Difference between revisions of "Medical Forage Context 2 (Source)"

Latest revision as of 11:23, 15 September 2007

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Quote: Tale's Medic Guide 2.31 Star Wars Galaxies 21 June 2003

Description Medic is one of the six starting professions. This guide aims to help novice medics on their journey to master medic. It does not cover the more advanced Doctor or Combat Medic professions, which become available when you reach master medic. Refer to the in-game Holocron (Ctrl-H) for more information.

Character creation Any character can become a medic. If you didn't start as one, you can still train in novice medic by conversing with a medic trainer NPC. You can have multiple professions at the same time, or be a pure medic. Some people like to start as an artisan to gain resource-harvesting equipment, then train in novice medic and concentrate on healing. Others focus on another profession and are medics on the side. You have 250 skill points to spend and novice medic consumes 15. You can surrender it at any time to reclaim the skill points, but it pays to plan ahead and work out how many medic skills you can afford while still retaining enough points for other areas.

Your medic can be any race, but healing mostly relies on your character's mind, focus and willpower. Some races, such as Mon Calamari and Zabrak, have bonuses in these areas which may suit those who wish to be primarily medics, with downsides in other areas. You can also adjust your starting statistics using stat migration in the tutorial (takes effect immediately) or after your character enters the game (takes effect slowly).

How to heal A starting medic can perform small heals without medicine, and bigger heals with medicine. Usually a medic heals health (the red bar) or action (green bar), while entertainers heal the mind (blue bar). Together, these are known as HAM (health, action, mind). The effort of healing without medicine causes focus and willpower wounds to your character, so it's better to use medicine.

Press Ctrl-I to open your inventory. If your character started as a medic, you should see a "Damage Stimpack" with 5 charges, an "Action Wound Medpack" and a "Health Wound Medpack" with 1 charge each. These are newbie medicines and they will soon be used up. If you didn't start as a medic, you'll have to obtain/craft your first packs but you should still read this section.

Let's use the stimpack first. Stims heal health and action damage (white areas in the red and green bars). The newbie stimpack also heals mind damage, but don't get used to this. They can be used anywhere by bringing up the radial menu on a damaged person and selecting "heal damage" or by targeting someone and pressing the "heal damage" hotkey (if you started as a medic this will be bound to one of your hotkeys at the top of the screen, e.g. F6 - if not, drag it from the Ctrl-A window). You can also target someone and double-click the stim in your inventory, use the stim's radial menu, drag the stim into a hotkey panel, or use the /healdamage command (can shorten to /heald). People who need damage healed include those who have been performing strenuous activities such as fighting, dancing or surveying, so you might want to join a combat group, or head for the nearest medical centre or cantina in your starting city (press Ctrl-M for a city map, or use the /find command). Combat healing will advance your character faster, but cantinas are always good because entertainers fix your mind wounds and battle fatigue while you heal (you just need to select "watch" a dancer or "listen" to a musician on an entertainer's radial menu), while you can fix the action damage they take from entertaining. Damage also recovers on its own while a character is resting.

You must also learn to use wound medpacks. Wounds are the slow-recovering black areas ("black rot") that appear in the red, green and blue bars after a character has experienced severe stress, such as getting beaten to a pulp by a giant monster or being cloned somewhere other than their bind point. As a medic you can heal the black wounds in the red and green bars, but only in medical centres, scout camps, or certain player-made buildings. You use medpacks in the same way as stims, except you select "heal wound" and the wound type from the patient's radial menu. You can double-click medpacks in your inventory, use the medpack's own radial menu, or use the /healwound command (can shorten to /healw) with the type of wound: /healwound action, or /healwound health. Using /healwound on its own does nothing unless you give it a wound type, so the default /healwound hotkey is useless. Perhaps make a set of macros (see the Ctrl-A screen) specifying the wound types, and drag them into your toolbar. Mind wounds (black area in the blue bar) are healed by entertainers. Wounds also repair themselves very slowly if a character rests in a medical centre, scout camp or player-made building.

Wounds also occur to the statistics not shown on the HAM bars. You can check for them on your own character by pressing Ctrl-C and looking on the "Personal" tab. For example, if somebody says they have 30 stamina wounds, you can heal them with a stamina wound medpack or use /tendwound stamina. At the time of writing, there is no visual representation of these stat wounds so patients have to tell you about them, but there may soon be a /diagnose command for medics to gauge stat wounds on others. As a medic, you can heal stat wounds in stamina, strength, constitution and quickness. Entertainers heal focus and willpower.

Healing without medicine If you run out of charges on your stims and medpacks, you can still heal limited amounts with the /tenddamage and /tendwound commands or hotkeys. These drain your mind much faster than using medicines, and also cause 5 stat wounds each to your focus and willpower, plus 2 battle fatigue, each time you use them. You'll need an entertainer to heal those later. Remember /tendwound is used with a wound type, e.g. /tendwound constitution.

Later if you reach the First Aid IV skill, you also gain an ability called /quickheal which works like /tenddamage. Quickheal requires at least 1000 mind to use, causes 10 wounds each to focus and willpower, plus 2 battle fatigue, and consumes about 2/3 of your mind bar, but it can heal up to 750 health and action damage per use.

It's relaxing to use these free heals in a cantina to heal entertainers, because the conversation is usually good and the wounds you incur are automatically healed by the entertainers themselves.

Note: you will gain no experience points (XP) for using /tenddamage or /quickheal. But you will gain XP for using /tendwound, so as a starting medic this is your only method of advancement without obtaining more stimpacks and medpacks.

Getting medicine To be an effective healer, you will need more medicine. You can buy it from other players using bazaar terminals (found in cities), player merchant stores, or a person-to-person trade (respond to trade requests by targeting the person and typing /trade, selecting trade from the radial menu, or double-clicking on the person).

You can get by with purchased medicines. But if you want to reach master medic (or bio-engineer), you'll have to start crafting stims and medpacks yourself. First, you need some resources. To make the most basic stim, you need 8 identical organics and 8 identical inorganics. Organic means anything that was once a plant or animal, such as wild rice, grain, meat or wood. Inorganic means anything that didn't come from a plant or animal, such as gemstones, petroleum or metals. So you can make a stim from 8 units of rice and 8 units of steel, or 8 units of wheat and 8 units of fiberplast, etc. Identical resources can be stacked together, up to 100,000 units at a time. Resource stacks can be split into smaller stacks using the radial menu or by double-clicking on a stack.

Sometimes people will give you organics and inorganics in return for heals. Other times you'll need to buy them. You can also train in novice artisan and use surveying tools to sample resources. However, the ideal solution is to obtain harvesting machines made by an engineer, which come in different types for different resources (e.g. the simplest organics harvester is called a micro flora farm). When placed on an area with a high enough concentration of materials, harvesters automatically gather resources for you. When you need more, you just visit your harvester and take out the resources it has gathered. Friends can give you shared access to their harvesters. Just remember to keep your harvesters topped up with maintenance cash or they will decay. Harvesters also need power, so your first harvester type will need to be a wind generator or solar energy device (unless you can find power for sale).

There are some other ways to get organics. Training in novice scout gives you the ability to use the "harvest resources" option to collect organics from creatures you kill (the larger the creature, the more you can harvest depending on your skill - some say meat is best, depending on the planet). At the time of writing, medics also have a pointless ability called /medicalforage, which you can use outdoors to find random organics one at a time (tough when you need 8 of the same type!). Medicalforage may be removed or revised by the time you read this - it was only added to solve a temporary beta crafting problem.

Note that attempting to supply yourself with enough resources and medicines as a solo medic is a long, hard road. Medics can advance faster with friends to give them resources/harvesters, or by joining a PA that supports its medics. If you're going to work alone, you'll need to raise cash by doing missions or ask for payment in return for heals. All good patients should /tip their healers. If they're not carrying cash, they can do a bank transfer with "/tip yourname bank 1000" or give you items/resources.

Crafting and Organic Chemistry Got resources? Look for the Generic Crafting Tool in your inventory and double-click it. If you don't have one, buy one or ask an artisan to craft one. Choose the schematic for "Small Stimpack - A".

Welcome to a screen you'll be seeing often. Stim A is the easiest stim to make, requiring only 8 organics and 8 inorganics. On the left hand side of the Stim A schematic you should see the organics and inorganics from your inventory, and in the middle are two slots that need filling. You can drag-and-drop the organics/inorganics into the slots from your resource stacks, or double-click a stack to make the required amount of resources jump into a slot. Note that you can't put different types of resources into one slot: they must be identical.

Click "Assemble" and the game will ask if you really want to do this. Yes/No boxes are annoying, so let's get rid of them. Press Ctrl-O to bring up the options screen. Select the "Misc" tab and switch off "confirm crafting actions". Goodbye confirmation boxes, hello faster crafting. Press Ctrl-O again to close the options screen and continue through the stages of making Stim A. On the last stage you can rename the stim, which can be quite amusing but is not necessary. There will now be a pause while you wait for the Generic Crafting Tool to manufacture the item and put it in your inventory. You will get a message when it's finished, and you should then have a spinning Stimpack A with about 11 charges as the final item in your inventory. Congratulations, you just earned some medicine crafting experience points (XP), which are used in training Organic Chemistry.

Wound medpacks are a slightly different story. After you've used the newbie ones you can't make Health Wound Medpack A or Action Wound Medpack A until you have enough medicine crafting XP to train in Organic Chemistry I (after crafting about 17 stim A). But like stims, these A-level schematics simply require 8 organics and 8 inorganics. As you advance in organic chemistry, you can also make medpacks to heal stat wounds, such as Stamina Wound Medpack A (8 organics, 8 inorganics).

At higher levels of organic chemistry, you gain the ability to make B and C-level stims and medpacks (then D and E in elite professions). These heal more points per charge, but they are also harder to make. And you have to find someone who is really hurting to make it worthwhile to use a stim charge that heals for 1000 or a wound heal for 500. For example, stimpack B is a multi-stage process where you make three initial components from various resources, then combine the components with more organics and inorganics. All up, a single stim B uses 64 resources. Many medics continue making stim A as their standard self-crafted medicine in the field. But the good thing about Stim B and Medpack B is they only require +5 medicine use skill (skill mods are listed in the lower left of the Ctrl-C screen), meaning novice medics can buy and use B packs, and others can make money selling B packs to novices. The C and higher versions require far more medicine use skill.

Medical Crafting Tips In addition to removing the yes/no boxes (see above), you can also resize and line up the crafting windows so that each "accept" button appears under the previous one. You only have to do this once and the window position should remain the same.

The most important tip is to start using multiple crafting tools. When you open up the generic crafting tool, you'll see that in addition to the food and/or chemical crafting tabs (where the stimpack and medpack schematics are stored) there is a tab called "generic items". It has a schematic for building Food & Chemical Crafting Tools, using some metals and other resources. These dedicated tools can only produce medicines and food, but you'll need them to produce higher level items. For some recipes you also need to be near a public food & chemical crafting station (found in cities) otherwise the schematic doesn't even appear in the crafting tool.

If you can scrape together enough resources to make two Food & Chemical Crafting Tools, you can put the Generic Crafting Tool in the bank for later. Having a pair of tools avoids downtime, because you can start crafting in the second kit while waiting for the first one to empty its output hopper. Later you'll want three tools, because the hopper waiting times are longer for more complex items.

The amount healed by one charge of a stim or medpack is random, but will be higher if you used good quality resources. If you examine resources you'll see they have their own statistics (flavor, potency, overall, etc), so there are different types and qualities of wild rice, aluminium, etc. Read the schematic to see which statistics are important in determining the properties of a crafted item (e.g. Stim A mostly wants high Overall Quality). Avoid making stims with poor-quality resources because you'll end up healing 70s when you could be healing 220s. You might also want to try experimenting on your stims and medpacks to increase the charges, increase the base amount healed, or lower the required medicine use skill. To do this, you need to be near a public food & chemical crafting station, which causes extra options (including experimentation) to appear during the crafting process. Experimentation becomes more important with advanced medicines. You can experiment in the field if you have an R5 droid, or experiment in your player-built house with a private crafting station. The best medicines are the result of successful experimentation with high-quality resources. You can even experiment on the sub-components of higher level stims.

Ever wonder why all your stims are alled "prototypes"? Architects can make food & chemical crafting factories, which are buildings that churn out up to 1000 items at a time. You can buy them or friends can give you access to their factory. You put enough resources in (e.g. 800 organic and 800 inorganic for a batch of 100 stim A), and the factory automatically produces crates of medicines, for which you get the medicine crafting XP. To get enough resources to run a factory, you need harvesters, power sources, and enough credits to run it all. Again, this is where being in a PA can help. Before you can manufacture something in a factory, you also need to make your own schematic in a food & chemical crafting tool while in the vicinity of a public food & chemical crafting station. Craft something, experiment on it, and choose the option to make a schematic instead of a prototype. The resulting schematic (found on your datapad, Ctrl-D) goes into the factory along with the resources. You must use exactly the same types of resources as you used in making the schematic.

Of course, this opens up some great opportunities for players who like crafting. You can manufacture components, stims and medpacks in bulk and sell them to the rest of us!

Medical XP and advancement By healing others, you gain medical experience, which is used in advancing through the three core medic skills: First Aid, Diagnostics and Pharmacology. The XP gained depends on how you healed the patient. For example, if you heal damage with a stim, you get about 25% of the amount healed as XP. Healing wounds gives about 250% of the amount healed as XP, because it deals with smaller numbers.

The only people you can't heal are those who have a declared overt faction (rebel or imperial) because your newbie character is neutral. You can heal yourself, but you do not get XP for it, just as you do not get XP for hurting yourself. Unless you're alone in the wilderness, it's better to let other medics get the XP for healing you.

Press Ctrl-S to look at your skill tree, where you can also check how much experience you have earned and of which types (select the medic skill tree if it's not already showing). When you have the required experience for the next level of skill, you can train from either an NPC medic trainer, or another player. It is far better to be taught by fellow players, because this gives them apprenticeship experience required to advance to higher professions and the NPCs charge too much cash.

Note that you can't hoard XP. You can only have twice as much stored XP as it takes to qualify for the next skill level. For example, if it takes 1000 medical crafting XP to qualify for Organic Chemistry II and you reach 2000 XP without training in that skill, you won't be able to gain any more medical crafting XP until you train. You can still make stims without training, but it won't give you XP.

Core skills You can spend medical experience on the following:

FIRST AID: Allows you to heal more damage with a single stim. This means you get more experience per heal and it's not as much work to heal people. Most medics like to climb this skill branch as fast as possible. It also adds some "special moves" to your healing, such as the ability at First Aid II to stop bleeding (which happens sometimes in battle and causes damage over time in the red bar, shown by red droplets falling on the person's head). At First Aid IV, you gain the ability to perform a heal without a stim, but at a significant cost to your mind (blue) bar.

DIAGNOSTICS: Allows you to heal damage faster by reducing the waiting time until you can perform another heal. This also helps you get XP faster, so it's perhaps equally as important as First Aid, some would say more important. At Diagnostics II you gain the ability to drag incapacitated (unconscious) players out of harm's way, which may be useful for preventing death blows during combat.

PHARMACOLOGY: Allows you to use higher level medicines and appears to reduce the amount of mind used per heal. It also increases the reliability of /medicalforage, and perhaps other things (the in-game description is vague). Some people swear by pharmacology as the most important skill branch, but others only advance in it as necessary to use the higher level stims.

To train in Master Medic, you need First Aid IV, Diagnostics IV, Pharmacology IV and Organic Chemistry IV. You also need 620 points of Apprenticeship Experience, which you gain from teaching skills to others.

APPENDIX A: Problem solving

During beta this appendix was a bug list, but most medic bugs have been fixed (congratulations dev team!). Instead, here is a list of problems you may encounter as a medic, and how to solve them.

Healing lag: In combat, you might find that you press your healing hotkey and nothing happens for a few seconds, while the patient takes further damage, and then the heal arrives. This may be because heals go into the combat queue along with special attacks, or it may be the result of lag affecting you or the server (and is probably beyond anyone's control). The solution is to anticipate. Send a heal in advance, so that you don't have to play catch-up, e.g. brawler attacks monster, you target brawler and hit your healing hotkey, brawler takes damage from monster, lag catches up and heal arrives. Another solution for combat lag is to make a healing macro that begins with /peace (the command to stop yourself fighting) followed by /healdamage. This cancels your combat queue, then sends your heal, giving it a better chance to get through fast (maybe try /peace; /healdamage; /assist - but switch music off first because it will make the combat music go crazy). The macro tool is in the Ctrl-A screen. You can drag macros to the hotkey bar.

Healing range: Unless you train as a Combat Medic and gain ranged stimpacks, healing range is only 6m. You're not a fantasy spellcasting healer, so you need to use the /follow hotkey to run over and attend to your patient. One small bug: at the time of writing, if you are outside this range and trying to heal damage, you'll get the message "no valid medicine found" instead of "target is out of range". Of course, this can also mean that you really have run out of stims. If you are healing wounds, you will get the correct "target is out of range" message if you are beyond 6m.

Hopper full: The crafting tool output area is called a hopper. If you craft something while your inventory is full (100% on the bar at the bottom), the item will get stuck in the hopper and you will have to clear it. Make a space in your inventory for the new item, then open the radial menu on the crafting tool, hold the mouse over "start crafting" and choose "open hopper". You will see a small window containing the item that is stuck in the hopper, which you can drag out into your inventory to clear the blockage.

Medic-as-crafter: Some players disagree with the developers' decision to make medics crafters. But unless you want to advance to Doctor or Combat Medic, you are not required to craft. You can advance in First Aid, Pharmacology and Diagnostics by using purchased medicines. Aspiring bio-engineers may also have hundreds of crafted stimpacks to give away. If you hate the crafting tool and still want to advance to an elite medical profession, try to gain access to a food & chemical factory which can be used to gain medicine crafting XP automatically, but at a slower rate.

Hotkey banks: The hotkey bar at the top is not one-of-a-kind. If it is showing as a single line of icons, use your mouse to stretch it into a double line (F1-F12 for the first line, Shift-F1-F12 for the second line). You also have multiple banks of hotkeys which you can reach with Ctrl-F1, Ctrl-F2, Ctrl-F3, etc. Perhaps set up a combat hotkey bank (with weapon and healing buttons), a medical centre hotkey bank (with all the different wound types), etc.

Drained mind: Beginner medics use a lot of mind per heal, so unfortunately you'll just have to cope. Higher level medics and the elite medic professions can keep going for much longer. Remember stims and medpacks are far more mind-efficient than the /tend commands. Some races have faster mind regeneration, and some have an ability called /equilibrium which distributes their remaining HAM energy evenly between the three bars - very useful in emergencies. Mind also regenerates faster while sitting. If your mind isn't regenerating as fast as it used to, check Ctrl-C for willpower wounds.

Missing schematics: "I've got Stim C but it's not showing in my crafting tool!" First, check the datapad (Ctrl-D) which shows all the draft schematics you possess. You can also check the required ingredients here. Then check whether you are using a Food & Chemical crafting tool (generic tool doesn't work for higher-level meds). Stim C and Med B also require you to be standing next to a public food & chemical crafting station. Stim D requires a private food & chemical crafting station (in a house or PA hall). Once you have a house with a private crafting station, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.