Tinkering

In this section, I'll be primarily talking about the modifications you can make, as in my opinion that is the primary draw of Tinkering. Of course, being able to make artifacts that you may not have is a great addition, but the times you will be doing this are few and far between. Therefore, I'll start by discussing Tinkering in the realm outside of modifications and speak in generalities here.

Artifact Tinkering

If all you have is Tinker I, you can pretty much forget about Tinkering artifacts as most of what you can make is pretty common and quickly outdated. Getting Tinker I for the artifacts you can make is definitely a waste, you much more want it for the artifacts of Tinker II and the mods you can use. Notable in Tinker I however are grenades and most injectors, these are low complexity artifacts you can learn how to make with Psychometry from bananas and are very handy to have. In Tinker II, you start to get access to more attractive artifacts like the portable wall and the geomagnetic disc. Tinker III artifacts get even crazier, but as I mentioned in my skill breakdown isn't really that worth the attribute investment.

Most of the artifact Tinkering you should be doing is one-off builds of rare items that you haven't found, but have found the data disk for (like the geomagnetic disc). However, depending on your playstyle you will also likely want many grenades for their high variety of uses. Injectors less so, and especially because the ingredients are not extremely common but salve injectors are particularly valuable with a common enough ingredient in dreadroot tubers. Even though this will compose most of your Tinkering, there is another use of Tinkering that is less obvious and less talked about: Tinkering for money.

Not all artifacts are worth the same amount per bit; there are some artifacts that are definitely worth more. There is a great post on Reddit by Braekyn that breaks down the most valuable artifacts by bit and tinker skill required for them, so I'll leave you to browse that if you are interested in it. The idea here is you Disassemble everything except for these particular artifacts, and make copies of these artifacts with the bits you have leftover from other artifacts you Disassemble.

Grenade Tinkering

Grenade tinkering is such a huge part of Tinkering in general that if you consider half of Tinkering to be mods, the other half might as well be grenades (leave in an extra 5% for injectors and miscellaneous tools). As such, it deserves its own section. There are two ways to use grenades:

1. Plant them as mines (step trigger) or time-bombs (turn trigger)
2. Throw them

If you're clever and plan things out, you can set up time-bombs in combat but you oftentimes don't gain much from that since equipping a thrown item it completely free to do. More often, you're going to be throwing them, which is also good for you since the useful grenades tend to have a considerable area of effect.

Grenades come in 3 tiers: mk I, mk II and mk III, the only exceptions being the phase shift grenade mk I and the Hand-E-Nuke which is less of a "grenade" and more of a "map deletion" so I won't be generally considering the latter when I talk about grenades. Phase shift grenades are just not good ever really, the phase-conjugate mod does what you need in this grenade but for any grenade. By extension, the mk I grenades are generally just too weak to be worth your time.

Defensive Grenades

The most obviously useful of all the grenades are the EMP grenades. Robots are always a threat until you gain neutral reputation with them, but they are categorically weak to an EMP. Not only are members of the Robots faction weak to EMPs, but robot creatures from other factions like the temple mechas are also vulnerable to EMP. It's always worth keeping several mk II - mk III's on you at any point in time to give you that edge from particularly dangerous robots like the galgal and chrome pyramid. Even early on the mk I's can help you get away from a chaingun turret pinning you down or an early rocket turret giving you trouble.

Flashbang grenades of all tiers are useful not only in being a constant part of the cure for monochrome, but also for the confusion that they inflict. This will notably break Sunder Mind, so it's often useful to have a few flashbangs on hand for just such an occasion.

EMPs only work on robots but if all you need is a getaway, the stasis grenades work perfectly for such a role. If you are suddenly ambushed by a powerful enemy you weren't expecting or a large group, a well-placed stasis grenade can be the difference maker between life and death. Likewise, a sleep or stun gas grenade can turn the tide in your favor against organic creatures. If you have a gas mask or a high-tier fitted with filters modded item, these can be even more useful as you can fight in the gas while your opponents flounder.

Offensive Grenades

Thermal grenades can be rapidly stacked to absolutely incinerate their target. 6-7 mk III thermals can literally disintegrate creatures without heat resistance, and even without being instantly killed being essentially permanently on fire is pretty awful since creatures will spend their turn trying to fight the fire. Freeze grenades being the opposite of this, even mk II grenades are extremely handy for locking down creatures. Not only will frozen creatures not fight back, but they also can't dodge (and twinning lamprey / trining lamprey can't clone). The mk III freeze grenades are so potent that even creatures with relatively high cold resistance will be nearly permanently frozen from 1 or 2 of these; certainly long enough to cut them to pieces. These two grenades naturally pair incredibly well with elemental resistance, particularly that from Carapace as you'll be immune to the effects of the grenades while your opponents are not so lucky.

The above naturally pair with plasma grenades. Again, probably stick to mk II and above (mostly for the duration), but stacking the coated in plasma debuff with the elemental effects of the thermal and freeze grenades is absolutely brutal. As if that isn't enough, tossing a gravity grenade right after a plasma grenade will suck all the gas onto your target, massively increasing the density which increases both the damage dealt and the duration of the debuff. Just be sure you're not in range or you're locked down with anchor spikes or are in a different phase.

The best part about using grenades is you don't need a special build in order to utilize them. You simply need to find 1 copy of the grenade in the wild or its recipe from a tinker, and then with Psychometry (guaranteed temporarily from the meal in the Ezra ovens) you can permanently learn the recipe to the grenades. The bits for their creation are often very cheap, and outside from the time dilation grenade mk III, gravity grenade mk III and plasma grenade mk III all you need is Tinker I. Grenades are the great equalizer between any build you choose and the more powerful residents of Qud, as long as you keep your eye out for them and stay strapped with a few on you at all times.

Modification Tinkering

Mods are, to me, the primary draw of Tinkering. Early on, the effects of mods will not be very drastic, but most mods will scale with the quality of item they are modifying so don't give up on them! I'll be going over the mods you can apply, breaking them down by the tinker skill required and covering the gear that they can go on. Something to note about all mods: an item can only have up to 3 mods on it at a time, so you have to pick and choose!

Tinker I

Lacquered

Lacquered causes any item it is applied on to be unable to be rusted and unable to be stained by any liquid. Normally, being stained with liquid doesn't do anything special but particular liquids like acid and lava will destroy items stained with it. lacquered items therefore can be pretty good on foot gear since this is usually the main gear that gets stained with such liquids. Anything else is pretty unnecessary; very few things cause rust or are otherwise negatively affected by liquids. You can do some funny things with a full set of lacquered gear like swim in lava, but not really anything practical.

Slender

Slender halves the weight of an item. This is useful if you plan on selling the item for money (especially since it increases its value) and is also useful for backpacks since it's one of the few modifications that can be applied to it. Otherwise, there are better mods to put on an item and is just literally outclassed by willowy.

Willowy

Speaking of willowy, it will quarter the weight of an item. Useful for the same things as slender, just… more so. Slender and willowy do stack, so it's useful for things like recoilers and backpacks that don't have many other worthwhile mods or for items you are just planning on selling.

Sturdy

Normally, sturdy isn't worth that much as items don't break or become damaged enough for it to really warrant a modification slot. There is an exception to this, and that is with gear modded to be overloaded. I'll talk more about that mod in its own dedicated section, but overloaded will commonly cause artifacts to break. If they're modded to be sturdy, that will no longer happen. So, if you're not planning on Overloading your gear, you can safely give this one a miss.

Drum-Loaded

Drum-loaded will increase the capacity of the weapon before it needs to reload by 20% or by 1, whichever is higher. For these weapons, this is actually pretty decent as there are not a ton of mods that these weapon types really thirst for. Unless you're planning on modifying your gun with phase-harmonic / phase-conjugate, this is a good pick.

Liquid-Cooled

This mod will use water to increase the number of shots the weapon fires per attack in exchange of occasionally consuming water to do so. Only one of these weapons, the chain laser, does not use ammunition so this also increases the frequency you need to reload. While this will certainly increase your DPS, you're probably better off with mods that don't require so much investment like masterwork and scoped. If you're hurting for DPS on an eligible weapon, this can be decent but otherwise, use something else.

Scoped

Scoped is a great modification since making yourself more accurate means your DPS will increase and you use less ammunition. This is a must-have mod for virtually any ranged weapon you have, although low-accuracy weapons will not be saved by this mod. Most weapons you will find yourself relying on will have high enough accuracy for this, but if you have particularly low accuracy weapons like explosives and bullet-based Pistols, you should probably try something else.

Counterweighted

Counterweighted will add a to-hit bonus depending on the tier of the weapon: crysteel+ nets a +3 bonus, carbide+ nets a +2 bonus, and anything lower nets a +1 bonus. For the majority of weapons, this is not great but on Cudgels there are already not many good modifications so you may as well take this. This also has some niche use on Long Blades as it will negate the downsides of Aggressive Stance and allow you to solely benefit from the increased penetration which can actually be incredibly good as long as you don't need the DV from Defensive Stance.

Electrified

Electrified is the highest damage mod of all 3 elemental damage mods and like those will scale with the quality of the weapon. On top of electrified just giving the highest raw damage bonus of all the elemental damage mods, it also benefits from electric damage being the least resisted of the 3. On top of electric damage having these benefits, it also benefits from Robots being weak to electric damage, with Robots making up some of the most dangerous enemies in the game. This makes electric damage extremely powerful and very worthwhile. However, the downside is that electric damage can arc to multiple creatures. Against mobs of enemies, this is good. When the mob is on your side, this can be quite annoying as you will constantly piss off your allies and have them attack you. A powerful mod for sure, but be careful with it.

Flaming

Flaming deals slightly less damage than electrified, and while fire damage is quite commonly resisted there are in fact ways to increase your fire damage through thermo casks and high-energy thermo casks. Flaming will also cause your weapon to increase the temperature of the enemy and while this probably won't be enough to ignite most enemies, when you attack multiple times via sources like Multiweapon Fighting, you can definitely start to light your foes on fire with your attacks reliably. Flaming also does not suffer from the same downside of chaining to allies, so if you plan on making friends this may be the better option for you.

Freezing

Freezing will do the same amount of damage as flaming, but unfortunately the change in temperature is quite bad and will rarely if ever be enough to actually freeze enemies. Since thermo casks and high-energy thermo casks increase both fire and cold damage, wearing one and modifying your weapons to be both flaming and freezing can deal considerable elemental damage. This can be particularly effective for weapons like Cudgels and Short Blades that don't deal much damage per hit in the first place.

Serrated

Serrated gives your weapon a 3% chance to Dismember on a hit. This stacks with the chance to Dismember with an Axe from the Dismember skill and can even Decapitate. On Long Blades, the chance is simply too small to really be worth it unless you can wear multiple pairs of precision nanon fingers. Particularly interesting about this mod, the Dismember chance is an on-hit effect instead of an on-penetrate effect, so it can be quite good. Like I mentioned, you really want precision nanon fingers to really make use of this mod on anything but an Axe, but if you have that you can easily reduce your opponent to a pile of limbs.

Sharp

Poor Cudgels getting the short end of the stick for this mod, because this is easily one of the best mods you can possibly have on a melee weapon. Increasing your PV by 1 is incredible and the primary difference between the damage of a 1-handed weapon and a 2-handed weapon. Always put this on unless you have a Cudgel or are doing something specific with your build otherwise.

Airfoil

Thrown weapons are definitely underdeveloped and hardly used; there's not many good mods in general for these so increasing the throw range with this mod is pretty good. If you're throwing something, it's probably a grenade anyway so this can be expensive to tinker on your grenades but can be worth it on a few to get really long range tosses in. You could also use this on all of Jotun's throwing axes and get some pretty ridiculous range on them which may be what you want if you're not a big fan of ranged weapons or are using a relic ranged weapon for its bonuses.

Masterwork

Masterwork is an all-purpose mod that is always good on anything it's on. Critical hits mean an automatic, free penetration on top of any normal penetrations and other bonuses for melee weapons. Raising the chance of these from 5% to 10% is just fantastic, and with precision nanon fingers this chance raises to 20% or 30% with two pairs (which is just nuts). On Pistols, you can stack Weak Spotter on top of all this for a total chance of 35% for a crit or 25% with just one pair of precision nanon fingers. Unfortunately, critical chance bonuses stack additively instead of multiplicatively, but this is still quite good. Like sharp, unless you have something very specific you are building for, slap masterwork on everything you can.

Feathered

Note here I say "equipped" and not "wielded", since anything in the game can be wielded. Feathered gives you 250 Bird reputation, which is pretty garbage. You start off neutral to Birds and they're all not threatening at all. Don't bother.

Scaled

Scaled gives 250 Unshelled Reptile reputation, which can actually be quite good. A single scaled item will give you enough reputation to be neutral with Unshelled Reptiles, and since you're likely to have at least one item with open modification slots (especially on bracelets), this can be very useful and allow you to otherwise dump Unshelled Reptile reputation and still be neutral with them. Don't put it on something like a helmet, but you're going to have space for this one for sure.

Wooly

Wooly gives you bonus cold and fire resistance depending on the type of gear it's on. If it's on body armor, it gives 10 cold and fire resistance. On anything else, it gives 5. Since it can be applied to virtually any gear, this is a mainstay for all your gear except where you have slot-specific mods that have better effects (like helmet's visored mod).

Fitted with Filters

Note here that helmets refer to headwear with an armor bonus except for plastifer. Fitted with filters gives you a resistance to gas effects that improves with the tier of the gear it's placed on. This gas resistance stacks with the gas mask and other equipment modded with fitted with filters. This is always good to have, since it's one of the very best mask and helmet mods out there. Since there are more helmet mods you'll want compared to mask mods, you'll probably mod your mask more often than your helmet (or both, depending on where you are in the game). If you only have a helmet (since late-game masks are usually worse than late-game eyewear), then this is an easy choice on your helmet.

Lanterned

This will cause your helmet to be a light source, similar to the miner's helmet. The light radius grows with the tier of the helmet it is on. The powered exoskeleton certainly has better mods, and helmets do as well. Not worth it typically, especially with the quantum mote being one of the best things you can equip in your floating nearby slot that also offers light. However, if you're before this point or really want to use something other than the quantum mote in your floating nearby slot, this can be a decent mod.

Visored

This gives you a +1 to DV. That's about all that needs to be said, this is a fantastic mod to take, put in on everything you can.

Padded

Padded gives you a 10% chance to just outright stop you from being dazed / stunned. If you have the Shake It Off skill, you now have double that chance to stop being dazed / stunned if you are currently dazed / stunned. This is great to have, since being permanently stunned is a really easy way for even powerful builds to die. Helmets are pretty hungry for mods in general, but this gives fantastic survivability.

Two-Faced

This will allow you to have two face slots, which can be really quite good as face slot items are more about the utility effects that they give instead of the DV or AV bonuses. Definitely a solid pick if you have multiple face slot items to use that give more than stats; otherwise this will just make these items worse. Particularly useful in the late-game with items like the VISAGE and the night-sight interpolators and other strong face slot items.

Terrifying Visage

This will reduce the cost of Berate, Intimidate, and Menacing Stare by a measly 10 rounds. Obviously, if you don't use any of those this is useless. Since most builds will not use those abilities, this is a bad mod to take. Even if you do use those abilities, headgear with this mod will also take up the face slot, making this even worse than it already is. This mod definitely needs a rework, it's just not worth the cost. This mod does turn the headgear into a mask as well, so it becomes eligible for fitted with filters.

Serene Visage

Serene visage reduces the cooldown of Meditate and gives 1 Willpower. The Willpower is pretty nice, but if you've looked at Meditate recently you'd know it doesn't have a cooldown, so I'm not sure what the point of the first effect is. Like terrifying visage, modding an item with this causes it to also take up the face slot and become eligible for the fitted with filters mod. If you have a helmet, give this a pass. If you really want the Willpower, I suppose you can go for it but it's usually better to just wear a mask for the DV or AV and mod that with fitted with filters.

Nav

Nav items, when powered, will give you a bonus to overworld travel speed, lower your chance to be lost and cause you to find more points of interest with bonuses that improve with the quality of the eyewear. There's much better mods to put on the powered exoskeleton, but for eyewear this is an easy choice. These bonuses will stack with other effects, but not with other nav modded items.

Polarized

This will reduce the duration of the confused effect of flashbang grenades with an efficiency affected by the tier of the eyewear. These aren't particularly common, but there's not much better to slap on eyewear so why not. Powered exoskeleton has much better mods though.

Flexiweaved

Flexiweaved reduced the DV penalty of the armor by an amount based on the tier of the armor. Early on, this reduction is not particularly significant and you'll probably want to give this a miss. If you don't care at all about your DV, I suppose you can always ignore this one but eventually you should want to raise your DV as it will simply make you more survivable. Note that this will only reduce the penalty, it will not make the armor give DV. This is definitely a good mod to have once you get to the crysteel tiers and also on the quartzfur cloak.

Recycling

Recycling will cause your armor to generate 1 dram every 10,000 turns. For reference, a day lasts about 1,200 turns and you drink a dram of water (baseline) about once every 500 turns. I mean, this is free water but body armor and powered exoskeleton in particular have much better mods for us to use. It's just too little water gained too infrequently.

Reinforced

Reinforced raises the AV by 1 of anything modded with it. This is easily the best mod to have on anything you can apply it on, nothing more needs to be said.

Fitted with Cleats

Due to the low amount of mods that can go on footgear, this is a good one to have. Just makes you harder to knock down and becomes better with higher tier items. The powered exoskeleton has better mods to put on it, but you might as well put it on your footgear.

Spring-Loaded

Regardless of tier, this will give bonus movespeed but the amount is random. This amount is decided when the modding happens and can be re-rolled with Precognition, but for us plebeians that live in the present we'll have to try again with other gear. We can get anywhere from 5-10 bonus movespeed, so keep trying until you max out.

Gesticulating

This gives you +2 Strength at the cost of a single floating nearby slot. Early game, this just isn't worth it since you only have one of those. Even late game it may not be worth it when you get a second floating nearby slot since you can float weapons or other equipment for bonuses that are probably going to be better than +2 Strength at that point in the game. However, if you have a lanterned helmet without a quantum mote or otherwise have nothing better to put in the floating nearby slot, this is worth it.

Six-Fingered

This gives you +1 Agility with no downsides. It's a pretty easy take, especially since there's not much else you'd want on your handgear anyways. Since it doesn't have the downside of gesticulating, this should be on every pair of handgear you have.

Spiked

Note that gauntlets refer to handgear with the word "gauntlet" in its name. On gauntlets, unarmed attacks deal 1d3 damage and cause a bleed with a save that increases in difficulty based on the tier of the gauntlet. On Shields, attacks deal 1d2 damage and cause a bleed with a save that increases in difficulty based on the AV of the Shield. It will also cause Shield Slam to deal more damage based on your Strength modifier and cause the bleed. On gauntlets, you'll probably always put on wooly and six-fingered, so you're competing really just with willowy, scaled, lacquered and maybe gesticulating. You're probably not ever doing unarmed attacks, so go with one of the above. On Shields however, you get great value from this mod so you should always mod your Shields to be spiked.

High-Capacity

Note that energy cells do not include those fueled by liquid like combustion cells. This will increase the capacity of the energy cell you put it on based on the tier of the energy cell. Since there's only 3 energy cell mods, you should mod your cells with this if the cell can charge itself. Note that modding your cell to be high-capacity will not charge it, so you'll have to charge it some other way.

Metered

Metered allows you to see the percentage of charge remaining in the cell. If you have tech scanning, this does nothing extra. Even though it's not competing for anything, don't waste the bits on this; seeing the precise readout of percentage is not particularly useful in the overwhelming majority of cases.

Tinker II

Electromagnetically-Shielded

Electromagnetically-shielded removes the EMP vulnerability of the artifact. EMP is not very common, so you'll probably only mod this on artifacts that have open mod slots for the off-chance that you do get hit with an EMP. Alternatively, if you decide you want to spam EMP grenades yourself against creatures like Robots, it may be beneficial to mod select gear to be electromagnetically-shielded so you are not likewise disabled by the EMP grenades you toss. In particular, the geomagnetic disc highly benefits from this mod as there are not many mods that otherwise benefit it.

Jacked

Jacked allows the artifact, while equipped, to make use of the onboard power systems on the creature equipping it. If this sounds like something you've never heard of, that's because it's very uncommon to have. Unless you are a Robot, there are 2 ways for you to have an onboard power system: the Electrical Generation mutation or the biodynamic power plant cybernetic implant. If you have one of these, a jacked item will have virtually unlimited charge except for the most charge-guzzling items like the phase cannon.

Particularly good jacked candidates:

• Energy weapons
• Force bracelets
• Hologram bracelets / tri--hologram bracelets
• Geomagnetic disc
• Precision nanon fingers
• Night-sight interpolators.

Of course, if you don't have an onboard power system this is always going to be a pass.

Note that this mod becomes less useful in the endgame when you can get biodynamic cells and radio-powered nuclear cells / antimatter cells that essentially solve all your energy needs. Also note that you don't always need to tinker this mod to get it; all ranged weapons disarmed from turrets come with the jacked mod.

Overloaded

While not every powered item can benefit from overloaded, a considerable number of them do benefit. The increase in power varies wildly depending on the item, so instead I'll talk about the general downsides and about standout application of the mod. An overloaded item will randomly break when used with a chance dependent on the amount of charge drawn from the use. Overloaded items also draw more charge and heat up the item on each use. This allows overloaded items to naturally synergize with jacked for the rechargeable power source and sturdy to prevent the item from breaking. This will not cause the item to stop heating, and sturdy will not prevent the item from being destroyed by this heat. Therefore, this combination is risky to use on items that constantly draw lots of charge and greatly heat up since you can destroy your item.

Items that particularly benefit from being overloaded are:

• high-voltage arc winders
• geomagnetic disc
• gas tumbler
• precision nanon fingers
• ulnar stimulators
• night-sight interpolators

Note that for these you'll also want them to be sturdy.

Fitted with Beamsplitter

This mod will cause the weapon to fire 3 shots instead of 1 while reducing the PV by 1. For the overwhelming majority of scenarios, this is actually not good at all because you're probably not hitting anything else near your target and you risk hitting your own allies and making them very angry with you. On top of this, you're going to do less damage with your shots. Unless you plan on firing in melee range at all times with this weapon, this is a pretty counterproductive mod.

It is notably effective with the high-voltage arc winder as that weapon doesn't use PV anyway, and especially against large groups of creatures this can be a helpful mod to have. Additionally, putting this on the space inverter will clone the player temporarily when fired.

Phase-Harmonic

This causes your grenades to explode in omniphase and your bullets to be omniphase, which means that they will affect both in and out-of-phase objects. Normally, this is pretty worthless. After all, there's only one enemy that you'll normally encounter that is out-of-phase and that's the astral tabby. There's the phase spider too, but that's pretty rare. Even with this, I still like to mod my weapons to be phase-harmonic just because of how annoying astral tabbies are unless I have neutral Cat reputation. However, if you have the Phasing mutation, this becomes an obscene improvement as you can phase yourself and rain death from perfect safety. With high-tier Phasing and high Willpower, you can permanently keep yourself phased in which case you become nigh untouchable and can still kill anything you wish. It's niche, but can be very good.

Displacer

When powered, any attack that hits from this weapon will teleport the target 1-4 tiles away. If you play a ranged build that wants to keep enemies away from you, this can be a good mod (if you can keep up with the power drain). However, those 1-4 tiles can also be towards you, so this doesn't always have the effect you desire. Because of that, it's probably not worth the mod slot because of its unreliability.

Nulling

Nulling will have a different effect depending on whether it's applied to a weapon or on armor. On weapons, nulling will use charge in order to cause the target to be affected by normality on a hit. On armor, nulling will use charge to astrally burden the wielder. So on one hand, we can inflict normality on others or have it perpetually inflicted on ourselves. Personally, I'm not a big fan of the ontological anchor even in general, so the armor effect has never stood out to me. The problem with being astrally burdened is more often than not it will negatively affect you rather than aide you, but there are some instances where it can be nice like to pass through force fields and resisting spacetime vortexes, but if you really want that you're probably better off just equipping an ontological anchor anyways. Normality likewise is not that effective against other enemies, so inflicting normality on enemies with a weapon has very few uses. Similarly, you're far better off just Tinkering normality grenades and using these should you need to inflict normality on an enemy.

If your own Esper abilities don't rely significantly on normality, if you have high glimmer it could be a good idea to use this mod on your gear to aide in killing other Espers as you'll be resistant or able to dissipate most of their abilities (Temporal Fugue clones, vortexes, force fields, etc) but some of the more threatening abilities like Sunder Mind and Confusion are not reality distorting and therefore cannot be resisted.

Phase-Conjugate

This is a nifty mod that will switch the phase of the grenade as it explodes, meaning it will never affect the same phase as you. Unless you have Phasing, this is not particularly useful as very few creatures can even exit the normal phase as I mentioned with phase-harmonic. Where this mod differs is that any grenade with this mod is always safe for you to use regardless of where you throw it. This makes it ideal for the most destructive of grenades and especially ideal for the Hand-E-Nuke; as long as you have a way to shift out-of-phase in order to use it on normal creatures. If you don't have a reliable way to phase, this is pretty useless unless you want to take it to throw explosives at astral tabbies.

Co-Processor

Before I explain this one, just know that this mod is rather complicated and not worth the effort. All good? Alright.

The first thing this does is it will provide extra Intelligence: 1 for tier 1-4 armor, 2 for tier 5-8 armor. Bonus Intelligence will allow you to gain more skill points on leveling up, but if you take it off you'll be penalized for your bonus during the next level up. The bonus Intelligence also helps you identify artifacts and spot hidden enemies.

The second thing this does is it will add compute power to the local lattice. What this means in English is that your items that benefit from compute power will be improved. The amount of compute power given increases with the tier of the weapon. So… what the heck does compute power do? Here's the short of it: if you're not a true kin, it's pretty useless but not completely useless. Here's the long of it. There are 4 artifacts that benefit from compute power: point-defense drone (ok), ganglionic teleprojector (not great), precinct navigator (ok), and blood-gradient hand vacuum (not great). If you're using compute power for these, it shouldn't be your main set of gear since none of these get great benefits from compute power in combat scenarios except the point-defense drone, and it's already good enough that it doesn't really need it. Compute power will also improve 3 mods: nulling (bad), morphogenetic (ok) and nav (ok). Similar to the artifacts above, you'll probably want a secondary set of gear for your compute power to boost your nav items; the other two are probably just not worth it. Morphogenetic definitely wants some compute power though, so if you really want to use this mod then getting some compute power will help. The rest of what compute power affects are cybernetics, so here we go.

Most of the cybernetics that this improves are either fairly rare or not great, so I'll list some of the better cybernetics that benefit from compute power: high-fidelity matter recompositer, all cathedras, penetrating radar, inflatable axons and stasis projector. These are already great cybernetics so some improvement is pretty nice, and inflatable axons and penetrating radar are both cybernetics you can probably build around. The issue is that often times the marginal gain in efficacy from this mod is not worth what you give up. All this to say: headwear has some of the best mods, and this is not one of them. It's cute as a backup build when you're looking for points of interest on the world map, but is otherwise not worth the effort.

Refractive

Refractive adds a chance to refract light-based attacks from you depending on what piece of gear it is applied to. Body / back slot items add 40%, hand shields add 30%, accessories add 20% and bucklers / other items add 10%. Note the keyword here is refract light, not reflect. This means it simply bends the light attack away from you and doesn't necessarily return to sender. It won't hurt you now, but it won't necessarily hurt the attacker either. It's cool, but not necessarily that worthwhile due to the low amount of creatures that would use light-based attacks in the first place. Notable here, however, is that the mutating gaze of a gamma moth is not considered a light-based attack and cannot be refracted, so don't expect this to save you.

Radio-Powered

Every cell you have should be modified to be radio-powered; this is a fantastic way to charge your normal energy cells. The mechanics behind radio-powered are actually somewhat complex, but what you need to know is that most of the time, Radio-powered cells regain charge while you're close to the surface, making this a free way of replenishing your cells with larger capacity like nuclear cells and antimatter cells. It gives virtually unlimited charge to your artifacts; especially those that have constant but slow energy drain.

Tinker III

Fitted with Suspenders

While powered, any item with this mod becomes weightless. Interestingly, it does not need to be equipped for it to be weightless. In order to keep these things powered, you definitely want to have self-charging cells slotted in like radio-powered cells. This is, to be sure, an extreme version of willowy and slender. Since this requires charge, it's probably not worth the effort (and certainly the Tinkering skill) in order to tinker this onto virtually anything. The only exception to this is the swarm rack which you can then also magnetize and wield in a floating nearby slot. If you've got the cells lying around and you've got super heavy equipment, then go ahead but all in all, probably not worth it.

Nanon

Nanon will add a chance to Dismember affected by a little randomness and the tier of the weapon. Each tier has 2 percentage chances and which you get is random. At max weapon tier and max percentage roll, this gets you to a 9% Dismember chance. However, more reliable energy weapons will net a 6-7% maximum Dismember chance (light rail, eigenrifle, chain laser) and this chance is raised by 2% when overloaded. We can boost this chance through precision nanon fingers; if we overload and nanon mod a light rail and wear 2 pairs of precision nanon fingers we can reach a 37% chance to Dismember from a range. It does unfortunately require the shot to penetrate, but with the chance to Dismember legs this can easily reduce the enemy to a pile of limbs before it can reach us. Certainly a good mod if you can reach it, but will be difficult to do so due to it being locked behind Tinker III.

Morphogenetic

When you deal damage with a morphogenetic weapon to a creature, all other creatures of the same race must make a Willpower save or be dazed for 2-3 rounds. With high quickness, you can easily get two dazes in on creatures before they recover from the first which will upgrade that daze to a stun. The save is actually pretty easy to make if you have a weapon that does low damage, so ideally you use this on a weapon that deals high damage (>15). Particularly noteworthy is the geomagnetic disc and it bounces when striking, resulting in multiple attacks per turn. This causes a morphogenetic save for each bounce and since the disc can never miss or not deal damage, it can very easily keep a crowd of enemies stunlocked. To be clear, this is a mod designed for crowd control but by the time you gain access to this mod, swarming enemies are simply not very threatening anymore. Historic sites are one of the only places where you encounter large groups of creatures of the same race, so outside of these it may be difficult to find extensive use of this mod. However, in scenarios where the mod is any good, it's extremely good as it will allow you that breathing room to take on a single enemy at a time.

Additionally, morphogenetic benefits heavily from compute power as it will increase the difficulty of the save. With high (>30) compute power, your enemies will reliably fail the save to resist the daze and with setups like the geomagnetic disk or Multiweapon Fighting builds you can reliably keep all enemies of the same race away from you.

A-F-F-I-N-E's Favorites

There's a lot of mods here, so you may be overwhelmed with decisions. Most of these mods honestly I don't use unless I have something very specific in mind. So, which mods do I pick for my gear? In case you're interested here they are. I'll separate this into mods I always take and mods that are flexible to put in those last slot(s) depending on my build and progress in the game. Virtually any weapon mod is workable, so I won't be covering mods for those since they vary heavily from build to build.

Note that these are not necessarily "the best" or what I would say everyone should pick, these are simply the ones that fit best with my style and I like to use.

Helmets

Always: Visored, Fitted with filters
Flex: Padded, Lanterned, Wooly, Two-faced

Headgear (non-helmets)

Always: Wooly, Scaled
Flex: Co-processor, Refractive, Lanterned

Eyewear

Always: Nav, Polarized
Flex: Scaled, Willowy, Overloaded, Sturdy

Body Armor

Always: Reinforced
Flex: Flexiweaved, Wooly, Refractive, Scaled

Back Gear (non-powered exoskeleton)

Always: Wooly, Scaled
Flex: Refractive, Slender, Willowy

Powered Exoskeleton

Always: Reinforced, Visored, Flexiweaved
Flex: Overloaded, Sturdy, Spring-loaded, Electromagnetically-shielded

Handgear

Always: Six-fingered, Wooly
Flex: Overloaded, Sturdy, Scaled, Willowy

Footgear

Always: Spring-loaded, Fitted with cleats
Flex: Wooly, Scaled

Shields

Always: Spiked, Refractive
Flex: Scaled, Willowy