Locations

The ships you encounter once had a crew. While you don't know much about the aliens, you know they were similar to humans. Like us, they left their homeworld and started expanding their borders.

And just like us, they were curious.

Aliens

Every campaign is built around some kind of mysterious event that happened to the aliens. Some aliens may have opened a portal to another dimension, another species may have conducted experiments on its own people. Whatever the cause, it always led to the crew's demise.

As you complete each of the four missions in the campaign, you'll learn a bit more about what happened. As you examine corpses, you'll find personal crew logs, and maybe even the Captain's log. Logs contain hints, knowledge bonuses, and if your investiation skill is high enough, they can unlock doors, power down sentinels, and more.

Environment

All locations are unique, but they all have common properties.

Structural integrity

The ships you encounter have all had a rough time. They're unstable, and your presence will only degrade them further. When the ship's integrity has dropped below 10%, it will be destroyed and your crew will be killed.

But it's not just the ship's total integrity that matters. If you manage to drop a single room below 10%, any Deadnauts in the room will start receiving structural damage.

Any serious type of destruction, such as using explosive weapons, destroying a Sentinel or blowing up a door will damage a room significantly.

Here, you can see two severely damaged rooms: Living Quarters C and Social Room D. Any Deadnauts - or enemies - in these rooms will take damage. But watch out for Living Quarters B, which is at 15%. A few stray bullets might drop that below 10%.

Note: if a Deadnaut is wearing a shield or receiving a field, then will not receive any damage from low structural integrity.

Power distribution

Every ship distributes power to subsystems in a different way. More power to a subsystem will result in that subsystem becoming more effective.

Power circuits

Most rooms on the ship are connected to a power circuit. The yellow disc on the floor will tell you how much of the ship's current reserve power is flowing into this room.

Every circuit has one power controller. Once you find the room with the controller, you can use it to boost or reduce power to all rooms on that circuit. Note that there is only a fixed power pool on the ship: boosting power on one circuit will decrease it on others.

Security system

Your arrival on the ship has awakened the security system. It will not only attack you and other threats, it will also attempt to block any signals going in or out.

The security system isn't fully functional, so it has to distribute power to different security components, making some more effective than others.

Power effects

Power affects systems in different ways. If Watchers are receiving a lot of power, they'll appear more solid and do more damage to firewalls.

High signal damping will result in stronger glitches if a Watcher sees your Deadnauts.

Doors and sentinels are attached directly to the power network and you can see how much power is being diverted to them by turning on the power overlay.

Here, you can see that the line moving from the disc to the door is relatively low.

But if we boost power to the room, the strength will increase. That door will now be relatively harder to open.

Finally, a strong atmosphere will make your enemies tougher on that circuit. The tougher they are, the brighter they'll glow around the edges.

Special artifacts

Some ships have special artifacts. For example, you may be fleeing from a seemingly unstoppable enemy when you encounter strange relics in the cargo hold - perhaps the relics are linked to the threat?

Another common sight is a portal. These spawn new threats onto the ship, so you might want to take them out as fast as you can.