Overview
Spoiler warning – Ed’s guide to R5A2 Prisoner Efficiency. Walks you through tool loadout and easy to follow tactics to reliably beat Prisoner Efficiency.
Tool Loadout
For your tool loadout:
One mine deployer
One bio tracker
Two auto sentries
Once you beat the Extreme portion the lights are going to turn off, making the map very dark. This is why the bio tracker is useful. If an enemy is moving, it turns red on the scanner and you can hold left click to ping the enemy. This makes finding and killing scouts easier and makes the regular enemies easier to fight in the dark.
Your mine deployer is mostly useful for the first alarm on the level as well as the Blood doors. You don’t need many mines on this level so most or even all of the tool refill can happily go to the auto sentries.
Full video guide:
Zone 15, 131, and 132 (Extreme)
Zone 15
Zone 15 is very small, it contains no enemies.
Loot everything and select the EXTREME objective.
Resources:
1 use medipack
1 use ammopack
1 use tool refill
1 bulkhead key
Objectives:
1 bulkhead DC
Zone 131
The bulkhead door to Zone 131 opens, which has no alarm.
Inside you will find only a single room with regular sleepers.
Loot and kill everything, and use the terminal upstairs to perform the Override command.
Once you finish the scan, the northern door to Zone 132 will open.
Resources:
1 use medipack
1 use ammopack
1 use tool refill
Objectives:
1 terminal upstairs
Zone 132
Zone 132 has only one room which always has two scouts in it and some regular sleepers.
It will have a single box with a bulkhead key, which you will need.
One full melee charge to the head will kill a scout.
Once you have the bulkhead key, go back to Zone 15 and select the HIGH objective.
Zone 15
The bulkhead door here leads to Zone 16 and is a class II cluster alarm. Close the southern and eastern doors and place a mine horizontally on each door, this should kill most of the enemies that break through.
Zone 16, 17, and 18 (High)
Zone 16
Zone 16 is only a single room, it is quite large and will typically have 10-20 sleepers in it. Previously this room used to have a scout too, however it was recently removed.
Again kill the scout with a fully charged melee swing to the head and clear the enemies.
There are two bloody doors in this area and one locked door which requires a coloured key card.
Use the nearby terminal (underneath the entrance you came from) and Query the key card. E.g. if the door says it needs key_red_775 you go to the terminal and type:
QUERY KEY_RED_775
This tells you which of the two bloody doors you need to open. You will only ever need to open one. Notice that the ceiling is covered in cocoons, these will cause enemies to respawn this room later.
Resources:
3 use medipack
2 use ammopack
2 use toolrefill
Zone 17 & Zone 18
The doors to zone 17 and 18 are known as Bloody or Blood doors. When you try to open them, several enemies are going to spawn inside, including enemies known as Hybrids. Hybrids can shoot missiles quickly and also have a fast melee attack. Before opening the door you should place some mines near it, which will kill the majority of the enemies. You can place the mines on the glass railing so that the laser of the mine is facing inside of the door itself and into the room behind it.
Be aware that any enemies which are sleeping behind this door will get woken up when you shoot.
After you have opened the door and killed all the immediate enemies, 1 person should stay behind in Zone 16. This stops the cocoons from respawning the room. The other 3 people head into Zone 17 or 18 and look for the key card. There should also be some resources. Once you have the resources head back to the central room, Zone 16, and proceed from there to Zone 19 using your key card.
Resources:
4 use medipack
4 use ammopack
2 use tool refill
Zone 19 and 20 (High)
Zone 19
Zone 19 is another zone with only one big room. Since the recent patch, it should have one scout and possibly some normal sleepers too. It will typically have some lockers with miscellaneous items but will not contain any resources. You may notice there is a bulkhead door that is currently in lockdown. This lockdown will end when you pick up the HiSec Cargo, allowing you to do overload.
At the top of the room, you will find the security door to Zone 20 which is a class III Cluster alarm. The enemies only have one way they can come from – the bridge. Put one or both of your sentries down to cover the bridge. The auto sentries don’t deal much damage but they do a great job of staggering enemies. If you are going to use two of them, spread them out so that they don’t attack the same enemies at the same time, as that wastes ammo. There are three floors in this room and the scans will typically visit all 3 floors, so it is best to split your team up. You may find it beneficial for one person to hold the bridge with the sentries, while the other three take a floor each to scan. Once you’ve completed the scan and cleaned up any remaining enemies, one person should stay behind here, in Zone 19.
Resources:
None
Zone 20
Zone 20 is another zone with only a single room. Before you go in there, one person should again stay behind in Zone 19 or Zone 16, this will stop the cocoons from respawning. This area contains a few resources and the HiSec Cargo. DO NOT PICK UP THE CARGO until you have prepared for Overload (next section).
Resources:
4 use medipack
3 use ammopack
3 use tool refill
Objectives:
One HiSec Cargo
Inside Zone 20 you will find two terminals, the bottom one has some audio files on it which contain lore. The 4 main files take 16 minutes to listen to. Typing in “logs” will give a list of log files, and typing in “read filename.log” will let you open the audio logs. There are several pages of logs, and most of them are gibberish. The ones with clear audio are the ones with larger file sizes. There is also an easter egg which is unlocked by combining all of the gibberish audio logs.
Once you have all the resources, read the next section to prepare for Overload.
How to easily beat Overload
The Overload objective for this map only unlocks once you have picked up the HiSec Cargo. However, picking up the cargo also triggers a permanent alarm of 3 sleepers every 30 seconds or so.
Before you pick up the cargo, you should make some preparations:
First, gather and use all the resources that you can.
Second, place your auto sentries ready for the Overload objective. You can place one of them at the bulkhead door itself, and another 10-15 meters behind. This stops them from hitting the same target and wasting time when they could be killing/slowing down multiple enemies between them. See the video for an example.
Third, whichever Blood door you opened earlier, go inside and close the first door in there and place a mine on it. That way if any enemies from the Error alarm spawn there, they will take time to break the door, then instantly die to the mines.
Fourth, make sure everybody knows their roles.
As mentioned before there will be a permanent alarm going. When you pick up the HiSec cargo one person needs to stay within range of Zone 16 to stop the cocoons from respawning.
One person needs to be dedicated to carrying the cargo while two people protect them. The other person is staying in Zone 16 for a while. The person carrying the cargo should be anybody apart from the person with the bio tracker. You will want the bio tracker to be pinging enemies and calling out which direction they come from.
When it is time to pick up the cargo, you will carry it all the way back to the beginning of the level and start the extraction scan. Once the scan reaches 85-90% you need to leave the scan zone, the scan will stay at 85-90% until you come back. You can leave the cargo in the scan
Fight your way back to the Overload door. Inside the door is a Birther enemy, as well as around 20 of her babies. The babies don’t deal much damage on their own but they are fast and the damage quickly adds up.
As you kill the babies, the Birther will start to give birth to even more babies, and she will also cover the room with a thick layer of fog making it hard to see what you are doing.
The objective for Overload is to grab a hard drive, which is in a locker in the back of the room.
Most new players try to kill the mother and fail several times before they succeed. The most effective way to beat this objective is for 1 person to defend the bridge behind you (which also stops cocoon respawns), while the other 3 open the door and kill most of the babies.
Once most of the babies are dead, 1-2 people run inside the room, grab the hard drive, and then announce that they have it. The locker with the hard drive can sometimes have a hack lock on it, your runners should ideally have lock melters, just in case.
At this point, all 4 players run back to the spawn point and finish the remaining 10-15% of the extraction scan.
It doesn’t matter if the person with the hard drive dies, as long as it gets picked up initially, it still counts
Full video guide: