I played again this nice old role playing game and this time I've gathered some data during play which I will share here.

Wasteland Character generation

Character generation is a very difficult thing in this game. There are a lot of skills and only the professionals know which skill is needed and which is not. Maybe I can help a little bit here.

The first thing you have to know is the importance of the skills:

Skills each character should have:

• Brawling (For hand-to-hand-combat)
• Perception (For spotting important stuff)
• Assault rifle (For using the best non-energy weapons)
• Energy weapon (For using energy weapons)
• AT weapon (For using anti-tank weapons like rockets)
• Demolition (For handling explosives in combat)
• Clip pistol (For firing normal pistols)
• SMG (For handling small machine guns)

Some of these skills are not that important. If you never want to use normal pistols like the Colt M1911A1 you don't need the Clip pistol skill. The SMG skill comes in handy if you are shooting a lot and you don't want to waste the 7.62mm ammunition. Remember that the shops have lot of magazines of all calibers but they are finite and they never restock. You'll normally never empty a store but if you like to hack'n'slay instead of finishing the game as fast as possible you may consider using the Uzi 27 SMG and the Mac 17 SMG which use 9mm and .45 magazines. In that way you don't have the problem standing in Las Vegas with empty M1989A1 rifles in your hands and having depleted all 7.62mm stocks in the whole Wasteland.

Skills at least one character should have:

• Climb (To get past obstacles)
• Swim (To swim in liquid stuff)
• Picklock (To open a lot of doors)
• Silent movement (To move without noise)
• Alarm disarm (To disable alarm devies)
• Bomb disarm (To disarm bombs and traps)
• Medic (To heal comrades. At least two or three characters should have this skill)
• Safecrack (To open safes and vault-like doors)
• Cryptology (To decipher messages)
• Helicopter piloting (To fly the helicopter at the end of the game)
• Toaster repair (To get stuff out of broken toasters)
• Electronics (To handle electronic equipment)
• Doctor (To heal strongly injured comrades)
• Clone tech (To clone yourself)
• Cyborg tech (To handle cyborg equipment)

Helicopter piloting and Clone tech is not that important. You don't have to clone yourself and if you don't fly the helicopter you still can reach your destination on foot.

All other skills may be useful in some places for one character to have. In my opinion there are four skills which are not useful at all:

• Knife fighting
• Knife throwing
• Rifle (You never need these weapons because they use the same ammunition as the more powerful assault rifles)
• Combat shooting (I think this skill is a bug. It does nothing and is only present in the PC version of the game)

After some thinking you may notice that every character needs at least an IQ of 23 because each character definetly wants to use energy weapons later in the game. And one of the characters needs an IQ of 24 because the Cyborg tech skill is needed also later in the game. We don't want to waste to much character points in the IQ attribute so we have our first character rule: One character should have an IQ of 24 the rest should have an IQ of 23. So now we can continue thinking and calculate which skills should be learned for a maximum of efficiency. I have divided the skills like that:

Skill	Char 1 (Technician class)	Char 2 (Thief class)	Char 3 (Gambler class)	Char 4 (Doctor class)
Brawling	×	×	×	×
Climb	×	×	×	×
Clip Pistol	×	×	×	×
Knife fighting
Pugilism	×	×	×	×
Rifle
Swim	×	×	×	×
Knife throwing
Perception	×	×	×	×
Assault rifle	×	×	×	×
AT weapon	×	×	×	×
SMG	×	×	×	×
Acrobat		×
Gamble			×
Picklock		×
Silent movement	×
Combat shooting
Confidence			×
Sleight of hand		×
Demolition	×	×	×	×
Forgery	×
Alarm disarm	×
Bureaucracy			×
Bomb disarm	×
Medic		×	×	×
Safecrack		×
Cryptology			×
Metallurgy				×
Helicopter piloting			×
Toaster repair		×
Electronics	×
Doctor				×
Clone tech				×
Energy weapons	×	×	×	×
Cyborg tech	×
SKP needed at beginning	15	17	17	14
IQ needed at beginning	15	17	17	18
SKP needed later	24	23	23	23

Now that we know the future of our characters we can begin to generate the characters. You should spent a lot of time roling good stats. A high IQ is not important but the higher it is the more skills you can learn at the beginning of the game. So you may want at least an IQ level which matches the number in the row IQ needed at beginning in the above table. In that way you can learn all skills which can be learned in the Ranger Center right at the beginning of the game.

You may want one character with a high charisma and a high luck (The gambler style character). All other characters should have high luck and dexterity which helps a lot in combat. A good strength comes in handy in close combat. You may also want each character to have a MAXCON higher than 30 so they can take some hits.

Here is the party I have generated now:

Cever Barlan, Male, U.S. (Technician class)

• Strength: 14
• Speed: 12
• Charisma: 10
• Intelligence: 17
• Agility: 15
• Luck: 13
• Dexterity: 11
• Constitution: 33

Yen Yamato, Female, Chinese (Thief class)

• Strength: 13
• Speed: 10
• Charisma: 12
• Intelligence: 18
• Agility: 11
• Luck: 12
• Dexterity: 17
• Constitution: 32

Jenny DeLuz, Female, Mexican (Gambler class)

• Strength: 14
• Speed: 15
• Charisma: 16
• Intelligence: 17
• Agility: 13
• Luck: 12
• Dexterity: 9
• Constitution: 30

Sinja Menyon, Female, Indian (Doctor class)

• Strength: 17
• Speed: 13
• Charisma: 11
• Intelligence: 17
• Agility: 12
• Luck: 12
• Dexterity: 12
• Constitution: 32

If you want to start with the same party you can download the game file here. Just copy the file into a fresh install of wasteland (PC version) and start the game.

Wasteland Skills

Each character can have plenty of skills. The following table lists these skills together with the minimum IQ level, the cost of skill points and for what the skill is needed.

Skill	IQ	PTS	Needed for
Brawling	3	1	Hand-to-hand combat. Higher skill means more attackes per round.
Climb	3	1	Climbing above obstacles.
Clip Pistol	3	1	Handling clip pistols like the H&K VP91Z or the Colt M1911A1.
Knife fighting	3	1	Fighting with knives.
Pugilism	3	1	Fighting with bare hands.
Rifle	3	1	Handling rifles like the M19 or the M17 carbine.
Swim	3	1	Swimming in rivers, lakes and pools.
Knife throwing	6	1	Throwing knives in combat.
Perception	6	1	Finding items and spot traps and stuff like that.
Assault rifle	9	1	Handling automatic rifles like the AK97 or the M1989A1.
AT weapon	9	1	Handling anti-tank weapons like rockets.
SMG	9	1	Handling small machine guns like the Uzi or the Mac 11.
Acrobat	10	1	Performing acrobatic stunts.
Gamble	10	1	Earning money by gambling.
Picklock	10	1	Opening locked doors and chests and stuff like that.
Silent movement	10	1	Moving without making noise.
Combat shooting	11	1	Mysterious unknown skill only available in the PC version of the game.
Confidence	11	1	Talk your but out of mysery.
Sleight of hand	12	1	Doinf some thief tricks.
Demolition	13	1	Handling explosives like grenades in combat.
Forgery	13	1	Recognizing or creating forged documents.
Alarm disarm	14	1	Disarming alarm devices.
Bureaucracy	14	1	Talking with bureaucrates.
Bomb disarm	15	2	Disarming bombs.
Medic	15	2	Healing injured comrades.
Safecrack	15	2	Cracking safes and vault-like doors.
Cryptology	16	2	Decypher crypted messages.
Metallurgy	17	2	Earn some money with minerals in the mine shaft.
Helicopter piloting	19	3	Flying the helicopter later in the game.
Toaster repair	20	3	Repairing borken toasters and get the stuff stucking in them.
Electronics	20	3	Handling electronic equipment.
Doctor	21	3	Same as Medic but more powerful
Clone tech	22	3	Cloning characters later in the game.
Energy weapons	23	3	Handling energy weapons from Laser Pistol to Meson Blaster.
Cyborg tech	24	3	To play around with cyborg technology.

Wasteland maps

Worldmap

Highpool

Agricultural Center

Rail Nomads

Quartz

Needles

Mine Shaft

Las Vegas