Wasteland Remastered walkthrough part 3: party management

If you missed it, go back to part 2 to learn about navigating the wasteland.

You can recruit up to 7 characters into your party in Wasteland remastered. Up to 4 of these can be rangers – the player characters. The rest are made up of NPCs (or clones, but we’ll come to that later).

Some NPCs are impressive, others less so.

The main difference between Rangers and NPCs is that Rangers will never disobey your instructions. An NPC can refuse to trade an item, or to use a skill or attribute. This can be inconvenient when your best Medic is an NPC and you would really like them to heal a wounded comrade.

The other difference comes in combat. NPCs won’t refuse orders to attack, but they will choose who they attack where there are multiple enemy groups.

Note than an injured or unconscious NPC will never refuse a trade. Just saying.

Walking wounded

Party members will frequently be knocked unconscious during combat, but sometimes it’s worse than that. Where a party member is unconscious they will slowly regain consciousness and then their health will recover. Different maps have different amounts of time passing for each step you take on the map. The quicker time passes between each step, the quicker you will heal. The camp command lets you hunker down in a safe spot and heal back to full health.

However if a Ranger would get knocked to -10 MAXCON or worse, they don’t become unconscious, they become seriously wounded (SER) instead. Once in this state a character gets worse, not better, over time. From Serious they drop to Critical (CRT), Mortal (MOR), Comatose (COM) and finally death.

Photo by Vincent M.A. Janssen on Pexels.com

This isn’t a fantasy RPG. Death is permanent and irreversible. A good medic can take care of a SER or CRT comrade. Any injuries worse than that and you’ll need a town doctor, or later in the game a party member with the Doctor skill. Otherwise they will die and you’ll need to remove that member from the party (see part 1 on how to do this without accidentally losing cash or useful items).

On the Radio

Levels are gained by using the radio to contact Ranger Centre and see if you have enough experience to gain a level. When a character gains a level they immediately receive 2 points in MAXCON, and you then have 2 points to spend however you wish. Gaining a point of INT also gives you a skill point to spend later. There’s no need to return to Ranger Centre once you leave, except to create new Rangers if you need to.

It doesn’t hurt to ask; but the answer is usually no

sometimes the answer is yes!

No loot unless I say

One other thing to note about this game is that while there are random encounters, there is no loot from those random encounters. Only scripted encounters (and hidden stockpiles) will produce loot for you. You can raise your experience by fighting enemies in the wasteland itself but you won’t gain money or better equipment this way. One way of getting money early is by stripping and selling items from your original party members, as already covered. We’ll note the others as we get to them.

Join me for part 4 where we will tackle our first adventure in the town of Highpool.