Escape from Tarkov: The Definitive Guide to Economy,Player Market and Card Hunting

In Escape from Tarkov, Skirmishes, raids into dangerous areas, and survival are just one-half of Escape from Tarkov. Another layer that detains players for hundreds of hours is the economy. Earlier we introduced the gameplay, essence and goals definitive guide in Escape from Tarkov. Today we take a look at The Definitive Guide to Economy, Player Market and Card Hunting.

You can pull almost anything from the location. Food, parts, chemicals, cartridges, weapons, items of clothing, fabrics, bolts, nuts, nails, and cans of fuel are needed for crafting, exchange, or costs some Tarkov money from merchants. There is a mountain of loot around, and your sacred duty, as a real gamer, is to take it all to yourself. It doesn't matter how much it weighs. It doesn't matter that you no longer have room in your pockets for another handful of nails. You have to endure everything!

This feature divides players into two types. Those who go to raids for PvP are not afraid to impose a fight and earn exclusively by killing. They are called "children" (chads). These are standard shooter players who are only interested in frags and shooting from cool guns in Escape from Tarkov. Loot is also essential for them to but still secondary. If the quests do not ask to collect loot, they do not do it - quickly kill the "full" (this is the name of the players who entered the raid in full and very expensive uniforms), undress his corpse to the last cowards, and take all the loot for yourself.

The other half are rats. They are more interested in the financial side of the issue:

• Improving their shelter

• Accumulating an extra million rubles in reserve

• Enclosing all the loot places

• They go on raids not for war but things. Yes, rats are not so good at fighting, and sometimes they are even afraid to fight - but they have money for the war.

At the beginning of the game, I was able to find an incomprehensible purple key, which I did not attach importance to - I did not know what to do with it. When I opened trading with other players, I realized that I am a happy owner of five million rubles.

But why collect bolts and nuts in a hardcore shooter? First, the exchange with traders: some traders exchange specific trash for the necessary equipment. Three canned food for AKM, a bunch of pliers and tape measures for a durable Altyn helmet, two packs of self-tapping screws for a hemostatic stopping bleeding, and so on.

You are, secondly, improving your shelter. Each player has a base somewhere underground, where he puts his swag and hides between attempts to escape from Tarkov. You can expand your cache in the shelter, where you store stolen goods and build valuable compartments.

For example, a bitcoin farm that uses a generator (which consumes fuel from canisters mined in raids) and the video cards you find to create bitcoins. High passive income allows you to spend a little more money on your equipment. If you are unlucky and you are sinking in cash reserves, tomorrow you will mine bitcoin, and at its expense, you will recover your losses.

Thirdly, the mined can be driven to the merchants. Different people in business buy other goods. It is better to push parts and weapons to the Mechanics, medicines, and any household waste - to the Therapist, clothes, and armor - to the Ragger. The Buyer takes everything in general, but at unprofitable prices. This is instead an option when you cannot sell the item to any of the other merchants.

The Buyer is a unique character. All the goods that the players sold him can be bought from him - but with a considerable mark-up. For a long time, he was rather useless - it was too expensive to take anything from him. However, with the last patch, a reputation was added to it: it introduced several functions, which we will talk about later, and also affects the price of its assortment, gives a discount on paid outlets, and opens a special offer with utmost trust. By becoming a Buyer Pet, you can buy items that other players have lost in the raid.

However, these are all children's games. The actual economic simulator within Escape from Tarkov begins when your PMC opens a flea market - a common market for all players, where they trade loot with each other.

You put the obtained machine on the exchange at your price, which can be strikingly higher (or less) than the merchants. Successful deals bring you money and a reputation in the flea market, which allows you to list more items for sale.

If you like auctions in MMORPG, then at this moment, you blow your mind. The game starts to feel completely different. It suddenly turns out that useless packs of sugar, which at best you could sell to the Therapist for a couple of thousand or eat, are estimated by players at an insane 70-100 thousand rubles because a very necessary moonshine is brewed from sugar. And the keys that you lazily gleaned from the jackets hanging in the houses, in their price jump from 20 thousand to five million - while the Therapist and the Buyer are unlikely to give more than 60 thousand rubles for them.

Tactics change instantly: now you accurately build goals and routes for loot and go precisely for those things that cost money. And if you are lucky enough to find a laboratory card - consider that you hit the jackpot.

Escape from Tarkov has a Laboratory location - a place with the most valuable and rare loot. Entry there is only with access cards (which cost 200-400 thousand rubles, depending on the situation in the game). Wilds and petitioners cannot enter this location - only raiders and PMCs go there. Insurance also does not work - if you die in the Laboratory, you will lose your belongings one hundred percent. All these difficulties pay off by the fact that in return from the Laboratory, you can take out the rarest and most valuable loot in the game: expensive stimulants, rare jewelry, and weapon attachments, intelligence, and so on.

All Escape from Tarkov players dream of the scarce colored access cards that open up special loot compartments inside the Laboratory. The most valuable and rare is the red card, the price of which reaches 40 million in-game rubles at the flea market. To realize how valuable loot it is, search the Internet for cuts from streams where players come across this treasure - people naturally go crazy with happiness.

Let's go back to the flea market. There you can trade any items that you got on sorties or create in a shelter by crafting. But there is one but. The thing must have a checkmark "obtained in the raid."

The bottom line is that you can put on a flea market and hand over for most tasks only those you found directly in the raid and did not take out in the next one. Everything you bring from your stash becomes non-raid - because it was not picked up on the map as part of the last sortie.

That is, if you kill a player during a raid and take his machine gun, it will not be a raid one - because the player did not find it in the same charge but brought it with him from another place. The only concession is that your crafted items also get a "found in the raid" checkbox. Therefore, it is possible to trade the goods that you produce in the hideout.

Let's go back to the flea market. There you can trade any items that you got on sorties or create in a shelter by crafting. But there is one but. The thing must have a checkmark "obtained in the raid."

The bottom line is that you can put on a flea market and hand over for most tasks only those you found directly in the raid and did not take out in the next one. Everything you bring from your stash becomes non-raid - because it was not picked up on the map as part of the last sortie.

That is, if you kill a player during a raid and take his machine gun, it will not be a raid one - because the player did not find it in the same charge but brought it with him from another place. The only concession is that your crafted items also get a "found in the raid" checkbox. Therefore, it is possible to trade the goods that you produce in the hideout.

This very peculiar mechanic exists to solve several gameplay problems. The first is the ax-pickers. Players who enter the raid with melee weapons run to a loot place, take all the most valuable and fly back like a bullet. Did they die in the process? They did not lose anything. They went out into the raid naked. Did you manage to take out the loot? They have free valuables stolen from the "right" players right from under their noses.

Due to the dominance of axes, a new condition was introduced: if you removed the loot from the location too quickly and did not earn enough experience in the process (did not spend a lot of time at the site, did not pick up a bunch of items, did not kill a single enemy), you are given the status of "running. " He removes the "found in the raid" checkbox from the things he got. You can still use them and sell NPCs, but you won't be able to put non-raid items on the flea market and turn in non-raid things on the quest.

The second is a banal deception of the market. If you could trade any item at a flea market, it would simply destroy the economy regardless of where you found it. It is enough to buy up the entire delivery of vending machines from merchants and put them on a flea market at an inflated price. With the mechanic "you can only sell what you honestly find," such a trick is impossible.

Another detail that is closely related to ticks and hatchets is pouches or protected containers. Small inventory cases hold very little loot, but they have one peculiarity: everything in the bags is not lost after death, and the pouches themselves cannot be removed from the corpse. It is convenient to carry valuable keys there or put things you are afraid not to convey honestly.

Of course, if you are killed, but the loot is in the pouch, the latter will lose the status "found in the raid" - but at least it will remain with you. So you can earn on the takeout of items that are pretty expensive even with ordinary NPCs, without any flea market (moonshine, personalized items of streamers, rare electronics).

There are several types of pouches. All newcomers receive "Alpha" - a small suitcase with 2x2 slots, which can only hold a trifle. For quests and exchanges, you get more and more bags - 2x3 slots, 2x4 slots, and the best one, Kappa ("Kappa"), for 3x4 spaces. The latter can be obtained by completing all the main tasks in Escape from Tarkov, which is very difficult - this is a reward only for the most diligent and skillful players and a conditional final goal of the game in its current state. There is also a 3x3 slot "Gamma" pouch, which is given to everyone who pre-ordered the maximum edition of the game.

Given the peculiarities of the mechanics and the fact that the protected suitcase is not visible on the PMC, the players call it an "asshole." Both in Russian and in English. Pouches are a separate game meme because placing valuables in a secure container turns into "putting a bottle in a point," no matter how strange it may sound. In general, phrases like "I found a tank charge, I'm shoving it in my ass" in Escape from Tarkov is common. It is doubly funny that it is in the "ass" that PMCs prefer to wear Vaseline as a pain reliever. Get used to it.

Escape from Tarkov in its current state has a division into conditional seasons - "wipes." The fact is that with the patches, the game gets new mechanics that do not get along with the current progress of the characters. The old code conflicts with the new one, so for better work and testing, the accounts of all players for extensive updates are reset to zero: they erase all progress, pumping, and loot in caches. This happens every few months. The largest wipes lasted up to six months.

Also, wipes are needed to improve the economy of the flea market. The longer the current season drags on, the more inflation grows. No matter how bad they play, the players, so money begins to settle, and the cache improves. The things needed for the initial progress are gradually depreciated, and only rare guns, armor, and cartridges became the only treasure. A month ago, you earned money supplying rolls of scotch tape to the market, but today they do not cost even a couple of thousand rubles - because no one needs it anymore.

Therefore, according to the community, the best time to play Escape from Tarkov is at the beginning of the wipe, or at least the middle of it. Most of the players do not yet have bitcoin farms, better equipment, "imbue" cartridges. You can fight on equal terms, without fear of being killed with one poke because of the "cool cartridge for several tens of thousands of rubles." In addition, everyone needs this or that garbage for pumping - so you can make good money on its extraction.

By the end of the wipe, the overall economy usually stagnates. Everyone has everything. There is no point in collecting most of the loot due to its uselessness. The only way to play on an equal footing is to get together in the only correct meta assembly for a lot of money. It's a pity if you don't have this heap. This approach to the economy of a large MMO game sounds as wrong as possible, but this is the case so far.

So another internal meme of the community appeared - endless questions "when is the wipe?". Because BattleState Games rarely says in advance on what date the next reset will be. Often, he completely denies that it will be before really large-scale updates.

So the end of your wealth is always a surprise, which is heralded by funny events. The last time it was a whole week of madness: one day, the bosses began to run to other locations, the other - the entire Tarkov was covered with impenetrable fog.

Later, all the prices for things were cut several times, the players were forbidden to use pouches, and all the Savages were replaced with raiders. All progress will be reset from day to day, so why not have some fun at the end?

Related: Escape from Tarkov: The Definitive Guide to gameplay, essence and goals.