Overview
Starting Deadnauts but aren’t sure how to start making your own character or compose your crew of space scavengers? You’re in luck space cowboy, because planet Earth has deemed you worthy to receive classified information on how to prioritize abilities and what character traits to look for, or avoid, in your Deadnaut posse. With the right party, and a fair amount of good fortune, you’ll be able to investigate derelict alien ships with minimal casualties. Not to fret though captain, everything’s shiny! If one of your party dies, we have the technology to clone them.The process is not perfect, however, and there is genetic degredation with each procedure…
Getting Started: How to Design Your Deadnaut, Part 1
INTRODUCTION
There are six phases of life your Deadnaut has gone through before they decided to embark on what is most likely a one way trip into the deep reaches of space: Birth, Childhood, Education, Early Career, Late Career, and Wisdom. From birth, you have 30 points to spend throughout your Deadnaut’s career. Every stat you allocate at birthcosts you 2 points from this pool, any character traits at childhood cost 1, education costs 10, but you can regain points in early/late career by assigning character flaws, and then stronger perks at the wisdom stage.
At first try, you’ll find you run out of points at education or early career, finding yourself reluctant to assign a flaw to your Deadnaut, because you want a team of super bad ass space rangers with sparkly clean records. Hate to break it to you captain, but generally the desperate and deranged seek out this line of work, bringing with them all the baggage that entails. Every hero or villain has their flaws, and your Deadnauts are no different.
1. BIRTH
So how do you construct your character? I won’t touch on what each stat boosts, there is the manual for that, but be sure to always place 9 stats total, for 18 points, so that before you proceed to childhood, you have 12 points remaining. The following is a basic weapon specialist whose sole job is to be proficient in combat and we’ll be min/maxing stats to get the most bang for your buck.
Every stat has been boosted to 4, except wits, because that stat has no effect on combat proficency. Think Jayne Cobb mercenary!
2. CHILDHOOD
This is probably the least important phase of your Deadnaut’s life, and might be part of the reason they’ve decided on their current profession; daddy didn’t hug them enough. Anyway, due to the large amount of environmental factors that can play out during searching a derelict ship, it’s best to choose one factor that you really want to stick out for your character, especially if it’s modeled after a friend or family member, but in this case, we want our Jayne Cobb gun wielding mercenary to enjoy combat. Not selecting anything means the character’s preference will be randomly selected with each new campaign start and possibly when they’re cloned.
If you REALLY find that you absolutely MUST be able to allocate more points to character traits, go back one screen and take away one attribute since selecting a preference only costs one point. The important thing to remember is you HAVE to end up with 11 points before you proceed, or you’ll get stuck in the education phase.
3. EDUCATION
This is the phase of life where your little Deadnaut focused all their efforts in school, presumably up to age 11 or so, since I guess learning on the streets with stealth still happens in the 22nd century. No matter what trait you pick here, they all cost 10 points and assign 8 points into their corresponding ability. You should have just 1 point left before heading to Early Career and we can make up this short coming by assigning character flaws… yay!
Something to take note of, however, is that there are several stat boosts here that you can’t get from your early/late career path, notably Cohesion, Intuition, and Stealth. So if you’re designing a character that focuses on any of these attributes pick them now.
Personally, I don’t see much use for stealth since you’re party is going to be together most of the time and sending someone off alone is usually a good way to get them killed.
See part 2 for final steps.
Getting Started: How to Design Your Deadnaut, Part 2
4. EARLY CAREER
This is the lovely phase where you’re going to have to start selecting character flaws that your Deadnauts have developed so you can earn back much needed points to redistribute into your career choice and boost your abilities even more. We’ll take a little detour and talk about some of the flaws, which ones are safe for which type of character, and others to avoid at all costs! If they’re not mentioned here, decide for yourself if you want to take them.
FLAWS
!Avoid!
1. Selective Deafness : While this might ring horribly true as a character flaw for whoever you’re designing your Deadnaut after, it is far too unpredictable and has a high probability of getting your character(s) killed. They won’t just ignore orders and stand idle, sometimes they’ll sprint off into unexplored areas, triggering rooms filled with hostile aliens, run into a sentinel (giant laser turret) and die, or even retreat back into destroyed areas and get themselves injured or killed by the vacuum of space.
2. Bad Vibes/Unlikeable : This won’t be an issue the first stage, maybe two, but you’ll quickly develop negative relationships that will degrade your party’s combat effectiveness. Sometimes negative relationships will develop on their own, but there is no reason to guarantee it happens.
3. Porcelain : Your character will get unnerved with even a little bit of damage, and since you can’t always control which character is getting attacked, this can be a ticking time bomb waiting to go off. If your character completely loses their mind and becomes unstable, they’ll start shooting at anything and everyone, getting themselves or another Deadnaut killed in the process.
!Preferred!
1. Stimulated : This flaw is really easy to negate, don’t give your Deadnauts any stims when they board a vessel and you won’t have to worry about them using stims when they aren’t supposed to! They can get their drug fix if they make it safely back to the ship. Just make sure to check your characters equipment before the next mission, sometimes your Deadnauts will try to sneak stims with them into the next stage.
2. Memory Lapse : This is a great flaw to take for combat oriented characters that will only shoot approaching bad guys. Do not take this for your hacker, sensor, or protection Deadnaut, you don’t want them forgetting how to do their tech roles at a pivotal moment.
3. Attention Seeker : A little strange, but the ‘radius’ for attracting enemies does not seem to be that large. This could be changed in a later patch I suppose, but I have not encountered a situation yet where this let loose the dogs of war and got my party killed, although I suppose it’s possible.
BACK TO EARLY CAREER
So now that you’ve selected a flaw, choose the corresponding career path for 8 ability points and then a second flaw so that you proceed to late career with 11 points.
5. LATE CAREER
This is more or less a repeat of early career and you can select the same career path or a different one for a rounded character instead of a highly specialized Deadnaut. You’ll need to select a third flaw to ensure you get to the wisdom phase with 11 points.
Optionally, you could select a fourth flaw and select the likeable trait. You can actually pick the likeable trait at early career, late career, and wisdom, up to a total of three times… but I don’t know how useful that would be. Unless you just want a social butterly.
6. WISDOM
This is where your biggest ability bonus is going to come from. Each stage up to this point (education, early/late career) has only given you a +8 bonus to your abilities, but the wisdom stage can give up to +16 in a single ability or distributed to 2 or 3 abilities. Remember in education how that was the only place you had access to cohesion, intuition, and stealth modifiers? There are three separate perks in wisdom that will put +16 into each of those. You could even select another flaw, going up to four, five or six! Again, only useful for the social butterfly power build.
If you can read the stats, Jayne Cobb, uber cool mercenary, has ended up with 60(!) combat, but is pretty terrible at everything else. If you choose to make this character, realize he’s going to be a super bad ass and gun down every bad guy almost single handedly.
SUMMARY
So, if you’ve read through all of that, or skipped to the end, the biggest take aways are :
1. End the birth phase with 12 points, there really is no good reason not to.
2. In my opinion, the best characters will have three flaws to really optimize their strengths. You can stop at Early Career if you want to with just 1 flaw, but you’re sacrificing 24 ability points doing so.
3. Stealth seems to be pretty crappy, especially since you’re going to have missions where you have to kill everything on board.
Party Composition: What You Need and Why
This next section is pulled directly from the manual and only features minor additions and spelling/grammar corrections.
BEGIN MANUAL PORTION
Roles
Although there are no character classes, your Deadnauts will generally fulfill of one of four general roles, and each role depends on the type of suit they’re wearing as that allocates slots for the different types of equipment.
Weapons: The most common kind of Deadnaut. Specialises in combat and carries offensive equipment.
Shields: Usually equipped with one or more shields. With the right equipment, they can also project a shield onto another Deadnaut
Sensors: Detection is one of the most important parts of the game – if you can’t see an enemy, you can’t shoot it. Sensor specialists can not only detect threats on multiple wavelengths, they can also actively scan a distant location.
Tech: Tech specialists are mostly involved with hacking and investigation. They can hack faster and longer, meaning they can manipulate things from a longer distance.
Attributes
Vigor: Speed, strength and hardiness
Acuity: Awareness and perception
Wits: Cognitive abilities and intelligence
Grit: Experience, bravery and cohesion
Attributes are generally fixed throughout the game, however, they can be manipulated briefly using special stimulants. Be warned: when a stimulant wears off, the Deadnaut will go into a withdrawal phase and take penalties.
Skills
Skills represent a set of abilities, typically related to a Deadnaut’s history that you can manipulate during the creation phase.
* Investigation: Boost clue investigation speed and may increase knowledge gained from examing corpses or equipment.
** Combat: Increases accuracy and reload speed.
** Protection: Boost range of fields; increases field efficiency
** Detection: Increases sensor range and efficiency
* Intuition: Increases chance of revealing points of interest
Stealth: Reduces chance of being detected by enemies
** Hacking: Increases hacking speed and firewall duration
* Cohesion: Increases stability in nearby Deadnauts
No * = Don’t bother.
1 * = Nice to have, but not a critical skill.
2 ** = Not having one Deadnaut that specializes in this skill is asking for trouble.
END OF MANUAL PORTION
So, now we know that our Deadnaut’s roles are determined by their suits and there are really four critical skills more or less tied to each type of role/suit. It may be intuitive, but I’ll list it out just in case:
Weapons – Combat: You want to gun down the enemy quickly. Missed shots not only means increased damage to your party, but environment damage that will possibly destory the room you’re standing in.
Shields – Protection: This may not seem important, but due to their shield they’re immune to environment damage in a destroyed room or can cast a shield on a fellow Deadnaut (or more, if they have the energy) and make them immune as well. This will decrease unnecessary damage taken and allow you to get past areas you might otherwise get stuck/die in.
Sensors – Detection: Not only will it boost your detection range of approaching threats, but it will enable you to do remote scans of adjacent rooms/areas, which will allow you to prepare for hostiles or give you line of sight so you can hack the turret in the next room or place a firewall.
Tech – Hacking: Placing firewalls to stop Watchers is pretty important, but if you don’t have a hacker on your team, opening doors will take much longer and could very easily have deadly consequences. If you destroy a room the doors seal automatically behind you and you don’t have 10 seconds to wait while your unskilled team mates try to open the door.
PARTY OF FIVE
I’ve heard people completing the game with 4x weapons and 1x tech, but I recommend one of the following two setups for your party composition:
1. 2x weapons; 1 shield; 1 sensor; 1 tech : High offensive capability, threats are neutralized extremely fast without sacrificing technical ability.
2. 1x weapon; 2 shields; 1 sensor; 1 tech : Superior defensive capabilities without sacrificing too much offensive capability since you can build your Protection specialists with up to 36 combat. You’ll be able to permenately shield 4 of your crew right from the start and take almost no damage (unless you face roll into a sentinel) the entire campaign.
Here is my “main” party that I’ve breezed through two campaigns with up to this point (REMEMBER, all of my characters have three flaws) :
Weapons – Note – I always take memory lapse as a flaw for my weapons crew
Dear Leader
Focuses : Combat and Cohesion.
Stats : 4 vigor, 4 acuity, 1 wits, 4 grit
Childhood : Enjoys Combat, rest is random
Education : First Leaders
Early/Late Career : Weapons and tactics
Wisdom : The savior
Final skills : 44 combat, 40 cohesion. He shoots straight and can encourage your squad to keep their cool in intense situations.
The Mercenary, aka Jayne Cobb
Focuses : Combat, and he names all his weapons Vera
Stats : 4 vigor, 4 acuity, 1 wits, 4 grit
Childhood : Enjoys Combat
Education : Defense Academy
Early/Late Career : Weapons and tactics
Wisdom : The general
Final skill : 60 combat. One man/woman wrecking crew.
Shield
The Paladin
Focuses : Protection and Combat
Stats : 4 vigor, 4 acuity, 1 wits, 4 grit
Childhood : All random, I usually make my whole party enjoy combat
Education : Walls of Solitude
Early/Late Career : Support and Defense
Wisdom : The general
Final skills : 40 protection, 36 combat
Sensor
The Voyeur
Focuses : Detection and Intuition
Stats : 1 vigor, 4 acuity, 4 wits, 4 grit
Childhood : Same as the others
Education : Star Scouts if your primary is detection or Cultural Awareness if you want max intuition
Early/Late Career : Sensors and Signals
Wisdom : The visionary
Final skills : 40/32 detection, 40/32 intution, depending on what you chose at education
Tech
Neckbeard
Focuses : Hacking and Investigation
Stats : 1 vigor, 4 acuity, 4 wits, 4 grit
Childhood : All random, 1 preference
Education : Young detectives for investigation, unless you want super high hacking skill, Minor Makers
Early/Late Career : Technology and Machines
Wisdom : The brain
Final skills : 48/40 Hacking, 32/24 Investigation, depending on education phase