EFT Tutorial and Guide
THE TARKOV CENTRAL
Interrupting Actions
Even though this topic isn't strictly related to looting, since we've talked about Simultaneous Actions, I think it's worth discussing the ability to interrupt ongoing actions as well.
It's quite common to start an action like healing or eating and suddenly hear enemy footsteps approaching—or even worse, to find yourself under enemy fire.
Healing, Food, and Drinks
For healing, food, and drinks, you can simply press the right mouse button, and the action will be interrupted. However, you’ll have to wait for your character to stop the action and put away the item they were using.
Some actions stop faster than others, while some take longer to cancel.
The action that takes the longest to interrupt is surgery using a surgical kit. Since this action gives you a significant advantage by allowing you to restore a blacked-out limb, it also comes with major limitations. Not only does it force you to remain stationary, but it also requires more time to be interrupted.
Losing the Item in Use or some of its Charges
For healing items and drinks with multiple charges, interrupting the action has no downsides. The action will stop at whatever point you reached, leaving the effects of the usage intact.
For example, if you are healing a missing 50 HP in your torso and you interrupt at 25 HP, the action will stop, you’ll have healed only 25 HP, and the medkit will have 25 HP worth of charge deducted. The same applies to drinking. If you’re drinking from a water bottle with 60 charges and you stop at 30, your thirst will be reduced accordingly, and 30 charges will be used up from the bottle.
However, for certain items, you can lose the item itself or one of its charges and get no effect.
For example, let’s consider a food can with a single charge.
-
If you interrupt the eating action immediately, your character will simply close the can and put it away—you won’t lose it.
-
If you interrupt later, your character will still put it away, but the item will be lost entirely, with no effect on your hunger.
This applies to single-use food and drink items, as well as surgical kits.
TIP: If you try to perform two actions that can’t be done simultaneously, the second one will interrupt the first. If you were using an item with a charge, you will lose that charge without gaining its benefit.
For example, if you interrupt surgery by trying to fill a magazine with ammo, you will lose a charge from the surgical kit without completing the surgery.
Using Animation Interruption to Speed Up Healing
Interrupting animations isn’t just useful for reacting to emergencies—it can also be strategically used to speed up healing.
When using a medkit, only the first part of the animation is actually needed to restore HP. The second part of the animation is only required when the medkit is being used to remove additional effects like bleeding or fractures.
This means that if you only need to restore HP, you can interrupt the healing action early as soon as you see the medkit’s charge number decrease—this indicates that the healing has already been applied.
By mastering this technique, you can save precious seconds, allowing you to heal efficiently without being locked into a full animation unnecessarily. If you need to heal multiple body parts, this can save you even more time, as you’ll shave off seconds from each heal.
If you want to know more about this, see it in action as well as a comparison to the recently introduced continuous healing mechanic to see which technique is the most effective, I suggest you to watch this video by Gigabeef.
Special Case: Individually-Loaded Weapons
In Escape from Tarkov, you may find yourself using weapons that don’t have removable magazines and must be reloaded one bullet at a time. This is the case with many shotguns, as well as rifles like the SKS and Mosin.
When you press R to reload one of these weapons, your character will start loading rounds one by one until the internal magazine is full.
This process takes several seconds, but what happens if an enemy suddenly appears while you’re in the middle of reloading? Or if you're in the middle of combat and only want to reload 2-3 rounds so you can start shooting again as soon as possible?
If you need to interrupt the reload, instead of pressing the right mouse button like you do to interrupt other actions, press the left mouse button, as if you were about to fire.
Even in this case, the action won’t stop instantly—you’ll likely load one more bullet before stopping (depending on the exact moment you press the left mouse button)—but then you'll be ready to shoot.
For safety, you can also press the left mouse button multiple times, but be careful not to keep clicking for too long, or you might accidentally fire a shot when the reload animation stops.
Practice!
Since interrupting actions usually happens in high-stress situations, it's best to be familiar with how it works in advance. Knowing the timing required can make a big difference.
I strongly recommend practicing in Practice Mode, so you don’t risk losing charges or items unnecessarily.
This is especially true for interrupting weapon reloads, which can sometimes be a bit tricky to get right and can determine the outcome of a fight.