Overview
It may sound nuts, you can explore an entire derelict (or, indeed, run an entire Weekly Challenge) without using your explore upgrades at all.This guide will likely be useful only if (a) you are a certain variety of hardcore masochist–which you kind of have to be to play Duskers in the first place; (b) you run the weekly challenge, which is the only play mode where reducing upgrade wear-and-tear to a minimum is actually important; and/or (c) if you’ve had a run (or anticipate having a run) where you lose your explore drone/explore upgrade somehow, but want to be able to try and forge ahead anyway,. It turns out you can explore just about any derelict more or less safely without using any of the explore upgrades (Stealth, Motion, Sensor, or Lure), regardless of which infestation types you’re dealing with. Here’s how.
1. Each Infestation Has a Trick that Allows You to Detect It (before it kills you)
Slime, Swarm, Leapers (aka Brutes) and Sentries (aka Patrol Bots) each have individual qualities that allow you to detect them, even without the benefit of an explore upgrade. Knowing these tells is essential, as identification and detection of infestations is the first order of business before one can begin dealing with them effectively.
a) Slime
Slime is, in a lot of ways, the easiest of the infestations to deal with if you’re not using an explore module, because it never moves. If you find slime in a room, it will grow toward you as soon as you enter (unless you’re stealthed), and will sometimes “lunge” after a fashion once it knows you’re there, spawning one or two new slime tiles in rapid succession if you drive to close to it and then back away quickly. If, however, the room isn’t entirely engulfed, you can move the first drone to enter the room into a relatively safe location, as that’s the drone the slime first noticed, and now that drone is the target. You can bring in a second drone, then, to pick up scrap or activate a generator or terminal (assuming they’re unslimed) without danger of drawing the slime’s attention until the first drone leaves, at which point the slime will start growing toward the remaining drone.
If there is something you need or want that’s totally engulfed in slime, well, that’s another matter. You’ll need a support or defense upgrade (Shield preferably, or Sonic), or an offense upgrade (unless it’s a fuel or generator room, in which case you risk damaging or destroying the thing you wanted to use by activating a Trap or whatever).
Also, if you have a Probe, send the probe in first to check the room (Probes don’t get damaged by slime), and let it scan the room to help you decide if the room is worth bothering with.
b) Sentry (aka Patrol Bot)
Sentries (or Patrol Bots) are the second easiest, because you can outrun them and outreact them, and they’re incredibly bad at their jobs. They will also move from room to room through any available open door, so if they are in your way, just back away quickly and lead them to a room you don’t need. Also, if you have a Turret upgrade, you can just drive up to them and shoot them in the face. If you get stuck in a room with them, you can even just move to one side or another of the door that you’ve entered from, hide outside their cone of vision until they’re in the middle of the room, and then exit before they have time to react. Hell, you can even lure them into your boarding craft and ride around with them in there indefinitely, provided you’re properly positioned. Like I say, they’re incredibly bad at their jobs.
In fact, if you want to truly appreciate just how bad sentries are at their jobs, I did a video awhile back to demonstrate it. Here it is:
c) Swarm
Swarms are probably the third easiest, because, while they are far faster than you and can detect you from a room away, and if they target you, you will probably be murdered before you can outrun them, they also buzz. Loudly.
So if it might be a swarm ship, make sure listen before opening a door.
A swarm’s starting location (like all infestations except slime) is always going to be the middle of the room, so don’t just listen at a door…find the section of wall closest to the middle of the room that you’re trying to check, as listen there. The swarm buzz loops, so take maybe five or ten seconds per listen, just to make sure that the sound effect has time to play through and restart. Also, beware trying to listen to very large rooms, because if the room is too big, you won’t hear them. If you have a concern, find an adjoining little room to the room you want to check, open a door between the rooms, and wait and listen to see if a swarm moves in–you will hear it if it does. If you hear one move into the room, close the door, shutting the swarm in the smaller room, and then go check the bigger one (though keep in mind that, if it’s a vent room, there might be more in there–multiple swarms in the same room make different decisions, and move at different paces.
Another thing that can make swarms tricky to listen for is that they come in two sizes–20 individual units (the usual for a starting infestation), or 10 (more commonly encountered as a spawn out of a vent, though they will occur as a starting infestation from time to time). The volume of the buzzing is reflective of what size the swarm is (or how many swarms there are in the same room at a given tiime), so a size 10 swarm will be a lot harder to hear than a size 20 swarm. Occasionally, you will encounter a vent room that starts with a swarm, and then the vent disgorges two size 10 swarms into the same room. When that happens, they’ll probably start chewing down doors, but if you run across one of those before any doors have been destroyed, you will notice the difference when you listen. It’s positively deafening.
d) Leaper (aka Brute)
Leapers (or Brutes) are the trickiest to deal with, because you have to rely on precision and, sometimes, reflexes. The trick with leapers is that, while they will move when they damn well please, and how long they wait before doing so can be as long as a minute or more of mission time, you will attract them if you open a door to a leaper room and park a drone right in the doorway–the leaper will be provoked to start moving toward the doorway immediately. Precision is crucial, though: too far outside the room you’re checking, and the leaper won’t notice; too far into the doorway, and you might get an immediate leaper hit to the face. So you want to park right in the middle of the threshold (or just a little bit back), wait until you see it coming, then immediately back out and close the door. Having some sort of “close all” alias is useful for this (mine is “cc=close all; close a1 a2 a3 a4 a5 a6 a7 a8 a9 a10 a11 a12 a13 a14 a15 a16 a17 a18 a19 a20”, but then I use that one in all sorts of different game situations).
The thing is, that only tells you that the leaper is in the room. It doesn’t help you get it out, as the leaper gives no audio cues until it jumps at you, at which point you’re kinda screwed. And once you’ve exited the doorway, the leaper is gonna stop, and probably return to the center of the room it was in. Even if you leave the door open, there’s no guarantee it’s going to keep on coming. So.
If you find a leaper in a room, you then need to find a way to observe when it moves out without endangering your drone, which requires a certain sort of room arrangement, or more precisely a certain sort of door arrangement. A diagram, I think, would be most useful to illustrate this. Here’s a schematic view of a random ship that I ran in this week’s Weekly Challenge:
In this arrangement, say you’ve got a leaper in that powered generator room in the middle right (r3, as it turns out, though that’s obscured by the generator icon), and you want to get it out of there so that you can check that room. What you want to do is park a drone in r4, right below d11, facing up into r7. Open d11, adjust with your observer drone’s distance to the doorway until you have visibility of the interior of r7 (sometimes it will be blacked out until you fiddle with it a bit) and then open d7, and wait. Sooner or later the leaper will move into r7, and from your vantage point in r4, you’ll see it pass by. The leaper won’t notice you on the other side of the door, but you will be able to see it pass–it will pass by that door, as it will always move to the middle of the room unless it detects a target (i.e. your drone) to leap at. Since the door you’re peeking through is to the right of the middle of r7, and the leaper entered from the right, it will pass by the open door without taking notice, leaving you safe. When the leaper comes into view, close d7 and d11, and then make your way into r3 via r2 (assuming it’s clear), and check r3 safely. Problem solved.
2) Exceptions
Sometimes, however, you’ll find a ship with a door that is open from the start, and you won’t be able to close that door. If the infestation you’re dealing with is slime or sentry, that won’t be a problem, as slime doesn’t move and doesn’t spread between rooms (open doors are irrelevant to slime) and sentries will roam freely between any rooms they have access to. If it’s either a leaper or a swarm in one of those rooms that’s open to another room, that’s a different kettle of fish, because swarms and sentries will be perfectly happy to move back and forth between the same two rooms, never varying their route unless something forces them to. There are ways to do this, with both leapers and swarms, but they each come with their own risks, and their own likelihoods of success.
a) Swarms
With swarms, it’s actually somewhat easier (though wildly risky) to alter their route, as they will make a beeline to any one of your drones that’s next door to them, provided they have an open door that allows them to get there. If you’ve got a long enough hallway between you and the swarm you’re hoping to relocate, park your drone just inside the door that’s farthest from where the swarm is, open the room to the swarm room, and when you begin to hear buzzing back out as quickly as possible and use a “close all” command or alias to shut both doors…this should hopefully result in the swarm being trapped in its new home, and your drone still being intact.
Alternately, find a biggish airlock room adjacent to one of the rooms the swarm is wandering through, move to the far end of the room, and open the connecting door. Have some sort of venting command prepped–either a vent alias (mine is “vent=open $r; open $d; close $d; close $r”), or simply “a$;a$” in the command line, with the $ corresponding to the airlock number–and trigger it as soon as the swarm is in the room. Kinda tense, but it generally works flawlessly, provided you’re not parked right next to the airlock door (in which case your drone may get sucked out into space along with the swarm).
b) Leapers
Leapers, frankly, are by far the most problematic in this sort of circumstance…on rare occasions, they will just decide to go wandering if you open a new door for them, but that works only rarely and unpredictably. It’s worth giving it a shot, but don’t expect it to succeed. Assuming it doesn’t work, and you really want to see what’s in those rooms (or there’s a generator in one of them that you desperately need to access, or something), that would be one moment where you will probably have to use an explore module to make that happen.
+ Using Sensor
Sensor would likely be fairly useless in a situation like this, though if you get lucky, you can start to time the leaper’s movement between the two rooms. You just need to guess when the room you’re entering is clear, pop in and drop a sensor, and then immediately back out; if you succeed, you’ll be able to know which room it is in, but if you don’t, well…Leaper hit to the face.
+ Using Lure
With Lure, just drop one in an adjoining room and wait for the leaper to detect and attack it. While it’s munching on the lure, close the door to the room the lure is in, confining the leaper in there for the duration. If you dropped the lure in the room you’re going to be entering from, make sure to get your generator drone into the other rooms right quick, and activate the generator and shut the relevant doors before the leaper is finished chewing through the lure. Done and done.
+ Using Motion
If you’ve got Motion, put it on a drone that isn’t your generator drone. Activate the Motion, and wait for the leaper to move into the room you’re not entering from, then pop in with a generator drone, find the generator, power it, and quickly shut the door. This can be risky, but if it needs to be done, it needs to be done. Of course, if you can’t get a conclusive Motion signal in either of the rooms you want to close off, you’re screwed. Also, if you only have access to one of the rooms in question, and that room turns out not to have the generator in it, you’re also screwed. On the risk/reward scale, the risk is often a lot higher than the reward likelihood if you’re using Motion in this sort of situation. But it can work, in the right set of circumstances.
+ Using Stealth
Stealth is the easiest to work with in this sort of scenario, probably. Simply equip the Stealth module onto your generator drone, open the door, activate the stealth, drive in and find the generator, and wait until the leaper is in the other room. When it is, power up the generator and shut the door to lock out the leaper. Of course, Leapers can often take a minute or more to move, which can wear down your Stealth charge. Also, if you can’t close up the door you entered from, the Leaper may just light out and go a-wandering. It’s not likely, but it does happen. So even this option can be an adventure. But it my experience, it usually goes more smoothly than the others (aside from Lure, which ensures a predictable result).