Gameplay

Basics

Trouble in Terrorist Town (TTT) revolves around a group of Terrorists (the players) who have traitors among them (referred to simply as “the traitors”). The traitors’ goal is to eliminate all Terrorists who are not traitors. The loyal, innocent terrorists (usually just called “innocent”) must of course prevent themselves from being murdered. However, the innocents do not know who is a traitor, and who is innocent.

The traitors are randomly selected at the start of the round from the group of active players. The number of traitors is a server-defined percentage of the total playercount. There is always at least one traitor. When the round starts, the players who were selected as traitors are notified and the game begins.

In order to beat the larger numbers of innocent players, traitors must use the fact that their identity is not (yet) known. How they do so is up to them. Traitors can access a “store” of helpful special equipment that they can purchase using credits earned by killing innocents.

If the number of players is large enough, the game will name a few innocent players as detectives, and supply them with special equipment similar to that of the traitors. Additionally, whenever a detective searches a body, the results will be available to all players. Other innocent players should protect the detectives to maximize their advantages. Traitors will look to take out the detectives, because killing one gives a traitor more credits to buy equipment.

Winning

The traitors win when all innocent players are dead. The innocent win when all traitors are dead, or the time limit is reached with at least one innocent player alive.

Individual players gain points by killing innocents when traitors, or traitors when innocent. Simply surviving the round is also worth points.

Teamkilling costs you a lot of points, and reduces your Karma. When playing as innocent, try to avoid immediately shooting everyone who looks remotely suspicious. You may well be gunning down someone from your own side, who might even save you later.

Death

When someone dies, you will not see it immediately on the scoreboard or in a death notice. Instead, someone must find the body and search it (using the Use key, default “E”) to identify it. Once a dead player’s body has been identified, they will no longer show as living Terrorist on the scoreboard, but will be shown as “Confirmed Dead”.

Searching a body also shows some information about how the player died, which can be used as clues to figure out who killed them. A detective searching a body shares this information with everyone (via the scoreboard).

Dead players and other spectators can also see players on the scoreboard who are “Missing In Action”, meaning they are dead but their body has not been identified yet. Note that innocent players do not have this information.

Rounds

Each round has three phases: preparing, active, and complete.

In the preparation phase, all players spawn and can start gathering weapons, exploring the map and getting into position.

When the round starts, the traitors are selected and notified. The round timer starts ticking down and the traitors have to start eliminating innocents. Usually “Haste Mode” is enabled, which means that the time limit starts out on the shorter side, but every death increases it to give the traitors more time.

As soon as either party has won, a victory screen is shown and the round complete phase starts. In this short phase everyone gets a chance to look through the victory screen. When the time is up, a new round starts with a new preparation phase.

Chat

As a spectator, you cannot communicate with the living players while the round is active. This prevents spectators from revealing the traitors, and other game-spoiling information. If you are a spectator, only other spectators will hear your voice chat. You can text chat with fellow spectators by using the team chat key.

As a living player, everyone will hear your voice chat. If you are a traitor, you can use the Sprint key (default Shift) to send your voicechat only to other traitors.

Karma

Karma is the game’s built-in system to penalise teamkilling (also called “random deathmatching”, or “RDMing”). Note that many servers have additional rules about this enforced by admins.

Every player has a Karma value. It starts at 1000, and goes down if you teamkill. At the start of a round, everyone who has a Karma below 1000 will have the damage they deal reduced by a certain percentage. As long as it’s above 800 or so, the impact will be minor, but at 700 you’ll already be doing only 80% of your full damage when you shoot someone. At around 500 Karma, it will be half.

Every time you damage someone who is on your side (e.g., innocent if you are innocent), your Karma is reduced by an amount based on your victim’s Karma. So if you kill someone who plays carefully it will hurt your Karma more than if you shoot a teamkiller. You can see other player’s Karma as it was at the start of the round on the scoreboard, and on a description when you aim at them, which goes from “Reputable” (green) to “Liability” (red).

During a round, Karma is updated behind the scenes. As soon as you damage someone your Karma goes down. So if you are Innocent, and you see someone kill multiple other innocents, you can safely shoot him: he is either a traitor, or a teamkiller who will have low Karma.

The updated Karma is not displayed on the scoreboard and crosshair info, because that would let you easily figure out if someone is a Traitor. This is the difference between Base Karma (shown on scoreboard etc) and Live Karma (updated “live” during a round). After the end of the round, your Live Karma becomes your Base Karma, and you can see everyone’s up-to-date Karma on the scoreboard.

At the end of each round, you regain Karma if you are below the maximum. If you did not damage a teammate that round, you will receive a significant bonus.

In general, your Karma will be okay as long as you don’t consistently kill teammates every round.

Special Equipment

For Traitors

Traitors have the ability to buy special equipment from a selection of useful items and weapons. This costs a credit, and you usually get only 1 at the start of a round. Killing innocent or detective players will reward the traitor with additional credits. If a traitor carrying a special weapon dies, it will drop just like his other weapons, and can be picked up by anyone. However, you can only carry a single special weapon at any time, just like other weapon types. Items do not count towards this limit, so you can for example have Body Armor, a Radar, and C4.

If you are a traitor, press the “Context Menu” key (default is C) to open the equipment screen. Select your choice and confirm it to receive the equipment.

For Detectives

Detectives can also buy special equipment in the same way. What they can buy differs from traitors, and detectives obviously do not receive credits for killing innocents but are instead rewarded credits whenever a traitor dies.

Keys

The following keys perform a special function in TTT:

Name in the keyboard settings	Default key	Function in TTT
Spawn Menu	Q	Drop weapon (including ammo)
Context Menu	C	Equipment menu (if traitor or detective)
Sprint	Shift	Voicechat only to traitors (if traitor)
Suit zoom	B	Shows quickchat/radio commands
Walk	Alt	Mute voice of living players (if spectator)
Numpad Enter	Numpad Enter	Toggle Disguiser (if you have it)
Show Help	F1	Shows TTT help and settings menu

Note: this list is not 100% complete. However, usually if a key has a special function help text will tell you.

Quickchat/radiocommand keys

Pressing the key that Suit Zoom is set to in your keyboard configuration will show a little popup with voice commands. Pressing the number key listed for a voice command will send the text to the chat. For some commands this will include the name of the player you are aiming at.

You may want to bind certain voice commands to dedicated keys, especially if you don’t have a microphone and find you can’t type quickly enough in sticky situations. I assume you know how to bind a key that isn’t in the keyboard menu. If not either google on something like “bind key Source” or ask people.

The console command used to send a quickchat is ttt_radio. You need to supply which quickchat text to send by adding its name, for example: ttt_radio help to send the “Help!” chat. Binding that to a key could look like:

bind "h" "ttt_radio help"

Entered into the console of course. These are the possible quickchat names:

Name	Text
yes	Yes.
no	No.
help	Help!
imwith	I’m with (player you aim at)
see	I see (player you aim at)
traitor	(player you aim at) is the traitor!
suspect	(player you aim at) acts suspicious.
check	Anyone still alive?