Introducing the Active Sensor Suite (Patreon)

More infowar?! YEP.

Are you ready for this 3-slot destroy-on-remove utility with multiple new mechanics? You tell me...

The Active Sensor Suite (let's just just call them "active sensors," or "AS," shall we? :P) lets you see the desire paths I wrote about in the previous post. The actual current in-game description reads "Detects long-term residual evidence of prior robot activity within field of view."

Since the last post I've finalized the appearance of these paths, which now use purple shades:

While active, newly discovered path segments are highlighted for a moment (the time is adjustable) to give an idea of how "heavily trafficked" an area is over the long term, which as described before could be useful knowledge for finding interactive machines and exits.

But that's not all this suite of active sensors do! Oh no...

For your three-slot investment you also get the same effect as the best sensor array and signal interpreter, all in the same package. So slot-wise the path visualization feature only costs one additional slot beyond a standard sensor set, though of course there's also the fact that you can't swap out this utility without destroying it.

These additional abilities are why the activation animation for the new sensor highlights a circle (the detection range) and for the first portion uses an animation similar to the signal interpreter animation itself.

Toggling the suite is also how you view all your known paths, since those do not change over the short duration you're in that area and you may want to reference them again later after having explored more. The length of time they remain visible is adjustable in advanced.cfg, and unlike other toggle animations this one doesn't disappear when you shift the map.

Wow, can these sensors get any more powerful? Of course they can! They're also immune to almost all forms of blocking and avoidance, including Watcher jamming, Phase Generator scrambling, and of course Hunter cloaking (but not Tracker-level cloaking, which still nothing can break).

By now you're probably thinking "what's the real catch here... Kyzrati is not this nice" so yeah let's get to that inevitable part ;)

Well it turns out 0b10 bots don't really like you so actively scanning the Complex, and doing so brings out the main drawback here: Using active sensors gradually raises your alert level depending on how many and which bots are within the scanning area, and also intermittently leads to a heightened response from 0b10 in the form of investigations.

Balance-wise we'll have to see how this works out and I imagine additional tweaks could be necessary.

The only way to acquire these sensors for yourself is by successfully looting a Heavy class bot--this utility was specifically added to complement their design and behavior in the first place. We'll get to those soon.