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[blazing glory]

Because the Gearhead roguelike is rather obscure on some points of the game and there is no wiki,I have decided to make a questions thread!.


I'll start with my question,what do you need to make a robot using the robotics skill?

[gimlet]

Going thru archive.org using the chaosforge address for the wiki still gives access to the original Robotics guide: https://web.archive.org/web/20070616043914/http://gearhead.chaosforge.org/wiki/index.php?title=Guides:Robotics

[Bouchart]

Robots need general supplies or mecha repair supplies.  The best to use seems to be mecha welding kits.

Robots can be built with up to ten items.  Items include weapons, armor, targeting computers, sensors, and the general/mecha repair items.

I like to use 8 mecha welding kits, a level 10 targeting computer and a level 10 sensor for my robots.  I don't know what's optimal, but I can build a sentient robot using those parts and a robotics skill of over 10.  The sentient robot ends up with stats of 25+.

Robotics is a hard skill to train, though.  Prepare to spend a lot of cash to pull that off.

[blazing glory]

Going thru archive.org using the chaosforge address for the wiki still gives access to the original Robotics guide: https://web.archive.org/web/20070616043914/http://gearhead.chaosforge.org/wiki/index.php?title=Guides:Robotics

webpage not avalible

Robots need general supplies or mecha repair supplies.  The best to use seems to be mecha welding kits.

Robots can be built with up to ten items.  Items include weapons, armor, targeting computers, sensors, and the general/mecha repair items.

I like to use 8 mecha welding kits, a level 10 targeting computer and a level 10 sensor for my robots.  I don't know what's optimal, but I can build a sentient robot using those parts and a robotics skill of over 10.  The sentient robot ends up with stats of 25+.

Robotics is a hard skill to train, though.  Prepare to spend a lot of cash to pull that off.

Mecha targeting computer and sensors?

[Blaze]

Robots can be made from anything if you have the skill for it. One guy made a robot made entirely out of glue.

Otherwise, when picking ingredients, you'll want:
Repair fuel: For general points, Mech Welding sets are probably the best for this.
A piece of armor: For vitality, higher DC is better. Weight doesn't seem to matter. Only the best piece matters. Shields don't count.
A comm system like a netphone or micro pc: For higher intelligence.
A sensor: for higher perception.

Weapons use a different system, if you choose to install a weapon, you roll for a chance for it to be installed. If you succeed, it replaces a limb. However, installing a weapon means your robot suffers a bit in terms of general stats. Don't use thrown weapons or else they'll lose them once they're used. Installed add-ons won't be added to an internal weapon no matter what.

You can pick up to 10 items.

So I'd say the best items for a general robot are:
7 X Mech Welding Sets.
1 X Androbot Armor
1 X MicroPC
1 X High level sensor

Be sure to have lots of mental points when making a robot, as the game will use extra MP at times.

[gimlet]

Odd, archive.org works fine for me.  Oh well, I copied it to pastebin: http://pastebin.com/e92Z8Cc4

According to that (and I remember this to be true or pretty close to true) the ideal robot is:
Ideal robot ingredient list
 5 mecha welding sets + 1 mecha repair kit. This is the maximum useful amount of build points. (3 welding sets is only one skill point bonus less, though)
 1 high-AC piece of armor (not a shield). (Vitality skill = Part^.V of armor = AC/3. Heavy Mesh Suit = 7.)
 1 class 10 sensor (perception bonus = class/2 ) After sentience check, though
 1 MicroPC (knowledge bonus = class/2 (so +2 from a micro PC).
 0 or 1 weapon, depending on preference.

[blazing glory]

Odd, archive.org works fine for me.  Oh well, I copied it to pastebin: http://pastebin.com/e92Z8Cc4

According to that (and I remember this to be true or pretty close to true) the ideal robot is:
Ideal robot ingredient list
 5 mecha welding sets + 1 mecha repair kit. This is the maximum useful amount of build points. (3 welding sets is only one skill point bonus less, though)
 1 high-AC piece of armor (not a shield). (Vitality skill = Part^.V of armor = AC/3. Heavy Mesh Suit = 7.)
 1 class 10 sensor (perception bonus = class/2 ) After sentience check, though
 1 MicroPC (knowledge bonus = class/2 (so +2 from a micro PC).
 0 or 1 weapon, depending on preference.

works now

[Frumple]

Quoting from the other thread to help consolidate things in here...

Unless you 'die' then you are unhappy once again

The easy way to "fix" death unhappiness is one of the northern towns, I think the one kinda' in the middle of the map, near the mountains. Forget what it's called, obviously. In it, is a masseuse (... or a hotspring. Possibly both. Something along those lines.) who you can pay for services. Said services are a massive happiness boost -- it only takes one or two goes to go from full red to full green -- which can then be maintained by conversation and deluxe rations quite easily. Maintaining perpetual stat boost from happiness is quite simple once you've got the cash to stop by regularly, heh. Which doesn't take too much... it's not very expensive.

S'also a very good place to swing by after a long sewer mission, since your morale will be tanked before you're done racking in those millions.

[Bouchart]

If you have a melancholy personalty, you can get the Badass trait, which makes you a better fighter as your morale falls.  Then you don't have to bother with happiness increasing stuff.

[Frumple]

... unless you want to do stuff beyond fighting, anyway. And even then, I don't recall how much the trait (which, y'know, you could be taking some other trait instead...) actually offsets the bad mood penalties, or how. Hopefully enough to make a net gain, but how much so...

I preferred to just sink some cash into happiness maintenance. Once you've got a few dozen deluxe rations shoved into your mech's inventory it's not really an issue anymore, and you're chatting everyone up anyway to make things cheaper so it's pretty easy to keep running even beyond the food. Universal bonus, much smaller cost than a trait investment, makes character interaction better, too, even beyond the stat boost. Going Badass and bad mood is fun for roleplaying, but kinda' iffy otherwise.

[Bouchart]

The penalty for a bad mood is what, -1 to all stats?  It's not much of a deal except for those times when you need to use some uncommon and hard to use skill like robotics.

[Seriyu]

I suppose I'll throw in stuff too!

First town, look around on the outskirts until you find an old phone (Press shift+t to call any NPC in your local area, easy way to talk to people that are just barely too fast for you to catch up with), and a small building, at the bottom of the building is a free robot. You can also get a free robot from the mech arena, but you'll need some skill that you should probably be getting anyway, with the possible exception of mecha artillery (if I recall most mecha artillery is pretty bad? I may be wrong), more robot is more good!

getting items from corpses (ie: ,) will get you some small amount of cash, even from wild animals, no reason not to do it!

[gimlet]

OH!  Big tip if you play in ascii mode and want to see more of the map at once:

Add something like
SCREENHEIGHT 80
SCREENWIDTH 133
to the gearhead.cfg file

Start up your dos prompt - usually cmd.exe, type in
MODE CON:  cols=133 lines=80

then start gearhead from the command prompt, BAM nice big map...

EDIT:   Ahh, with cmd.exe instead of typing the MODE stuff, you can also change the window size from the upper left box on the window properties->layout->window size & tick "current window only" unless you want all your cmd windows to be hugeass.

[Frumple]

Iirc, mecha artillery ends up being useful if only because of nukes in the late game. Don't exactly need a huge amount due to the whole gigantic AoE thing (AoE and SCATTER damage has a massive bonus to hit), but...

[Bouchart]

All the mecha skills are useful, with the possible exception of Mecha Fighting, because that just covers unarmed attacks.  Early to mid game when money is tight, you don't always get the choice of what weapons or mecha to use.

But the most useful early mecha is the Novastorm Buruburu.  Storm pistols are deceptively powerful.