tree; it causes all enemies attacking your current target to attack you as long as your current target is not attacking them.
Master Ranger (title granted: Master Ranger)
The Master Ranger box grants additional modifiers to most Ranger related skills as well as granting both melee and ranged defense (+10 to each). A Ranger also obtains the final Camo Kit schematic (Dathomir) here.
List of rare Creature handler pets! (2004)
The Nearly Impossible to Find Pets:
The Rare Pets:
Other Hard To Find Pets:
Pets For The Novice Rare Hunter:
The Extinct Pets:
Most Uncommon Pets:
Most Wanted List:
Vertexon's Guide to Creature Handling (v. 2.0)
This is the latest revision of my Guide to Creature Handling from the third phase of the Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided Beta Test. This is designed to function as a Quick Start Guide and supplement to the Manual. The intent here is not to provide a comprehensive list of statistics or recommended creature choices.
If you're already familiar with the basics, feel free to skip around to the section that interests you. One of the things that makes Creature Handler an exciting and engaging profession are the many subtle nuances and game play approaches possible. As someone once commented to me, "it's like an entire game in itself."
I have tried to touch upon the main points, but there will necessarily be some areas left for future exploration.
Contents:
Section 1 - Earning the Prerequisites
Section 2 - Mask Scent
Section 3 - Taming
Section 4 - Finding and Approaching Babies
Section 5 - Training Your New Pet
Section 6 - Storing and Calling Your Pet
Section 7 - Using Your Pet in Combat
Section 8 - Healing Your Pet
Section 9 - Creature Handler XP and Advancement
Section 10 - Mounts
New info from the Creature Handler Designer: emote-triggered pet animations!
You can:
/pet, /reassure, /nuzzle or /hug a pet and it will either perform a "happy" animation, or it will sit, or it will lie down.
Some pets have a "sit trick" or two. Telling a pet to do trick1 or trick2 while it is sitting will make it do the sit-trick instead, if it has one.
You can /bonk, /whap, /scold, /bad or /slap a pet and it will perform an "ashamed" animation.
You can /pointat or /tap a pet to make it perform the 'alert' animation.
Using /summon or /beckon on a pet will either make it look confused, or will make it follow you.
Section 1 - Earning the Prerequisites
In order to tame creatures and make them your pets, you'll need to earn at least the Novice Creature Handler skill. The prerequisites for Novice Creature Handler are Exploration IV and Hunting IV (both in the Scout profession). Both the Hunting and Exploration disciplines require Scout XP (as does the Novice Creature Handler skill itself), so you'll need to earn a lot of it.
The fastest way to earn Scout XP is generally to kill as many creatures as possible, and extract resources from their corpses. You can then use the resources for crafting (i.e. camp kits - though please note that making camps gives you Wilderness Survival XP, not Scout XP). You could also sell them to other players, or donate them to Medics at the Hospital (medics are always in need of resources from animals). It's really not important what you do with the resources, since the act of harvesting them is what gives you Scout XP. If you can get a group together (preferably of people who don't need Scout XP) and take down lots of more dangerous creatures, you can earn XP fairly quickly. It doesn't really matter what planet you hunt on, though it will be easier to get a group together in the more populous areas. You can also earn Scout XP by successfully using the Mask Scent ability near aggressive creatures (see the next section).
Once you have Exploration IV, Hunting IV, and enough Scout XP for the Novice Creature Handler skill, go find a Creature Handler Trainer NPC and learn the skill. Not every city has a Creature Handler Trainer, so you may need to ask around to find the one nearest you. A good rule of thumb is to search for players who are already Creature Handlers (CTRL+P, "Search"). This is particularly valuable in the case of skills other than the Novice and Master skills, since other players can teach them to you for free.
You may be wondering which species to choose for your character to become a Creature Handler. The answer is "whichever species you like."
Wookiees appear on the surface to be a natural choice, since they have a +10 bonus to Taming. This is offset somewhat by other factors that are not in their favor, such as their inability to speak Basic or to wear armor. In addition, they don't have quite as large a selection of wearables as some species (like Humans) in which to place skill enhancements.
Section 2 - Mask Scent
Once you have Exploration II, you gain access to the /maskscent command. In your long career as a Scout/Creature Handler, this ability is going to be your best friend. If you don't already have it assigned to a toolbar slot, you should do so now (you can drag it from the "Other" tab of the CTRL+A actions menu to any toolbar slot).
Mask Scent gives you a chance to slip past creatures without them noticing you. The more skillful you are, the better chance of success. If it works, then aggressive creatures (who show up as red dots on the radar) won't attack, and more docile creatures won't run away. If you're in potentially hostile wilderness areas, you'll want to always have Mask Scent on when not in town. If it wears off, hit it again. If a creature detects you, hit it again. Creatures will attempt to detect you as they are entering radar range, and again as they leave it. Just be cautious, because aggressive creatures will sometimes automatically attack if they break your mask scent while you're standing nearby.
If you successfully avoid detection by an aggressive creature, then you'll be awarded some Scout XP. This is a nice little bonus, but probably won't replace harvesting as your primary means of XP gain. If Mask Scent fails at the wrong time, you might end up getting mauled by what you were trying to sneak past. Note that you cannot run back and forth to "farm" XP from a single group of aggressive creatures.
Section 3 - Taming
Once you have the Novice Creature Handler skill, you'll gain access to the "Tame" option on the radial menu of baby animals in the wild (this option also appears on Bio-Engineered pets that are Difficulty 10 or lower whether you're a Creature Handler or not). Baby animals are easily identified by the "(baby)" tag at the end of their name (for example, "a Greater Gulginaw (baby)"). The Tame option will not appear for creatures that you have less than a 15% chance of successfully taming with your current skills. Creatures that have high Ferocity and/or Difficulty Level will require more Creature Handler skill to tame. Some creatures, like Krayt Dragons, are so powerful that no character can ever tame them.
At first, it will take trial and error to determine the relative difficulty of taming particular species with your current skill set (there is some randomness involved in successfully taming, as well). If you acquire the Master Scout skill, you will be able to see each creature Difficulty Level (also called "CL" or "Challenge Level") which is extremely useful if you plan to do a lot of taming. Your Creature Handling skills determine the highest CL you can tame (starting at 10 for a non-CH, and culminating at 70 at Master CH). The challenge level of a particular creature is constant for all players, and is not the result of any calculations based on your character or his skills.
In order to tame a baby animal, simply approach it and choose "Tame" from its radial menu. Your character will then start talking to the creature, trying to earn its trust ("Steady! Don't bite me!" etc). The creature's name will turn white (or pink if you have joined a faction), indicating that it is no longer attackable until the taming process either succeeds or fails. The baby will stop moving while you attempt to tame it, but will usually start wandering again if you fail. If it wanders more than a few meters away from you, it will be out of "taming range." Thus, you may wish to /follow the baby while you make repeated attempts to tame it. Just be careful not to follow it into range of nearby hostiles (unless you're prepared to defend yourself).
After a moment, you'll get a system message letting you know whether you have succeeded or failed. If you failed, you can choose "Tame" from the radial menu to keep trying until you succeed. Note that sometimes babies will suddenly attack you after a failed taming attempt (including usually non-aggressive species). When this happens, you'll have to act quickly to either kill the baby, run away and come back, or perhaps fire a /warningshot (if you have the appropriate skill) to scare it off. If a baby that is significantly weaker than you, your character's auto-attack may finish it before you have a chance to react. For this reason you may wish to equip a weapon that you have no skill with ahead of time (to minimize damage to the baby in case of aggro).
If you successfully tame the creature, you'll be awarded some Creature Handling XP. A "Pet Control Device" for the creature will be added to your Datapad (CTRL+D), under the "Data" tab. The pet control device will be represented by your pet's name and image, and will give you lots of valuable information about the pet's condition (such as its vital statistics and trained commands). This is also the primary means of storing and calling your pet (see Section 6).
Section 4 - Finding and Approaching Babies
Baby animals tend to spawn at lairs, surrounded by adults of the same species (though it's not entirely unheard of to find non-lair babies in certain situations). The difficulty involved in finding a particular baby depends on the species. Some babies are extremely common, some are uncommon, some are rare, some are impossibly rare, and a few cannot be tamed at all. Therefore, you may have to journey far to find the type of baby you're looking for. This is another area where your fellow Creature Handlers (as well as Rangers with tracking ability) can be an invaluable asset and source of information.
When you spot a lair in the distance, it's usually a good idea to cycle through the creatures standing around it (TAB) and choose to "Examine" any that you're unfamiliar with (by using the radial menu (~) or by typing /examine). The Examine window gives you useful information such as resistances to particular types of damage, whether the creature is Aggressive, whether it's Tamable, and what sorts of resources you can get from harvesting it. If you choose to get the Master Scout or Ranger Tracking skills, you'll gain access to even more information on the examine window (such as CL and special attacks).
Even if a particular species does sometimes produce babies, this doesn't mean that every lair of that type will initially have a baby. If you encounter a baby-less lair, you can try killing off (or luring away) the defenders, then "tapping" the lair by hitting it once or twice and quickly using /peace. By tapping and pausing instead of attacking relentlessly, you can (with some practice) get the lair to produce more defenders without having them instantly attack you. In this way you can both protect your life, and avoid getting attacked by any babies that might spawn
When you find a lair with a baby (recall that baby animals have "(baby)" at the end of their name), it's important to take note of whether you have a non-zero chance to tame the baby itself. Pull up its radial menu from a distance, and see if the Tame command appears. If not, you'll need more skill before you can tame it. Creatures with high ferocity, for example, require you to increase your "Taming Vicious Animals" skill modifier.
If you just blunder up to a lair full of aggressive animals without preparation, chances are you're going to get hurt (and lose your chance to tame the baby). Unless you want to be mauled by the lair guardians, make sure you have Mask Scent on as you approach the lair. If you're detected (or it wears off), then wait out the timer and Mask Scent yourself again. Don't underestimate the importance of doing this, or that cute and cuddly family of Corellian grassland slice-hounds will tear you apart like the pack of vicious dogs they are.
As a final note while trying to tame: don't attack the baby. Some people can kill off all the adults without causing the baby to aggro, but I have found this to be a pretty risky strategy (particularly since babies tend to auto-follow an adult at all times). Tell your group members not to attack the baby. Politely ask random passersby not to attack the baby, and why. While the baby will be invulnerable during the actually taming process, it can still be attacked before and after each attempt. If the baby you're trying to tame gets involved in combat with another player, you're pretty much out of luck. For this reason, I tend to retreat to isolated areas to do my taming. This makes any potential combat riskier, but also greatly reduces the chances of someone wandering along and taking potshots at the creature you're trying to tame. If you try to tame something right outside a popular town, you're practically asking for someone to interfere.
Particularly if you're trying to run from a baby that attacks you during a failed attempt, well-intentioned passing players might jump into combat to "help" you fight the creature, not realizing you're running because you're trying to keep it alive.
Section 5 - Training Your New Pet
So now that you've successfully tamed a baby animal, the first thing you're going to want to do is train it some commands. As a Novice Creature Handler, you have access to three commands: Follow, Attack, and Store. Every time you tame something, you should immediately teach it all three of these (unless, of course, you're about to be chewed up by its parents).
When you teach a pet a command, what you're doing is binding that action to a particular spoken phrase. Once you bind "Attack" to the phrase "Sic'em, Fido!" you can make your pet attack your lookat target simply by having your character say that phrase aloud (in this case: "Sic'em, Fido!").
To do this, choose the "Attack" sub-option under "Train" on your pet's radial menu. The radial menu will disappear, and a little question mark (?) will float off your pet's head. This indicates that it's waiting for you to speak the phrase you want to associate with this command. At this point, just make your character say "Sic'em, Fido!"
If you're successful, you'll gain a little Creature Handling XP and you'll get the message "You have trained your pet a new command." If you fail, you'll get the message "Your pet doesn't understand you." In this case, choose "Attack" from the "Train" menu again, and then speak whatever phrase you wish to bind to the command again. Keep repeating the process until you're successful (it shouldn't take more than a few tries in most cases).
Once you've bound this particular command to a spoken phrase, there's no need to use hotkeys or radial menus to issue the order to your pet. Now and in the future, simply speak the phrase (i.e. "Sic'em, Fido!") to command your pet. You can see the phrase that has been bound to each of your pet's commands by looking at its Pet Control Device in the Datapad (CTRL+D). This is the exact same system used for Droids and Faction Perk pets (like storm troopers). Rather than having to earn extra commands for Droids and NPC pets, however, you'll have access to all possible commands right away.
If you start out four commands with the same word (i.e. "Bob attack," "Bob stay," "Bob release," "Bob group") then your pet's name will change to that first word (in this case, "Bob"). Note that, as a Novice Creature Handler you only have access to three commands. You'll need to advance and learn more if you want to name your creatures. Once a pet has learned its name, you can teach it again to assign different strings to those commands without causing it to lose its name (as long as you don't start four commands with the same word - unless you want to change its name). Keep in mind that there is a name filter in place, so you cannot have a pet named "Obiwan." The name filter doesn't provide feedback to the player, so if you're not seeing a name change after four commands, you might need to try something different.
While it's tempting to train your pet with very short phrases (even single characters), I advise against doing so. Many players find shouts of "a," "a," f," "a," extremely annoying in open chat. A good alternative is to use the /tellpet command. Not only is this invisible to other players, but it has a greater range than just speaking aloud.
Section 6 - Storing and Calling Your Pet
Until you get the Pack Management skill, you can only have one pet out at a time. Before you can tame or call any additional pets, you'll need to Store the one that's out in your Datapad. You can do this by getting close to the pet and choosing "Store" from its radial menu, by choosing the "Store" option from the radial menu of its pet control device in your Datapad, or by using whatever phrase you've bound to its "Store" trained command. Voila! The pet will be safely stored. All of your pets will automatically store after a few minutes themselves if you logout or are disconnected, so there's no need to worry about an exploding router at your ISP causing you to lose your favorite pet.
Pets will also auto-store if they're incapacitated in battle (unless they are quickly healed back to their feet). You cannot manually call or store pets if your character is in combat, however, and there's a 30 second timer on pet storage once a pet himself has left combat.
You can call a pet out simply by choose "Call" from his pet control device in your Datapad. You must be in a public structure, a campsite, or outside in a city to call pets.
Note that your skills determine how many pets you are allowed to have stored at once, in addition to how many you are allowed to have out at once. As a non-CH, you can only store two creature pets in your Datapad at a time. You'll need to advance in the CH profession to gain access to more pet storage slots. It is therefore important to budget your storage space efficiently. Particularly if you wish to use the Tame and Release method to gain Creature Handling XP (see Section 9).
Finally, pets will grow (and increase in size and strength) the longer you have them. Pets grow whether you have them out in the world or have them stored in your Datapad. You must log in regularly for them to continue growing, but you don't have to feed them (or even call them) during that period. Pets grow a little about twice a day, reaching full adulthood in the neighborhood of five to seven days (if you're logging in regularly). So brand new pets probably won't be viable for serious combat until you've had them for a while.
Section 7 - Using Your Pet in Combat
Sooner or later, you're probably going to want to use your pet in combat. You can either order your pet to attack a target (by selecting the target and speaking whatever vocal command you bound to 'Attack'), or you can order the pet to Guard you (assuming you have earned the Guard command and given it to the pet) and then attack the target yourself. Pets who have been ordered to guard a player will automatically defend him if something adopts an aggressive posture toward him, so just causing a creature to attack you at this point will be enough for your pet to charge into the fray. Please note that pets do NOT automatically Guard their masters, so you will have to explicitly order them to do so (or they'll just stand there and watch you take a beating).
Just like players, pets are incapacitated when one of their Health, Action, or Mind bars reaches zero. At this point, an enemy can execute a "coup de grace" (a.k.a. "deathblow") to kill the pet. This is a Bad Thing, and should be avoided. All creature pets have a statistic called "Vitality" that starts at 100/100 and decreases each time they receive a deathblow. When your pet reaches 75, 50, and 25 vitality, it will receive a corresponding decrease in its statistics (i.e. Health/Action/Mind). While you can restore some of the lost vitality with a Bio-Engineer's "vitality pack," doing so will decrease the maximum vitality. Thus, if a pet is killed enough it will eventually reach a point at which its stat loss cannot be recovered.
Section 8 - Healing your Pet
If you have at least the Novice Medic skill, you can heal your pet's damage with stimpacks, just as you would another player. Even if you have no medical skills, you can use Pet Stimpacks (which are made by Bio-Engineers) to keep your pet healthy in battle. This is extraordinarily helpful in most combat situations, and can often make the difference between an incapped/dead pet and a victorious pet. Always keep a few stimpacks or pet stimpacks on hand while traveling.
Pets can be wounded like players, as well. If your pet takes a Health or Action wound, you can heal it by feeding the pet after battle. Your pet will think "(Fido) Hungry!" out loud when it has such a wound (if its name is 'Fido'). Pets will eat anything players can eat, so travel biscuits are just as good as melons for this (beverages cannot be used... only food). If the item of food has multiple charges, the pet will only consume one charge per feeding. Though it's not a prerequisite skill, I like to have at least Wilderness Survival I from the Scout tree, to gain access to the Forage ability. This gives you a pretty good chance of finding food for your pet in almost any outdoor area, which is great for healing pet wounds on the run. Even more useful is purchasing a factory crate of food from a Chef, who can experiment more charges into each treat. This way the crate itself will only take up one slot in your inventory, and you can pull a single multi-charge piece of food out at a time.
If your pet takes a Mind Wound or battle fatigue, you'll need to Play with you pet. Your pet will think "Fido Play!" out loud when it has a Mind wound (if it's name is 'Fido'). In order to play with your pet, you'll need to have taught it one of the two pet Tricks (which you get by advancing to Creature Empathy I and Creature Empathy II). Simply say the phrase that you bound to the trick, and the pet will do it (and heal his Mind wounds). The second trick heals more wounds per use than the first, but it may take several uses of either trick to fully heal your pet (depending on how many Mind wounds it has).
Section 9 - Creature Handler XP and Advancement
There are three ways to gain Creature Handler XP: successfully taming a baby for the first time, teaching a new command to a pet for the first time, and having your pet contribute to the death of an NPC or creature.
The non-violent means of Creature Handling advancement is "tame and release." Simply tame a creature, teach it every command that you have access to, then release it and find something else to tame. Keep in mind that this is a form of "grinding," and is both slow and mind-numbing. Still, if you have access to a lot of commands (and only need a few thousand XP for your next skill), you might decide to close the gap with a little tame and release.
A faster (but riskier) method of advancement is using your pet in combat, which is by far the more normal method. You need to kill something that's powerful enough to be a challenge to your pet (not necessarily to you) to get decent amounts of XP this way. If the target's CL is less than half that of your pet, you'll get 1 XP from the victory. If you find that you're consistently earning 1 XP per kill, then you need to find something more challenging for your pet to hunt. If you're using a particularly powerful pet to advance, this might require finding a group to go big game hunting with.
If you earn the Pack Management skill and start using two pets at once, it's important to note that your XP per kill will be divided by the current number of active pets.
Section 10 - Mounts
Certain types of pets can be trained as "mounts," which will allow the pet's owner to ride around on it. Needless to say, this is incredibly cool and highly recommended.
Normal mount walking speed is faster than a player's running speed, and the mount equivalent of burst run (called "gallop") is faster than a player's burst run (and tends to last longer).
You can't make just any pet into a mount, however. At this time, the only creatures that can be mounted are: Dewbacks (Tatooine), Bols (Dantooine), Kaadu (Naboo), Carrion Spats (Corellia), Falumpasets (Naboo), Humbabas (Corellia/Talus), and Brackasets (Dathomir).
All variants of a mountable species will work (i.e. dewbacks, lesser dewbacks, mountain dewbacks). Entirely different species that are similar in appearance will NOT work (i.e. NOT bagerasets, bolmas, mawgax, etc).
Anyone can own and use a mount (if they have enough skill to control it as a pet), but only a Creature Handler with the Group Management IV skill can teach it the "Mount" command. Non-CHs are limited to creature pets CL 10 and below, but fortunately each currently mountable species has such a variant in the wild (lesser dewbacks, lesser plains bols, motley kaadu, carrion spats, plodding falumpasets, and lowland brackasets).
A pet has to reach a certain size (which varies by creature) before the Train As Mount command becomes available in its training menu. In most cases this will be around 50-75% of its total adult growth, though some of the larger variants (like giant carrion spats and savage humbabas) may be mountable much soon. Giant carrion spats in particular can be made into mounts immediately after taming, making them a popular choice among Creature Handler salesmen. When a giant carrion spat reaches a certain size, it can even become too large to be used as a mount. When this happens, the owner will receive a one time pop-up box asking if he wishes to stop its growth, or no longer have it function as a mount. This is your only chance to decide, so make sure you choose carefully.
You can climb aboard a mount by choosing "Climb On Mount" from its radial menu, or targeting it and typing /mount. You can dismount by choose "Dismount" from the creature's radial menu, or typing /dismount. You can still engage in combat while mounted, but you will be unable to use any of your special profession moves. In addition to being limited to default attacks, your mount will drastically slow down to prevent you from attacking while keeping out of your target's range (a.k.a. "kiting").
While mounted, you can give your mount a momentary boost of speed by typing /gallop. You cannot attack while galloping, but you can still be attacked. Since you cannot attack, however, the normal speed restriction while in combat is not in effect (making this a handy way to escape from tight situations). After a few moments your mount will become "winded" and return to its normal running speed while it rests (just as with a player's burst run ability). You can end the gallop earlier by using the /gallopstop command (for example, if you are already galloping and wish to stop to engage in combat).
Doctor FAQ part 1
I don't want to be a doctor, but I want to heal myself in combat. What do I need to do?
You'll need to have the novice medic skill to heal yourself at all. Having that skill will give you enough medicine use skill to use Stimpack A's or Stimpack B's. Either of these will heal your health and action, but not your mind. Only Combat Medics have the ability to heal mind damage. Entertainers can heal mind wounds, but not damage.What's the difference between Stimpack A's and Stimpack B's?
Power. A well crafted Stimpack A will heal for under 100 damage. A well crafted Stimpack B can heal for 400+ damage. The other difference is what goes into making these. A Stimpack A requires just 16 units of pretty generic resources (8 organic and 8 inorganic). The Stimpack B that I mentioned requires 104 units of resources that come from 4 different planets. It is possible to create stimpack B's using more available resources, but they won't be as powerful as I've indicated here. Expect a Stimpack B (especially a good one) to cost considerably more than a Stimpack A. As the medicine use skill required for a Stimpack B is no higher than a Stimpack A, Stimpack A's have all but vanished from SWG. Even the most basic stimpack B's are potent than a good Stimpack A and usually aren't much more expensive.
If I get novice doctor and then all of the medicine knowledge skills, will I be missing anything?
Although this seems like an inexpensive way to use all of the top level medicines, you're going to missing quite a bit, really. Even though you'll have high enough medicine use skill to use resuscitation packs and enhancement packs, you must first acquire the proper skills to apply them, which come in the wound treatment line. If you want to use the best doctor's stuff and not spend all the points going to master doctor, get all of the wound treatment skills and a couple of the medicine knowledge skills. Ignore wound treatment speed and medicine crafting. Then, you can use all of the nice doctor's stuff. Note, however, that you're not going to make any of it and your results won't be quite as good as a master doctor's, but you'll save yourself about 34 skill points.
Why doesn't my enhancement pack do anything? (What skills do I need to enhance people?)
So you just made it to Novice Doctor and you can finally make enhancement packs. You make your first one and go to use it and...nothing. No error message, no results, just nothing. The problem doesn't lie in the enhancement pack. You simply don't have the skill to use it yet. In order to use an enhancement pack, you must have two things. First, you must have the medicine use skill to use the item and, second, you must have the Enhance ability, which is awarded in the Wound Treatment tree of doctor. Once you reach that level, you'll gain the ability to use enhancement packs.
Why doesn't my cure poison/cure disease pack do anything?
Just like the enhancement packs, there are two requirements for using a cure poison/cure disease pack. You must have the appropriate medicine use skill, but you must also have either the Cure Poison or Cure Disease skills which you acquire with Advanced Wound Treatment Speed and Master Wound Treatment Speed, respectively.
What skills do I need in order to revive fallen players?
You must first have the skill revivePlayer, which comes with Master Wound Treatment. You must also have enough medicine use skill to use the resuscitation kit, which is usually in the 50's. At novice doctor, you'll have Med Use of 55, which is good enough to use most resuscitation packs. If the Med Use on the Pack is above 55, however, you'll need Medicine Knowledge 1, as well. Once you've got those, you'll be able to revive fallen players.I only have a few skill points to spend on doctor. How should I spend them?
This really depends on what you want to be able to do. I'll break down the various skills and let you know what you need in order to be able to do each one. You can pick and choose as you see fit. In my experience, Doctor is a class that is very often "sampled" rather than mastered.Revive - This is one of the most common things that people think of when they think of doctors. They want the ability to bring people back to life. In order to use a resuscitation kit (which is needed to revive a fallen player), you need to have two things: Master Wound Treatment (for the revive skill) and a high enough medicine use skill to use the pack (usually you have enough at Novice Doctor but some packs may require Medicine Knowledge 1, depending upon the ability of the crafter and the resources used). Most resuscitation kits have a med use requirement in the 60's. If you can find a willing doctor, you might be able to get these experimented down to the point where you don't need any extra med use beyond Novice Doctor. If you want to be able to make resuscitation kits, you're going to need Master Doctor's Medicine Crafting.
Attribute Enhancements - Another common request for doctors is the ability to apply enhancement packs, or buffs. Similar to being able to revive fallen comrades, you'll need two things. You first need Advanced Wound Treatment for the healEnhance skill and you'll need some points in Medicine Knowledge in order to apply the packs. How high you go is dependent upon which packs you wish to use. To use the most potent D level packs, you'll need at least Master Doctor's Medicine Knowledge, if not Master Doctor. If you want to use lesser packs, you don't need to go as high. In my experience, though, I've found that there's a big difference between the top level packs and the lesser ones. To be able to craft your own enhancement packs, you'll need to climb the Doctor's Medicine Crafting Tree. Again, how high you go is dependent upon what level of packs you want to craft. The best enhancement packs are very high up the tree - Health and Action D packs are available at Master Doctor's Medicine Crafting and D Level Enhancement packs for the secondaries aren't available until Master Doctor. One other thing to note is the bonuses that are granted by advancing along the Wound Treatment tree. Bonuses to wound treatment appear to have an impact on the power of your buffs. Therefore, the higher you go along that line (even though you need only go to Advanced Wound Treatment to apply an enhancement), the better your enhancements will be. Be sure to check out the question regarding the randomness of enhancements for more information.
Cure Poison/Disease - If you're into PvP, you're probably interested in these abilities. Poisons and diseases do occur in PvE, but not as often - the most common poison/disease infectors are Combat Medics in PP. In order to get them, you'll need to climb the Wound Treatment Speed tree as well as the Medicine Knowledge Tree. You'll obtain the skills Cure Poison and Cure Disease at Expert and Master Wound Treatment Speed, respectively. Poison and Disease Cure packs, however, are some of the most taxing items on medicine use requirements. The highest level packs can't be used by anyone without Master Doctor (or at least a experimented version for ease of use and Master Medicine Knowledge). Like the enhancement packs, if you want to craft these, you'll have to climb the Medicine Crafting tree, but how high to go is up to you. What level packs do you want to make? The ability to craft these packs alternates through the levels. Poison A is available at Novice Doctor, Disease A is available at Intermediate Medicine Crafting Poison B is available at Advanced Medicine Crafting and so on.
I don't know if I should become a combat medic or a doctor. What are the pros and cons?
So you've made your way up the medic tree and now you need to choose which path to take, huh? Well, let me try to lay out some of the pros and cons for each profession (this is coming from a master doctor, so you might want to take this with a grain of salt).Doctors get the best medicines. They have the ability to craft and use the highest wound packs and stim packs. At master medic medicine use, combat medics can use some of these, but not all. Doctors are the only players in the game that can do these things: Cure States (including Stun, Poison, Disease, etc.), Apply Enhancements, and Revive fallen players. In addition, doctors gain medicine crafting experimentation all the way up to Master level where they have 10 experimentation points to spend. Combat Medics gain Combat Medicine Experimentation, which is a different animal altogether.
On the downside, doctors need to be brutally close to a player to do much for them. Any healing must take place within 6 meters of the patient. However, the ability to use some powerful enhancements on your friends will lessen the need for you to heal them in combat. Another downside, no way to deal damage. A doctor is a support character. Being a master doctor doesn't leave much room for a whole lot else and, if you want to be able to craft your own meds, you'll probably need to spend some points in artisan so that you can survey. Again, this doesn't lend itself well to being able to do much damage in combat.
So how about the combat medics? Well, the primary thing a combat medic can do is heal from a range. There's no requirement for a combat medic to be within 6 meters of a patient to heal that person. In fact, they can be great distances from a patient (40 meters or more) and still apply a good bit of healing. This is great if you're in a hunting party or on the battlefield. Sometimes, the seconds saved by doing this at a range is the difference between life and death. Also, combat medics gain the ability to do Area of Effect (AoE) heals. They can heal anyone within a given radius. This isn't as potent as a single heal, but you can heal numerous comrades at once. Again, this is a big boon for combat. In addition to the healing powers of a combat medic, combat medics get a bit of offense to go with their skills. Combat medics can apply poisons and diseases to victims. Poisons are essentially like a bleed shot - they slowly tick away at a given pool. Actually, from what I've heard, the good poisons can eat away your pools pretty quickly. Diseases, on the other hand, inflict wounds on the patient over time. To add to the effectiveness of these attacks, the only true counter to them is to have a doctor (and a fairly powerful one at that) cure you. Although a doctor can't do much damage, he's probably the combat medic's worst enemy as a doctor can negate the unique attacks of a combat medic. Poisons and diseases are quite effective in PP. combat, but not so much in PvE combat. If you're looking for PP., combat medic may make more sense but, if you're going to spend most of your time hunting monsters, having the ability to throw a disease pack isn't going to get you very far. Additionally, combat medics now gain the terrain negotiation ability which used to only be available through obtaining scout skills. Terrain Negotiation enables you to run up hills at a greater speed.
However, for combat medics, I've heard that it's a difficult profession to "sample." You either want to go master or don't go at all. You can't use the really effective poisons and diseases until you reach master level and any competent doc (with some smart comrades) can do a great job healing folks in battle. Also, in order to make it to combat medic, you need to climb the Ranged Weapon Support tree of Marksman so it actually costs a few extra points to be a combat medic.
Medic/Doctor Skills Summary
Doctor FAQ part 2
Why can't I make my stimpacks nearly as powerful as these other doctors?
Well, the more powerful of a doctor you are (specifically, how far along you've advanced along the medicine crafting line) is going to determine, in part, how well you can make your medicines. However, more often than not, I see that most people aren't using advanced components to make their medicines while the higher level doctors are. Advanced subcomponents (the Advanced versions of Biological Effect Controllers, Chemical Release Duration Mechanisms, Liquid Suspensions, and Solid Delivery Shells) become available at Organic Chemistry 4. These are much more potent than the normal versions but also require some rather rare resources, such as Lokian Wild Wheat and Talusian Water Vapor. Using these advanced components can mean the difference between a Stimpack B that heals for 200 and one that heals for 400.Here's my guide to crafting (some doctors have think there are better ways, but here's my guide):
First of all, know your schematic. In order to make a good product, you really need to know what you're looking for in the resources you're going to be using. Sometimes, people will tell you about this awesome resource that they have that has shock resistance 999. Well, that's all well and good if your schematic actually looks for shock resistance. However, with medical items, they never do. Rather, you're looking for Overall Quality, Potential Energy, Unit Toughness, and, in some cases, Decay Resistance. Let's use a Small Stimpack - B as an example (as it uses subcomponents and is probably the most often crafted medical item).
A Small Stimpack - B requires 3 subcomponents, a biological effect controller, a chemical release duration mechanism, and a liquid suspension. Now, you can use basic versions of these, but you won't get nearly as powerful a Stimpack as if you'd used advanced components. Let's really break this down component by component and then we'll come back to making the stimpack, itself.
Let's start with the biological effect controller. Assuming you decided to go with the advanced version, you're going to need 18 units of Lokian Wild Wheat (which can be a real pain to gather, especially for a doctor without much in the way of fighting skills) and 18 units of Tatooinian Fiberplast (which is pretty easy to come by, actually). Now, the next thing to do is to look at your schematic. A biological effect controller has two attributes, charges and effectiveness. Having a high number of charges on your biological effect controller is going to give you a stimpack that can be used more times, which everyone enjoys. Having a high power on your biological effect controller is also nice as it will add to the power of the stimpack. However, I strongly recommend making biological effect controllers with as many charges as possible and only add power when you can no longer add charges (you'll see why in a bit).
Okay, so you know which resources you need, but how do you know which resources are good? That's a whole complicated matter in itself and there is another FAQ here (the next one, actually) that addresses this issue. Be sure to ready that. One trick to this is that, at any given time, there is often only 1 kind of Tatooinian Fiberplast and 1 kind of Lokian Wild Wheat available so, unless you've got a stash of some good stuff on hand, you're left with whatever is there. Most of the top crafting docs try to keep a nice supply of the good stuff on hand so that they're not bound to use whatever crummy resources may have just spawned.
Let's say, for sake of examples, we're gotten some Lokian Wild Wheat with OQ: 648 and PE: 523 and some Tatooinian Fiberplast with OQ: 755 and PE: 923. What does that mean to us? Well, when you craft the item, you'll get some degree of success (usually Great, but can be Moderate, Amazing, or a couple others). That success tells you what the initial stats on the item will be. However, you now get to experiment on the item (note that you need to be near a crafting station and using a specialized crafting tool, such as the food and chemical crafting tool, to experiment). This is where the resources' attributes really come into play. When you go to the experimentation screen, you'll see a number of boxes (maybe 1 or 2 on the left have been filled in). You can then spend experimentation points to try to fill those boxes, in turn, making your item more powerful. The number of boxes available to fill (and, likewise, the power available in the item) is directly related to the resources you used. Let's break that down.
Experimentation levels are based on a percentage. 0% would be the worst an item could ever be and 100% would be as powerful as an item could ever be. The maximum percentage you can reach is determined by the resources you used. We already said that the charges were based on OQ (66%) and UT (33%) so let's look at what our resources have in those areas. The Lokian Wild Wheat has OQ 648 and no UT. The Tatooinian Fiberplast has OQ 755 and UT 923. In order to determine the maximum percentage we can reach, we use this formula: (((648+755)/2000)*0.66 + (923/1000)*0.33)*100. That gives us a result of 77% (rounded). So, with the best experimentation, we could have a biological effect controller with 77% of its maximum number of charges. Note that OQ was averaged over the two resources because they both had that attribute while UT was only used from the fiberplast because the wheat didn't have that stat.
When you're actually spending the experimentation points, there is some risk involved. A success will mean that the item will become better than it was prior to your experiment. A failure will cause no change, or, even worse, make the item less powerful. There are a few things that have a direct impact on how well you experiment. First and foremost, your ability as a doctor. The higher your crafting level, the more success you'll have. Also, the quality of the crafting station and crafting tool you're using. Although it's undocumented, the malleability of the resources you're using also has an effect on experimentation. The higher the malleability, the easier it will be to experiment. And, finally, how you spend your points will make a difference. If you try to spend all of your points at once, there is a higher risk of failure. However, if you spend just one point at a time, you reduce that level of risk. When you run an experiment, the percentage of that stat is impacted by the level of success of the experiment and the number of points spent. For example, if you had spent 3 points and achieved a great success, you would increase the quality of the item by 3*7%, or 21%. Had you spent only 2 points, you'd increase the quality by 2*7% or 14%. Of course, this works the other way, too. The more points you spend when you receive a failure, the more costly that will be. So, experimenting a point at a time can be a "regulating" approach. You're going to have less severe failures, but, as you're experimenting more times, you're more likely to get some failures. However, when you have a failure with just 1 point, the item is probably still salvageable. When you have a failure spending a lot of points, you've probably pretty well destroyed the item. Note that, if you fail and a percentage drops to 0%, don't bother experimenting on that stat any longer - you'll never get it back over 0%. I don't know if this was designed to be this way or if this is a bug, but that's the way it works.
Now, when you go on to make the liquid suspension and chemical release duration mechanism, you'll find that they only have 1 stat that can be experimented upon: power. Therefore, unit toughness no longer matters. You're going to be looking for items with high overall quality and high potential energy. So, maybe now you can see why I said that you should try to get as many charges on your biological effect controller as possible. You can't add charges to the other subcomponents so your biological effect controller is your only chance to add more charges to your final item through a subcomponent.
It should be noted that the power supplied by an advanced liquid suspension FAR outweighs the power supplied by an advanced chemical release duration mechanism (often about 3:1). As advanced chemical release duration mechanisms require herbivore meat (and any creature based organic is more difficult to obtain than something you can drop a harvester on), advanced chemical release duration mechanisms are often left out of the final product and a basic version is used, instead.
So, now let's go back to the stimpack. We've got all of our subcomponents created and we now just need some resources for the stimpack itself. Well, a Small Stimpack - B requires two resources (besides the subcomponents): organic and inorganic. It doesn't get much more generic than that. Because of this, your strategy should be a little different here. Rather than settling for whatever is out there because that's all there is, you really need to pick and choose here. If you open up a flora survey device, you'll see a long list of organics that can be found on your planet. Go through these until you find something of excellent quality. For my generic resources, I often can find organics and inorganics that have overall quality, potential energy, and unit toughness over 900. Once you've got those, simply put your item together just as we already described with the subcomponents. At this point, you probably want to focus on power during experimentation (which is why having the extra charge already added from the biological effect controller is nice).
What resources do doctors need to make their medicines?
Here's the grocery list, along with a few notes. You should be aware that just about anything can me made with nothing but plain organics and plain inorganics, but in order to make anything powerful, you're going to need plenty of the things on this list. This list is really designed for people that would like to gather resources for a doctor, not so much for the doctor him/herself.
These are the items for basic medicines:
- Organic - Just plain old organics. Any will do so docs are usually looking for something with high OQ and PE
- Inorganic - Same as the organics above except they also want things with high malleability.
- Water - Most medical items require a liquid suspension unit, which is requires water.
- Avian Meat - Used in enhancement packs, which are always a popular item made by doctors.
- Seeds - Used in a number of upper level meds which require seeds rather than plain organics.
In addition to what is listed above, doctors will need these following resources if they want to make advanced subcomponents and, with those, more powerful medicines:Here is the full Resource Tree:
How do you know how good a material is for crafting medicines? (For Doctors/Medics)
This is actually much trickier than it seems at first. By looking at your schematics (let's use the schematic for a stimpack -That formula (as dictated by the schematic) is correct for paired resources, but not for individual resources. In order to help you understand what I mean, I'm going to have to delve into the mathematical formula that governs all of this. The basic concept of this formula is the same for all attributes of an item (effectiveness, charges, ease of use, etc.), but the resource attributes that are used vary slightly. Here's the formula use to determine the maximum effectiveness of a stimpack - B:
MAX_EFFECTIVENESS = ((Resource1_OQ + Resource2_OQ)/COMBINED_MAX_OQ) * 0.66 + ((Resource1_PE + Resource2_PE)/COMBINED_MAX_PE) * 0.33
So what does all of that mean? Well, the MAX_EFFECTIVENESS is the maximum value to which you can experiment an item (as a percentage). A MAX_EFFECTIVENESS of 100% would be, in essence, perfect item experimentation and can only be produced with perfect resources. A MAX_EFFECTIVENESS of 50% would be a mediocre item. That doesn't mean it will have 50 power, it means that it will have exactly half the power the "perfect" item would have. Note that this really only holds for the resources used. For a liquid suspension, for example, you're only using resources so, something experimented to 100% would be the best liquid suspension possible. However, for items that require subcomponents, things become a little more complicated. In such cases, you can use perfect resources to experiment to 100%, but you might not have the "perfect" item as, in order to achieve such a feat, you'd have to use "perfect" subcomponents, as well. So, even though you might be able to experiment a stimpack to 100%, if the subcomponents you used to creates it were only experimented to 20%, you're still not going to have a very good stimpack.
Now let's look at the two "halves" of this equation. Start with the first half:
((Resource1_OQ + Resource2_OQ)/COMBINED_MAX_OQ) * 0.66
This seems simple enough - we're going to add the Overall Quality attributes of our two resources together and then divide by the maximum of those two - in essence, we're simply averaging the two values. Then, we multiply that value by 0.66, which is dictated by the 66% weighting that OQ is given in the schematic.
The second half looks like this:
((Resource1_PE + Resource2_PE)/COMBINED_MAX_PE) * 0.33
This seems to be just like the first half, but there is a key difference here. Every resource in the game has an Overall Quality attribute, but not all of them have a Potential Energy attribute (most inorganics do not). So how do we average two numbers if one of them doesn't exist?!? Simply put, we don't. Rather, any resources that don't have a Potential Energy attribute are thrown out of the equation entirely. The ramifications of that are very dramatic. Let me show you what I mean through an example.
Let's take the following 4 resources (2 organic and 2 inorganic):
- Organic 1: OQ = 950, PE = 200
- Organic 2: OQ = 600, PE = 600
- Inorganic 1: OQ = 700, UT = 700
- Inorganic 2: OQ = 950, UT = 50
If we were to use the simple 0.66*OQ + 0.33*PE (or 0.66*OQ + 0.33*UT) formula, we'd get this:- Organic 1: OQ = 950, PE = 200; Quality = 693
- Organic 2: OQ = 600, PE = 600; Quality = 594
- Inorganic 1: OQ = 700, UT = 700; Quality = 693
- Inorganic 2: OQ = 950, UT = 50; Quality = 643.5
So, it seems apparent that the first organic and the first inorganic resources are the best ones to use, right? Well, that couldn't be more wrong. Let me put those numbers into the aforementioned formula and you'll see what I'm getting at:MAX_EFFECTIVENESS = (950+700/2000) * 0.66 + (200/1000) * 0.33 = 61.05%
Now, just for the sake of argument, let me use resources 2 and 4 instead and see what we get:
MAX_EFFECTIVENESS = (600+950/2000) * 0.66 + (600/1000) * 0.33 = 69.15%
How the heck did we get a better result from those resources when those weren't the best ones?!? The key here is that we're not using the correct formula for determining the quality of a given resource. Sure the 66%/33% formula looks correct based on the schematic, but that schematic is designed for multiple resources put together, not individual resources.
Take a close look at the example formulas just above. Notice, in the second half of the formulas, we're only dividing the Potential Energy by 1000, rather than the 2000 that Overall Quality is divided by. Why is that? Well, the inorganic resources have no Potential Energy so that resource is "thrown out" for that part of the formula. Instead, the Potential Energy of the organic resource is effectively weighted TWICE as heavily as the Overall Quality attribute. In addition, as only the Overall Quality of the inorganic resource is being used, we need not worry about any of the other attributes of that resource. Therefore, our real formulas for determining which is best looks more like this:
For organics: 0.5*OQ + 0.5*PE
For inorganics: 1*OQ
Let's try re-evaluating those four resources using these formulas:
- Organic 1: OQ = 950, PE = 200; Quality = 575
- Organic 2: OQ = 600, PE = 600; Quality = 600
- Inorganic 1: OQ = 700, UT = 700; Quality = 700
- Inorganic 2: OQ = 950, UT = 50; Quality = 950
Lo and behold! Using these new formulas, we can see that The second organic and the second inorganic really were the best choices. Of course, these formulas are tailored for effectiveness. If you were interested in charges, instead, you'd have to use these formulas:For organics: 1*OQ
For inorganics: 0.5*OQ + 0.5 * UT
Note that there are a couple caveats to this. First of all, I'm assuming that you're using "normal" organics and inorganics in that the organic resource will have Overall Quality and Potential Energy but no Unit Toughness and the inorganic will have Overall Quality and Unit Toughness but not Potential Energy. There are some types of resources that don't follow this trend, but I don't recommend using them. (Read the advanced section to see why.)
Also, even though it is mentioned nowhere in the schematics, malleability does have an impact on crafting. The higher the malleability of the resources you use, the easier it will be to experiment on the item you're crafting.
How do you know how good a material is for crafting medicines? (For Resource Brokers)
For those of you that don't need to craft but would like to broker resources to the medical community, here are some quick formulas you can use to gauge the quality of individual resources. For any formula, simply plug in the attributes of the resource in question and you'll get a value ranging between 1 and 1000. The higher that value, the better the resource.
Duration: 0.6 * DR + 0.4 * OQ
Charges: 1 * OQ
Duration: 0.6 * DR + 0.4 * OQ
Charges: 0.5 * OQ + 0.5 * UT
Charges: 1 * OQ
Charges: 0.5 * OQ + 0.5 * UT
* These resources can be used in a couple ways. If the crafter wishes to add power to an item, the first formula will show the value of the resource. If, however, the crafter wishes to add charges to an item, the second formula will show the value of the resource. In general, most crafter's want charges on Lokian Wild Wheat and Tatooinian Fiberplast while they want power on Organics and Inorganics. If you have a buyer in mind, you may want to contact him/her ahead of time to see what he/she desires.
** These resources are used in enhancement packs and, unlike any other medical item, Decay Resistance is also factored in. Even though I haven't identified DR in the formulas, all things being equal, a resource with a higher DR would be more desirable than one with a lower DR.
Advanced tips for selecting resources
There are lots of resources out there, but how do you know which ones are the best ones? Well, you can refer to the previous question for some basic guidelines, but I thought I'd add in a few tips that I've picked up along the way that aren't always so obvious.
First of all, realize that the quality of your resources will have a minimal effect on the initial stats of any item, but they have a dramatic effect on the final result. What do I mean by that? Well, let's put it this way - you can use crummy resources and make a Stimpack B that initially heals for 250 and you can use great resources and make a Stimpack B that heals for 255. Big deal, right? Well, when it comes to experimentation, you'll be happy you used good resources. Those resources determine how high you can experiment various attributes of an item. So, for that stimpack that was made with crummy resources, maybe we can only experiment up to 280 while we can experiment the one made with quality resources up to 350. See the difference now? I thought so. Be sure to read the crafting guide above for even more details about how this is done. I'm going to continue assuming that you understand the math behind this (explained above).
So, it should be simple to find the best resources, right? Well, not always - there are a lot of things to take into account when selecting a resource. First of all, we want to consult the schematic. Let's take a look at a Small Stimpack B (even though it requires subcomponents, I'm going to focus on the additional resources used - 12 organic and 12 inorganic).
With organic and inorganic resource requirements, you really have your choice of everything out there, which is, literally, hundreds of resources. So what's best? Well, first of all, the schematic says that power is based on OQ (66%) and PE (33%) while charges are based on OQ (66%) and UT (33%). So, it would seem that we want resources that have high overall quality, potential energy, and unit toughness. This is true, but there's a bit more to it than that. Be sure to read the previous question about determining good resources before reading any further.
Consider what you want to do with this item. Are you after something that has a ton of charges or something that is very powerful on each charge? Basically, ask yourself this question, "Once I assemble this item, where am I planning on spending the experimentation points?" Usually (but not always), you will want to spend all of your points in effectiveness, raising power, before you bother to raise charges. Sometimes, however, you might want more charges - that's your call and dependent upon the situation. For now, let's say that we're going to try to make the most powerful stimpack available and we'll worry about charges later. Let's see what that does to our resource selection.
When crafting, attributes of all of the resources used are thrown together in some way to determine how powerful the final product will be. That is, of course, determined by the schematic. In this case, we're looking for high overall quality and potential energy. Let me lay out a few resources and see if you can pick out which ones would be the best for what we want to accomplish (pick one organic and one inorganic):
- Organic: OQ = 943, PE = 855
- Organic: OQ = 976, PE = 755
- Organic: OQ = 960, UT = 976
- Organic: OQ = 879, PE = 989
- Inorganic: OQ = 750, UT = 991
- Inorganic: OQ = 956, PE = 912
- Inorganic: OQ = 995, UT = 513
- Inorganic: OQ = 899, UT = 921
So which ones did you choose? The best answer is 4 and 7. Is that what you picked? Let's take a closer look at these resources and see what each one offers (if you didn't pick what I did, you may want to pay particular attention here).Picking an organic is actually pretty simple. We want the organic that is going to give us the highest Overall Quality and Potential Energy (as combined by the schematic formula). In this case, we're going to evaluate these resources by using this formula: OQ * 0.5 + PE + 0.5. That will give us a value somewhere between 0 and 1000 - the higher the better. So let's see how each resource scored:
- 899
- 865.5
- 480
- 934
Notice that #3 scores much lower than the others. That's because it doesn't have a Potential Energy attribute. Therefore, it's Potential Energy is effectively 0, which is definitely not what we want. You're missing out on a full third of the possible power that could be had here. Not many organics don't have Potential Energy, but a few, such as wood or bone, don't have Potential Energy, but have Unit Toughness, instead. From the numbers, you can see that #4 edges out #1. If you had selected #1 from the list, don't feel bad, I probably would have had to pull out a calculator to determine which one of the two was really the better choice. They're awfully close. Just notice that, even though #4 has a lower OQ attribute, it's still the better choice because of the higher PE.So how about the inorganics? This is where it gets a touch more complicated. Now, rather than evaluating each resource on its own, we have to see how it interacts with the organic that we just selected. The key to this process is to remember our goal - the most powerful stimpack we can make.
From the schematic, we can see that power is based on OQ (66%) and PE (33%). Therefore, Unit Toughness has absolutely nothing to do with what we want to do - we need to remove that attribute from our calculations. That leaves us with this:
- OQ = 750
- OQ = 956, PE = 912
- OQ = 995
- OQ = 899
At this point, we have one anomaly in that #6 has a PE rating (things like petro fuel or radio actives are inorganics that have Potential Energy but no Unit Toughness). Since we're after a high powered stim, it would seem logical to use the inorganic that has Potential Energy, wouldn't it? Well, it's not. Think about the formula that is used to determine the max experimentation percentage (explained in the above crafting guide). In that formula, shared attributes from various resources are AVERAGED. Hmmm...but the stats on that inorganic are even better than the ones on the organic, so wouldn't using this organic help make the stim more powerful, you ask? Absolutely! But, not as much as one of the others.The reason for this is in the formula that is used. All resources have an Overall Quality. Therefore, we'll average the Overall Quality attributes and multiply by 66% to determine that part of the power schematic. However, what about that other 33%? Most of these inorganics don't have a potential energy, but one of them does. Well, here's how it works: as long as one resource has a given attribute, it will be used. However, if the other resources don't have that attribute, you're not penalized for that. If none of them have it, however, you're heavily penalized. Let's look at the formula (as it is calculated) to see what the heck it is I'm talking about:
- ((879 + 750)/2000)*0.66 + ((989)/1000)*0.33 = .53757 + .32637 = 86.4%
- ((879 + 956)/2000)*0.66 + ((989 + 912)/2000)*0.33 = .60555 + .313665 = 91.9%
- ((879 + 995)/2000)*0.66 + ((989)/1000)*0.33 = .61842 + .32367 = 94.2%
- ((879 + 899)/2000)*0.66 + ((989)/1000)*0.33 = .58674 + .32637 = 91.3%
Notice that the formula for #6 is different from the rest. Because that inorganic has a Potential Energy attribute, it was factored into the equation. In the other cases, there was no Potential Energy, so we just ignored it. But what would happen if we used two resources and neither one had a Potential Energy attribute? Bad things. Let's see what would have happened if we had combined #3 with #5 (which both have Unit Toughness while neither has Potential Energy):((980+750)/2000)*0.66 + 0*0.33 = 57.1%
That's just horrible! As a rule of thumb, you usually want to have at least one resource with a given attribute, but no more than that. Trying to find multiple resources that have everything you want can be difficult. If you know what you're after, you can make your life a lot easier.
So, notice what we saw from our results above. #7 gave us the most powerful stimpack at 94.2%. Why? Easy - it had the highest Overall Quality. In the end, that's really all we were concerned about because that's all that mattered when it came to power.
Okay, so now we know which one will give us the most power, but what about charges? Well, the inorganic that we picked for power won't give us the most charges. If we go back to our formula, here's what it looks like for charges:
- ((879+750)/2000)*0.66 + ((991)/1000)*0.33 = .53757 + .32703 = 86.5%
- ((879+956)/2000)*0.66 + 0*0.33 = .60555 + 0 = 60.6%
- ((879+995)/2000)*0.66 + ((512)/1000)*0.33 = .61842 + .16896 = 78.7%
- ((879+899)/2000)*0.66 + ((921)/1000)*0.33 = .58674 + .30393 = 89.1%
In this case, #8 is the best, so why not use that one? Well, we said that our goal was to make the most powerful stimpack available and not worry about charges. And, in reality, you'd see ABSOLUTELY NO LOSS IN QUALITY from using #7 over #8. Why not? Well, we've already seen that we can experiment effectiveness all the way up to 94%. That will easily take you 7 experimentation points and probably more. Even if you're a master doctor, that only leaves you with 3 experimentation points to spend. With that, there's no way you're going to reach 79% on charges, much less 89% - you just won't have enough experimentation points. This actually brings up another point - if you're not a master doctor and only have a few experimentation points to spend, having the greatest resources out there isn't necessarily going to help you. Just because you have resources that allow you to experiment up to 95%, if you only have enough experimentation points to make it up to 50%, you're just wasting potential. Sometimes, you can get lesser quality resources for a song and they'll still give you all the power you'd have gotten out of the best resources out there, which will almost certainly cost you more.By the way, if you picked #3 and #6, I applaud you - you're thinking outside the box, which is a great thing. There's no rule that says that your organic has to have Potential Energy and your inorganic has to have Unit Toughness. They can easily be reversed. Using those two resources together would give you a max power experimentation percentage of 93.3% which is nearly as powerful as the ones we picked as being the best.
I hope this helps you get into the concept of choosing resources a little more. Obviously, this doesn't cover every situation out there, but I was trying to show you how to use the schematic formula to your advantage. The better you understand that formula, the better crafter you'll become. For those of you that don't like math, I hate to say it, but crafting is all math. Period.
Doctor FAQ part 3
When I experiment on an enhancement pack, I get a success, but my power or duration goes down! (Or vice versa) Why?
On some medical items, such as enhancement packs, there are multiple attributes tied to a single experimentation line. With enhancement packs, both duration and enhance power are tied to the single effectiveness line. Therefore, when you spend a point (or more) experimenting on effectiveness, you're really impacting two attributes, not one.In terms of game mechanics, when you spend an experimentation point on a given attribute, the game "rolls the dice" to see if you succeeded or failed. Of course, that result is determined partially by your skill as opposed to the complexity of the item you're crafting, the resources used, the quality of the tools you're using (supposedly, I'm not really sure about that), and, of course, pure luck. If the roll is a good one, you'll get a success. If not, you'll end up with a failure. When you succeed, the attribute that you're impacting goes up and, likewise, when you fail, the attribute goes down.
However, if you're impacting two attributes at the same time, as is the case with the enhancement pack, the game "rolls the dice" not once, but twice. It rolls them once for each attribute; in this case, once for power and once for duration. However, only 1 message is returned to you and that is an average of the two results. So, for example, perhaps the roll for power was a failure but the roll for duration was a great success. The average of these two might be a good success or just a plain success, but you're going to see your power drop because of the failure. The duration, however, will go up. That's where the anomaly lies - the fact that two things occurred and yet you only received one piece of feedback.
Of course, this phenomena can work both ways. I've seen many cases where I'll get a failure and my power will go up - of course, in such a case, my duration went down.
What is the benefit of an advanced subcomponent?
With just about any medical item (except for the most basic), you'll find that you need to use subcomponents (biological effect controllers, liquid suspensions, etc.) to craft them. When you reach Organic Chemistry 4, you can craft advanced versions of these items. So, what good are they?
Well, let's take a simple Small Stimpack - B, which requires 1 biological effect controller. If you made a basic biological effect controller, it may have 5 charges while an advanced biological effect controller might have 15 charges. Now, when you insert that subcomponent into the Small Stimpack - B schematic, you'll find that the number of charges on the biological effect controller is added to the number of charges on the stimpack. So, for example, if a Small Stimpack - B normally has 12 charges as a base, using a normal biological effect controller with 5 charge will leave you with a stimpack that has 17 charges as a base (You can then raise this number through experimentation). However, if you were to use an advanced biological effect controller with 15 charges, you'd find that the stimpack would have 12+15 or 27 as a base (which could, once again, be raised by experimentation).
Advanced subcomponents won't raise the maximum experimentation percentages you can reach (that is determined by the organic and inorganic resources you use), but they can greatly impact the base values that your stimpack will have before you start the experimentation.
Is it always better to use advanced subcomponents?
Although using advanced subcomponents will always provide you with a more potent final product, it's not always best to use them. In fact, in many cases, it's very cost inefficient to do so.It's important to realize how subcomponents work (which can be read in a different FAQ). The key is that the values of the subcomponents are added to the base values of the product being produced (it's not always 1 to 1, but it's pretty close). Therefore, the benefit of an advanced subcomponent can vary greatly depending upon what it is you're constructing. Here are a couple examples:
Let's start with everyone's favorite medical item, the Small Stimpack - B. This item requires 1 BEC, 1 CRDM, and 1 LS. Suppose we have 2 CRDM's that we could use. First, we have a basic CRDM with a power of 18 that cost 64 credits to construct (this cost is based on 16 units of resources required at 4 credits per unit). Second, we have an advanced CRDM with power of 60 that cost 320 credits to construct (16 units of Herbivore Meat at 15 cpu and 16 units of Class 4 Liquid Petro Fuel at 5 cpu). Let's see what we'd end up with, using these two different subcomponents. As we're not really interested in the values of the other subcomponents or the experimentation results, I'll just make up a number for the power of the basic stimpack and then look at how that number would be changed by adding the advanced component. For comparison, this approach will work fine as all other things would be equal.
Basic CRDM (Power 16)
Small Stimpack - B Power = 350, Cost = 64 + Other Resources
Advanced CRDM (Power 60)
Small Stimpack - B Power = 394, Cost = 320 + Other Resources
As the cost of the other resources is a constant value, the difference in construction costs of these two stimpacks is equal to the difference in construction costs of two CRDM's. So, in this case, the advanced Stim would cost 256 more credits than the basic Stim. For that cost of 256 credits, you've achieved a gain of 12.6% in power. That's not a bad tradeoff, but we're still not completely done with our comparison.
If this stimpack is being made for your own use, it's your decision alone that determines if it is a good idea to use the advanced CRDM or not. However, if you're making these stims for sale, the issue becomes a touch more cloudy.
Let's say that you're planning on selling the basic stim for 800 credits. For simplicity sake, let's assume that the other resource costs tally 400 credits. With that in mind, the basic stim would cost 464 credits to construct and, at a selling price of 800 credits, we've got a profit margin of 72.4%. That's not bad at all. Now, if we want to see the same margin on the advanced stim, what would we have to sell it for? Well, as the advanced stim would cost 720 credits, we need to multiply by 1.724 to get the new selling price. That gives us 1241 credits. So, if that advanced stim would sell for 1241 credits or more, the advanced CRDM is a good investment. If they won't sell at that price but the basic Stims sell at 800 credits, you're really only hurting yourself (in terms of profit margin) by using advanced CRDM's. These numbers are going to vary greatly depending upon your galaxy and economy so I offer these only as an example. It's still up to you to determine if it's a good idea to use them or not.
However, with all of this background behind us, let's look at a different medical product. Let's say we're looking at a Small Stimpack E. A Small Stimpack E requires 3 BEC's, 1 CRDM, and 1 LS. Again, let's assume that we've got the same basic and advanced CRDM's from above but, with the additional subcomponents, we'll raise the cost of "other resources" to 900 credits. However, the big difference here is that the "base" values for a Small Stimpack - E are MUCH greater than those of a Small Stimpack - B. Here are my two sample stimpacks:
Basic CRDM (Power 16)
Small Stimpack - E Power = 900, Cost = 64 + 900 = 964 Credits
Advanced CRDM (Power 60)
Small Stimpack - E Power = 944, Cost = 320 + 900 = 1220 Credits
In this case, the power increase from the basic Stimpack to the advanced Stimpack is a mere 4.8% while the cost increase remains at a constant 256 credits. Obviously, we're getting much less bang for your buck at this level. The reason for this is that, by adding the values of the subcomponents to the base levels of the final product, the percent increase is inversely proportionate to the base values of the product being made (as the base values go up, the percent gain goes down and vice versa). However, the cost of the gain remains static. So, in this case, I think it's pretty easy to see that using an advanced CRDM is just silly. You're basically throwing credits away because it's going to cost you a lot more to produce a product that is only marginally better.
So what conclusions can you make from all this? Well, simply put, you need to put some thought into where you use advanced subcomponents. The more costly the advanced versions (advanced CRDM's can be very costly due to the Herbivore Meat requirement), the more careful you should be about using them. As my example showed, using an advanced CRDM in a Small Stimpack - B might have been a good idea, it seems folly to use it in a Small Stimpack - E. You'd find a similar trend with any other medical products, such as Wound Medpacks or Enhancement Packs. Of course, this comes with one big caveat. If you really must have the power (such as is often the case with enhancement packs), it might be worth spending the extra credits for that marginally better item.
However, there are other items which can be easily crafted using some basic subcomponents without any real loss of power. The Resuscitation Kit is a perfect example. This item requires 1 BEC and 3 LS's. Well, Resuscitation Kits don't really benefit from the extra power provided from an advanced LS, so what's the point in using your best advanced LS's to make them? However, they greatly benefit from the extra charges that can be provided from a nice advanced BEC. So, when I craft a Resuscitation Kit, I often use junk LS's, which are cheap to build, and some of my best BEC's and end up with a Kit with many, many charges for a great price.
So, while it's easy to say that using an advanced component will make your product better, I think it's somewhat naive to say that it's "better" to use them at all times.
How do I use a factory?
Factories can be used to make multiple identical items. By identical, I mean that every item produced in a factory (from a single schematic) will have the same serial number. It will also have the exact same stats as the item from which the new items are based.Okay, to start from the very beginning, if you want to make pharmaceuticals in your factory, you're going to need a Food Factory (for some reason, it isn't called a Food/Chemical Factory like the Food/Chemical Crafting Tool). Most architects can make one of these for you, but they can be a little pricey.
Once you have a factory, you need a manufacturing schematic to load into the factory. A manufacturing schematic tells the factory what to make and what ingredients it needs to make that item. So, let's start by making a manufacturing schematic.
Grab your food and chemical crafting tool and go near a food and chemical crafting station. Load the schematic of the item you want to mass produce into your crafting tool. Let's say we're making a biological effect controller, so you'll need 6 units of organic and 6 units of inorganic. Once you've got the schematic loaded, insert the resources that you're planning on using to do the factory run. Then, assemble the item. At this point, you'll be given 3 options, experimentation, creating a prototype, or creating a manufacturing schematic. Most likely, you want to experiment on the item at this point to make it better. Once you're done experimenting, you'll be returned to this screen. When that happens, press the "Create Manufacturing Schematic" button. This will take you forward to a screen where you can name the item (I usually leave this alone, but you can change it if you'd like) and you can set the manufacturing limit for the schematic. There is a slider that you can use to vary the limit from 1-100, but you can also type an extra zero in there to make a limit of 1000. Typing anything over 1000 results in an error message. If you only have enough resources for 50 items, you might want to set it at 50, but I usually set mine to the maximum and, if I run out of resources before I make 1000 items, I simply destroy the schematic.
Now that you have your factory, you're going to need to find a place to put down your factory. Put it somewhere convenient (and preferably near a crafting station - find a house nearby that has one or buy a droid with one in it). Once your factory is put down, you'll want to load it with some credits and power. Factories require 1,440 credits per day for upkeep and 1,200 power per day (although power is only used while it's running). You can accomplish these tasks by accessing the "Pay Maintenance" and "Deposit Power" options in the radial menu. To see what maintenance and power is left, you can check by using the "Status" command.
Now that your factory is set to go, you need to load that manufacturing schematic. To do so, select "Access Schematic Slot" from the factory Options menu. Find the schematic you want to use and click the "Use Schematic" button. Your factory now knows what it is going to build and what it needs to build it.
So, the next step is to load the ingredients into the Ingredient hopper. You can access this hopper by selecting "Ingredient Hopper" from the Options menu. Simply drag the resources you want to use in your factory from your inventory into the ingredient hopper. Note that you MUST use the EXACT same resources you used to create the manufacturing schematic. Factories make identical items from identical resources. That means that if you used Tatooinian Domesticated Oats called Oimiev to make the schematic, you MUST put Oimiev in the ingredient hopper. Nothing else will do, not even a different type of Tatooinian Domesticated Oats. So, if you're going to do a large run of identical items, make sure you have a large number of resources to do it. If you've forgotten what resources you used to make the manufacturing schematic, you can bring up the ingredient list by selecting the "Ingredient List" option in the Options menu.
Once you have your ingredients in place, you're set to go. Now, just click on the "Start Manufacturing" button under options and you'll get an activation message letting you know that the factory has started. Items can take a while to produce (roughly 8 seconds per complexity, so about 2 minutes for a biological effect controller) and will eventually show up in a factory crate in the Output Hopper. Factory crates of medical items can hold up to 50 items - the crates only take up 1 inventory space. So, with 6 crates of woundpacks, it would be possible to be walking around with 300 woundpacks (50 for each attribute) and have plenty of space to spare!
Okay, so that take care of making simple items in a factory, but what about more complex items, like a Small Stimpack - B? Well, like I said earlier, all ingredients must be identical. Because a Small Stimpack - B requires subcomponents, you'll want to first do factory runs of each of the subcomponents. This will yield crates of subcomponents that are all identical (they all have the same serial number). When you're done with that, take 1 of each subcomponent out of each crate (1 BEC, 1 LS, and 1 CRDM - you can take one out through the radial menu or simply by double-clicking the crate) and use those to make the manufacturing schematic for the Small Stimpack - B. When you load the manufacturing schematic for the stimpack into the factory, simply load the crates of subcomponents that you just used into the ingredient hopper along with the organics and inorganics that you used.
A few other notes about factories. If you ever need to redeed a factory (in order to move it, perhaps), make sure you've removed everything from it. Empty the ingredient and output hoppers, as well as the schematic slot. In order to reclaim the deed, you'll need to have at least 3000 credits in the factory. Those credits will be used up in the redeeding process, but any extra credits and power will remain.
Also, once a factory is running, the Options menu changes to have only one option: "Stop Manufacturing." However, you can actually access the Output Hopper by opening the radial menu and selecting "Options." Don't select "Stop Manufacturing" under Options, just select "Options" itself. This will open the output hopper. This hopper will refresh automatically when items are added to it and you can readily pull items from here while the factory is running.
The Output Hopper of a factory also makes for an excellent storage space. It can hold up to 100 items and when we're talking about crates of up to 50 items each, that's 5,000 items. Once you remove something from the output hopper, though, you can't put it back in. So, if you just made a large batch of items that you wish to sell, you might want to leave some of them in the output hopper until you have somewhere to put them.
Why can't I see any schematic for Small Stimpack D (or any other D+ level schematic for that matter)?
Some schematics require the use of a Private rather than Public crafting station in order to be assembled. You need be near a Personal Crafting Station or a Droid with a Food & Chem Crafting Module built into it (which counts as a personal station, even if it isn't your droid) in order for these schematics to appear. The ones in town are public and simply will not work for you. It should be noted that some of the publicly available Food & Chemical Crafting Stations you might see in some of the outposts on the advanced planets will act like a Personal Crafting Station for this purpose.Which creatures drop the best Herbivore/Avian Meat?
There is no single creature that drops the best meat. Rather, meat (along with other creature resources, such as hide or bones) shift around the galaxy just like other resources, like copper or vegetables. One week, Perleks on Lok might be dropping excellent quality avian meat and the next week, they might be dropping horrible quality meat. If you want the best meat, you're going to have to keep on top of what's out there, just as you have to do when you're tracking harvestable resources.Some people say that the "advanced" planets, such as Dathomir, Lok, etc. usually have the best herbivore/avian meat, but I'm still not convinced this is true. I think the shifts are totally random. The only benefit from the advanced planets is that, usually, the creatures there are larger (and tougher), and therefore drop larger quantities of meat. Larger quantities dropped means it's much easier to gather large quantities for factory runs of pharmaceuticals.
As a convenience, I have listed here some (probably not all - but all that I know of) the creatures that drop herbivore or avian meat on each of the planets.
Doctor FAQ part 4
What's better, using Stimpack B's with First Aid 4 or Using modified Stimpack C's with Pharmacology 3?
Personally, I think using Stimpack C's with Pharmacology 3 is a better deal. For those of you not familiar with this, let me explain. Stimpack C's normally have a medicine use requirement of 31 or 32. Pharmacology 3 gives the owner a medicine use skill of only 30. However, any medicine crafter worth his/her salt can experiment Stim C's down to a requirement of 30 without sacrificing much in the way of power. In addition, Stimpack C's aren't much more difficult to make than Stimpack B's. B's require 12 units of organic and 12 units of inorganic (along with subcomponents). C's require the exact same subcomponents and 14 organics and 14 inorganics. However, the difference in power is quite dramatic. A good stimpack B will heal for about 350 while a good stimpack C will heal for about 550.
It has been brought up, however, that some doctors sell Stimpack C's for a great deal more than B's (even though they cost little more to produce). If availability of Stimpack C's is a problem in your area, you might still want to use Stimpack B's with a level of First Aid to boost effectiveness. This is really a judgment call on your part but I bring it up as an opportunity to save a few skill points.
The upside is that you can spend 5 less skill points and heal yourself about as well. I say that you'll only heal yourself about as well because First Aid offers a bonus to healing damage. Therefore a Stimpack B that heals for 350 in the hands of someone with First Aid 4 will heal for considerably more than its base value. The Stimpack C in the hands of someone with Pharmacology 3 (and no First Aid) will heal for about it's base amount, making the two roughly equivalent.
What is an appropriate tip for a medic?
Obviously, this is up to the tipper and it's a touchy subject, but let me explain a few things. In order to make a medpack (let's say a medpack A, which is the most basic), a doctor must use about 50 units of resources. Expect a medpack like this to sell on the market for about 400 credits (give or take a bit for the galaxy/economy of your area). That will provide about 20 charges. So, the doctor spends 20 credits every time he/she heals you. I consider it good form to tip at least enough to cover the doctor's costs. So, 5 heals would be worth about 100 credits. Note that medpack A's heal wounds very slowly. The more powerful meds cost more and heal faster.
Now, this certainly isn't set in stone and I don't really recommend anyone use this exact formula. Like I said before, medpacks come in many shapes and sizes. A medpack E would fix up horrible wounds in a matter of seconds while someone using medpack A's would spend an awfully long time to do the same thing. Of course, a medpack E is MUCH more expensive to make (or buy) than a medpack A.
Most folks seem to go with a system where they pay for how much damage was healed (myself included) and I think it works quite well. If you tip a few credits for every point of wounds healed, you'll find that the doctors will like you quite a bit. Tip a bit more and they'll like you even more.
Also, don't forget about tipping medics in the field. The stimpacks they use on you in the field cost money/time just like the medpacks they use on you in the med center. Just because you're in the heat of battle when you get healed doesn't mean you can't take a few seconds to tip a medic once the fighting subsides. If you don't want to deal with it during combat, tip your medic before or after your trip. Also, if you're out hunting creatures, you could always pick something that you could pull meat off of. I'm sure most doctors (myself included) would be happy to come along and heal you with good meat as payment (especially good herbivore meat).
I often heal for different amounts than what is listed on my medicines. Why?
Certain medic and doctor skills grant bonuses to using medicines. At novice medic (with no skill points spent on first aid) you'll heal damage and wounds at roughly the same rate as what is listed on the medicine (with a bit of variance thrown in for good measure).However, as you advance through the First Aid tree in the Medic skills, you'll gain bonuses to healing damage. Note that this bonus is for healing damage, not wounds. Your ability to heal wounds will remain unchanged as long as you're a medic. So, if you have first aid 4, you can use a stimpack more effectively than someone who does not.
Once you make it to Doctor, you can begin getting bonuses to healing wounds by advancing through the Wound Treatment tree. Now, you gain no further bonuses to healing damage, but you'll be able to use medpacks to heal wounds better as you progress.
What does the register command do?
If you look at the global map (Ctrl+V), you can open the folder on the right side named "Medical Centers" to see where the medical centers are on the map. To the left of the medical center name, you might see an icon. These icons have 3 different meanings.
- Sun - A doctor is in the medical center and waiting to heal wounds there.
- Moon - A patient is in the medical center and waiting for a doctor to heal them. (There are no registered medical staff there.)
- No Icon - Impossible to register at this location.
As a doctor (you get this skill at Novice Doctor), you can enter a medical center and type /register to register yourself with the medical center. Once you do this, the Sun icon will appear next to the medical center in the global map. As soon as you leave the medical center, however, you will "unregister" automatically. If there is not another doctor present who has registered, the icon in the global map will change to a moon or disappear entirely, depending on whichever is appropriate.This isn't a horribly useful command in heavily populated cities, but it can be very helpful in lesser populated areas where people don't always want to trek to the medical center only to find it void of medical personnel.
I have also hear rumors that you gain a healing bonus by registering with a medical center (even a 25% bonus in a detachment HQ), but I have not confirmed this.
Can you enhance a pet?
Absolutely. Additionally, even though you don't get experience for healing a pet's damage, you do gain experience for buffing a pet. Of course, pets don't perform special attacks so buffing their strength and quickness stats is pointless. Also, for pets with 9000 HAMS, health and action buffs aren't always that essential, either. After all, what's another 1500 points, when you've already got 9000? However, buffing constitution and stamina is a wonderful boost for pets (especially the ones with giant HAMS). With buffs to constitution and stamina, the pets will regenerate hit points much faster which means they need to be healed much less often, which any pet owner will love. Note that if a pet is stored in a data pad, the buffs disappear, but they can be rebuffed as soon as they are brought back out.
How do buffs work? how do I know how powerfull they are?
Interactive Calculator
Interactive Calculator Version 2
Total Buff Power
Heal Power of Pack x Environment x [(100 + Wound Treatment Skill + Bivoli + BE modded clothes) / 100] x Med City Bonus
for example:
900 Heal Power Buff pack
110 Med Module Droid
100 Master Doctor Skill
25 Bivoli
25 BE clothes
10% Medical City Specialization Bonus
900 x 1.1 x [(100+100+25+25)/100] x 1.1 = 2722 total buff
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now how Battle Fatigue affects this...
If player Battle Fatigue is 0 - 250 = no change in buff value.
If player Battle Fatigue is greater than 250 then...
Buff - [Buff x (Battle Fatigue-250) / 1000] = Buff after Battle Fatigue
so with 696 Battle Fatigue (Randomly chosen number)
2722 - [ 2722 x (696 - 250) / 1000] = 1507 buffed after 696 Battle Fatigue
Helpful Notes:
How do bio-engineered clothes work?
Wearing clothing with bonuses to various skills can make you more formidable than the average joe on the street. There are a number of different bonuses that you can acquire and there are a couple different ways that you can get them.
The most common type of enhancement is to get some clothing which has been crafted using tissues created by a Bio-Engineer. Bio-Engineers can make a number of different tissues with various effects but, most important for doctors are the passive and active biosensors, which give bonuses to injury and wound treatment. (They both behave the same, but active biosensors grant larger bonuses than passive ones.) Bonuses to injury treatment will impact your ability to heal damage while bonuses to wound treatment will impact your ability to heal wounds and apply enhancement packs.
It is also possible to find "skill tapes" or "armor attachments" which can be put into sockets of clothing. Note that this is very different than the tissues that a Bio-Engineer makes. Tissues from a Bio-Engineer must be crafted ahead of time and put into the clothing by the tailor when the clothing is made. Skill tapes, on the other hand, are inserted into clothing with sockets after the clothing has been crafted. (The more skilled the tailor, the more likely the clothing will have sockets and the more sockets it will have - I have seen clothing with up to 4 sockets.) Skill tapes and armor attachments can not be made by anyone - they can only be found by looting enemies and containers throughout the game and, usually, they are only dropped by very powerful NPC's. However, with skill tapes, you can acquire all sorts of bonuses, including bonuses to medical experimentation or medical assembly or any combat profession out there.
While this all sounds great and as if you have a potentially limitless form of character advancement, there is a catch. Any bonuses are capped at +25. That includes bonuses from tissues and skill tapes/armor attachments. Even though it is possible to wear clothing with higher bonuses than +25, the benefit caps at that point. (Note that your skill mods will show +55 or whatever you have, but the effective use is only +25. You are essentially wasting those other 30 bonus points.)
Also of note is that, through skill tapes, you can increase your medical experimentation skill. Every 10 points of medical experimentation equates to 1 extra experimentation point for you to use. As this is also capped at +25, anything beyond +20 will only decrease your chances of critical failures when experimenting. There is no way to have more than 12 experimentation points.
Are there any unique loot drops that are good for doctors? (Janta Blood)
There is only one known item that can be looted that is specifically for doctors. As you might have guessed from the title of this question, that item is Janta Blood.
Janta Blood is used as a replacement for a Biological Effect Controller. The good thing about Janta Blood is that the power rating on it is very high, unlike a normal Biological Effect Controller. The most common Janta Bloods have only 10 charges, but have 100 power (as opposed to the 10-20 that an Advanced Biological Effect Controller has). There have been reports of more powerful bloods being found. Also, when these are looted, they are often dropped in small bunches (of 3 or 4) in which case all of them are identical (having the same serial number) so that they can be used in more advanced meds, such as enhancement packs, which require identical subcomponents.
Janta Blood can only be found by looting Jantas. Jantas are NPC's that are found on Dantooine - they resemble cavemen. The power of the Jantas range from medium to high and some can have some pretty high resistance, as well - be wary when fighting them. Also, they are social so, if you attack one that is in a group, expect the others to come to help. There doesn't seem to be any correlation to the type of Jantas that drop the blood. I've heard of people getting them off warriors or shamans, which are some of the more powerful, while the only ones I ever found came off a scout, which is one of the weaker versions.
Of special note, there is a cave of Jantas in the far SE of Dantooine (7000, -4000) and a camp of Jantas in the SW (-3900, -5500). You can find about 30 Jantas in the cave and, the only time I visited the camp, I found only 2. I usually have the most luck finding random spawns of them in the far West reaches of Dantooine, west of the Imperial Outpost.
Even if you know where to find the Jantas, Janta Blood is a fairly rare loot drop - I've killed a lot of Jantas and only once have I picked up any Janta Blood from them.
The Doctor Profession: for Holocron Users (Guide to Fast Progression)
So you've gotten a holocron and it has told you to master doctor and now you want to know what the fastest way to get through doctor is, right? Well, here are some tips to get you to master doctor in no time. Keep in mind that these tips, for the most part, involve no acts that I would consider "doctorly." Using these techniques, you are using the skills of the profession, but not really putting them to any use except to perfect them. However, here are some tips for those of you that want to do nothing but master one of the best professions in the game (at least by my opinion).
The bulk of the experience you'll have to earn to make master doctor is medical experience. You get this experience by healing damage and wounds, enhancing players' attributes, or by raising the dead. Note that you DO NOT earn experience for healing your own damage or enhancing yourself. As that's the case, almost all of these tips are going to require someone else's help. So, as this is going to be the bulk of the work, here are some ways to gain medical experience very quickly.
- The Tumble to Standing Technique - Buy your self a crate of stimpacks - you'll probably want stim B's. Next, find a friend (that has Advanced Ranged Weapon Support Abilities from the Marksman Profession) and find a nice secluded place where you won't bother anyone (and no one will bother you). Usually, your own house or a building in a city work well. Have your friend write a macro to "tumble-to-standing" over and over again and have him run that macro so that he/she continually tumbles into the corner. Doing so will cause the person tumbling to use up a lot of action pool points. Now, write a macro for yourself that causes your character to heal the tumbler periodically. You'll want to work out the time delay so that you heal when the tumbler is almost out of action. You get experience based on the number of points healed, not the number of stims used, so you want to maximize the amount of damage you heal per stim use. You can potentially use this technique to make it all the way to master doctor, but you'll find that, once you get past Master Medic and you start to need a lot of medical experience to advance, this technique is a little slow.
- The Burnt Pet Technique - This option is available if you have a friend that is a commando that has a flamethrower. Buy a crate of health wound medpacks and get your commando friend to torch your pet periodically. Then, continually heal the heavy wounds that the burning attack causes. Again, these actions can be set to macros to speed up the process.
- The Cantina Medic - Get yourself some stimpacks and head to the cantina. You'll find that many of the dancers use up a lot of action points doing their acts. Heal away to gain some experience. To maximize the experience gain, get a couple of the dancers to macro and create a macro to heal them as they perform. This is a readily available option as you'll likely find a lot of dancers in major cities, but it tends to be one of the slower methods of gaining XP.
- Enhance Your Experience - Once you've made it to doctor, you'll find that healing damage with stimpacks doesn't get you as far as it did when you were going through Medic. Once you've earned novice doctor, get to Wound Treatment 2 as quickly as you can (using one of the aforementioned methods). Once you've made it to Wound Treatment 2, you gain the ability to use enhancement packs. Now, earn some more experience so that you can get a box or two in medical knowledge and find a doctor that will sell you enhancement packs to match your medicine use level. With some enhancement packs in hand, call your pet, enhance your pet, store your pet. Repeat. You'll find gaining experience using enhancement packs goes VERY fast.
The rest of your experience will be gained through medicine crafting experience. This is fairly tough grind for most doctors as there aren't any items that really provide a ton of xp for crafting them. Throughout medic, practice crafting Chemical Release Duration Mechanisms (8 Organic + 8 Chemical) or Solid Delivery Shells (8 Organic + 8 Metal) or Liquid Suspensions (6 Organic + 6 Water) until you make it to Organic Chemistry 4. Once you've reached that point, you can switch to Advanced Biological Effect Controllers, which require 36 units of resources (18 Lokian Wild Wheat + 18 Tatooinian Fiberplast). Of course, switching to these will be a tad more expensive as Lokian Wild Wheat and Tatooinian Fiberplast are always in demand. You can make it all the way to Master Doctor using Chemical Release Duration Mechanisms or Solid Delivery Shells and it will probably be cheaper, but it'll take a lot longer, as well.What can a Droid do for a Doctor?
Almost every Master Doctor (and plenty of others that aren't yet masters) have a droid. Why? What can a droid do for you? Well, a droid is essential for a couple reasons. Let me explain.First of all, droids have a number of capabilities. They can be used in combat, they can store items and/or data, they can allow you to heal outside of a medical center/camp, and they can be used as a personal crafting station. However, not every droid does all of these things.
When a droid is constructed, it is really "tailored" to the requirements of the buyer. For me, I purchased an R2 droid that allowed for item storage, healing outside of a med center, and can be used as a Food and Chemical Crafting Station. The most important aspects are the abilities to heal outside of a medical center and to use the droid as a crafting station.
Let's discuss healing outside of the medical center. Any location in which you can heal wounds has a "medical rating." That rating directly applies to how well you can heal wounds (this also applies to application of enhancements) in that location. A medical center has a rating of 1 (or 100% ability), while a basic camp has a rating of .65 (or 65% ability). Therefore, your healing abilities in a basic camp are going to be greatly reduced compared to how they would be in a medical center. Your droid behaves much the same way. A droid must have a medical module installed in order for it to allow healing outside the medical center. If you have a droid with one of these modules, any place in town becomes a medical center. (However, I've found that my droid does not work in most cantinas.) How well you heal using your droid is another story - it's really based upon the quality of the medical module that was installed. A poor medical module will only allow you to heal as well as if you were in a basic camp while the best medical modules allow you to heal better using your droid than you could in a medical center! The best I have seen (and I use personally) is a medical module with a rating of 1.1 (or 110% ability). Remember, this applies to wound treatment as well as enhancement application, so it's best to use a good droid for applying enhancements.
Of course, having a droid that also doubles as a crafting station can be a great thing. Need a stimpack E or an enhancement pack D? No need to track down a crafting station - just pull out your droid.
The model of the droid has no impact on how it works - it's all about what is built into the droid. I went with an R2 droid because I liked it and it offered a few extra options. However, if you're looking for a less costly solution, you could get all the ability you needed in a cheap mouse droid.
I have really only "glossed over" the important aspects of owning a droid and I claim to be no sort of expert on the subject. Instead, I refer you to the website J'Vee Technologies, which was put together by a droid engineer and explains very well the ins and outs of buying and owning a droid.
Doctor FAQ part 5
Temporary Enemy Flags (TEF) and Healing Implications
From time to time, it's possible that a Medic or Doctor can end up being a rather unwilling participant in the Global Civil War (GCW). It's important to understand how the TEF system works so that you can protect yourself properly. This can be very important for some medics/doctors that don't have the skills to defend themselves from the combat players out there.
First of all, understand the colored names. If you're a neutral player, everyone's name will be blue. That means that you don't readily know what faction anyone is aligned to, Rebel, Imperial, or Neutral. If you join a faction (either Rebel or Imperial), however, you'll begin seeing people with purple names. Those people are aligned to the same faction you are. So, if you're Imperial and see someone's name in purple, you know that he/she is also Imperial. Everyone else will appear blue - they might be Rebels and they might be neutral - you just don't know. This, of course, is all reversed if you join the Rebellion.
Second, we need to understand the TEF. Covert players are allowed to partake in the GCW, but only on a limited basis. They can not attack other players directly, but they can attack NPC's of the opposite faction. This means that a Covert Rebel can't attack an Overt Imperial (and vice versa), but the Covert Rebel CAN attack a stormtrooper. When and if that Rebel decides to attack that stormtrooper, however, that Rebel gains a TEF - he has made his alignment known to the Empire, if only for a short while. At this point, the Overt Imperial could open fire on the TEF'd Covert Rebel. If left alone and the Covert Rebel doesn't attack any more Imperial NPC's, the TEF will go away in about 10-15 minutes.
Now, who can you heal? Well, you can heal anyone that is of the same faction as yourself or anyone that doesn't appear to be opposed to your faction. For neutrals, that means you can heal anyone that isn't overt and doesn't have a TEF. For Rebels, you can heal anyone except an Overt Imperial or a Covert Imperial with a TEF. For Imperials, you can heal anyone except an Overt Rebel or a Covert Rebel with a TEF. If you try to heal someone opposed to your alignment, you simply get a message that reads, "It would be unwise to help such a patient." and you won't be allowed to perform the action. You can consult the following grid to see who you can heal.
But, just because you CAN heal someone doesn't mean that it's always safe to do so. If you heal someone that has made their alignment known to the opposing side (let's say you're a Rebel medic and you heal an Overt Rebel), you have also made your alignment known - you'll get your own TEF, just as if you had attacked a stormtrooper. The same would occur if you were to heal a TEF'd Rebel rather than an Overt Rebel.
So how do you know if someone has a TEF? Target the player and look at the status effects on that player (this is where you'd also see poison, dizzy, stun, blind, etc.) If you see a small flag, that means that the person has a TEF. You might want to consider waiting for the TEF to wear off before you heal the person to avoid getting your own TEF.
The Small Stimpack - A+
The Small Stimpack - A+ is an item that was added with the mid February publish. This is an item that can not be acquired by simply earning skill boxes in medic or doctor - it is acquired through a quest (or series of quests, rather).To begin the quest, you must speak with Melios Purl, an NPC standing the middle of the Bestine Medical Center. He gives you three missions, in all. The first is to rescue a woman and bring her back to the medical center safely. The second is to kill a mutant womp rat and retrieve a sample of it. The third and final mission to to deliver an item to someone waiting near Bestine. All of these missions can be accomplished by someone with very little combat skill (the mutant womp rat was the only thing I had to fight) and take under 10 minutes to complete if you've got a speeder.
For your efforts, you will be given the schematic for a Small Stimpack - A+, which behaves exactly like any other stimpack, healing health and action damage while doing nothing for mind damage. Note that the schematic is not immediately placed into your datapad. Rather, when you receive it, it appears in your inventory. From there, you can double-click it to "learn" the new schematic.
This is a limited use schematic - it has only 5 uses. However, with each use, it is possible to generate a manufacturing schematic to produce 1000 of them. So, even with a limited use schematic, you could potentially make 5000 of these things. Below are the stats.
Ingredients:
Inorganic: 8
Organic: 8
Experimental Effectiveness: 66% OQ, 33% PE
Experimental Charges: 66% OQ, 33% PE
Range of Charges: 14 - 24
Range of Power: 95-150
Med Use: 5
This item is really nothing more than an advanced version of the Small Stimpack - A. As the Small Stimpack - A maxes out at roughly 20 charges and 100 power, this schematic offers a little extra punch for the same cost in requirements.