Mutations

To preface this section, every mutation in the game can be quite useful in the right circumstances. Some mutations require significantly less investment in order to be good, so I'll be analyzing the cost of taking the mutation vs the impact that it has. I won't be judging how fun they are, I'll only be thinking about how impactful they are towards winning a run. You should note that a good build does not solely consist of the highest rated mutations, but rather a handful of typically 3-5 star mutations or potentially one or two 2 star mutations. 1 star mutations are typically just terrible and should probably be avoided. My rating will be a combination of my personal preference, how good the mutation is in a general sense (mutations that require higher levels of knowledge / specificity get a lower rating here), and how much the mutation contributes towards a winning run.

Morphotypes

Chimera

Chimera has a very interesting gimmick associated with it. While you give up all possibility of gaining a natural mental mutation, the physical mutations you gain from spending mutation points can grow you new limbs. To be precise, when given your choice of 3 physical mutations to choose, one choice will also grow a new limb. This can be good and bad; as new limbs aren't always just a straight improvement. The only exception to this are extra hands, which are indeed just a straight improvement. Any other limb will average the AV / DV bonus given from the equipment in that slot, which means you'll need to obtain more gear than normal (if you choose to grow more limbs). This results in you being incentivised to stack items that give secondary bonuses like resistances.

Is this worth giving up any possibility to gain mental mutations? On average, it tends to be. Especially if you can gain more hands, the DPS increase you can gain from Multiweapon Fighting builds skyrockets. However, you can also get unlucky and take a less-useful physical mutation for a weak limb, such as just an extra face. By the time an extra face is super impactful, you're probably at the end of the game and still an extra hand will probably be more impactful as a permanent change.

Additionally, the Chimera morphotype will provide a special interaction with brain brine, namely you gain nothing from mental mutation or mental defect rolls.

Esper

Esper is the mental flip of Chimera, only you don't gain any additional benefit. The only thing it does is restrict your options to only mental mutations. While the mental mutations are certainly powerful, they struggle in 1 very crucial aspect of the game: large groups of enemies. If you are relying on mental mutations as your sole source of damage, I'll call it what it is: a mistake. This is the trap many Espers find themselves in, since they are incentivised to try and boost their Ego as much as possible to improve their plethora of mental mutations. Many physical mutations exist to improve your efficacy in melee combat, which is rather important for most of the game. Without the assistance of these physical mutations, you may find that melee combat is more dangerous than normal.

Indeed, along with the psychic glimmer your mental mutations will result in, it's actually quite a good idea to not invest too heavily in your Ego before you are at a power that defeats other Espers. In the meantime, you'll need to have a strong capability in melee or ranged combat. Esper battles are often won not with mental mutations alone, as the other Esper tends to have their own mental arsenal to counter yours.

The primary benefit of this morphotype relies heavily on random chance. You are of course more likely to roll good mutations by taking this morphotype, but not guaranteed. You can very easily find yourself with your choice of only weak mental mutations and find yourself significantly underprepared for the challenges ahead of you and especially for battles against other Espers. At the same time, you can find incredible mutations and quickly find yourself a psychic monster.

Unstable Genome

Unstable Genome leaves your entire build to chance. You can take it several times and just see what you end up with, or if you don't know what to take or aren't super satisfied with your choices of mutation for 3 mutation points, you can put those points into Unstable Genome and see what you get. While you could get something quite good, like Multiple Legs or Precognition, you could just as well get something not worth the points, like Teleport Other. This is not to portray this mutation as only giving you one choice, you get the choice of 3; it's just to illustrate that you may not get something good by taking this.

Since this leaves so much up to chance, I can't rate it too high but you can get some absolutely incredible builds if you get lucky.

Physical Mutations

Adrenal Control

Adrenal Control has a bizarre opportunity cost. Taking Adrenal Control requires you to invest mutation points into it for it to be of any use at all. Doing so implicitly will lower the amount of points you can invest in your other mutations. Adrenal Control will boost those other mutations, but only if they're physical mutations. At typical max rank of physical mutations, 10, this bonus is a +4. If we instead did not take this mutation and spent all the mutation points elsewhere, we would have a useful maxed mutation or a mutation that requires no investment and 2 mutations at +5 each permanently. Now you might counter and say that if you have tons of physical mutations, Adrenal Control will boost all of them. And I would say yes, that's true. But that also costs 4 mutation points every time you want to buy a new mutation, and these mutations only go up to rank 5 with a maxed Adrenal Control. Some of those mutations may not even get much benefit from such an increase, such as Multiple Arms or Burrowing Claws.

Now comes the silver bullet: Adrenal Control only lasts 20 turns, and then goes on a massive cooldown. This is just not worth it in nearly any capacity. The last benefit of Adrenal Control is the quickness, but this is marginally better than rank 1 Heightened Quickness at rank 10 Adrenal Control and quickly gets outscaled. We have better options.

Beak

Stats are always useful in any run. Ego is handy in affording items, but is particularly useful if you're looking to gain a few mental mutations. You won't be barred from equipping any face slot items, and you have a 20% chance of dealing a peck attack that deals 1 damage per penetration. The peck is pretty useless, but the Ego is nice for 1 mutation point. If you're looking to do more mental mutations, this is a pretty handy 1 MP option. Bird rep is pretty useless since you start neutral and birds are very non-threatening (except dawngliders, but you need Unshelled Reptile reputation as well).

Burrowing Claws

Burrowing Claws are interesting because they can be used with or without any investment. If you don't invest into them, then they just become a more convenient way of breaking through walls since you don't have to swap to a digging tool (or get / carry one around) for most of the game. The uninvested Burrowing Claws are therefore a mild convenience as opposed to something that really impacts your run in a significant way, so why rate them as highly as I do?

Burrowing Claws are natural, Short Blade weapons. This means that they have an uncapped penetration value and benefit from Short Blade skills; meaning that going a Multiweapon Fighting build can be highly synergistic with your mutation. Now, if you invest in Burrowing Claws and build around them to have incredibly high Strength, you can dish out an incredible amount of damage; even though the burrowing claws will simply never catch up to the damage of the highest tier daggers they will still outpace their damage if you can make use of the uncapped penetration. In addition to this, you absolutely shred apart walls; so fast in fact that you can use this while in combat to morph the terrain in your favor and draw the enemy into 1-on-1 matchups. Even still, they require a considerable amount of investment, and if your build does not revolve around them, you're better off just leaving them unranked.

Carapace

Carapace is an incredibly powerful mutation. It's so good that it's comical that it costs less than the likes of Adrenal Control and Flaming Ray / Freezing Ray. The only downside of Carapace is that if you take it at all, you must invest heavily into it; which can pigeonhole you into a build you weren't originally going for (which is why it only gets 4 stars on the Mutation Buy Rating). On the upside, that build is nearly guaranteed to be extremely good.

At rank 10, Carapace is simply a better version of the zetachrome lune. With modding, you can make the lune marginally better in defensive stats, but that of course requires you to find it first. You can have Carapace at rank 10 as early as level 20; around the time you get to Bethesda Susa. Not only do you get the defensive stats, but you also get an incredible amount of heat and cold resistance. Where Carapace gets truly insane is when you rapidly advance it to bring it past rank 10. With two rapid advancements, Carapace becomes far better than any armor could hope to be: 85 cold and heat resistance and 11 AV at the cost of -2 DV. With the Weathered skill, this makes you immune to all cold and heat damage. This of course requires a lot of investment, but is absolutely worth it. While tightening your shell can be handy in niche scenarios or when combined with mental mutations, most of your time won't be spent using that but at very high AV totals (like with rank 16 Carapace), you can become practically immune to physical attacks while tightened.

Just to put in perspective, with the best AV equipment in the game and rank 16 Carapace, you can have 28 AV without a Shield; which is enough to protect perfectly from any attack except for the most powerful of attackers like salt kraken and some types of cherubim. If we tighten our Carapace, that puts us at 39 AV, again without a Shield. Supplement this with neutron flux and the Calloused skill and you can reach some truly frightening levels of durability.

Now, a lot of this analysis looks at Carapace at the higher echelon; but how does it fare throughout the game? While you may initially think that you should build your equipment around AV, Carapace actually works better by building DV. The -2 from Carapace can easily be overcome by heavily investing in DV, and since the AV bonus is so high from Carapace we can have strong AV and DV. Once we get strong enough AV items, we can then swap over to an AV build. Also, being neutral to irritable tortoises is pretty cool too.

Corrosive Gas Generation

Corrosive Gas Generation is incredibly highly damaging and very useful, and benefits from having a damage type (acid) that is only resisted by very few rare and/or very avoidable enemies. It will hang around for a while, which means at low enough cooldown you can really stack up the density and therefore the damage. This allows you to lure in enemies from around the map and annihilate them with ease. However, this applies also to non-enemies or allies; you can easily do significant collateral damage which requires an extra layer of care if that matters to you.

There were some changes to the way enemy AI interacts with the player surrounded by gas; they are now much less afraid of charging into the gas to get at you if they are melee based. While this is great for when you rank up the mutation, it means that Corrosive Gas Generation no longer keeps enemies at bay even at rank 1. Corrosive Gas Generation demands your mutation points, but it doesn't really need to be too greedy about them. If you are capable of surviving in melee for prolonged periods of time, the damage from the gas will simply stack up enough to kill whatever you are fighting.

The gas is very difficult to control as it will spread in unpredictable ways. You can mitigate some of this if you have enough intuition about how gas density and diffusion mechanics work, but even then the best of us can only make an educated guess. This is important as the gas will rapidly destroy any wall it comes in contact with, which can be both convenient and really bad. You must take care to only start using your gas when walls are no longer necessary to your survival, which does take experience to understand. Despite this, it is a powerful enough mutation to not matter in a large portion of circumstances.

Double-muscled

Even without any investment, a +2 to Strength is already pretty worth it. With investment, we can get even higher Strength which allows us to focus our attribute points elsewhere while keeping the highest penetration value possible for our weapons. We can combine this with weapons that have no penetration cap, like Horns and Burrowing Claws to devastating effect. Where Double-muscled propels itself ahead of most mutations is its capability to stun on melee attacks that penetrate as well. Combine this with a build that makes as many attacks as possible and you can easily stun enemies near permanently. This mutation is a staple in most of my builds; you become far more effective in melee with it and a before and after comparison between having it and not having it is quite noticeable.

Something relevant to note is that the daze chance from Double-muscled is a bit of a special case. It is completely separate from other daze chances, like Bludgeon, and can proc in the same attack as another daze chance (resulting in an immediate stun). Additionally, this chance is not affected by precision nanon fingers.

Electrical Generation

Electrical Generation is VERY good, but it is an expensive mutation to take in character creation. It can deal a great amount of damage when you drink energy from cells to spam it, and it synergizes extremely well with higher quickness and movement speed as the recharge occurs every time you make a move, instead of the time frame of a normal "turn" like what normal cooldowns use. This makes the "cooldown" of using Electrical Generation improve with action speed instead of Willpower. This also provides an exceptional power source for jacked modded items, which can be attained even without Tinker II by disarming turrets. With the capability of modding (or just being very lucky), we can create jacked force bracelets for infinite uptime on the forcefield.

The downside to this mutation is that it requires investment, and requires more investment the more your build relies on jacked items and its damage. Electric damage is great in many instances, as enemies tend to have very low (or even negative) electrical resistance, but can be inconvenient as it can arc to our allies and cause creatures to be angry with us; so we need to be careful when using this mutation for damage.

Electromagnetic Pulse

In order to have any significant range or duration, we need pretty heavy investment in this mutation. The mutation is also only effective against robots, the reflective shield, and artifacts. Robots, fair enough; it gives quite a few turns to work at the higher tiers. The reflective shield is pointless, since you need to get close to use the mutation but lowering the shield just lets you use ranged weapons; which you can't use as effectively now because you had to get close to use the mutation. Finally, very few enemies actually use weapons that are weak to EMP; and those that do are not very threatening at all. The only exception to this are the templar, which are quite rare outside of the A Call to Arms quest. It is not useful in the early game at all, and requires you to be investing in it so that when you finally do face an enemy where it will be useful, it can actually be effective.

All of this to be outclassed by Tinker I and the ability to craft EMP grenades, which you can attain for a grand total of 100 skill points (you can get Tinkering for Barathrumites reputation). While they don't last quite as long, they're dirt cheap to tinker and can be thrown, and more importantly don't cost any mutation points and you're probably going to want Tinker I anyways for all the vast benefits this gives you. With Psychometry available in the ovens of Ezra, if you have 1 EMP grenade you can easily learn the recipe for mass-production.

Flaming Ray

Flaming Ray, with investment, becomes a pretty decent damage option for a while. It's another mutation that requires investment, so if you pick this mutation up you'll need to rank it up for it to be any good at all. Unfortunately for it, being that it is an elemental damage mutation it needs to compare with the likes of Electrical Generation and Corrosive Gas Generation, which it does struggle to do. It has a remarkably low cooldown, which means it is very spammable and does do respectable damage, just not to the degree that Corrosive Gas Generation does.

It can be used to evaporate liquids (with enough ranks and patience) and synergizes well with flaming modded items. It's cool and handy early, but a considerable number of enemies in the mid-late game have fairly decent heat resistance; robots in particular. Because of this, heat damage just isn't quite as useful as electric or acid damage and creatures can cool themselves down more easily than they can warm themselves up by patting out flames. Or, they can just stay on fire and continue to hit you; which will cause you to deal more damage to them but dealing more damage is never as good as taking no damage yourself; and Flaming Ray doesn't get you to that point enough to rate it much higher, especially for 4 mutation points and the investment required.

Freezing Ray

Freezing Ray is the cold equivalent of Flaming Ray, which immediately makes it slightly better (but only slightly). It does less damage, and the temperature change is rather pitiful so creatures won't remain frozen for long or perhaps even at all. Despite this, it makes you harder to freeze, which is really the main reason to take this mutation. Because of this, Freezing Ray is actually useful without any investment at all. If you want to be able to freeze anything, you'll need to invest heavily; just like Flaming Ray. But if you just want to be practically immune to freeze, just take it and enjoy your enhanced freeze point.

If you are interested in trying to permanently freeze creatures, combining this mutation with Double-muscled, Multiple Arms and Multiweapon Fighting with Cudgels can be a rather devastating lockdown build. The specificity is quite high, however, and it doesn't really get to the point of being foolproof so care is still necessary. While it does have more utility than Flaming Ray, it unfortunately is so costly at character creation that it doesn't quite stack up in that rating.

Heightened Hearing

For the cost of the mutation, Heightened Hearing is unbelievably good. It's even good without any investment, as it allows you to "see" enemies past walls, and the higher you rank it the more omniscient you become. High rank Heightened Hearing means you will never be surprised about any enemy ever again, and the fact that it's always active means you can passively enjoy its benefit.

However, for these exact reasons, Heightened Hearing is also incredibly annoying. The higher rank it is, the more annoying it gets to move through the map quickly. Since you're always aware of where enemies are, you'll be prevented from using your automation (autoexplore, autowalk, rest, Disassemble all, gather, etc) while an enemy is perceived in your set radius. And you don't want to turn off that radius because in many cases you still do want to be stopped when an enemy is nearby. Because of that, I can't give it a perfect score.

Heightened Quickness

Heightened Quickness is a mutation that scales unusually; as it gives heavily diminishing returns the more you invest into it. Base-rank, it's already good and worth the mutation points, as quickness is massively important and hard to get. However, ranking up the mutation only gives an extra 2 quickness per rank; so at some point it's not really doing much to continue pouring mutation points into it.

This is both good and bad, since if you know when to stop, you save on mutation points that can go elsewhere. But if you don't, this mutation can be a dump of mutation points that don't offer much more benefit. A good rule of thumb: I tend to rank this up to rank 6, which gives me +25 quickness. This hits the threshold of making me act twice every 4 turns. If I combine this with bonuses from sunslag, I can then hit the threshold of acting twice every 3 turns.

Horns

Horns try to be a more offensive version of Carapace, and they succeed pretty well. Like Carapace, if you take Horns you are now forced to build around them or at least invest into them. These deal very high damage, especially when invested in, and cause one of the most deadly bleeds in the game. They even have the added benefit of giving an enhanced chance to hit with all attacks made with them, so you will practically never miss even with low Agility. Horns are so powerful in fact that you'll probably want to use them as your primary weapon, and even if you don't, they will always strike on a Charge making that skill even better than it already is.

Now, the problem with Horns is that you must now play a melee Strength build in order to get proper efficacy from them. If you don't, then the armor they provide is simply not worth the investment you must put into them as you cannot mod the Horns. Helmets have some of the most useful mods, and Horns having no defensive benefits besides the AV means not being able to use helmets is actually something significant we're missing out on. For this reason, if you do not have a build that already can utilize Horns well, you'll probably not want to take it.

Horns also come in at a relatively steep cost of 4 mutation points on character creation, which when compared to other offensive mutations such as Sunder Mind and Corrosive Gas Generation is not quite as good. It's the de-facto offensive melee mutation, but while it is a cut above the melee weapons you will find it is not so significant to completely warrant the cost.

Multiple Arms

Multiple Arms does what it says on the tin: you grow 2 extra arms with this mutation. This will give you 2 hand slots, 2 arm slots and another worn on hands slot. Early game, this will be slightly annoying as you'll need to have extra gloves to wear. Midgame and later, it becomes a blessing as you can stack the side effects of higher tier gloves and their mods, and it's the same story with the arm slots. Based on your mutation rank, you will have a different baseline chance to strike with your mutated hands from your natural hands. This starts off quite low (10%), and increases to 37% by rank 10. In order to break the 50% threshold, you'll need 2 rapid advancements, putting your chance to strike at rank 16 at 55%.

Now, these odds aren't great. In fact, they're pretty bad. In fact, they're really bad. However, this is not where the story ends with Multiple Arms. These percentages are your baseline chances to strike, which means that all the Multiweapon Fighting skills add on top of this percentage. With Multiweapon Mastery, you can throw on an additional 50% to your chance to strike. This means if you dump on those two rapid advancements to bring the mutation to rank 16, you can get above 100% chance to strike with your offhand attacks. Throw on Jab and this means your Short Blades are guaranteed to strike twice every time. This can be very powerful, but is a very steep investment. Generally speaking, there are other damage mutations with a bit better return on investment.

As an alternative to dumping huge amounts of mutation points, you can instead put in none. That's right, Multiple Arms is a mutation you can easily leave at rank 1. That is because even at rank 1, you can still enjoy massive power from the mutation. You could also just put a single point into the mutation which would bring the strike chance with the mutated arms slightly above the natural chance (15% vs 17%). There are 2 configurations to squeeze the most out of Multiple Arms.

The first configuration is Multiweapon Fighting with two-handed weapons. Axes in particular work very well with this, as Dismembering chance doubles on two-handed weapons. When you use a two-handed weapon, what determines your chance to hit is the primary hand that is holding the weapon. This is the hand that has the weapon name with its normal text color, while the secondary hand has the weapon name grayed out. So, if you use your non-mutated hands as the main hands holding your two-handed weapons, then you'll benefit from all the Multiweapon Fighting skills making your maximum chance to hit with your offhand weapon 65%. This results in more DPS than rank 16 Multiple Arms and 4 one-handed weapons (except when those mutated hands are holding Short Blades with Jab and the non-mutated hands are holding a two-handed weapon). We can force the hands that hold the two-handed weapon by filling all other hands with one-handed items and then equipping the two-handed weapon in the primary hand we want to hold it. The game will automatically use empty hands to hold the two-handed weapon before trying to unequip one of your other weapons.

The second configuration is a two-handed weapon, an offhand dagger and a Shield in the last mutated hand. The chance to strike with a mutated hand only affects the strike chance, so a Shield in the mutated hand still has its full block chance affected by skills in the Shield tree. Since we're not using a Shield for its damage, it has full effectiveness in the mutated arm (we could also do this to wield two Shields, but I tend to prefer the extra damage from the two-handed weapon instead since two Shields only benefits you with Swift Blocking and when taking 3+ hits in a round). Then we use a dagger in our natural offhand, as Multiweapon Fighting with a Short Blade deals far more damage than Multiweapon Fighting with any other class of weapon. This configuration is only marginally inferior to the first in terms of damage, but has the additional benefit of a Shield.

Multiple Legs

Multiple Legs seems like a considerable investment for a rather underwhelming benefit when you read the description of it during character creation. Indeed, I was rather unimpressed by this mutation for a long time and never took it, but I am here before you today to claim this mutation as one of the best in the game. The only thing holding this mutation back is the massive cost during character creation, but even then it's still worth it.

Multiple Legs gives you bonus movement speed and some extra carrying capacity. The carrying capacity is convenient, and just the extra sauce on top. What we really want this mutation for is the movement speed, because it's absolutely massive. Unlike Multiple Arms, Multiple Legs hungers for investment. While taking it does absolutely require you to invest, you are so heavily rewarded for doing so that it's worth every point. Multiple Legs is one of the best mutations to invest a rapid advancement or two into, since you can even gain over 300 bonus movement speed from two rapid advancements. This means you move 4 times for every move an enemy makes; this is unbelievable. And it only gets better when you improve it with your boot slots (of which you have 2 now) and the mods you can put on these.

If you are at all interested in ranged combat, this mutation should be at the top of your list. With it, you can reliably kite any enemy in the game throughout the entire game as long as you keep investing into it.

Now, by gaining all this movement speed we have a secondary synergy in perhaps the most unusual place: Ironshank. Normally, ironshank is very bad since it will slow you to a crawl at its final stage (-80 movement speed). This doesn't come without a benefit, as you do gain 5 AV for your trouble. Normally, this is not worth it in any way. However, with Multiple Legs we laugh at losing a mere 80 movement speed. Reducing you from moving 4 times per turn to 3 times per turn is not a big loss, and having a free extra 5 AV is a significant boon. We can obtain this synergy as early as Golgotha; so slap on your Multiple Legs and sip on that black ooze for a very powerful synergy.

Night Vision

Hot take, but Night Vision is a bit overrated as a mutation. It can't be upgraded, and its range is quite poor. In fact, as soon as you get a glowsphere the vision it gives you is outclassed. Having to hold an item in your offhand means you can only use a single one-handed weapon, which is pretty inconvenient admittedly. However, you're not really hurting for killing power in the early game, even with a single one-handed weapon. By the time it starts to hold back your damage, you'll have found a floating glowsphere. While this will prevent you from using a hoversled or light-obfuscating lens, better inventory management solves the hoversled need and 1 DV is nice but not the worst thing to miss out on (especially if you're building on AV). Then you get a guaranteed quantum mote from Barathrum for light and 1 AV and DV; an item so good you'll probably be using it even if you have Night Vision. I will give credit where it's due, it is one of the few ways to reveal Haggabah so in that way it's useful but that's a single enemy that can be beaten in other ways.

Is it useful? Yes, for 1 MP it's one of the better options for that cost. Is it worth downgrading your build over to fit it in? Not at all.

Phasing

Phasing is one of the most pathetically scaling mutations in the game. Each rank, you get just 1 (one!) more turn of being phased. It also has anti-synergies as well in the very good mutations Heightened Quickness and Multiple Legs because each turn of Phasing only counts your turn. Meaning the faster you make your moves, the less actual turns you spend phased.

Despite all this, it is still an incredibly powerful mutation absolutely worth taking. Phasing is the (near) perfect defensive mutation; not only can you escape from the overwhelming majority of threats with it, but you can also bait attacks and improve your map mobility by bypassing hazards. With heavy investment and phase cooking effects you can remain phased for long periods of time (practically endlessly), and combine this with phase-harmonic / phase-conjugate gear and you can rain death upon the enemy from perfect safety. With Harvestry and Spinnerets, you can farm infinite phase silk to sell for money, or you can cook with it to gain extra phase time. With Corrosive Gas Generation, you can phase out, spew your stink, and then phase in to dunk your gas cloud on enemies (they won't try and avoid the gas while it's phased out).

Alternatively, you can keep it at rank 1 and just use it as an emergency panic button. If you get grabbed or cornered, you can make it back to safety with full control over where you end up. If you get blocked in by force fields, you can pass right through them.

Despite how good it is, the anti-synergies and the fact you can gain this mutation through cooking effects makes me unable to rate it perfectly; but you will not be disappointed by this mutation.

Photosynthetic Skin

Photosynthetic Skin is like a conditional Heightened Quickness that also gives regeneration speed. This regen is only effective outside of combat; so it's really more of a convenience than anything else and I'll instead be focusing on the other aspects of this mutation, however I should still mention that with the Regeneration mutation this regen will apply in combat as well. This mutation gives the exact same quickness at every rank that Heightened Quickness does. This makes it synergize quite well with Heightened Quickness, and is also advised to take this mutation to at least rank 6. If you want to rapidly advance this mutation, you should only do so once as doing so twice is not as effective (doesn't break into the 5 day duration or past the 50 quickness threshold). So, what gives? It does the same thing as Heightened Quickness, plus a bit more and it's not rated quite as well. How come?

This is because Photosynthetic Skin has a few disadvantages that come with it that Heightened Quickness doesn't suffer, and the added regen isn't very significant to the success of the run. Namely, you take massive damage from defoliant, you don't bleed blood, and you have to constantly refresh your quickness buff specifically on the surface in daytime. Bleeding sap can cause both you and your enemy to get stuck in it, which can be beneficial or catastrophic rarely. More often, it just means you can't fill biodynamic cells from yourself. Taking damage from defoliant is pretty awful, as usually this is a gas you simply ignore and laugh at enemies for wasting upon you and this mutation doesn't grant you any protection from a different gas in exchange. During long dungeons, your quickness buff will fall off meaning you will have to cook with the starch generated by walking in the sun to refresh your quickness buff. If you run out of these, you'll have to go back up to the surface. Additionally, you won't be able to benefit from any cooking effects while the quickness and / or regeneration buff is active, since it's a metabolizing effect.

Photosynthetic Skin is also unique in that it benefits from Self-discipline skills to lower your hunger rate, letting you enjoy the metabolizing buff for longer. Additionally, the reputation for vines, flowers, roots and the Consortium of Phyta are all pretty nice, especially the Phyta rep since it will easily allow you to get the Snake Oiler perk right away. All-in-all, if you're not interested in cooking effects or willing to sacrifice them, this mutation is nearly as powerful as Heightened Quickness.

Quills

Quills tries to be an offensive version of Carapace and absolutely fails. Quills provide damage reflection, but the amount isn't particularly significant (3%) and only works with melee attacks. Not only is the amount insignificant, but it reduces the number of Quills you have, which reduces the efficacy of the mutation. The AV it provides is poor and bars you from being able to wear any armor yourself, which removes your opportunity of wearing better AV or DV armor in its place OR benefiting from any body armor mods. The gimmick of Quills is that you can fling some of your Quills to deal damage to everything around you. While these ignore accuracy, their max penetration value is abysmal (6) which makes this option (even if you wanted to use it) rather ineffective regardless of mutation rank starting in the midgame. It doesn't start at 6, mind you, it starts at 0 and by rank 10 is only 4.

In case it wasn't bad enough, quill fling uses 10% of your current Quills, which makes it weaker and weaker every time you use it. Additionally, you're actually penalized for using your quill fling because when you lose half your Quills, you lose half your AV bonus from the mutation as well. If the hole isn't deep enough for you to bury this one, Quills gets a variable quill increase every rank. This means that you can have two characters with Quills at the same rank, and one could have less Quills than the other, making it weaker. Why the devs decided to introduce RNG into an already weak mutation, I have no idea.

Despite all this, Quills can be effective in the early to mid game. It requires significant investment in order to do so, and becomes ineffective during the late game. Any enemy with 8 AV or more will take practically no damage from quill fling, and this is most of the enemies past level 30. Against the most dangerous enemies, Quills becomes an active negative because it takes the spot of more effective armor. It's rated as high as it is because it can carry you for a while, but when it falls off it falls off hard.

Regeneration

Regeneration is an interesting mutation, as it becomes less useful the more you know about the game. For a novice player, it's a very good mutation; a lifesaver even. It will prevent many debilitating effects even at rank 1, and dismemberment can be catastrophic to a newer player. However, once you learn the enemies that are capable of Dismembering and the alternatives to solving this, you find that you rarely if ever get Dismembered at all. And when you do, you can get it fixed fairly trivially. It still stays handy for its capability to remove minor and (at rank 5+) major effects, but once again the more you learn about the game the better you get at avoiding these effects in the first place. Rank 10 provides you immunity to decapitation, but if you know what can decapitate you then it's quite easy to not be decapitated. Creatures capable of this are very rare, so this is not a feature that is particularly exciting.

Despite this, it is quite handy for fixing minor mistakes and for the combat regeneration you get for extended fights. When combined with the massive extra regen speed from Photosynthetic Skin, a high AV build can become extremely difficult to kill outside of creatures that hard-counter AV builds. While it's not a mutation I tend to start with, it's still a good pickup if there's nothing crazy in the mutation buy.

Sleep Gas Generation

This mutation doesn't need to be ranked up too much to still be really good. While it doesn't work on robots, against anything else it will ensure it either doesn't get close to you or becomes sleeping beauty if it does. Enemies that you're currently fighting will have to fight through constantly being put to sleep, which leaves them dazed when they awaken and provides a massive +4 PV bonus to the attacker and -12 DV penalty to the snoozer. Unlike Corrosive Gas Generation, it doesn't destroy your valuable walls for protection and while it doesn't do damage, it keeps you alive which tends to be more valuable. A very good mutation, not much more to say.

Slime Glands

Slime Glands are kinda cool, they let you walk safely on slime and you can dilute dangerous liquids with the slime you spit. You can also use this to influence where enemies walk but enemies will still walk through slime if they must to attack you. Slime does retain heat better and dilutes blood from warming up an enemy if you're planning on keeping them frozen, so slobbering on enemies you want ice cubed can be a useful strategy. If you've got the extra point lying around, go ahead but the other 1 MP options are probably better.

Spinnerets

Spinnerets is a very specific mutation that really struggles being used in any way other than to cover your retreat. Sprint tends to be more than sufficient in building the gap between you and the enemy for you to escape anyway, and if there's more room than a 1 tile corridor, the enemy can simply walk around it. You can use this to draw enemies in by getting in melee with them, then activating Spinnerets and moving back. All this really accomplishes is making them easier to hit or providing some gap for you to use ranged weapons against them. Once they break free, you have to do this again and any enemies behind them won't suffer the same fate, so you can really only do this a limited number of times before you run out of space.

Perhaps the biggest benefit is that you no longer become stuck by webs or liquids like sap or asphalt once you have this mutation, making it useful even at rank 1. Additionally, with the Harvestry skill and some form of Phasing, you're able to infinitely farm phase silk. This makes it quite easy to get infinite money or the ingredients for improved Phasing. The Arachnid rep is kinda cool since it makes you neutral, but Arachnids are one of the least threatening factions so it's nothing crazy. An OK mutation, but there's probably better choices. Take it if you really want to all-in on Phasing.

Stinger (Confusing Venom)

Stinger comes in 3 flavors of venom: confusing, poisoning and paralyzing. The only difference between all 3 are the effects of the venom, so we'll only cover the alternate effects on this mutation here.

Stinger provides a small boost to Arachnid rep, but this is not enough to become neutral by default so isn't worth much. Arachnid rep in general isn't that useful anyways. Stinger increases its PV with rank, and stays fairly relevant with investment. Your Strength also does not factor into this PV whatsoever, so it's always at the same efficacy. The damage it deals is unfortunately low, especially for being a Long Blade class weapon. Rank 10 only puts it on par with a |crysteel dagger, which means it's not doing that much damage. However, the damage value it does is actually completely irrelevant because no matter what, the Stinger can only penetrate once. That's right, even against an enemy with 0 AV, Stinger will only penetrate a single time. This makes it pretty useless as anything aside from a venom delivery tool, especially because the Sting attack automatically hits, penetrates and inflicts the venom. The Stinger will always strike on a Charge or Lunge, but relies on Sting being off cooldown to apply venom.

Each venom has a Toughness save to resist it, so in order for the venom to stay relevant, the Stinger must receive investment. Robots are immune to all Stinger venom, so these mutations are useless against them. By rank 7, the venom should always work except on creatures with the highest Toughness values in the game. Also notable is that when Stingers strike, their strikes will be doubled by Weapon Expertise and Weapon Mastery, so these skills can vastly improve the amount of venom injected.

Confused as an effect will essentially negate the enemy it hits for the duration. If this enemy is the only one around or is locked in a corridor, then the fight against it is pretty much guaranteed. It can also be used to remove an enemy to temporarily deal with another. The problem is the confused enemy will wander around and make room for another enemy, so you need to be careful not to introduce a more dangerous threat that you would have rather saved your Sting for. It will also reduce the targets MA, which probably isn't super handy unless you are playing a melee Ego build with psionic weapons and psychic attacks. It can be useful in the right circumstances, but is definitely overshadowed by the other venom.

Stinger (Paralyzing Venom)

This mutation just gives you a few free turns on non-robots. With investment, you can reach 4-7 rounds of paralysis, which is less than what you get from confusing venom with the added benefit of keeping the enemy still, easy to hit and not replaced by more dangerous stuff. At rank 10 and very high Willpower, you can nearly permanently paralyze enemies with this venom; an ability that becomes more effective with rapid advancement. While this can be good, it's useless on robots and requires a very particular build that invests in Willpower.

Stinger (Poisoning Venom)

The venom here can deal pretty significant damage; the only downside is that it's over time. Another downside is most enemies with the HP to tank the damage over time before you kill them are high level robots, which are immune to the poison. It also reduces their healing, but that's pretty irrelevant since enemies don't tend to heal unless it's something like an arconaut that happens to have a salve injector. Can also be used with hit-and-run tactics, where it tends to shine the most as long as you have the space to work (Teleport Other comes to mind here, give them a sting and love tap to the other side of the map).

To be sure, this mutation can be quite strong if you're able to clear the distance or disable your opponent (Cudgel stuns, freezing, Phasing). For 4 mutation points, it ends up being quite expensive for a damage option that just doesn't always work (robots immune) and incentivises a (in my opinion) very boring playstyle. I see this more as a more specific Corrosive Gas Generation with no defensive utility that costs more, but if you're willing to play and build around it this can reliably kill enemies. Something important to mention is the damage of the poison stacks with itself, so multiple strikes with Weapon Expertise and Weapon Mastery go extra hard with this one.

Thick Fur

One of the better 1 MP mutations, this will make you neutral to baboons and give some bonus ape reputation which can be handy for finding Oboroqoru's lair or even water ritualing the man himself, and the 5% bump to cold and heat resistance is nice. If you got leftover points, this is a pretty good one to take.

Triple-jointed

Like with Double-muscled, this mutation is strong in very similar ways. Instead of damage, we get accuracy and become harder to hit, which makes this very handy since you can never "cap" on Agility returns. While you don't get a particularly reliable chance to not use your cooldown of an Agility-based ability, you get a decent chance especially at rank 10. If you're relying on it to save you, you'll probably be out of luck when you really need it, so this mutation is more of a "win more" mutation that benefits being proactive and really using as many Agility-based abilities as possible.

With this mutation boosting Agility, you can also ignore investment into this attribute in favor of boosting your other attributes as long as you invest the mutation points into the mutation.

Two-headed

Regeneration doesn't protect you from all status effects; in fact some of the most crippling and hardest to avoid status effects are not covered by Regeneration. Daze, stun and confused all are covered by the effects this mutation can shake off at a massive 50% rate per turn. This is effectively improved with higher quickness as you have more turns to proc the chance before the enemy gets to take their turns. Additionally, after the Moon Stair update a lot of creatures got access to skills like Menacing Stare and Berate, giving this mutation even more efficacy as it can shake off shamed and terrified.

For those of you looking to tackle the games greatest challenges, Two-headed is a considerable boon against the Nephilim Qon. She constantly confuses the player during the fight, and being able to resist this with reasonable effectiveness is huge, especially to those uncomfortable with fighting while confused. With the addition of many creatures that are able to use these debilitating effects that Two-headed can negate, it has really brought up its usefulness. The best part of all this? This is at rank 1 and needs no further investment!

You also gain a second head, and with that comes a headgear slot and a face slot. There are many fantastic face slot items and with two heads, you don't have to worry about relying on the two-faced mod to enjoy multiple. In fact, you can still use two-faced and get even more face slot items. Headgear also comes with the benefit of the fitted with filters mod, so at high gear tiers you can become basically immune to gas by stacking fitted with filters modded items. Stacking Ego with severed faces is also a common strategy at higher tiers of play with this mutation.

For a Chimera or primarily physical mutation focused build, this is where the benefits end. If you're running a build heavy on mental mutations, you get the actual ranked benefit of this mutation which is the mental action cost reduction. This is basically a quickness buff for your mental mutations which can be handy for spamming a rotation of mental abilities (like a Syphon Vim into Teleportation without retaliation) or for specifically Light Manipulation to shred something apart in the blink of an eye. Additionally, it gives those mental focused builds a physical mutation to sink rapid advancements into so they aren't wasted.

There is a downside to this mutation, and that is that your equipment's AV and DV bonuses will be averaged across all the extra slots you now have meaning you have to get more equipment. Luckily, headgear is easy enough to come by that shouldn't be an issue, but in the midgame you may struggle with fleshing out your face slots. Oh, and I guess this also lets you take a Decapitate on the chin, so there's that too.

Two-hearted

Toughness is good, don't get me wrong, but the added ability to Sprint longer? Yea, don't really care too much about that, especially when there are skills I already don't take that double my Sprint time. Because the secondary effect isn't one that's really useful, and the fact that I typically don't want for Toughness even without this mutation leaves me rating it lower than the other attribute boosting mutations. Similar to Regeneration, this mutation becomes less useful the more you know about the game.

Wings

Last physical mutation and boy do we end on a banger.

Wings can either be unbelievable or practically useless depending on how you play the game. If you like to go on long excursions underground and practically never see the daylight, you won't get as much out of this mutation. But make no mistake, this is one of the very best there is.

This mutation requires investment, but not much: at minimum, bring this mutation to rank 6. At rank 6, Wings offers perfect Flight, meaning that you will never fall unless you melee attack while flying. This means you are immune to all melee attacks while on the surface and you can always flee to the world map. Taking Flight and landing do not take turns either, so you can perfectly control when you are in the air or on the ground with no cost.

You also move incredibly fast while Sprinting with this mutation as well, making closing or growing the gap with Sprint extremely effective. Speaking of growing or closing the gap, it will also significantly enhance your Charge and Jump range, meaning your melee builds have insane movement potential. In case this wasn't enough, Wings also provides fantastic utility with overworld travel, as you move way faster and hardly ever get lost.

In case these benefits are not enough, Wings also make several quests in the game a near surefire win. Like Multiple Legs, I was not a big believer in Wings until I took them for several runs. Now, I'm a diehard fan; take the Wings pill.

Mental Mutations

Beguiling

As an ability, gaining a follower is really good. Followers are quite powerful, and by having good Ego or investment into Beguiling you can get followers that are a bit higher level than you. You can also use this mutation to convert a dangerous enemy to your side so you don't have to fight it. Only problem with this is if you're actually facing an enemy that can dunk on you alone, you're probably not able to Beguile it reliably or even at all so you're probably not using it for that.

While followers are good, legendary creatures are head and shoulders far above normal creatures and you're only able to have a single follower via Beguiling. The thing about legendary creatures is that they can all be recruited via water ritual. Of course, you do save a lot of reputation by using this mutation instead of converting via water ritual; but you unfortunately anger anyone who resists your Beguiling.

So, we've got a lot of problems here. We can only gain 1 follower, and if we mess up that potential follower is now angry with us, so we're not even really comfortable using it on neutral creatures unless we're sure we won't fail. Then what happens when your follower dies? You've just lost a considerable amount of power. You can of course gain it back with another, but if that follower was only powerful because of levels you are in a tricky scenario.

There's also a skill that does essentially the exact same thing as Beguiling (just without any bonus HP), but it's actually more reliable since you don't anger enemies you fail to convert with Proselytize. With Proselytize, you can also convert creatures with a mental shield like oozes and if there is any chance of converting a neutral creature, you can take all the tries you need to succeed. All that for a couple skill points, for free if we start as an Acolyte or for 300 rep from the faction that has the easiest method of gaining reputation; the Mechanimists.

To really seal the deal here, it costs 5 mutation points to start with this one. Are followers good? Yes. Is the extra HP significant? Not really. All in all, this mutation's rank is carried by the incredible potential followers have, but you'll probably want to end up avoiding this one.

Burgeoning

Burgeoning is somewhat hard to rank, because the reasons why it is effective are the exact same reasons why it is extremely deadly to yourself. Burgeoning lives and dies by RNG. Early ranks of Burgeoning spawn pretty worthless plants; qudzu, seed-spitting vines and the like. Mid to late ranks of Burgeoning spawn very deadly plants, which (especially when placed directly on enemies) can be used to great effectiveness. The problem here are 2 plants in particular: feral lah and aloe pyra.

Feral lah is the plant that creates tumbling pods, the explosive seeds that blow up from damage or proximity. While they won't blow up from your proximity since they're allied with us, they will blow up from the proximity of anything hostile to you. Hostile things tend to move directly to you, so there's a good chance that the enemy creature is somewhat close to you. Worse still is that a tumbling pod can cause a chain reaction and the pods tend to stack together near the feral lah once it doesn't detect any more enemies around. Then when a new one gets into range, they start to move over and all blow up. If you're remotely close to the explosion, that puts you in it too. These also tend to blow up the rest of your plants as well.

Aloe pyra don't move; instead they sit there and don't do much. When they're stepped on, they will spew a burst of flame in all 4 cardinal directions across the map. Since other plants from your Burgeoning can trigger this fire explosion, you can be immolated quickly and easily by your own Burgeoning; especially if multiple aloe pyra spawn from the same Burgeoning. The map can easily devolve into a chaotic mess of flame and agony from liberal use of this mutation, and the world burns even hotter when you combine this with Temporal Fugue (god save you).

If you don't care about the world incinerating or you have 100% heat resistance, this is actually quite a powerful mutation due to its very low cooldown and powerful plants especially at the high tiers (looking for rank 13 Burgeoning). However, before that it will likely get you killed more often than not.

Clairvoyance

Clairvoyance is a mutation that really needs investment; and it needs quite a bit for it to be meaningfully useful. But when it is useful, it's really useful. Early on, the radius is poor, the duration is short and the cooldown is very long. It's only through strong investment that these 3 become manageable, but any form of vision through walls is very powerful. Clairvoyance will show basically everything in the radius (even Haggabah) and since it grants you sight of that area, it synergizes very well with other mutations that require vision (like Sunder Mind, Burgeoning, Cryokinesis, etc). It's cheap to get and just gets better with time; just don't be expecting much at the start.

Confusion

Confusion is in a really unique space as a mutation. It's got a pretty long cooldown and the duration of the effect isn't super impressive and the range on it isn't crazy either. However, Confusion synergizes with nearly every mental mutation by lowering the target's mental armor significantly. It also pacifies the enemy for the duration, meaning you can just as easily use it to turn the tides in your favor. Since it's AOE, you can use it to weaken enemies for you to either focus a single / few enemies or to get away and escape or position yourself more effectively. You do need to be careful about using this on Espers as they could potentially have Mental Mirror, in which case this is disastrous. But as long as you're careful with this in that specific scenario, you can supercharge your other mutations by weakening enemies with this one.

Cryokinesis

At low ranks, enemies are just going to walk out of it. At high ranks, you'll get the enemies in the initial range since it'll freeze them, but it won't do much damage. If you get too close to the area at high ranks, you'll end up frozen as well if you linger for too long. This mutation needs quite a bit of investment to be capable of even freezing an enemy caught in the initial zone. Enemies will just walk around this or wait out the 3 turns it's active, so you'll only ever hit creatures you specifically drop this on. And 4 MP to start with this trash? Give this mutation a miss.

Disintegration

Disintegration can do some pretty respectable damage early if you pour investment into it, but the problem here is that it doesn't scale nearly fast enough to keep up with one-shotting enemies. You can use bioscanning to help you identify when an enemy is weak enough for a Disintegration since it does do a hefty amount of damage, but the exhaustion really really hurts. It means that failing to kill all things around you with Disintegration leaves you incredibly vulnerable. Since it deals unbelievable amounts of damage to structures, you're almost guaranteed to be very exposed after using it.

The problem with this mutation is that resonance grenades to basically the same thing except they can be thrown and don't exhaust you. So not only can you use these grenades at range, but you can also use them over and over again until they get close. It can be used as a last-resort, but there are other mutations that are on the defensive side that work far more often and in far more scenarios.

Domination

Domination is in the running for most powerful mutation in the game, and it makes a very compelling argument for it. Just with this single mutation, you can turn literally any character into an absolute monster. Domination needs no assistance and no builds, only the know-how of how to abuse it.

We can begin at the basic level of understanding for Domination. Domination lasts a considerable amount of time (200 rounds at rank 1), and it's clear that this was its intended function. We can take control over a creature, and if we are the same level or at least close, we're nearly guaranteed to succeed in this. We can draw a particularly strong enemy out to safety, then take control of it and proceed to fight other enemies until that creature dies. If the creature lives too long, we can steer it into dangerous liquids or remove any weapons / armor that it might have to weaken it. If we really want to take it a step further, we can even have the creature target itself and kill itself while dominated. While using Domination in this way, it's advised to have a powerful defensive mutation like Force Bubble or Phasing in order to protect yourself if an enemy makes it to you while in the other creature's body, as after taking damage your Domination breaks and you come back to your own body.

The second level of understanding is that we can get ourselves a follower that we are capable of dominating. This works particularly well if this follower is particularly capable in combat in a way you are not. You can control this follower's body to investigate a dungeon floor in safety to yourself. As long as you keep track of your remaining turns in Domination, you can reel the follower back in just before the dominate ends, refresh your cooldown and do it all over again. Actually, if you stand outside of the zone the follower is fighting in, you don't even need to do that last part because when the Domination breaks, it will instantly be teleported to you. You gain the body of a strong creature and keep yourself in perfect safety. If the follower dies, well better them than us as we can find another and rebuild.

The third level of understanding comes naturally after the second. Followers level up and gain skill points, attribute points, and (if they're not a robot or a templar) mutation points. However, they're not smart enough in the base game to use those resources and there's no way we can direct them to. However, while we dominate a creature, we take full control over their body as if it were our own, allowing us to spend their resources in any way we wish. With this, we can have multiple followers that are all just as powerful as us, if not far more powerful. With the boosted stats of legendary creatures, this combination can make an absolutely frightening monster under your full control. You can also ensure that your follower has exactly what you want equipped and not just whatever autoequip has decided to put on them (it tends to favor AV in most scenarios). We can then leave them to wander and protect us (the AI will use mobility skills with ruthless efficiency) or take their bodies for our own to scout ahead or clear out floors under our control.

The fourth level of understanding also follows from the second, and that is if we are able to gain full control over our followers and enemies, we can also do this to merchants and allies with equipment that we want. Instead of having to kill these creatures, which we may not want to do as not to draw their hostility or because we want them to restock, we can simply dominate them and take their belongings. A successful dominate will not cause a creature to be hostile, but a failed one will. We can work around this by simply ensuring the creature we are dominating is weaker than us to the point our dominate is guaranteed to succeed or to be a little more careful and use Precognition as well. Using this, we can get uber powerful followers, infinite money and all the items we could ever want.

The fifth and final level of understanding cuts out the middleman in level 3: instead of powering up a more powerful body, why not permanently take it for your own? That's right, any creature you can dominate can be permanently under your control if you can obliterate your own body in a single hit. This is easier than it sounds, because you can just target and punch yourself down to low HP, then equip some high-damage rifle in the body you want while dominating it and take the final shot on your old body. Doing so will permanently place your mind in that body, but will not transfer over any of your stats, skills or mutations. Therefore, this tends to be better to do when swapping to powerful bodies that are at level 1, such as village mayors, baboons, and merchants.

There are many reasons to use Domination, and not only are they all incredibly good, but they also all have virtually no downsides and only extreme upsides. It's a high cost to start with this mutation, but it is absolutely worth it.

Ego Projection

Ego Projection can be used in two ways: if you already have good melee stats and you fight often in melee, Ego Projection can give you that little boost depending on the specific enemy that you're up against. Have a hard-to-hit enemy or want a little more DV? Boost Agility. Need an emergency bump to your HP? Boost Toughness. Need to deal max damage on your weapons? Boost Strength. If you don't already have good melee stats, it's probably because you dumped either Agility or Strength. Since you likely won't be fighting in melee often, if you find yourself in a situation where you want to fight in melee you can use this mutation to give you the stats necessary to succeed. It's got a fairly steep cost, but doesn't require too much investment since if you're picking this up, you should have a fairly high Ego in the first place. If you don't have a high Ego, then this is not the mutation for you. If you're taking this at all, it's because your build works well with it. Otherwise, not a great mutation.

Force Bubble

Force Bubble surrounds you in a nigh-impenetrable barrier that moves as you move. There's not much more that needs to be said for you to know this is a banger of a mutation. You can shoot through it, fire ranged mutations through it, whatever. You can even synergize it with Disintegration to nullify the exhaustion period. Since it means enemies are totally incapable of pathfinding to you, if there's not another enemy in vision they'll just stand there for you to kill them (most of the time). If you've found yourself in a bad spot, you can pop Force Bubble and use a recoiler to get out. If you can kill an enemy before the duration of Force Bubble is down, you've won; they have no possible chance to beat you.

There are some creatures that will still determine that they can make an attempt at breaking through your Force Bubble; creatures like Saad Amus with his ceremonial vibrokhopesh, chrome pyramids with their swarm rack and galgal with their naser cannon will detect they have a good chance of punching through the forcefield and will attempt it. Be careful with this, as you might think yourself invincible by pumping up this mutation, only to be humbled by a creature that can combat it.

At low ranks, it already lasts a fairly considerable amount of time (12 rounds at rank 1). This means it's one of the rare mental mutations that is VERY good even without any investment or even any Ego at all. At higher ranks, it lasts quite a long time and can eventually get near perpetually or actually perpetually on.

Force Wall

At first glance, Force Wall seems to be a very finicky, weaker version of Force Bubble. However, unlike Force Bubble we choose where to place our 9 tiles of Force Wall which leads to this mutation being limited more by the imagination than anything else. While inferior in terms of a panic button as the wall will not push away enemies, it is far more powerful in the hands of a proactive player.

While you won't be able to walk with the wall surrounding you, you can combine Force Wall with Juke in order to surround yourself with walls to be able to teleport out or go to the world map, making it nearly as good as Force Bubble in that aspect. In addition to that basic defensive ability, you can also place it around enemies (as you have likely had done to you at one point or another when angering high-level Mechanimists) to then rain death upon them. Doing so this way has the added benefit of ensuring that enemy stays put whereas with Force Bubble it could turn its attention to something else and continue to move around. Force Wall also deals with rocket turrets far more effectively since you can place the wall right in front of the rocket turret to destroy it while Force Bubble can only temporarily withstand the barrage.

Additionally, Force Wall has a higher duration than Force Bubble, which can lead to infinite uptime much more easily. Force Wall is my preferred forcefield generation method and the fact that it costs less than Force Bubble as well is just another bonus.

Kindle

Kindle's design is completely baffling to me. It has a 25% chance to heat a target by 100 degrees each turn it shares a tile with it, which is not enough to set them on fire. Chances are that by the time this rolls twice, the target will have cooled already and still won't be set on fire. This effectiveness only decreases as the game goes on and more enemies are resistant to being ignited. It provides a pathetic amount of light and can't be moved. All of these are somewhat understandable for a 1 MP mutation, but then you look at the cooldown… 50 turn cooldown for this? Pick something else.

Light Manipulation

Light Manipulation is the only somewhat reliable mental mutation in terms of damage; all other mental mutations simply have far too long of a cooldown or don't have reliable killing power. Light Manipulation can definitely get the job done, but the more you rely on it the worse off you are when you meet more and more enemies. The damage is good and the fact that it never misses is amazing, but uses come back pretty slowly. If Light Manipulation is your only source of damage, you'll eventually run out of uses or meet an enemy that can withstand your damage.

If you use Light Manipulation as a supporting ranged option, then it does its job quite well. Relying on it for light is a tricky balance since as you use it, you can see less and less so you'll probably still want a light source anyways even if you have a high rank Light Manipulation. It won't scale to the very most powerful enemies in the game, but will get the job done reliably with virtually any normal enemy as long as you keep putting points into it.

Here's a cute little trick you can do with Light Manipulation though: get high quickness and a high rank Two-headed to reduce your mental action cost, then stab a creature with a skulk injector. You now do double damage to them and can send off a massive volley of beams. Have fun.

Mass Mind

If you use a lot of mental mutations, then this can be handy in case you come across an unexpected powerful enemy after using up your cooldowns. It can also be a fun mutation to spam your other mutations with and laugh maniacally as chaos fills up your screen. However, this comes with a very heavy cooldown, meaning that you're only ever doing this once per combat really.

I also do not like this mutation for the negative Seeker of the Sightless way reputation. Seekers are some of the most dangerous enemies in the game because of their psychic weaponry and weapon skills, so making it any harder to become neutral with them is usually just a bad idea; especially because the benefit this mutation gives becomes less useful the better you are at the game as you won't get into situations where it is useful very often. On top of this, using it raises your glimmer so the more you use it, the more dangerous the psychic assassins will become; simply unnecessary added risk. In case this wasn't enough, while it does have the chance to save you if you play poorly, you can play perfectly and through no fault of your own get absolutely screwed and have all your mental mutations put on cooldown. If this happens at the wrong time, this can just lead to your death. Is it fun? Yea it can be fun. Should you use it if you're trying to improve at the game? Probably not.

Mental Mirror

It is extremely difficult to raise your MA, so the fact that Mental Mirror not only gives you quite a considerable amount of MA but also reflects mental attacks back means this is quite good. However, the downside to this is that it will only do so once and then go on cooldown. Luckily for us, most triggers of this have their own, equally long cooldown so chances are it'll be up again by the time we get attacked again (the only exception being psychic weapon attacks).

While this mutation single handedly secures you against virtually any mental attack (as long as you don't dump Willpower), there are so few creatures that are actually capable of any of these attacks that we can also pacify the factions (Seekers of the Sightless Way and Svardym) and probably would want to anyways. If you plan on getting a lot of glimmer and partaking in Esper battles, this is a good mutation to have. Otherwise, we can play around this and then you'll get literally no benefit once you get a few Schrodinger pages.

Precognition

Precognition is in the running for the best mutation in the game, and like Domination also requires absolutely no investment in order to still be incredible. Precognition has so many uses in fact that I won't be able to cover all of them, but I'll go over the main ones. While Precognition won't save you from every kind of death, it will save you from most which is all we can ask for really.

The biggest drawback of Precognition is that you need to have a little precognition of your own in order to use it most effectively. Precognition is best when you anticipate a dangerous or otherwise irreversible situation and want to know what will happen before committing to an outcome. Putting ranks into the mutation helps give you extra leeway in choosing this specific moment to reverse to, but the more you learn the game the better your sense of when to start your vision becomes. It's especially handy if you can see a risky move in the middle of combat that could be disastrous if it goes poorly, but combat-defining if successful. If you pop your Precognition just before committing to the risky move, you can try your dangerous move and if it doesn't go well, just try a more conservative option or potentially even flee.

Precognition is also a great mutation for learning the game in case you're not interested in roleplay mode. It lets you learn more easily where your mistakes are made or the power of certain enemies without jeopardizing your run.

This ability on its own is already game changing and enough to put Precognition into the top tiers of mutations. Where Precognition goes crazy is in the more creative applications of it. Precognition can be used to cook with neutron flux in perfect safety, allowing you to get practically unlimited AV without risking your character. We can use Precognition to see what our mutation buys will be, and there are ways of rerolling those options in case you don't like them. We can practically guarantee desired results from drops of nectar, brain brine or gamma moth mutation rolls, albeit with great effort and expending other expensive resources (and typically also with the assistance of Domination). We can even guarantee the stat or mutation point we want from an Eaters' nectar injector.

Precognition is one of those mutations that has endless applications that will continually come up the more you learn about the game. Out of all the mutations in the game, this is the one I constantly lament not having in the plethora of situations where it's game changing.

Psychometry

Here's the deal: Psychometry is a largely redundant mutation. For the way I prefer to play, there's never any reason for me to take it. However, I would be dishonest if I used this as the only way to rate it. Psychometry has 3 abilities that are all pretty cool, but basically invalidated by an average Intelligence score (which you should have in every run anyway).

The first ability is the most unique; having this mutation (even at rank one) acts as a permanent military security card. This is cool, but only really useful in Grit Gate. You can also just buy a pickaxe from Mafeo for like 5 drams and bypass the doors entirely and grab the loot or have a digging mutation. You can also deactivate machines, but again this is only useful in a single place: the Tomb of the Eaters. A Maintenance Security Card does the same thing here, and by this point in the game is pretty easy to get. You can also just walk around the fans and bypass needing to turn them off. It's convenient, but not really worth a mutation.

The second ability is the capability to unerringly identify artifacts up to a certain "complexity". This "complexity" is different from tier, and refers to how hard the artifact is to understand and not necessarily what Tinkering skill is required to make it. Unfortunately for Psychometry, if you have the basic Tinkering skill (which 3 callings start with and everyone can get for rep from Barathrumites) you're probably just as capable of identifying artifacts as Psychometry will ever get you to be. If you're dumb as dirt and have no Intelligence, then Psychometry (with considerable investment) can serve as a way to figure out what artifacts are without having to pay a premium to a tinkerer. You'll need rank 8 Psychometry to identify any artifact without mods.

The third ability is the most useful, and what you will actually use Psychometry for. You can learn how to make an artifact, but this is more difficult than just identifying so you can only do this to lower tier artifacts. You'll need rank 13 Psychometry to be able to learn how to make any artifact. The problem with this is that it requires you to have the artifact already, and if you have the artifact you probably don't need to make another. You can use this to make very expensive artifacts like high-voltage arc winders for money, but by this point you're probably not hurting for money in the first place. In addition to these requirements, you still need the Tinkering skill to make the item and the bits to do so and you cannot learn mods. Mods are the primary reason to use Tinkering in general, so not being able to learn them with Psychometry kinda defeats its purpose outside of very specific situations.

Where Psychometry is quite useful is in learning recipes for injectors or grenades, since these are artifacts that you actually do want quite a number of. However, these artifacts have incredibly low complexity, meaning that you can have rank 1 Psychometry and be capable of learning the recipe of any injector or grenade (yes, even Eaters' nectar injector and the Hand-E-Nuke). This may prompt you to say "Well if we get the best part of Psychometry at rank 1, that means it's good without investment right?" Wrong. Well, technically right, but wrong. We can get rank 1 Psychometry by cooking with sun-dried bananas 100% of the time, and the ovens of Ezra contain such a recipe infinitely. Why buy the mutation when we can get it by eating some 'naners? Save yourself the points.

Pyrokinesis

This is the heat version of Cryokinesis. Instead of freezing the target, it does a little more damage and sets them on fire. Well, it would if you could actually land it on something. Most of the time, the enemy just leaves the range before it does anything significant. For 4 MP, pick something else.

Sense Psychic

Why would you ever pick this when Heightened Hearing exists? As we covered with Mental Mirror, there are virtually no enemies that even have mental mutations for us to sense. The one thing it can do is sense Haggabah since Invisibility is classified as a mental mutation, but that's it. Pick Heightened Hearing if you are even considering this. If you're a pure Esper, just pick Clairvoyance and see the whole map at the push of a button.

Spacetime Vortex

This is not a mutation I like to use, but I'd be lying to say it's useless. While not exactly predictable, using this mutation as a last-ditch effort to put a considerable distance between you and an enemy can be effective (unless that target is a templar with a powered ontological anchor). The cooldown gets to be quite low with considerable investment and as long as you can keep distance with heightened movement speed or quickness, you can get rid of very powerful enemies by banishing them to a random tile of Qud.

Unfortunately, before this point the cooldown is so huge that you've only got one shot and if you miss (which happens often since the vortex is placed in a random tile next to where you select), then you're just down 1 turn and in no better position than before. Additionally, if you accidentally fall in you could just get placed into certain death, but if the place you were before was already certain death then you may get transported somewhere better which can be a unique if less reliable way of escape (if you're getting this mutation for this, just get Force Wall; much more reliable).

Now if you're really lucky, you may get a powerful ally to pop through the vortex if you miss the enemy. What's more likely is that a chrome pyramid or leering stalker will play peekaboo and annihilate everything in a 20 tile radius. If you're luckier still, you may get powerful gear in perfect safety. Or, once again you could get a hostile mighty cherubim.

Since this is a somewhat effective way of one-shotting nearly any creature in the late game, I can't rate it 1 star. Until rank 11 however, know that this is firmly a 1 star mutation.

Stunning Force

If you're going to use this at all, it requires investment all the way through. The stun only lasts 3 turns and can be saved from or shaken off, so those 3 turns may not be as long as you think. This will push not only enemies, but terrain around as well so it can be extremely annoying when used in corridors. It's got a bad range, pretty hefty cooldown, and fairly low damage. It can be used in clever situations to give yourself a bit of breathing room and is one of the few reliable ways to interrupt Sunder Mind, but don't expect much from this one.

Sunder Mind

Sunder Mind is the premier damage mental mutation. Since it has a long cooldown and requires up to 10 turns to complete, you have to really commit to Sunder Mind and can't use it too impulsively. However, if you have 10 turns of space between you and an enemy without a mental shield, that enemy is as good as dead. Sunder Mind only requires you to have sight of your enemy, and only requires that you can see it for the first turn since it gives you vision of them until the completion of the attack. While it can be interrupted, it's not likely that this happens often.

If you use Sunder Mind on an enemy, it cannot use Sunder Mind on you which can be a very handy way of preventing yourself from being obliterated by this very mutation. Sunder Mind bypasses phase, so you can also use it while Phasing to kill from perfect safety. When combined with ways of keeping enemies away from you like Corrosive Gas Generation, Sleep Gas Generation, Force Bubble and Force Wall, this mutation can single handedly take down even the most powerful of organic enemies from perfect safety.

Using Sunder Mind as a legitimate form of damage requires you to invest fairly heavily into Ego or the mutation. If you don't, Sunder Mind will do practically no damage at all and the turns spent in psychic combat will be better spent hitting the enemy some other way. If you do put investment into this mutation and Ego, then you can be practically assured of the death of anything you target.

Syphon Vim

If you build for Syphon Vim, it can be a pretty good source of damage against targets without a mental shield. On top of that, it can also be a way of healing yourself fairly quickly and synergizes extremely well with defensive mutations like Carapace, the gasses and forcefields. If you don't build around this, you're probably never getting it to a point where it's particularly useful since this mutation needs quite a bit of investment in order to be useful. Since it heals you as well as damages the enemy, it can be very useful in cases where you need to simply out-DPS your target since you can sustain through their damage with this and a salve.

Once you use this though it goes on a cripplingly long cooldown, meaning you're only using this once in a combat. Because of this, Syphon Vim is pretty handicapped and not nearly as useful as it could be.

Telepathy

If you're planning on building an army that you micromanage, then maybe this mutation will be a bit helpful for you. For the vast majority of you, you will entirely forget that you have this mutation unless you get glotrot and then you'll be confused why your prices are unaffected. It's a good attention to detail from the devs, but unless you're also Amphibiouss((D) it's not like you're trying to keep glotrot for any period of time at all. I'll mention that you can technically use this to find out where Haggabah is, but you probably won't use this mutation anyways.

Teleport Other

Teleport Other is the panic button Spacetime Vortex tries to be, but is somewhat more successful and costs less. You do have to be in melee for it to work, but that's probably where the dangerous enemy is anyways. Like Spacetime Vortex, without investment you've only got one shot with this but unless the enemy has Mental Mirror you'll always succeed. The downside is that while you are guaranteed to teleport the enemy, there's no guarantee that where they end up is better than where they currently are. In the vast majority of situations, it will work to your benefit. However, there's always a chance they just get sent to your escape route and you remain in largely the same situation as you're currently in.

At high levels, this becomes a non-issue and you can reliably get away from any enemy in the game unless that enemy has Teleportation. While I prefer other defensive mutations like Force Wall, if you don't have the points during character creation this can be a decent one to take.

Teleportation

Teleportation requires investment, as early ranks of Teleportation are practically unusable. It's not until rank 7 or 8 that the uncertainty radius becomes really manageable, but as long as you maintain an explored zone behind you, you can escape from any situation no matter how dire. This puts high rank Teleportation as an even more reliable defensive tool than even the forcefields as Teleportation will get you out of being engulfed, cornered or followed with Teleportation from the enemy. However, the rating here suffers as Teleportation is almost exclusively an escape option and an extremely costly one at that; both in character creation and in mutation point investment required.

Temporal Fugue

Temporal Fugue is an interesting mutation, since as unbelievably powerful it is, you have to be very careful of your inventory to make the most of it. Your fugue clones will have the same inventory as you, and they will use any and all injectors and grenades (and boy does the AI love grenades). The fugue clones also have an incredible love of ranged weapons, so if you own one or have one equipped, you can be all but guaranteed they will spam it at anything and everything.

In addition to your inventory, you also need to be very careful about the mutations that you have since your fugue clones love to spam those as well. In fact, if you slap Temporal Fugue on otherwise very strong builds with no consideration with how the multiple AI clones will use that build, you can actually hinder yourself or even straight up endanger yourself. Of particular note is when the fugue clones overdose on shade oil injectors and spawn anti-clones of yourself which then proceed to kill you.

Despite all these drawbacks and dangers, having even just 2-3 of yourself pop up at the drop of a hat is so unbelievably powerful that it's worth building entirely around this. Temporal Fugue works best with builds that focus on one thing and only do that one thing, especially melee-focused builds. While the cooldown is quite long, Temporal Fugue can be used to devastating effectiveness to take down virtually any enemy with reliability and safety, as long as you plan around it.

Time Dilation

Time Dilation requires you to have a melee build to really use at all. The slowdown falls off so fast outside of melee range that it's not very noticeable at all. Within melee range, it can be used to greatly enhance your 1-on-1 for the 15 turn duration, but unless you're already deadly in melee range you won't get as much out of this. That is to say, unless you're already destroying things in melee, this mutation is not going to suddenly make you competent at it. However, this mutation can give you the edge you need to reliably take out strong enemies in melee.

The fact that the duration cannot be improved really hurts this mutation, but you can severely cripple an enemy's quickness at higher mutation ranks. Against particularly powerful enemies with large health pools, this still may not be enough to kill them and then you still need to survive their onslaught. While a good mutation for sure, it's not the silver bullet that the likes of Temporal Fugue and Sunder Mind are in their niche.