Revulsion Essentials; FAQ; That Stuff You Should Know

Overview

All the important things Revulsion doesn’t tell you, or that you didn’t read when it did.

Absolute essentials:

• You need to be at full health to get through the first door. Find the mini medkit, use it, then step on the button.
• You have four bars on the left- HP, Armor, Armor Refill Delay, and Action Points, from top to bottom, respectively. You need to use medkits and the like to refill HP, Armor is refilled with medkits and armor pickups in the world, you can ignore armor refill delay idk, and Action Points are what it costs to use your Medkit or other special item. Find potions pickups in the world like armor pickups to top this one off.
• If your health goes below zero, you’ll end up in a ‘fight for your life’ state with slowmo and a second bar showing how much negative health you can take. Get more life by killing dudes, using your medkit item, or by just not getting hit for a little while (it’ll regenerate back up to zero or one). Too much negative health and YOU DIED.
• The fifth bar at the bottom is your EXP. If you die, you lose all exp since you last stepped into a fast travel teleporter, gained a level, or had a level transition.a big ol’ chunk of exp okay I’m not exactly sure how much.
• Speaking of teleporters- this is how you save/checkpoint/refill life/ammo/etc. Stepping into one (even without traveling anywhere) will also regenerate most of the monsters in the level (along with armor and action point pickups, but NOT loot), so there’s a bit of a tradeoff to doing so. You’ll want to poke your head in anyways if you’ve slain a bunch of dudes to save your exp before you throw yourself off a cliff or something.
• Simply discovering the fast travel teleporter isn’t enough to save your exp- you gotta step into it. Discovering it puts it on the map, though.
• You also slowly regenerate ammo and refill half of your maximum capacity of all ammo types when you run over the blue ammo boxes.
• Ammo Boxes are a type of item you can keep in your inventory; simply having it increases the amount of its specified ammo type you can carry. They’re heavy and take up 300 storage (your soft storage limit is 3000, check the bottom of your inventory pane).
• You can equip both a medkit-type item and a special-type item: Medkits are blueish greenish, specials are red. Specials don’t consume very many action points, so go nuts with them. You don’t have to choose between regaining life and throwing exploding bowling balls at people, I didn’t figure that out until level 20 or something.
• There’s five damage types- fire, ice, poison, lightning, and ballistic. Fire and lightning are good against zombies, ice and poison are good against demons. Lightning’s just kinda good in general- go grab a blaster for your pistol slot.
• Some enemies have armor, that’s the yellowy bar over their life. If you’re dishing out the hurt and their life value isn’t going anywhere, this is why. You just have to deplete it like you do regular life.
• Item level tends to be more important for your survival than item quality or quality percentage- keep your gear at level for a better time.
• Need new gear? Vending machines always have stuff at your level. Vending Machine in Sanctuary just has armor and blueprints, so find one in the world. Doesn’t matter if the mission level is 2 or 20, the vending machine always has stuff at your level.
• There is a vending machine very near to the spawn point if you choose Open World, then Gate Security. Just drop down into the ravine and hook a round, and mind the ambush.
• You don’t get a lot of money for selling stuff to the vending machine, it’s better put towards deconstruction in the fabricator.
• You may find wall textures that look square and ‘minecraft-esque’; you may be able to break them with a pickaxe or explosives. It’ll take four to six good thunks per tile with the pickaxe, so if there’s something behind it, you’ll know by then.

How Items Work

Every item has an item level, a rarity (referred to as ‘quality’), and a quality percentage.

Item level determines how good the item is at base. You want to be using stuff that’s at your level as much as possible. If it’s more than two levels below your current level, you should probably priotise replacing it.

Rarity is essentially bonus item levels. A level 10 shotgun at green rarity (‘high quality’) will have stats as though it’s level 11, but will still require only level 10 to use. Blue rarity is two levels, purple three, yellow is idk i haven’t seen one yet, but you get the idea.

Quality percentage makes your item perform better at its level. A level 10 24% shotgun will have lower stats than a level 10 43% shotgun. More quality percentage is good, but it’s not worth stressing over.

Items don’t degrade; quality percentage doesn’t go down. Your stuff doesn’t break.

Armor has two values- Armor, and Defense. Armor adds to the maximum for your armor pool, that’s the bar that lives below your health bar. Defense reduces the amount of damage you take. Generally. I’m not sure if defense still applies when your armor runs out or not, but the skinny of it is, big numbers good. Reinforced armor gives you extra big good numbers, but makes you move slower, so biggest numbers might not be goodest- that is for you to decide.

Armor can also have a prefix- Sprinters, Enduring, Berserkers, Grounded, etc. It’ll tell you what each gives you when you hover over the item- sprinters for movement speed, berserkers for added attack damage, etc. Again, reinforced slows your movement speed, so that one has a trade-off.

It’s worth mentioning that ammo boxes are also affected by level, rarity, and quality percentage, so get rid of your old ones if you’re using them.

Finally- all items take up storage if they’re just hanging out in your inventory. Ammo boxes take 300, armors take 100, etc. Your default storage limit is 3000, if you exceed this, it penalizes your movement speed.

The Fabricator

This handy machine in Sanctuary is where you go to break down junk, repair damaged items you find in the world, or craft things from blueprints. Let’s break it down.

Again, damaged items can be repaired here at less cost than it takes to buy new, plus some gun parts or metal scrap or whatever from loot boxes found in the world and from dismantling stuff. Your stuff doesn’t get damaged; you found it that way. It’s not all worth repairing, of course, so don’t go out of your way to mend everything you can find.

Hoarding stuff generally isn’t useful. Old gear can be dismantled at the fabricator for bit used to repair other damaged items, enhance armors, and craft from blueprints. Clicking ‘dismantle’ will give you an “Are you sure?” prompt along with a readout of what you’ll get from doing so. You can push (push once, not hold, just push) the run button (default shift) and the Dismantle word will turn green- this’ll skip the prompt.

This is how you’ll get most of the gem-type components you need to enhance other bits of gear or craft blueprints, so dismantle your stuff instead of selling it to the vending machine.

Speaking of gem-type components- the “Enhance Item” button is used exclusively for armors. Each armor can have a prefix- Enduring, Reinforced, Sprinters, Marksman, Berserkers, Endless, etc. Some blues may have other prefixes you cannot craft, like “Grounded” which grants more lightning resistance but I don’t even know if any enemies use lightning attacks so idk. Anyways, you take your non-prefixed armor, fabricate it, choose ‘Enhance Item,’ and select which of the prefix types you need, cough up five gems from your resource pile, and bang bang, your armor has that prefix now. Doesn’t work for guns.

Up at the top of the inventory pane, you’ll see a tab titled Blueprints- you can click on that to see a list of everything you can make yourself in case the vending machines are being stingy. You find some blueprints in the world, you get some as Advancements for doing various tasks, you buy most from the vending machine. Click on ‘Fabricator’ when you’re next to the fabricator to craft the blueprint item or to enhance the blueprint.

‘Upgrade Blueprint’ on a selected blueprint takes a small amount of resources and increases the rarity color of the item you’ll get out of it. It also heavily increases the construction cost of the item and does not seem to be reversible (except maybe if you find another copy of the blueprint?), so choose carefully.

I thiiiiink finding a duplicate of a blueprint increases the ‘quality %’ of the blueprint, which in turn means you get a better quality % item when you craft it.

That’s pretty much it as the fabricator goes. Build stuff if your stuff’s old and low level, dismantle stuff if you’re replacing it.

The World: Missions, Dungeon, Open-world, etc.

• Missions are sets of maps you need to complete sequentially, finishing one mission unlocks the next one. They’ll tell you what the level of enemies in the level is before you choose them. That first leap from mission level 2 to mission level 10 is a bit of a doozy, though.

  You can leave missions to go back to Sanctuary to use the fabricator, vending machine, or storage. Choosing ‘Abort Mission’ will reset your progress on the maps-completed-sequentially part but otherwise carries no penalty. If you’re having a bad time because you’re well under-leveled, you can abort and try someplace else.

  At the end of a mission is a mega-crystal-thing that pumps out exp and awards you with whichever mission rewards were listed when you selected it.

  You can also redo missions, if that’s your fancy! You can still get the mega-crystal thing for another bucket of exp (it’s usually worth two levels or so), but you won’t get the blueprint rewards again.

• The dungeon just produces procedurally-generated maps with monsters and loot to blast through. Floor number doesn’t seem to do anything; monster level seems to vary five levels up and like ten levels down from yours. You might get pasted by a zombie rocketeer some five levels above you, that just happens sometimes. Sucks.

  Dungeon has a lot of loot chests to bust open and seemingly a higher frequency of ‘Epic’ or ‘Legendary’ monsters, which themselves have busty loot chests. This is where you’ll go when you need more dosh, generally speaking.

• Open World is a weird one- it doesn’t particularly explain to you what the established monster level is for an area, so you just sort of have to explore and find out. Loot boxes DO reappear in this one if you visit the teleporter or get buttwasted, but whether or not that’s worth it to you is up to your discretion.

  Open World is most of the game’s levels stitched together, best as I can tell, with teleporters dotted through it to mark your progress. Don’t get weirded out if you see maps you just finished here. Keep in mind, of course, that dying removes all the exp you’ve gained since your last teleporter visit, so explore carefully.

Final notes on enemies and guns

• Some guns just work better than others. Crossbows suck. The Blaster is an incredible pistol of mass destruction. The Acid Cannon just eliminates demons and uses railgun ammo, which most other things don’t use, so you’ll have buckets of it available. It also gets super accurate if you aim down the sights.
• Some guns share ammo types across weapon slots- the SMG uses pistol ammo, as do ordinary pistols, the assault rifle uses rifle rounds, and so does the minigun. Explosive crossbow(which again, is terrible) uses grenades, much like the grenade launcher. Heed this when you’re choosing which guns to prefer- it’s no good to use the assault rifle AND the minigun if the one’s going to choke out the other, but if you’re more keen on, say, the Acid Cannon, then assault rifle is probably a good choice.
• You get Red Mana by killing guys and by it regenerating slowly like every other ammo type. It’s not a great ammo type for opening a level with, but if you’re halfway through, you’ll be sitting on a nice fat stack of ammo to use with, say, the Death Orbs if that’s your fancy.
• Some guns have a huge ‘recoil animation’ if you will after firing- the firestorm grenades, for example, or the cluster grenades, or the double shotgun. Their reload animations are quite fast, though. Weapon swapping is really, REALLY fast, so you’re usually better off chucking one of those grenades, swapping over to another gun for a few rounds while the ‘recoil animation’ cools off, then popping back to it for your speedy reload.
• Minigun zombies will stand still and spool up their minigun while you’re in line of sight. Break line of sight to interrupt that and make them waste time. Don’t let them back you into a corner.
• You really, really, really want some kind of a fire or lightning weapon for the minigun/grenadier/rocket zombies. They’re THICC. Also usually the most dangerous thing on the field.

That’s the gist of it, I think. Give a shout if there’s some integral detail I’ve missed.