Character screen and inventory | The basics of the gameplay Wasteland 2 Guide

Character screen.

Character screen is the basic source of knowledge about the individual party members. You can find here their inventory, equipment, statistics, attributes, skills and bios. You can access this window by pressing "C", or by clicking the right mouse button on the character icon.

Each character can wear the following:

• Head, torso and legs apparel; backpack - they influence only the appearance. Only the four original heroes can wear them. You will find many different pieces of clothing - from usual ones to very unique, like for example gorilla outfit - when searching stashes, shops or looting fallen enemies.
• Armor - the armor value oscillates between 1-10. The same values hold true for the piercing penetration value of individual weapons. Armor reduces damage only if its value is higher than the armor penetration value of a weapon Some of the heavier armors require appropriate Strength levels to be worn. They also can slow down your movements, make it impossible to run outside of combat and during the combat, decrease the distance that you can cover at the cost of one action point.
• Trinket - an item that raises the value of a skill or perk. Sometimes, this may only be one attribute, or skill, sometimes two, whereas the rest of skills cannot be raised in this way at all.
• Canteen - shows the amount of water necessary to explore the wastes (only in Arizona). It is a value that is shared by all the party members. You can replenish water by finding oases during the exploration of the world, or by using springs in certain locations, e.g. Rangers' Citadel.
• Rad suit - after you wear it as a character, it becomes shared by the entire party. Its protection level indicates how irradiated areas you can explore.
• Weapons and ammo - each character carries around two types of weapons, regardless of their type or size. You can easily switch between them during combat, without using up the action points.

All of the worn and unworn items use up the payload that a given character can carry. The capacity for that is determined by Strength, and the weight of the individual items can be looked up, after you roll your mouse over that item. If your equipment weights more than a character can carry, then the character will be slowed down. With very high overload, the character may even be unable to move.

Searching of the stash.

An item picked up from a corpse, or taken out of a locker automatically makes it into that character's equipment. While searching, you can select another party member to give a particular item to them, or select the option that allows you to distribute some of the equipment between every member of the group so that nobody carries too much.. Therefore, you can conveniently assort, e.g. ammo to the character who uses it, instead of carrying it over manually. If, however, you want to carry something over from one character to another, you simply need to click the left mouse button on the item and, while holding the button down, roll it over the icon of the character that you want to give it to. You need to keep in mind that the characters cannot be standing too far away from each other, if you want to transfer equipment. In a similar way, you can throw an item away, but you release the button after you roll it outside of the equipment window.

To get a more convenient view of your belongings, you can switch between the individual categories, if you want to get the view of, e.g. weapons or ammo only. Also, each item can be marked as waste. You do that by clicking the right mouse button on the individual item and selecting "flag as junk". During the next visit to a shop, you can sell all the items that you have flagged this way, with one click. Every item of no use (you will know it by the gray colour of its name) is categorized as worthless and will be automatically sold when you select a proper option during bartering. Other items (white colour of the name) can always be used for something. This category contains of course: guns, medicine, ammunition, clothes and quest items (they have an additional marking); also all kinds of items that may seem worthless, like cans of spray, notes, books or letters can sometimes provide useful info, like for example combination for a safe. In most of the larger locations, you will find the story of this place, divided into several parts. Collecting all parts of the story, which are spread onto the whole location, can bring a lot of fun to those who love complex game lore. However, those books are of not much more use.

The situation is different with unusual items from toasters (but not only, as sometimes they can be simply lying on the floor). These items can be sold for unique rewards. They can be divide into three categories:

• Historical artifacts, which will be of interest to Flintlock Eggleston in the Ranger Citadel museum. This category contains items connected to the lore (for example pre-war catalogues or pictures). Most often, they will earn you money or earlier promotion onto higher level.
• Technology items, which will interest captain Ethil Mercaptain in the Citadel. These items are for example parts of synthetics and game consoles. Every such item that you bring, will earn you a Requisition, which can be exchanged for an item from her store.
• Unclassified items, like for example the spray can mentioned earlier. Such items will interest somebody in the wasteland, but you don't know who and where. When you meet a person that is interested in a specific item that you have, a new key-word will appear in the dialogue box. For these objects, you will receive unique rewards (depending on the item and the person that wants to have it). You can presume that a certain person will be interested in an item that you have by talking to them and learning what is their occupation - for example, you can give the spray can to a guard who is trying to cover a graffiti on the walls of the Citadel.