I haven't completed this game yet (farthest I've made so far was floor 34 on Normal). I'm partly making this guide to 'iron out' how I play the game and help out some of my friends who are picking up the game.

SOTS: The Pit has been an enjoyable and challenging game, at times unforgiving and cruel in the most fun way. Unfortunately, finding useful information on the game has been spotty at best, and the wiki is still in the early stages (And of course I contribute to the wiki[sword-of-the-stars-the-pit.wikia.com] when I can, you should too!)

That said, lets move on to the guide!

Marine
The Marine is a pretty straight forward class. High health, great starting armor and weapons, not much else. He has terrible scavenging and survival skills in general. You'll need to spend a lot of time failing to repair/lockpick stuff to get your skills somewhere serviceable (plus skill point investment. Luckily, it's easy to gain stat bonuses, since he gains 4 per level.

Engineer
Engineers are very adept at getting the most out of the environment. They are decent at avoiding floor traps, getting into machines, and opening containers right out of the box. Their combat skills however, need to be trained up before you hit floor 10 or lower. If you just started playing, Engineers are quite good at getting messages off computer consoles. Discovering recipes becomes very possible with some investment in Deciphering.

Scout
Scouts are your 'jack of all trades' class, and gain more skill points per level than any other class (8 per level) With decent skills to begin with, they can pick most ranged weapons up and use them effectively. Also note that they start out fairly skilled in melee, which can be useful in the early game.

Ranger
Rangers honestly seem like they are above average in all the right places. Their stats are average or better. The Health pool and HP growth is on par with the Marine. You can pick up rifles and assault rifles and immediately begin using them effectively. You're high melee skill combined with the tail attack means you can more or less blaze through early levels without having to use your sar or pistol. The only place Ranger suffers in are technical skills, which can be leveled fairly easily, albeit failing regularly early on and missing on quite a bit of potential loot.

Toss in the fact that Ranger has a natural movement of 3, and heals 2 HP instead of 1 while moving around, they can seem fairly OP. If the Marine is a bit too brain-dead for your tastes, Ranger seems like an excellent starter class.

Psion
He's like an unstoppable psychic Jackie Chan in a ladder store
Psions have a lot going for them in the early game. They of course have excellent power and brain stats. Their finesse is average, while their might is way below average (30).
They start with stealth armor, which lets them avoid encounters a little easier, and their starting weapons emphasize armor penetration with a laser pistol and vibro sword.
If you follow the melee/naked strategy for the early game, the Psion excells at it. They start start with a whopping 65 melee and the ability to cast Psi Armor, which boosts your physical defence - great for when you aren't wearing armor early on. On top of this, they start with TK Thrust, which does excellent damage at range and can knock back the target.

Early Game

The very first level will always be a cave floor, with a large amount of rot piles, rats and bats. I find it worthwhile, especially as a Scout or Engineer to hit every room and their piles. This is the easiest source of food, ammo, and who knows what else (depending on your luck).

One thing that has been fairly worthwhile to do, is to strip off your armor, and stick to your knife or punch for the earlier stages. The monsters early on deal fairly little damage, you'll hit a level up quickly (meaning you have a full heal handy), and it's one of the best opportunities to gain skill ups for melee. If you happened to start on the Engineer, it may be worthwhile to spend several moments punching one or two of the wall supports (or any furniture really). You'll get hungry doing this, but it's the easiest way to get that abysmal melee skill up. Be careful when facing numerous enemies, you may want to consider using your knife or pistol if you're being overwhelmed.

Once you've gotten melee up a decent amount, you can forgo knifing weak monsters like rats and bats - saving a significant amount of durability on your weapons. You can even punch down trapped doors, disabling the trap in the process.

Primary Focus for the first 5 levels:
Skill up melee, kill weak monsters with punches.
Conserve healing items
Focus on upping essential skills

The 45 skill level cutoff:
Any skill under 45 has a chance to increase through use. If you lockpick a door for example, you can gain one point to lockpicking as long as its below 45. You may want to hold off investing in sub-45 level skills if you're confident you'll have enough opportunities to level them through use. Some skills you may want to invest in anyways if they are crucial to your survival.

• Foraging - increases your chance of finding better items and how much you can find. As an example, low foraging will usually turn up food pellets, while higher foraging can yield the superior Sol Rations. You will want to keep leveling this up every chance you get.
  
• Lock Picking - easily leveled by opening every door on the floor. Vital to scavenging and getting into rooms. Remember that if you fail to open a door three times, it will trigger an alarm that attracts the attention of nearby by monsters, and summons any security bots in the area.
  
• Electronics - enables you to repair many of the broken down devices you'll encounter. Important for restoring cookers, lab stations and computers.
  
• Mechanical - enables you to open rusted containers. Most containers have a low mechanical skill requirement, so you shouldn't need to level this as much.
  
• Computer - enables you to access consoles and open certain containers.
  
• Engineering - a new skill from the DLC, lets you sabotage devices like the Mastermind and Indoctrination tower. You won't encounter many sabotage-able devices until you hit floors 15 and down. Most of these devices give you a penalty or boost enemies in their room, but you can reverse their effects if you can re-engineer them. Up to you if you'd rather try this instead of destroying these devices.
  
• Decipher - important for unlocking recipes and flavor text. Once you've filled up your message log you can pretty much skip this. Has some other uses, like opening tesseracts (storage devices you can access from any other tesseract devie)
  
• Biotech - determines your success chance at cooking. Most simple recipes you won't need to worry about, but more advanced ones will be a problem if this isn't leveled up.
  
• Medical - determines how much you'll heal your self with kits, as well as your success chance with some kits like the Tarkan Field Surgeon. Pretty important really.

Goes into detail on the merits of the weapon categories these skills affect.
Every point into a weapon skill will up your chances of hitting with that weapon type. Higher levels in a skill also seems to reduce your chances of damaging your weapon.

• Melee - Important for making it through the early levels, and dealing with weak enemies at all levels to save durability on your gear. While the medium punch is pretty underwhelming damage wise, there are melee dependent weapons like claws and hammers which can be quite potent.
  
• Knife - Knives are a decent melee weapon. If you start with one, you'll likely use it quite a lot to quickly deal with weak enemies, and finish off tougher ones up close. They pale in comparison to most blades however, but if you can't find any blades a knife will be one of your best backups.
  
• Blade - One of the best melee weapon types in the game. Blades come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, from the sar and lightning sword capable of enemies standing next to your target, to the vibro blade which packs a sizeable amount of penetration. Later in the game when you have better armor, you can easily dispatch enemies you used to need a gun for.
  
• Pistol - One of the most common ranged weapons, they deal average damage and tend be on the low end of penetration. They're your all-rounder/back-up weapon.
  
• Rifle - there are quite a few rifles in the game, typically an uncommon drop from medium and large weapon locks. They often come with above average damage, accuracy, and penetration. Shotguns are also considered rifles; one of the best short range weapons you can find.
  
• Assault Rifle - Fairly rare, they tend to be low accuracy weapons with average damage. You have the option to target multiple enemies or hit a monster multiple times. They can pump out a lot of damage while eating through ammo quickly.
  
• Heavy Weapon - Extremely rare, to the point that I've never found them. Probably deal tons of damage, and includes things like the RPG (I've found ammo for them at least).
  
• Spear - Never found a spear in game.

All psionics require a substantial investment to unlock any of their powers (unless you're a Psion who gets several starting powers). Classes that gain a lot of skill points are the most likely candidates for psionics. I'm maintaining an article that covers all the psionic powers in the game, and any notes I can offer on them Here[sword-of-the-stars-the-pit.wikia.com]

• Empathy - focuses on debuffing and controlling organic enemies. Lifesense is excellent for determining how to tackle rooms and avoid unwanted encounters.
  
• Telekinesis - A mixed bag of skills, Manipulation is a nice utility ability that makes some tasks safer such as boobytrapping chem pods or repairing vending machines (which tend to explode if you fail). TK fist and shrapnel storm are excellent combat skills, and deflect is a great defensive skill.
  
• War Mind - Similar to Empathy, has the earliest access to a control spell, berserk. You can berserk an enemy and shut the door, letting the enemy do some of your dirty work for you. While I haven't gone all the way into War Mind, Puppet seems like it could be very useful if you capture a strong monster.
  
• Redaction - One of the best support trees in the game, it can improve your survival chances significantly with Heal and Cure. The later skills are of questionable value, but ever point into the tree ups how much you can heal yourself.
  
• Manifestation - A mixed bag of skills like Telekinesis. The first two skills are excellent, generating food and giving you a nice Cone AOE attack that can inflict the burn debuff. Dissolve is fairly irrelevant if you have high picklocking skills, but can save ammo if you need to break devices.
  
• Mecha Sense - the robotic version of Empathy. Lets you find, disable and control robots.
  
• Resistance - Contains defensive skills that increase your armor, turn you invisible and reflect attacks back at your enemies.

When to level
Once you've gotten enough EXP to level, you may want to consider holding off on opening the character menu [hotkey: c].

• Wait until you've performed certain skill related actions, so they will only cost 1 skill point.
  
• If you have a fight ahead of you, remember that opening the character menu will heal you. If you're confident the fight won't level you again, it's a free heal! (it's unlikely, but it will reset all skill costs to 2 points if you level again)

Marine
Can choose to focus on upping finesse or brains, which will improve one set or the other of your 'vital' survival skills (finesse for shooting things, picking locks, electronics. Brains for hacking, engineering, medical, etc) Their technical skills like computers and lockpicking should be a priority if you want to reliably repair and scavenge.

Engineer
Engineers are at a disadvantage when it comes to might - having such a low stat means they are susceptible to diseases and poisons. If it stays to low, it's entirely feasible to die to a random rabid bat, because the disease worsened to level 10 (instant death). Fortunately, they two stat point per level; just be careful around disease inflicting monsters until your might is around 50 or so. Combat skills should be a main priority, as you start below average in just about everything.

Scout
Scouts also suffer from a fairly low might stat, but not as low as the engineer. This is fortunate considering they only get one stat point per level. Their combat skills are decent, you can go evenly into both combat and technical skills. Since they gain 8 points per level, Scouts have an easy time picking up one or two psionic skills as well.

Side note: In both cases, Scouts and Engineers benefit greatly from additional might, which reduces the time for poison to wear off, increases the chance of sweating out diseases, and even ups your inventory space after enough points.

Ranger
Stats are pretty good to begin with. Consider focusing early on into might, and then switch to finesse to up you gun skills. If you decide to invest in psionics, consider doing brains or power in place of might. Skillwise your combat skills are great, and you can focus on your technical and scavenging skills early on. As you go deeper you'll need to upgrade your combat skills to reliably defend yourself.

As far as skills go, investing into several of the technical skills is your best bet. Throw some points into your relevant ranged weapon skills as you go along. Feel free to forgo investing in any melee combat skills - you'll get plenty of skill ups while fighting in hand to hand combat.

Psion
Psychic powers are your bread and butter, so it's extremely important to increase your psi points pool. Brains increases your pool by 1 per point, and Power gives 2 per point. Power will increase your resistance to psionic attacks and up all your psychic skills by one per 5 points.

Your main issue is dealing with multiple or drawn out fights - your psi pool recovers slowly if you don't rest, and psi restoratives are pretty rare. You'll be forced to rely on your weapons, don't neglect those combat skills!

Investing in Psionics
With the exception of the Psion, investing in psionic powers is a decision you need to make early, and one you'll need to stick with until you get at least the first skill.
Some of the best skills I've found so far include:

• Psi Drain - 3rd skill in the redaction tree, on humanoids and psychic enemies you can expect to get 20-70 psi points back. Has a short cooldown and minimal cost; it's well worth the points invested.
  
• Lifedrain - This is the War Mind version of Psi Drain, it does pretty much what it says - steals HP.
  
• Paralyze - The second skill in the War Mind tree. This skill is absurdly powerful, disabling most any organic enemy you'll run into. It's cheap and has a low cooldown too!
  
• Redaction - Yes, the whole tree. It's all about keeping you alive and healthy. Cure removes all status debuffs (or reduces it by 1 level). Heal is an excellent clutch heal and gets better with every skill point. Metabolic Control reduces the amount of food you need to consume, which can be essential in the late game where food can become quite scarce.
  
• Reflect - This is probably one of the best skills for dealing with rooms packed full of enemies. It's expensive and has a long cooldown, but in the late game where rooms are full of very dangerous monsters, turning their huge damage attacks back on them is awesome.

Pretty much every psionic skill tree can be useful. The only exception is Manifestation - it's skills are of questionable use considering how long it takes to unlock anything.

• The Manna skill produces bread that gives a laughable amount of food.
  
• The fire spell is decent but takes a lot of points to get - it's damage isn't too impressive but it's a cone attack.
  
• Dissolve is basically a way to attack doors and devices. By the time you get it though, you should be able to open and use most anything with ease. Besides, those psi points are better spent dealing with the monsters in the room!
  
• Duplication is entirely a gamble. You risk losing an item for the chance to get a copy of it. By the time you get this, it may be a godsend, but you may just end up losing vital supplies that are hard to come by.

I'd suggest investing elsewhere - those 50-90 skill points would be better spent upping scavenging and combat skills instead. They're more reliable and don't cost psi points.

Perhaps the most important part of this game is maintaining your gear, keeping a supply of meds, and a pack full of ammo. Not only do you need to worry about having enough ammo to deal with serious threats, you also have to contend with the fact that your gear steadily degrades over time. And lets not forget that the act of repairing your gear reduces it's maximum durability!

In essence, the above points means the frugal adventurer will be the most successful. In early sections I've pointed out the benefits of having a good melee skill early on, going without armor for the first few floors and conserving durability. I'm going to expand on the reasoning for this here as briefly as I can.

Durability determines how long you have till it breaks. Once it hits zero, it's gone. The longer you can go between repairs will determine just how much mileage you can get, hopefully long enough to find an upgrade or replacement. Depending on your class choice and how much luck you're blessed with, this may be soon or never. Plan accordingly.

The more encounters you can overcome without losing durability, the better. Up against an infant zuul swarm or bat? Punch them to a pulp and eat some damage. Food is far easier to come by than ammo or new gear, meaning resting can be quite efficient as long as you find a safe spot.

Acid: It'll ♥♥♥♥ your gear up
Acid is the archenemy of all the gear you own. Acid damage can harm just about anything with durability that you're currently carrying, typically starting with what you have equipped first.

Acid can get all over you in many ways. The obvious case being acid traps. However, some monsters such as the dreaded mole will spit acid all over you. Another, more frequently encountered monster is the protean. These grey single celled menaces make multiple acid attacks that will positively DEVOUR your gear, worse still they damage your gear when you hit them in melee range! Be sure to keep your distance and prioritize killing these types of monsters whenever you can.

Repairs
Determining when and where to repair is incredibly important.
Ideally, you should hold out until your gear is near breaking point (flashing red), put the gear away and try to make for a repair bay. These machines repair at 80% efficiency, meaning you lose around 20% max durability per repair. Try to repair every bay you come across, and keep in mind where they are so you can retreat and repair as needed. Don't be afraid to go back a few floors to keep your gear in working order.

Portable repair items such as the ballistic repair kit should be regarded as a severe emergency option - situations where being able to use your weapon without it breaking will mean the difference between living or dying. The hit to your max durability is size-able; around 40% lost.
The only exception to this is the rare nano repair device, which has a 90% efficiency.

The Mid Levels
If you can manage to scrimp and save that durability and ammo and make it to levels 5-10, you'll hopefully get your hands on a new weapon and armor along the way. If you invested your stats wisely, you should be able to open armor and weapon lockers reliably. Levels 10 to 15 you'll have a better chance of finding the better tiers of gear such as medium armors and high penetration weapons. Plus, the monsters on these floors will drop materials that are essential for crafting certain weapons and survival gear. Remember, having better gear is no excuse to blow durability on the random weak monsters that still spawn on the lower levels.

I'll finish this section out with one final observation I made in the later levels. With my skill in weapons at 70+ - gear seemed to degrade less often. This may be partly due to the fact that you deal more damage and kill quicker - but the number of times I saw 'Weapon Took Damage' seemed to pop up less frequently over a series of attacks.

Better to worry about a full bag, than an empty one
I try to prioritize what I hang onto by how essential it will be for either immediate survival, or survival in the 30+ floors.
This is a basic ranking I keep in mind, the top most being the most important. Items lower down typically get dropped to make room for ones higher in the list.

• Armor - If you can, get your hands on a couple sets. 2-4 is reasonable depending on how much bag space you have. Swap in upgrades as you find them. Equip armor that's better suited for a fight if you can. (Just remember getting hit stops your attempt to equip)
  
• Misc Equipment Liir talismans, grav boots, utility belts. Any item that fits into a slot on your character is valuable. Prioritize pieces that fit your play style, consider stashing pieces you don't need in a blue locker.
  
• Weapons - I try to carry as many as I can. The more variety I have, the more often I can use the right weapon for the right job. Change up what you're using to do just enough damage to kill a monster.
  
• Ammo (for weapons you have) - Of course, most of your weapons need ammo or they're useless.
  
• Medical Supplies - Dying because you didn't have a medkit or vaccine just sucks. You can start to drop antibiotics and antivenom items once you have 50+ might though. Maybe keep one or two for encounters with monsters that inflict high levels of it.
  
• Sets of ingredients When you have a set of ingredients to craft something useful, hang on to it until you find a lab station!
  
• Rare/Multiple use ingredients Some ingredients are just to good to let go, if they mean you could craft a handy laser rifle, quantum helm, or other neat item. Some are just to rare but needed for lots of stuff (like string sinks, nano wire and capacitors).
  
• Food - you should always eat what you find if you're hunger is low enough, and then start hanging onto the stuff. The exception would be items that also give benefits (like energy drinks and healing foods).
  
• Ammo (for weapons you don't have) - You always have a chance to find the weapon that uses it. No harm in hanging onto it. A stack of shotgun shells could be considered an ingredient; used to make grenades, mines and breaching charges.
  
• Common ingredients some stuff like electronic parts and bindings can be found easily on most any floor. No more than one stack of an ingredient should be necessary,

All weapons have a penetration and accuracy stat, that determines how effective they'll be against a monster. Make sure to refer to your monster page in the sotsdex for details on any previously defeated enemy.

When you have several weapons to choose from, try to pick a weapon that has enough penetration to best a given monsters armor. Try to save weapons with higher penetration for more armored enemies, unless you have an overabundance of ammo. (This is particularly common if you get your hands on a sniper rifle, which you'll find tons of ammo for).

I can't stress enough the importance of avoiding overkill here. You don't want to waste a charge on your laser carbine when a pistol shot is enough to finish off a wounded enemy. Always try to deal with weak enemies with your fists or knife, especially later on. Use your knife, blade or pistol to thin out swarms of weak mobs if you're at risk of being nickle and dimed to death.

There's no one in The Pit who can call you a coward (not in any language you can understand anyways). There are a number of enemies you can easily flee from, such as medium/large proteans, yetis, space bears and hopkinites.

Some monsters are also unable to open open doors, so it's entirely feasible to lock them in rooms, or close a door behind you and sneak out the back. Most monsters won't be able to track you once you leave their line of sight, and give up after looking for you around a corner.

One handy trick I've used on numerous occasions is to throw a teleport grenade at my feet. You have no idea where you're going, but sometimes it's better than where ever you are right now! (hopefully)

Every monster has a different aggro range, and some you can even be sneak up on if you come directly from behind. Some monsters appear to respond to other monsters being attacked, the sound of gunfire, or the smell of blood (the Zuul Infant Swarm in particular seem to aggro this way[/spoiler]

If you open a door into a room with monsters, you can usually shut the door immediately and avoid being noticed.

It's worthwhile to unlock doors whenever you can, and then close them behind you. This helps break up line of site; saving you from drawing unwanted and potentially dangerous attention.

Some monsters are unable to open doors - particularly proteans and other lower life forms. It's entirely possible to lure some troublesome monsters into a room and 'lock' them in.

For those monsters that can open doors (robots, humanoids, large mammals), bear in mind they have to stop and waste a turn opening a door, which can buy you a little more time to get away. Thankfully, you are exempt from this limitation, and can open and close doors freely.

Most robots also have a habit of staying in the room they spawn in, basically guarding the room from intruders. If you don't want any trouble, you can easily walk up and close the door. Unless you trigger an alarm somewhere they won't come after you.

While these can be easily avoided early on. Later on in the game you may find you need to run, and the only way to safety is through a trapped door. Knowing what you're getting into will better enable you to weigh your options.

I've found my ideal method for testing door traps is to follow these steps:

• Strip down and drop all your gear. it sounds crazy, but if that trap happens to be an item destroyer? You'd risk losing a valuable piece of gear. hit ctrl-g, pick up some common or garbage item for it to destroy (it won't do anything if your bag is empty).
  
• Make sure your health is high! If it's a harm trap, you really don't want to die. Doing these trap tests early on is ideal since it's easier to keep your health up with weaker enemies and frequent level ups.
  
• Make sure your melee skill is pretty decent (read, you can take out 2 or 3 rats, bats or zuul spawn easily). Why? Because if that trap is a teleporter, you're going to need to fight your way back to your gear pile. Again, I stress you do these trap tests early on, since most monsters in the upper floors can easily be defeated with nothing but your fists and your birthday suit. You should have no problem getting back to your gear, and it also helps that the early floors tend to be small. (if you're an engineer, go beat up some furniture and doors until you've got a decent hit/miss ratio.)

Once you've triggered a door trap, for the rest of the play through you can mouse over any known door trap and it'll tell you what it does.

Dealing with harmful door traps you can'y avoid
Sometimes the only way into a valuable room is blocked by a health damaging, blinding or madness trap. It'd suck to go through it and have to pay the penalty.

Thankfully you can tear the door apart with your bare hands. That's right, just punch the door till it's destroyed. Once it's broken, you can walk through no problem. (You can opt to use a weapon, but it'll cost durability and ammo.Later on, you'll also encounter reinforced doors and doors with greek letters - these doors will have much higher health and armor!)


If you've discovered a floor trap previously, feel free to lure enemies near them, you can set them off with a well placed shot. If you really want to wrack up some damage on a tougher enemy, you can pretty much guarantee the trap going off with a grenade. Grenade damage plus a mine trap? Lets just say I seriously hope you're smart enough to do this at a safe distance.

This mostly covers noteworthy devices, and any relevant tips/thoughts. It's not meant to be an exhaustive guide. The wikipage here[sword-of-the-stars-the-pit.wikia.com] is being updated frequently with objects you'll find in rooms.

Manufacturing Bays
These are typically found in Bot Repair rooms. Be wary, since these rooms almost always have a number of security bots. This machine will pump out robots every couple turns, it could be anything from a flimsy scavenging bot, to a hulking heavy defense bot.

To top things off, robots can run up to this thing and heal themselves!

If you want to get a bay out of the way, there's a few options available

• Option one - (the safest method) This involves chucking a grenade at it, ideally while the other bots are hanging around it. Kill the bots, blow up the machine.Two birds with one 'nade. Use an explosive grenade and try to avoid any lockers, crates etc.
  
• Option two - the fun method - clear out any bots in the room, ideally with an EMP grenade. Then run up to the machine and sabotage it. You usually have a 50% chance of succeeding. Get away from it if you succeed. the next bot that tries to spawn will cause the whole thing to explode!
  
• Option three (Jedi Mind Trick) - You can use the telekinesis skill 'Manipulation' to sabotage the machine remotely. You may want to draw robots to another side of the room.

Repair Bays
Generally, these are meant for your use. However, if you leave one up and running, wounded robots may run up to one of these to heal themselves! Bear this in mind and try to kill any fleeing robots if you know one of these is nearby.

Med Bays
Same issue as above, but it'll be certain humanoids that will attempt this. I've also found that some med bays have a chance to turn out to be Interrogation Chambers you can booby trap. Sucks if you needed that heal, but it'll explode if anything wanders near it now.

Meditation Chambers
Usually found later in the game within Psi Lab's, if you can make a successful deciper check, it will seal you in and give greatly accelerated healing and PSI regeneration per turn. Be sure you're standing ON the chamber when you use it.
Tesseract Wellls
These are like a personal storage locker, which is connected with any other Tesseract Well in the game. It requires a successful decipher roll to use.

Blue room storage devices
These were added with the latest DLC, essentially these acts like a Tesseract Well that carries over to other saves/playthroughs. (i.e. if you play through to level 10 as a scout, store a shotgun, and die. The next time you get to level 10, you can get that shotgun from storage).To remove items, you have to click the icon that looks like a square with an arrow pointing down. It will try to move everything in the locker to your inventory.

Quick Tip: if you only want certain things out of the locker, drop your inventory in a corner of the room, then take everything out of the locker (you can click the down arrow icon to the right of your bag to drop everything quickly). You can put what you don't need back in the locker, just don't forget to grab your gear in the corner!

Alarms
If you really flub a skill check while operating a machine or fail to pick a door lock three times, an alarm will go off. This will call any robots in the area to that room, and they seem to be able to track you if you stay in the area. Either get somewhere you can fight, or get out of there!

The following section contains mostly recipe spoilers. If you're planning to gain these recipes legitly, I'd suggest you ignore this last section.

A 'handy' melee weapon
Once you start running into humanoids and medium sized robots, you'll start to pick up one of the less common materials necessary for this weapon. The rest of the parts are fairly common. The Razor Fists. They equip to your glove slot, and replace your medium punch.
You'll need: Binding, Razor Teeth, and Composite Cloth
They apparently have the same penetration as a knife, and 20 durability. These things break pretty quick, so try to hang on to parts for more if you plan to use these for a while.Note, this is a lab station recipe.

The Rifle, your easy ticket to rape town.

Behold, ladies and gentleman, the humble rifle


It's stats are generally 'average', with decent penetration but otherwise a starter pistol with less accuracy and more range (not sure how a rifle could be less accurate than what appears to be a magnum, but whatever)

Why is this a ticket to rape town you ask? Because with two very common materials, you can turn this underwhelming performer into a got dem bonafide SNIPER RIFLE. The materials in question? One binding, an Optic part, and the rifle itselfNote, this is a lab station recipe.


Note the extra damage, improved accuracy, and that excellent penetration stat. That 14 range? It essentially means you can attack things OFF SCREEN while zoomed all the way out. (pro tip: hit H to hide your hud and you can target spaces previously blocked by the hud.) Only downside is it has a slow reload. But frankly, you should be killing just about anything you meet before needing to reload. Keep your pistol on hand as a backup just in case though.

One additional benefit, that just goes along with most ballistic rifles in general: the ammo is fairly plentiful, and I've scavenged up to 100(!!) rounds out of a single crate before. On my latest ranger play through (which by the way, is a class very well suited for the sniper rifle) I almost always had between 200 and 250 rounds, and at one point well over 400 rounds. This was from levels 8 to 16, where I was taking out feral Zuul, Yeti, and various other high health or high armor targets.

So there you go. The only hard part is lucking out and finding the rifle itself. Good luck!

Mods & Mutagens
You know those mods and mutagens, the things that more often that not drop your stats or crap up your weapons and armor? It's usually not worth the gamble to use the things when you're scraping by on a pistol, knife and flack jacket.

Fortunately, they can be identified! There is of course an identifying tool, which comes with a number of charges (pro tip: you will almost never find both an abundance of mods AND the artifact identifier) Luckily, you can craft your own one shot identifiers using relatively common robot drops. The item is called a Diagnostic Chip. All you need is a logic Circuit and a Cybernetic brain. They may be a bit harder to find off weaker robots, almost never from scavenger types. Computron, librarian and surgeon bots are you best bet, but security robots will occasionally drop them.Note, this is a lab station recipe.

The only downside to this hand made alternative is that you have very little control over WHAT it identifies. If you happen to have multiple mods and mutagens; the best course of action is to drop every other mod/mutagen but the one you want identified.

That awesome energy weapon you can't find ammo for
Specifically, I'm referring to weapons that require those darned Energy Backpacks. But guess what? The fix is stupidly easy to scavenge and craft! You just need 4 energy cells and a single binding. That's itNote, this is a lab station recipe.

Go forth and spam that bad ass chain lightning blaster!

Stimulants: how to break those pesky fear, berserk and confuse debuffs
This one requires a material that's harder to come by until you start finding bio pods and stronger protean monsters. The item in question is an otherwise simple to craft stimulant, Hum Gum. The first part? A sonic module. By the time you start finding the next ingredient, Exotic Proteins, you'll probably have a dozen of the things ripped out of all those damn bats Note, this is a cooker recipe.

Curing severe diseases on the cheap
Did you know that if your disease progresses to level 10, you die right there on the spot? If you haven't been investing enough into might, or are just damn unlucky, it's going to happen to you eventually. Even if it doesn't get that bad, the longer that disease keeps bouncing back between going up and down in levels, your stats will steadily drop. The sooner you cure that space flu, the better!
This is another cheap and easy recipe for those of you prone to hugging one to many giant virii. It's called an Aggressive Antibiotic. All you need is a piece of moldy bread and some antibodies. You should find the latter component off most diseased monsters, particularly the giant virus Note, this is a cooker recipe.

That's about it, these are the most useful recipes I've found on my many many playthroughs. Many an engineer and scout died to bring you these valuable recipes.

Suggested recipes from others!

Cutelilduck pointed out:
"A worthwhile recipe I find myself using the Base Paste. Its 2x Fat Strips 1x Bone Slivers. It prevents acid from effecting you for a few turns, which is perfect when you get cornered or grabbed by a protean."