Step-by-Step White Knight Start-Up Guide
Purpose
This guide is intended to provide new players with a structured route for starting strong, exploring the map, discovering features, and becoming familiar with the mechanics. This guide provides you with a few character builds, and a route to take to get set up. You'll learn the following:
- Finding jobs and earning your first caps
- Getting your first level ups and boosting gun skills so you can fight
- Exploring the quests in a logical order and getting Support Perks along the way
- Gathering resources, mining and crafting your own fresh gear
- Becoming a crafting professional so you can craft even better gear
- Building your own base, and a network of tents and Safe Houses all over the map
- Embracing the game's economy, and making more caps via Bartering with NPC merchants
- Buying a vehicle for faster, smoother travels
- Great places to hunt and level up
- Fight hostile encounters in Real-Time and win
- Open locked containers and find numerous items like blueprints
- Get a human NPC companion to travel with you and assist you in combat
Play Style
White Knight means you're a total good-guy, so you won't be murdering children or enslaving anyone according to this guide. If you're okay with that, then use this guide. If however you already know you're going to be a bad-guy, then don't even bother reading this - use some other guide instead.
Orientation
One of the very first things to accept is that, while you can play this game with only one character, a multi-character approach better lends itself to the game's build limitations. This guide will start you off with one lead character, but he is a support provider for your additional characters who specialize more in fighting. So you start with support, work hard to build up some infrastructure, then add fighters to your network. Your fighters will thus be well supported.
For best results, switch to Real-Time mode. You may be a big fan of the old original Fallout games which were in Turn-Based, and you can play in TB here, but you'll be exploring quests according to this guide, and most quests are much more enjoyable in RT. Some are even so bad in TB that players call them bugged. A 30 minute fun RT quest can become a 2-hour snore-fest in TB mode. We cannot have you falling asleep so...go into your FOnline Reloaded game directory on your computer and find the two Config files:
FOConfig.exe
- Keyboard Language Switch: Alt+Shift
- Always Run: enabled
- Default Combat Mode: Real-Time
- Ammo Amount...Display: Lines and Numbers
- Damage Indication on Head: Delay 5000ms
FO2238Config.exe
- Enable All Displays: Player Names, On-Screen Awareness, TC Countdowns
- Display TC Zones: Show Area
- Set Main File Paths: master.dat and critter.dat
- Set Key Bindings: 'R' for Weapon Reload, 'X' for Detonator, 'S' for Super Stimpak, Control+Q to Disable Aim.
- Set other Key Bindings as you see fit. Maybe one for Healing Powder or regular Stimpaks, other keys to aim.
Remember this is not "Fallout 2 Online". There is no such game. This is a massive multi-player and it runs mostly in Real-Time. The game's best features are in RT too, like Town Control, but even public locations are all in RT anyway. If you go to Ares Rocket Silo, you're in RT regardless of your setting. Same with Warehouse, all the PvP in New Reno, etc. When you travel in a vehicle (including the vertibird!), you will get into forced encounters. You can escape quickly if you're in RT mode, but you're stuck there until combat ends if you're in TB. I hope you win that fight or you lose your car. Easier just to get used to the fast-paced world of Real-Time. You'll level up faster too.
That said, TB can be fun too, but TB characters have specific builds with certain perks. Player-Killers will set Turn-Based traps on the map. It is times like those when having a TB-optimized fighter can be fun. Watch for red dots on the map where PKs have lit flares to attract victims. Go there if you think you can handle it, but otherwise avoid them.
A Build
This guide is not about perfecting or debating builds. You're presented here with a PvE Lead Character Start-Up build. It works. It's just a support character so don't worry about combat optimization - that comes later with your fighters.
You can alter this build if you like, but remember: this guide is written with specific goals and steps, so if you change it too much, you'll break the guide a bit.
- Strength 5: Allows Adrenaline Rush, a popular perk for raising defense in combat.
- Perception 6: Without Close Combat skill, PE 6 is what you need to get Awareness, an important Support Perk.
- Endurance 10: 10 is considered mandatory for almost all who want to stay alive, even PvE.
- Charisma 1: Seems low, but you can get a NPC human companion easily and second one later with enough leveling.
- Intelligence 7
- Agility 10: Work and shoot faster with max Agility.
- Luck 1: Nobody can have everything. This is not a sniper - that's later.
- Trait 1: Fast Shot means you shoot faster. You cannot aim with VATS but this is just a support character.
- Trait 2: Good Natured means you get a NPC human companion sooner.
- Tag Skill 1: Small Guns is standard for a support role, and it starts higher than Big Guns or Energy Weapons, and has the support perk, (Boneyard Guard), that gives a small boost at level 1.
- Tag Skill 2: Lockpick. This gets your lead character into opening locked containers sooner, and you find good useable loot that way, including combat armor, weapons, drugs, and ammo.
- Tag Skill 3: Outdoorsman allows you to travel faster and much more safely, which is important since you'll be carrying materials and valuable things to sell.
Register this guy and get ready for the ride of your life...