If you're brand new To Tarkov or even at an intermediate level, this poast might be interesting.
Recently, I hit level 40 for the first time on what has been my first full wipe – it felt great!
On Christmas Eve, 2020, the wipe started and I was primed and ready to go.
Since our country went into complete lockdown, I had a lot of time on my hands.
I grinded like a MF’er
I spent so much time at Interchange I considered applying for a full time job stacking shelves at Oli.
I quested, I got very minimally better at PVP…
I got Tarkov’d more times than I’d care to admit.
Finally I made it to the top of the mountain, level 40…
Unlocking all traders to max level and having access to the delicious AP SX ammo and 40 Round MP7 mags not to mention all the other goodies…
That happened sometime in early April so Three and a half months roughly to make that journey.
The thought of making a solo run at Kappa was on my mind.
But with zero SBiH kills under my belt and some very frustra… *ahem* “challenging” quests ahead, it just didn’t seem like it was worth it for me.
Instead, I thought, it was time to put everything I’d learned over the prior 3+ months to the test.
So I reset my account completely.
Bear in mind, I had reached level 40++ with a 50 GPU Bitcoin farm and 110m roubles in stash as well as a stash full of nice weaponry and armour.
I’d be lying if I said when I saw my clean stash after hitting reset, I didn’t have pangs of regret.
“Wtf have I done?” lol
But the challenge was on.
How long would it take to get to LVL 40 from scratch this time around?
The answer, as you’ll have seen in the title, was exactly 25 days.
Less than a third of the time it took me to get there on the first go around.
I played casually most days out of the 25 and when I played it was a pretty focused effort to push levels every session by focusing on doing quests primarily.
I’d learned in my previous run to 40 that just XP gridinging Interchange or other maps whilst looting doesn’t move you up in levels very efficiently – as fun as it can be.
Quests are where the big XP gains are to be found and crucial for leveling up.
So with this in mind, I went to work and was amazed at how quickly and easily things progressed this time.
For example I hit the flea market on day one, instead of taking like a week or whatever to get there as a complete noob.
Planning Is Key
I started planning out my raids carefully with goals to hit multiple quests in each raid.
If I went to Shoreline, I’d be killing scavs, hitting locked room objectives in the Resort and marking areas of interest around the map all in the same raid.
Some raids I was coming away with 3 or 4 quests completed at times.
Because of the amount of thought required to play this way, I didn’t feel like questing every session.
Some days I just wanted to chill and decided to mess around in Factory or go GPU hunting on Interchange.
Incidentally I currently still need 13 GPUs to get back to the 50 I had before 😉
Night Raids
Another thing that helped greatly when it came to the process of leveling efficiently was going into raids at night time – 9pm – 5am to be specific.
Before resetting my account, I’d been doing dark raids at Interchange, which is pretty much just like raiding during the day once you get inside the mall – it’s very well lit.
But maps like Woods and Shoreline had always been tackled during daylight when they can be quite challenging with a lot of PVP getting in the way of questing.
This time around I started diving into Shoreline during the dead of night with just a torch attached to my weapon.
Despite some initial fear, It blew my mind how easy and fun those raids became compared to some of the experiences I’d had by day involving sweatlord PMCs armed with meta weapons and an agro outlook on life lol.
If you’re looking to complete quests and avoid PVP, don’t be afraid to drop into Shoreline or Woods or any other map with a 12g Shotty equipped with just a torch to light the way, it’s incredibly effective.
But not only that, it’s also amazingly atmospheric, tense and extremely fun.
Even though you know you’re less likely to encounter PMCs at night, the threat is still always there, lurking around every corner meaning it’s still a buzz to get through a raid with your objectives achieved.
It’s just less likely that a greasy thicc boy dampens the mood.
As a side note, raiding at night can be spooky and a bit like being in a horror movie which is exciting, fun and for me has created some truly memorable, unique gaming experiences.
Tarkov is such a beautiful game and I’d argue never more so than at night under the moonlight or when transitioning from dusk till dawn and vice versa when the sky is completely red!
Laterally around level 37 I started taking Night Vision in with me (GPNVG-18) with me and then things got even easier, and I’ve yet to die with that headset on!
You feel like an absolute ninja running around the map headshotting scavs in the dead of night.
So to recap, Two of the big keys to this noob’s success in fast levelling have been night raids and a heavy focus on stacking quests.
Other things that helped were levelling up hideout as a priority, using Scav runs to top up the finances or just get a release from the constant threat of PMC death.
And also…
Map Knowledge
The cool thing about questing is, you’re being led around each map and shown the points of interest in a way that etches them into your mind.
I noticed that on my second play through to 40, maps like Shoreline and Woods which had at one point overwhelmed me a bit, were familiar and easily navigated by using points of interest.
If you are weak on any of the maps, I’d advise doing what I did at the start of this wipe which is to open up map genie and go into offline mode and run around the points of interest till you start to understand how the map is structured.
Don’t spend long doing this, you only have to go in and do this offline once or twice per map before you start to get a feel for it..
Then let the quests do their job of giving you the grand tour of each map!
Use The Wiki!!!
Oh, and another thing, each time I planned out my raid, I’d have a tab open in my browser to the wiki for each quest.
The Wiki is amazing for just outlining everything that you have to do for the quest and this includes every single quest.
Especially useful for the Gunsmith tasks btw 😉
By having the tabs open for all the quests I planned to hit on any particular raid, I knew exactly what I needed and could easily refer to that when I got stuck.
I don’t have 2 monitors btw, I would just tab out when I needed to and that worked fine.
If you have 2 monitors, you’re already off to a head start on me lol.
I’ll leave this here for now, hopefully it was interesting to at least someone out there.
What’s next for me?
Well, I suppose we still have a decent amount of time left in this wipe…
I do need to go Interchange and collect some GPUs to finish off my BTC farm but that option of pushing for Kappa is still there I suppose, heh…
