Sharpton Projects

The Sharpton Projects are a sprawling maze of rat nests and scavenging opportunities, located in sunny Gangland.

What's in Sharpton

Sharpton Projects is riddled with rats of different sizes, the smallest being Scuttling/Little/Tiny rats which pose very little threat, whereas at the opposite end of the spectrum, you have the Giant/Huge/Unusually size/Mutant rats which are likely to chew Newbies to pieces with ease. In between, you have Large/Tan/Black/White rats, which are manageable, as long as you're wearing enough armor. All the rats, with the smallest in exception, will attack you if you move into the room they're in, but not vice versa. If you die without a cocoon and rats are present around your corpse, when you enter the room, your corpse instantly and completely biodegrades and rats may steal your things and cart them off to their nests.

There are often Access panels which you can find by searching in some areas. If you have fairly high Scavenge skill, or have the Junkrat mutation, and get a message along the lines of "Hmm. You have a hunch there's something here", try searching a couple of times and you should reveal an entrance to a previously inaccessible area (though you have to do this again if you leave and enter the room again).

If your scavenge skill is shit, getting through the Projects is considerably more difficult, but there are a couple of tricks you can use to even the odds. The first is to use the 'lmap' command, which will display all passages, including hidden passages and inaccessible rat holes. The other trick is to use the 'look <direction>' command. If you look in a direction where a passage lies hidden, you will receive a message prompting you to search the area. This is also useful for figuring out which passages marked on your 'lmap' are usable, and which are rat holes. All this notwithstanding, it is still difficult to reveal and use hidden passages without at least a modest Scavenge rating, even if you can see where they are.

The Basement

The Basement of Sharpton can be accessed in a number of ways, the easiest of which is searching for a vent in the Maintenance room at the front entrance, then going through the air duct and going down from the fan room. If you've killed any rats, butchering the tails from them is a wise idea, as Chester is in the room beneath the fan room and giving them to him nets you $66 per tail, and often Fat Ratzo will give you packages to deliver to Chester, which earns a solid $225 per package. There are also some valuable diagrams in the filing cabinet in that room.

Rat Nests

This is where having your ass gnawed off a dozen times pays off, there's plenty of semi-valuable loot to be had in Rat's nests, especially $180 Bike chains and Buckey lube. (Although earlier, rats used to be able to pick up items, they don't seem to be able to pick anything up any more. This has it's benefits; you won't see heaps of scrap wood and ashtrays you dropped earlier gravitating in the nests. On the other hand, randomly spawning junk won't turn up in their nests either.)