How to Get a Desert Rifle Early

This is a guide for getting an early game panic weapon as early as level 1, as your first kill even. This depends on a variety of factors. Here is a video example of me doing this.

There are two main methods of finding your issachari rifler victim:
 * Find a neutral one in a salt desert village (most convenient would be to start in one)
 * Walk around in the salt desert and find one. they will be hostile/neutral depending on your reputation.

The neutral method is much safer because issachari riflers' most damage causing source is, well, their rifles. At melee range they will resort to using their short swords instead, which is comparatively safer. Finding a neutral one allows you to easily get into melee range.

Their demeanor is important, but another important factor is whether they are surrounded by people. This is why this must be done during the day so you can see the entire map. You're looking for a rifler that is the closest creature to the edge(if they are hostile) where you are, and all other creatures (that is hostile or will be hostile once you aggro the rifler) are about 10 tiles away.

Getting a hostile rifler into melee range
You can run up to them, but you will definitely die at level one. The safer method works for MOST characters at level one, but it assumes that you have at least 18 toughness, and at least 3 AV. When you're scouring the desert, make sure you stay at the very edge to move into another zone if you see something you don't like. as long as you leave immediately after entering, the enemies there won't aggro you. You won't get that luxury if you come back to that zone though. You will be insta-fried.

Move close enough that they fire a shot at you. This might hit you, which is why you need the 18 HP and decent AV. then run away back to the closest zone edge. If they weren't too far away they will pursue you into melee range without firing all their shots. if not, you're better off running away in the same zone until they run out of bullets, and then run into melee range.

Doing the deed
Killing a rifler who's out of ammo is the same as killing a raider, except they wield two weapons so they have a 15% chance of having two attacks per round. If you're sufficiently geared (~5 AV, 18 TOU, at least 17 STR) you can just bump into them until they die. They may get you into low HP, so pack witchwood bark, They won't move, so attacking the same spot is fine even if you're confused.

For those who lack sufficient damaging moves early on, you can still do this with torches as a thrown weapon. just equip them in your thrown slot, get close range, and then throw it at them. ideally this will be at melee range because the torch will continue to emit heat and the rifler should be sitting on it to set on fire. the fire will give them damage over time (which is significant early on) and they will waste turns patting it out. you can throw more at them if you like, but one or two is usually sufficient)

Once they die, pick up your early game rifle. you can also pick up the torches too. Make sure you have "auto light/douse torches" checked in automaton so the torches you pick up don't burn to ash in your inventory. the slugs will also burn up but that's ok because they won't have much after combat anyway.

Rifle usage
Once you have the rifle, you should ration ammo wisely until you reach Grit Gate. You will likely only have the ~20 bullets that your starting village trader have, and each shot will either one shot or significantly damage your foes. I recommend reserving them for high AV creatures like eyeless crabs, or legendaries. The rifle also will carry you through golgotha, so you can also use them to blast at black, brown, green jels without them getting into melee range. This combined with careful traversal makes contracting disease very rare! But thats for the golgotha specific guide :P

Limits
If you want to know the lower limit of how weak you can be and still pull this off, I tested a flat 10 (except toughness, which was 16) tinker (since int does not provide combat benefits) with all armor unequipped (so 0 AV 3 DV, from negative AGI modifier) with both rifler types. It's doable with the neutral villager rifler, but the hostile one is very dangerous if you get unlucky and the bullet manages to hit you. At 0 AV, it crit my character for 37 damage, which no level 1 character can take. Nothing's stopping you from going back and doing this strat at a higher level and better gear, though.