A number of people have asked me to write this, especially given how well received my other two Guides have been (Weaponsmithing and Creature Handling), and since you have to become a Scout to become a Creature Handler, I figure I�d fill in the blanks.
Before you Start
Given that the Scout is a newbie character, I�ll start this guide at character development.
Race
When picking a race to be a Scout, it is primarily up to the tastes of the player, as there are no serious advantages from any race, though some races do get minor bonuses:
Wookies get a bonus to trapping.
Bothans get a bonus to concealment.
Transdoshans get a bonus to harvesting.
None of these are even remotely imbalancing and do not provide a serious advantage to any of the listed races. Bottom line, play what you like.
Profession
Scout, obviously. Even if you want to be an Artisan or Marksman, pick Scout as your primary because the Scout starts with a General Crafting tool and a good balance of your stats.
Starting Planet
The best starting planets for a Scout are the fringe worlds, like Dantooine, Rori, Talus, or Yavin. Corellia and Tatooine are simply too crowded to make scouting fun or viable. The downside to starting on these more remote worlds is, if you want to also be an artisan, there are fewer people here that will buy your goods and you�ll be paying for tickets to other worlds just to sell your goods.
However, if you�re looking to play a �pure� scout, then nothing beats these wilder worlds for wide open hunting.
In the Game
Now that you�re in the game, we�ll go over the basics of how to play your Scout.
Join the NRA
The very first thing you�ll want to do is find the Marksman trainer and learn Novice Marksman. I know this makes little sense in the context of �pure� scout, but you can�t harvest living animals (they tend to get rather peeved), so you have to kill them first. And, as you advance in Scout, you�ll need the ability to kill larger, more aggressive animals, and this becomes problematic if you can�t hit the ground with your gun, even if you throw it. Consequently, you�re going to advance up at least one tree of the Marksman profession, and likely two.
At this point, pick a weapon you�d like to use and find an Artisan to make you a CDEF version of it or, if you�re interested in doing it yourself, you�ll need to learn Novice Artisan, then go survey some ore up. I�ll leave the Artisans for another Guide.
Setting up your interface
At the top of your screen is a set of buttons, which have a random set of your commands assigned to the function keys represented, F1-F12. Grab the left side of the bar, move it down a bit, place your mouse in the upper left corner and drag upwards to double the size of your bar. Press the down arrow once to give you a nice clean slate of two rows of buttons, then drag the rows back to the top of the screen until they lock.
In the lower right hand corner of your interface is a small row of buttons. One of them is a list of your controls, the button 3rd from the right. Click on this to bring up the list of your abilities. Click on Combat and drag a few buttons up to your toolbar at the top of your screen. Good ones are things like Attack, Peace. As you advance in Marksman, you�ll get a lot more buttons here and can put them up on the bar as you get them.
Click on Other and put Stand, Sit, Prone, Kneel, and Burst Run on the right hand side of your toolbar.
Click on Macros and then Create Macro. Choose an icon, like a hand or something, call the macro �Loot�, and type the following text in the body of the macro: �/loot;/harvest�, without the quotes. When you�re done, drag this up to the middle row of buttons on your toolbar.
Create another macro, call it �Bone�, choose another icon, and type this into the body of your macro: �/harvest bone�, again without the quotes. Drag this button onto your toolbar.
Create a final macro, call it �Hide�, choose another icon, and type this into the body of the macro: �/harvest hide�. Drag this onto your toolbar.
A Hunting we will go
Now that you have a gun, and the skill to use it, it�s time to find some game. Luckily, there is low-level game to be found outside of every city, so all you have to do is step outside the front door and turn on of the city and turn on your overhead map (Ctrl-M by default). At this point, your screen will fill with big blocks of green (buildings in the city) and little triangles. The blue triangle in the center is you, the white ones are NPC�s you can interact with, the yellow ones are non-aggressive ones you can examine or shoot, and the red ones are aggressive NPC�s who may or may not attack you if you get too close.
Get near a group of yellow triangles and either click on one press the target key (Tab by default) and cycle through the ones present. Pick a likely target.
Now, my strategy is one of conservative safety, and it has allowed me to solo things in the wild for long periods of time without being killed or needing help, so I�ll share it with you here. You may use it or not at your own discretion.
Once you have a target, back off from it until it is at least 55 meters away (your distance from your target is in the upper right corner of your screen, along with the HAM, or health/action/mind indicators for your target.) Press the prone button on your toolbar and turn to face your target, then press the Attack button. You will start firing at your target, but it does not know where you are and will meander about a bit before finally figuring it out. When it charges and gets to 20 meters, press your kneel button and rise to kneeling and finish the creature off. If you have any specials (like Body shot), you may use them at your discretion, and I�m sure there�s a Marksman guide out there for your weapon that can go into these in more detail.
Do not run. 90% of the creatures in the game can outrun you, so running is pointless as they�re going to hit you. When you�re standing, you�re far less accurate. When you�re moving, you�re even more so, and if the target is moving, you�re even worse than that. So running gets you three sets of penalties and STILL has you beaten on. All of this is visible above the creature�s head, to the left of their HAM indicator, by a small number that goes up or down based upon your current accuracy. The lower the number, the worse your accuracy. Now, there are some creatures you can outrun, and if you can outrun them then by all means �kite� them as that means you live longer (�kite� means to run around and do damage to the target without taking any yourself). But for every monster that you can outrun, there are two that can not only outrun you, but outrun you on burst run mode. In the end, kneeling and finishing the monster off is far easier than trying to run around.
I killed it, now what?
Once the creature has died, you have a few options.
You can press your Loot button, which will try to loot the creature (and fail because creatures have no loot, only humanoid NPC�s), then randomly harvest meat, hide, or bone from it. This is the option you use if you don�t care what you�re getting.
You can press your Hide button, which will specifically skin hides from the creature.
You can press your Bone button, which will specifically harvest bone from the target. One thing to note, not all creatures have bone. Spiders and other insectoids for example have no bones, only hide and meat.
Any one of the three options above will generate Scouting experience for you. At this point, this is the only way to generate Scouting experience. For right now, just keep the harvested materials and we�ll talk about what to do with it later.
Training
Once you have enough Scouting experience, you�ll need to find an NPC Scouting trainer, or a fellow player, and get trained up. Both Exploration and Hunting require Scouting experience, so which should you take up?
Advancing in Hunting not only allows the Scout to harvest more resources from creatures, it also increases their creature knowledge, allowing them to see more information about creatures when they Examine them, such as if they are killers (do deathblows to players), or how ferocious they are. The downside of taking up Hunting is that the Scout gets less experience from harvesting, which means they need to attack larger and more aggressive creatures in order to get more Scouting experience.
Advancing in Exploration allows the Scout to move more quickly over diverse terrain, such as up hills and through water. The higher the Exploration, the less affected the Scout is to adverse terrain. Additionally, at Exploration II, the Scout gets MaskScent, which allows the Scout to hide their scent, reducing the chance aggressive creatures will attack them. MaskScent is also the other way a Scout can gain Scouting experience, as successfully masking your scent from an aggressive creature rewards the Scout with experience.
It�s a tough call which to choose, as they are both very useful. My recommendation is to balance them out, taking Explore I, then Hunting I, then Explore II, etc. This provides a good, balanced advancement.
Trapping
Once you�ve collected some bone and hide, you can start making traps and advancing in the Trapping skill. To make traps, simply double click on your General Crafting Tool (GCT), select General, then at the bottom select the Trap you want�in the beginning, it�s a simple, drugged dart that makes your opponent drowsy. Follow the on-screen prompts, putting hide and bone in where indicated, and when you�re done you�ll have a trap in your inventory that can be used three times. Drag it onto your toolbar and go looking for a creature.
When you are within 20 meters of the creature, click on the trap in your toolbar. You will then hurl the trap at the creature and it will either affect them or not. If it does affect them, then kneel down and shoot the creature until it�s dead, then harvest it. If it does not affect them, then you can either try again or just kneel down and shoot. A creature can only be under the affect of a specific type of trap once, so once he�s trapped by your dart trap, throwing any others at him would be ineffective.
Obviously, given how close you have to stand to the creature, and the fact that you�re not prone, means that trapping is very risky business. To be honest, the absolute best way to take trapping up is in a group, especially if there is a brawler present. Then you have the freedom to hurl traps to keep the creature affected and can kneel and shoot from a closer range without risking a vicious beating.
Wilderness Survival
There is only one way to advance in Wilderness Survival, and that�s by building camps. Once you have hide and bones, bring up your GCT and select Basic Camp. Put the hides and bones where appropriate, follow the prompts, and it will dump a basic camp into your inventory.
You can not build camps (or any other structure) within 1 kilometer of town, so head out a bit until you are more than a kilometer away, then double click on the camp in your inventory. The land will shift, tents and torches will appear, and you will be standing in the middle of your camp.
Camps are used to heal people by letting them regenerate faster. The experience comes at the end of the camp, when it�s abandoned or disbanded, and accumulates the longer its in place and the more people that use it. Using it by yourself, it can take fifteen minutes or longer before it has accumulated its maximum experience (which is 400 points for the basic camp). If others are present, or wander in and out, that drastically speeds up the process.
When you are finished camping, find the small controller on the ground, click on it, and select Disband Camp from the radial menu. You will be told how many experience you gained.
Scouts and Grouping
Typically, Scouts do not play well with others. In Star Wars Galaxies, harvesting/Scout experience is not shared or split, nor are the resources obtained. Consequently, Scouts can be the biggest Ninja looters in the game.
A Ninja looter is someone who �steals� the loot by harvesting a body without any respect for an established looting order. These are the scouts that, instead of hanging back and shooting, will run up and kneel 10 meters from the target to make sure they are the first to harvest it. They are also hammering their loot buttons when the target is near dead to make sure they get in first. These people are also the ones that just drop camps down randomly in the group without asking to make sure THEY are the ones that get the Wilderness experience.
There is no quicker way to alienate yourself from a party than doing any of the above. Here are my recommendations on how to be a great Scout in a party:
1. Ask in the beginning who the Scouts are, or who�s working on Scouting experience and establish some kind of looting order, then respect that order diligently.
2. Find out who is only Scouting for hides and bones and negotiate with them to give them a goodly share of the harvested resources in exchange for you doing the harvesting, as they may not be interested in advancing Scouting, they just need the resources.
3. Make the party leader call for camps, and make sure they indicate who should be building the camp instead of relying upon the Scouts to police themselves.
4. Use your special abilities, like running up a hill ahead of the slower party, /maskscent to avoid agro, and scout around to see what�s up.
5. Make sure you tell people when a mob is aggressive, ferocious, and/or kills when you Examine them, as only Scouts can see this information and it is very pertinent in selecting who the group should be fighting.
The Merchant side of Scouting
There are a lot of professions that need the fruit of Scout harvesting.
Engineers need hide and bone for armor.
Tailors need it for clothing.
Medics need it for their trade.
Chefs need meat for theirs.
In the process of advancing Scouting, you will collect quite a bit of these types of products. When you have a large enough lot, perhaps 1,000 of a given object, you might seriously consider selling it, either on the bazaar or by hawking it in town. I recommend the bazaar because most Scouts aren�t really interested in wandering around town being a merchant, and on the bazaar people can buy it whether you�re online or not.
Look around on the bazaar to see how much folks are selling the same stuff for, and if no one locally is selling it, look on the galactic scale to see how much it�s being sold for on other planets. Settle on a decent price, keeping in mind it costs you 100 credits just to put it on the bazaar, then put it up for sale. You�ll be notified by mail if someone buys it, and the credits will dump into your bank.
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