A new player loads the game, opens the task list and sees a wall. That is not an exaggeration: out of 580 current tasks in our catalogue, 280 are available at level one — very nearly half. The game does not tell you which one to start with, and that is the first thing people trip over. Why there are
A new player loads the game, opens the task list and sees a wall. That is not an exaggeration: out of 580 current tasks in our catalogue, 280 are available at level one — very nearly half. The game does not tell you which one to start with, and that is the first thing people trip over.
Because "available" and "doable" are different things. Character level stopped being the main gate a while ago: far more often the road is blocked by trader loyalty level, which grows from trading and reputation rather than from experience. So the number of formally unlocked tasks is large, while the number you can actually begin with is about a dozen.
Tasks are spread across traders very unevenly:
The sensible start is Prapor and Therapist. Both open with simple tasks that need no rare items and raise loyalty quickly — and loyalty is what unlocks everyone else.
1. Debut and Shooting Cans at Prapor — you learn how handing items in works. 2. Shortage and Sanitary Standards at Therapist — medical supplies you are picking up anyway. 3. The Survivalist Path line at Jaeger — long, but the individual tasks are small and tick over in the background. 4. Checking at Peacekeeper — it drags you across different maps, which is worth more than any guide.
Do not chase experience. The median reward across all tasks is 11,800 XP and the mean is 19,169, but those figures are pulled up by a tail of expensive level 50–65 tasks. The first few hundred tasks give far less, and trying to "farm XP through quests" early simply does not work.
Do not accept everything on offer. Some tasks carry conditions you must not break until the very end — "do not kill Scavs until the task is complete", for instance. Accept it, forget it, fail it.
> Rule of thumb: keep no more than five or six tasks active, and make sure at least one of them is on the map you are actually heading into.
The Quests section has filters by trader and by level, and My Summary has a completion counter plus a hint about what to do next. Progress is stored in your browser; you do not need an account for it.