Basic Durability Guide

Durability And Maintenance

A guide to the world of efficient equipment use.

As a PMC, your equipment is very frequently your life. Armor, Guns, and Melee weapons all lose durability and eventually break if not repaired. Quick measures can be taken to drastically extend the life of your weapon, and using repair kits can extend the life of them indefinitely. At least until you lose the clone carrying it. Both clones and equipment are expendable after all!

Durability

Your average gun loses 1 durability per bullet fired. Each gun has different durability, but if you have some idea of how many bullets you think you'll fire in a mission, then you've got some idea of how much durability will be burned. If we're using a basic Rogue AR, it has 135 durability. That means we can fire 135 bullets out of it before it breaks and MUST be repaired before firing again. Up until that last point of durability is gone though, your gun will work just as well as it does at maximum durability. At that point all we have to worry about is how many bullets we think we will fire in a mission. In this case we would have to fire 135 bullets, almost 3 and a half stacks of 7.97 ammo, in order to break the gun in our mission. Given the low resistances early in the game and low enemy counts, one might expect to kill 1 enemy per bullet. For a conquest mission with 2 floors, you might have to kill 15-20 enemies per floor plus a few extras when we get lost looking for the elevator. So that's perhaps 60-80 bullets and somewhere around half the durability of the weapon used. Well within tolerances!

These are pretty idealized circumstances though. The first two wrinkles here are firing mode and accuracy. Accuracy is capped at 95%. That means you can expect roughly 1/20 shots to miss if you have 100% accuracy, and chances are at times you will have less. The more you miss, the more bullets you will have to spend per target. Secondly, firing mode restricts your options for bullet usage. The Rogue AR has two firing modes, one that fires 2 bullets, and one that fires 4 bullets. That means if we see a single enemy and want (or need) to kill it, we need to spend 2 bullets per attempt! And some guns even have higher minimum shot firing modes! This can be mitigated with careful gameplay, but that's both more complicated than this guide is willing to get, and less necessary than you might think.

Repair

So mixing in accuracy, firing mode restrictions, and the simple notion that missions can be 3 floors or more, one can easily imagine spending more than 135 bullets on a mission. The solution is quite simple! Repair! Different categories of weapons are repaired using specialized repair items, often salvaged from other weapons the enemies carry. While some weapons need very specific repair items, generally they're pretty easy to find. The Rogue AR is repaired using the aptly named "Weapon Parts" item, which CAN be salvaged from most guns and by dismembering Autonomous Robots(the OTHER kind of AR). It might take you a few tries, but they're not hard to find. These repair most guns by 20 points, giving you another 20 bullets to fire.

Doing field repairs with weapon parts will greatly extend the life of your gun, but can't be done indefinitely. Quick repair items will generally reduce the maximum durability of your weapon. For weapon Parts, it repairs 20 durability, but reduces the maximum by 10. THIS IS FINE. The game supplies you with ample ways to restore maximum durability. Most of what you need to worry about is making it through the mission. With weapon parts, we should be able to do that just fine. Suddenly, our Rogue AR which started only able to fire 135 bullets, can actually fire 135 + (135/10)*20 which works out to around 375 bullets*. On early missions, you're more likely to have issues finding enough bullets to shoot!

• Recently buffed to 30(!!!) durability per repair so your total is going to be closer to 500 bullets. Really. Don't worry about max durability issues.

Fixing Max Durability

Once you've made it through the mission, battered and bruised with your trusty Rogue AR a little beat up too, how do you restore it to a fully-functional state? The first option is Gunsmith Boxes. You start the game with 3 and the recipe unlocked. Later on they can also be obtained in trade and as loot. They will repair 80 durability AND restore the maximum condition on your weapon to full, which will get you plenty more use out of your gun. You might be tempted to use only Gunsmith boxes to repair your weapons. If you have a lot of them, that's fine, but particularly early this is rather inefficient, and you should use weapon parts to repair between box uses to get the most out of your gun.

Secondly, and in some ways easier, is using interdimensional demon artifacts. No joke. Quasimorphic cultists, the Quasi-samples item, and amputated limbs from quasimorphs that phase out on death will sometimes spawn a "Shard". A magic crystal that restores maximum durability and then replenishes 500 durability. It works on any category of item.

Limb-amputation on a live target can be finnicky, but it's a somewhat common occurance during rapture events. Especially if the human faction you're fighting has a lot of chainsaws. There's other items that can be spawned this way as well, but that's a topic for another guide.

Final Notes

While this drifts a bit from the topic of durability and maintenance a bit, the last two things to remember is that you have multiple weapons and damage type matters. Resistances matter a lot in this game, and respecting them will let you kill targets more quickly with fewer bullets. If you're pumping 40 pierce damage into a target that has 40 pierce resistance, you're only getting 2 damage a bullet through. If you have a 9mm weapon that does 25 damage and the target only has 10 blunt resist, your 9mm weapon will do 15 damage and take the target down with many fewer bullets. Fewer bullets means less wear and tear on your gun, and multiple guns means more durability to get through the mission.

Good maintenance will ensure your weapons last as long as you want them, but there's lots more you can do to make efficient use of your equipment during a mission including:

• Positioning to kill multiple targets with one shot
• Save high minimum shot weapons for dealing with groups.
• Try different guns. There's a lot of guns.
• Swapping out weapons mid-mission for an equivalent or better gun. No really, this game has a lot of guns.
• Consider using grenades on large groups of enemies.
• Minimize shooting when you have accuracy debuffs from wounds. Or being plastered drunk off Bay 12.
• Use melee/silenced weapons to avoid attracting attention.
• Let wounded enemies die from their wounds while you fight other enemies.
• Use hazards like fire, explosive barrels, and chemical tanks.
• salvage weapons that are almost broken and craft other weapons from the parts