Abiotic Factor (Video Game)

"So, ready for your first day?"

Abiotic Factor is a Survival Horror Survival Sandbox game developed by Deep Field Games (who had previously made Unfortunate Spacemen, as well as being formed from the remnants of the failed studio which made The Dead Linger). The game was released in Early Access in 2024 and released in full as Abiotic Factor 1.0 in July 2025.

Located in the GATE Cascade Research Facility, your Player Character, a scientist that was just transferred to the facility, arrives to find out that it has been inundated with alien monsters and that their way out has been cut completely. Using your scientific smarts, you will have to not only find your way out of the facility, but also survive using the resources found in the massive underground laboratory.

Proudly inspired by Half-Life (with a fair share of influence from SCP – Containment Breach), the concept could be described as 'Half-Life, but you're NOT Gordon Freeman' (or alternatively, you're Gordon Freeman without the HEV suit). It will take a long time for you to find your way out of the facility - so you must eat, drink, rest, and find safe shelters in a hostile environment, as well as scavenging any materials you can find to make new inventions.

Check out their official website here.

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The '90s: The game takes place on March 1993, which can be seen in small details such as the absence of cell phones and emails making references to the likes of "Macho Man" Randy Savage and Nirvana.
Absurdly High Cap: Each skill maxes out at 91655 experience but it's easily possible to play through the entire game and not max even one. Some skills such as Agriculture and Construction can be maxed out much faster due to their generous and repeatable experience point sources, but certain other skills are extremely unlikely to be maxed out such as Fortitude (which requires taking or blocking damage that would kill a scientist several hundred times over at least) without dedicated Level Grinding, which is why experience boosters (which are also multiplicative with each other rather than additive) such as the Wrinkly Brainmeat trait are considered very useful.
Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
- The capacity of water containers is grossly undersized. Water coolers, which usually hold about 19 liters of water in real life, hold just under five liters here. Huge oil drums that normally hold several hundred liters of liquid can only hold ten liters. An entire sink holds a MERE 250 MILLILITERS. Meanwhile, your player can do a full-body wash with the same amount of water - 250 mL (half that with the R.A.I.N. Shower). These unrealistic numbers make water management easier and more balanced.
- The only way to get water from sinks is to fill them yourselves from other containers or wait for them to refill on their own - apparently, it never occurs to your player character to simply turn on the sink to get an endless supply of clean water. Given the emphasis on using the restroom in this game, getting water from the sink would make things a bit too easy.
- Iodine pills are the game's first and most common way for players to heal themselves from radiation exposure, but actual potassium iodide pills are only effective against radioactive forms of iodine. Given the nature of the anteverses and the sludge found in Manufacturing and Reactors, it's highly unlikely that all radiation encountered through the game originates from iodine, but the game would be a lot more complicated if the player were forced to seek specialized radiation treatments based on what made them fall ill to begin with.
- The power outlets in the game have built-in cords with plugs that plug into your devices, rather than the other way around as is usual in real life. This makes it easier to manage your cables and justify why all the cables are the same length - because the outlets are probably standardized, unlike your devices.
- Despite being based on the Glock 17 and chambered in 9mm, the Security Pistol only has eight rounds in its magazine, even though its inspiration has the correct magazine size. Considering the game is mostly centered around melee, and the fact that the pistol is probably the first ranged weapon the player obtains, it's somewhat understandable that it would be nerfed to dissuade the player from feeling too powerful.
- Antejuice replenishes double the thirst for a given volume than water does. This essentially means that antejuice somehow contains twice as much water as pure 100% water. This allows antejuice to act as a rarer, more-effective equivalent to water for managing thirst (and also is used for apiculture).
- The Energy Pistol fires beams strong enough to inflict lethal damage and has incredible range. It can be powered via hand crank. This ensures that it'll never run out of power, giving you just enough time to charge up another shot to fend off the Reaper if you're caught in a pinch.
- Marion somehow has IS-0052 and IS-0099 (the Gravity Dampener and Antique Shotgun, respectively) on hand to trade with you even though they're supposedly one-of-a-kind. This allows multiplayer servers to provide everyone with one, or perhaps replace one if you lose it somehow.
- Although most hand-held devices such as the vacuum and flashlight require electrical charge as in real life, construction tools such as the hand drill and power drill do not, even though they clearly should. This is because they're meant to be direct upgrades to the screwdriver, which didn't require electricity in the first place - having them require electricity would be a Power-Up Letdown.
- Some later-game devices require laser power rather than electrical power, which... makes no sense. Since the lasers you use to charge such devices are probably going to be powered by an electrical outlet in the first place, it doesn't really explain why some sort of laser emitter can't just be integrated in the devices themselves to convert electricity to lasers. The real purpose of separating these power sources is to give you a new type of resource to think about as electricity becomes increasingly trivial to manage.
Action Bomb: Volatile Pests and Volatile Exors will attempt to harm the player by self-destructing, dealing lasting acid damage. Volatile Exors are tanky and will only explode after you significantly damage them, but will still drop their usual items. Volatile Pests are a different story, trying to explode on you as soon as they see you. They DON'T drop their items upon explosion but they also have low health, encouraging the player to take them out quickly. There's also the Bombogi in the Space Queen portal world, and Sappers will try to explode on you if you take too long fighting them.
Action Survivor: Your character is first and foremost a civilian scientist, with *at best* a GATE-provided self-defense class to their name; even picking the Defense Analyst class will start you off with combat skills that are merely *mediocre* rather than nonexistent, with damaged hand-me-down Security gear only slightly better than what can be scavenged in the Offices. As the game progresses, the players' skills improve, and new resources and technologies scavenged from the later sectors and anteverses can be made into some impressive weaponry, those civilian scientists/rookie security guards will become a force of destruction carving a bloody path through hordes of aliens and militants alike, possibly ending a game with a body count in the *hundreds*.
Air-Vent Passageway: Owing to its inspiration, there are a lot of people-sized vents around the Cascade facility to crawl through. They usually serve as paths to progression, shortcuts, or lead into secret closed-off rooms. Sometimes they might even have a Deadly Rotary Fan in the way to spice things up; mercifully they stop moving when the power goes out at night.
A.K.A.-47: Many of the firearms are based on real-life guns but have differences in terms of names and designs.
- The Security Pistol is designed after the Glock 17, but its slide differs greatly and can only hold about eight rounds of 9mm in the magazine for some reason. However, its unique slide design allows it to have a flashlight duct taped to the barrel without issue.
- The Montese SMG is clearly the SITES Spectre M4, although its magazine is only capable of carrying eighteen rounds of 9mm in comparison to the real life weapon having either a thirty to fifty round magazines.
- Romag Shotgun is a frankengun between the Benelli M4 and Franchi SPAS-12 shotguns.
- Talagi Magnum looks to be based on the Colt Python.
- The Patois Rifle is the French FAMAS G2 assault rifle.
- The Gutnic Rifle is a H&K G36 with glowing runes gouged into the metal and a magazine capacity of twenty-five rounds of 5.56.
Almost Dead Guy: A given, seeing as how you're caught in the middle of an unfolding catastrophe.
- One of the first is likely to be Alice, the shell-shocked Defense Team member outside the (sealed) door to the Security sector. She drops some ominous hints about what when down there, before vanishing without a trace some time later. You can find her Shade in the Night Realm, showing that, as her dialogue suggested, not *all* of her made it out.
- One can find Grayson, a wounded technician, outside the door to Manufacturing in Offices. He drops the hint about the power cells needed to proceed. Unlike most cases, the player can actually heal him with a bandage, at which point he becomes a roaming trader with an inventory that updates as the game progresses.
- A dying soldier is found in the control room within Silo 3. True to form, he warns the protagonist not to reopen the portal to Flathill before promptly dying. You do it anyways, and end up potentially unleashing The Fog on mankind. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!. Granted, you wouldn't have had to do that if the Order hadn't removed the Dark Lens and caused this whole fiasco in the first place, so the warning feels a bit hypocritical.
Ambiguous Situation: It's implied that Anteverse 168 and Anteverse 33, Canaan and the Flesh Dimension respectively, are connected in some way. The Leyak figurine can be found in Canaan's swamp; holding the Lodestone (first found in Canaan) in your inventory while you sleep will give you nightmares that take place in the Flesh Dimension. The Accursed Hood (made from Hexed Wood found in Canaan) also claims to grant the player "improved trades with Anteverse XXXIII." The specifics of how are unclear as of yet.
An Interior Designer Is You: Players are expected to choose an area to set up their "base" in. Outlets are sporadically placed around the facility, and players can pretty much build their base anywhere with power. Some locations, with built-in amenities such as natural stoves or charging stations, are generally more favorable. There are tons of furniture options available and the ways to build your base are endless, although you're generally limited by the layout of the room - however, more creative players can use bridges and shelves to build new floors and bag walls to create new rooms.
Anti-Frustration Features:
- Portal worlds periodically "reset" after some time, giving the player a renewable source of certain resources. This makes early portal worlds like Far Garden (Anteverse Wheat and Exor Hearts in the early game), Flathill (office supplies, some other standard resources and crucial power cores), and the Train (more standard materials as well as stuff to trade with the Blacksmith) useful for crucial resources. The facility's automatic PA system and the UI will also alert the player when the portal worlds reset.
  - In addition, you might think that portal worlds completely revert back to their original state when they reset. While they do regenerate all their enemies, furniture, and items, player-placed furniture will not despawn. This means that it's completely feasible to build a base in a portal world without any fear of your base getting erased - in fact, most portal worlds have at least one power socket to encourage this.
- One of the "air feels strange" events that can occur at night is a "portal storm" - unlike the Exor or Order attacks, the portals cause enemies to spawn directly next to your crafting bench, bypassing all your defenses. However, this and ONLY this event can be halted completely with a portal suppression field, which the players can create once they get the necessary resources from the Labs Sector.
- In the same vein - tired of the Leyak constantly harassing you? You can build a containment unit for it at a certain point, preventing it from spawning anymore. You can even interact with the containment unit's control panel, tinting the glass to become opaque, in case you don't want to look at its ugly mug. The same unit also works for its ice-themed cousin, the Krasue.
- If the player becomes fatigued to the point of nearly dying, they can sit down on the ground almost anywhere - not enough to last, but just enough to stave off death.
- The Antique Shotgun, a.k.a. IS-0099 is the only ranged weapon that's one-of-a-kind. However, this also meant that unlike the other (non-crafted) guns in the game, it could be repaired with basic materials before the light gun repair kit was introduced.
- Plants require water to grow; if neglected, they will die. However, a fully-grown plant that's harvestable does not need water to survive, allowing the player to keep them around if they don't need any additional resources from them yet. Likewise, plants don't require light to grow, making water management the primary challenge in agriculture.
- Wall torches, lamps, and other light-emitting furniture usually don't need power sources. This allows them to be placed anywhere to provide light without elaborate cable setups, even at night when other light sources go off.
- GATE recharging stations remain active at night, allowing players to recharge their devices any time. This ensures that players can recharge their flashlights even when the lights go out.
- If the player dies from falling into a Bottomless Pit, their loot will drop somewhere on land instead of being permanently lost, allowing it to be recovered. If the bag is STILL somewhere unreachable, then exiting and reopening the save will relocate it to the Office Sector plaza, outside Warren's kiosk.
- If the player is launched by a gaseous nest or jump pad, they won't sustain fall damage no matter how far they fall, as long as they land at or above the elevation they launched from.
- Vehicles never need to be refueled or recharged, and never need any sort of maintenance. They are also completely invincible and never take damage no matter how many enemies you run over or walls you crash into.
- If the player has lost their vehicle or gotten it stuck somewhere, they can go to the vehicle's original spawn point and press a button to "recall" the vehicle to that position, with all the loot stored inside intact. There's also a button next to Warren's kiosk in the office sector that recalls all carts (e.g. the platform cart) in the world.
- Refrigerators are so rare and without a makeshift alternative (the only place where more spawn is Flathill and the Furniture Store) that you can package them without risk of breaking them into base components. You can scrap them, but considering the amount of storage space they provide (though the Crush Depth update restricts the type of item they can store to food-type items) and how useful they are for preserving food for much, much longer than other containers as long as they're powered, and they barely give about two monitors worth of resources when scrapped, it's not remotely worth doing so.
- If the player attempts to go to sleep while the Leyak is following them, they will receive a warning in the form of the dream being distorted and twisted, with a pixelated Leyak chasing behind the scientist in their dream so they aren't caught off guard. Likewise, the player will be warned when the Krasue spawns, allowing them to take care of the issue as soon as possible.
- Thanks to the amount of furniture, cabinets, cupboards and containers to find and loot in The Furniture Store, zombies don't actually start getting in until the first button is pressed. This leaves the player free to start looting it for resources, by either packaging unique furniture to take to base, looking through each container, or scrapping said furniture for materials. This also gives them time to explore the store and familiarize the locations of the buttons (every visit will have the placement be shuffled around), making the mad dash towards each one to activate the central elevator less stressful.
- Weather events will expire after one day, but nearly every weather event can be stopped early by some means, though most of them will require a bit of a trek to deal with. The Fog Phenomenon, Airborne Spores and Radiation Leak can be stopped via buttons in certain locations, the Rolling Blackouts can be ended by destroying the Giant Power Leech that appears after destroying enough of the smalled leeches, and the The Black Fog can be halted by sitting on the Night Throne in either the Night Realm or in Residence Sector.
Apocalyptic Log: Besides the holograms of Dr. Derek Manse (see Scientist Video Journal below), the player can find E-mail terminals that include conversations from other staff members at GATE. These conversations can provide backstory, hints, and even new crafting recipes. As a new employee at GATE, these holograms and E-mail terminals will be the player's primary source of information, aside from the remaining surviving other staff members that they can talk to.
Applied Phlebotinum: Quite a lot of them to go around, thanks to Cascade researching into all sorts of strange creatures and dimensions, discovering an inordinate amount of remarkable materials. One example is the Tarasque's ichor, which is required to repair a device to open the Mycofields Portal as well as create teleporter pads. In fact, several times throughout the game, you'll find machines that are repaired using alien materials, suggesting that GATE regularly integrates their discoveries into their technology.
Arbitrary Skepticism: Verging on Flat-Earth Atheist. Despite working at Cascade and overseeing a variety of mind-bending experiments with earth-shaking implications for the future of the human race, Dr. Manse scoffs at the idea that the Yeti is real, even while Voussoir has the Yeti in containment. It isn't really clear where his skepticism stems from; he simply seems unwilling to call a spade a spade and admit that the large, white-furred, mountain-dwelling simian is in fact the large, white-furred, mountain-dwelling simian of legend and folklore. He pooh-poohs the idea of the Loch Ness Monster existing in the same audio log. Noteably, said audio log is found in the Hydroplant, where the Darkwater Beast is swimming.
Arm Cannon: Defense Robots have arm cannons that shoot long-range grenades as well as Molotovs, and Expedition Robots have arm cannons that blast acid. The Waterbot also has an arm cannon in the same vein, but it appears to be for watering plants. Exors and Armored Exors have organic cannons that shoot quills in the place of their right forearms; the latter can be harvested and modified to create quill-firing arm cannons of your own. You can also create a different type of organic arm cannon out of the friendly Skinks you find at the Cloud Reactor.
Artificial Intelligence: The goal of the project that birthed the Security Bots was - and remains - the creation of true, sapient AI. Let's just say they've got a long ways to go. The results so far aren't really even up to the task of guarding the Cascade Facility - the bots don't even have IFF functionality, and attack anything that moves indiscriminately, among other deficits.
- The Containment Bots in the Lab sector will invariably break the subject's leg in the process of transporting them to a holding cell, and they are also completely unable to prevent or cope with the contained subjects escaping from said cell and will keep bringing them back to the same one every time.
- The Defense Robots in the Hydroplant sector are straight-up Killer Robots that attack indiscriminately with explosive weapons (inside of a sensitive hydropower facility, mind you) and have a crippling vulnerability to back-strikes which will cause them to explode.
- All three models also have severe security flaws like carrying the door access codes in their code, allowing anyone who obtains enough security bot hardware to hack the secure keycard readers. The facility has also compensated for the aforementioned IFF issues by issuing Night Passes, which simply cause anyone who holds one to be completely ignored by security bots, opening yet another major security hole.
- The robots are, however, capable of restocking the soda vending machines, and come with automatic soda dispensers built into them (except the Defense Robot, which explodes so readily because it's storing live frag grenades in a container designed for soda cans).
- Later on as you approach the Reactors, you meet the friendly and passive Waterbot, who is capable of speaking and tends to the gardens. However, it's noted that its construction involved use of otherworldly reservoir growths, which may have played a part in the success of its A.I.
As Long as It Sounds Foreign: The heavily FAMAS-inspired assault rifle introduced in the Crush Depth update is named "Patois", French for "slang".
Attack Its Weak Point:
- Most enemies take extra damage when attacked on the head.
- In addition to its head, the Tarasque and Behemoth are also vulnerable on their chest-tentacles. They also collapse and expose their weak back-flaps when they take a certain amount of damage.
- Defense Robots are extremely tough, but their backpacks are filled with explosives that will begin beeping and explode if you're able to damage it enough.
Attack Reflector: The Carapace Armor set bonus grants a thorns effect that causes damage to melee attackers. The F.O.R.G.E. armor set grants an effect that has a chance of deflecting bullets.
Auto-Revive: The Swinging Censer trinket gives the player the ability to resurrect themselves upon death (if they choose to). This can be used only once every five minutes.
Awesome, but Impractical:
- The player can tame a Pest and put them in a Pest Wheel, which allows them to generate energy. While using an enemy as an energy source is neat and the animation of the Pest "running" in the wheel is amusing, the Pest only runs if fed, and doesn't run for very long. You're probably better off using batteries.
- When the player resets the security system, the player can actually obtain IS-0042, the Lost Dog, which takes the form of a massive painting. Though the idea of having such an object to display in one's base is cool, the painting is so monstrously large that it's actually rather difficult to find the space to hang it, depending on one's choice of base location - it's by far the biggest piece of furniture in the game.
- The players can loot firearms from Order soldiers or scavenge them from Security offices further into the facility. These weapons are usually much stronger than the makeshift Magnetic Weapons you can craft, reload quickly, and hold more than one shot. On the downside, they can't be repaired without specialized equipment, have low durability, and their ammo can't be crafted. Some even have biometric locks which prevent players from using them unless they're using one of the biometric arm coverings, which prevents them from using other armor and causes them to miss out on certain set bonuses. Having a flashlight-mounted pistol is damn handy, though, as a light source that doubles as decently effective emergency weapon, but you're rarely going to use it for any other purpose.
  - Taken up to 11 with the big, badass Wessex Rifle used by Order Snipers. Players can loot it for themselves, but unfortunately, it drops VERY rarely, Snipers themselves don't show up often, the ammo only drops from Snipers and Jotuns, it requires Accuracy level 10 and the higher-levelled Bio-Mimic armwraps to use, and it's one of the firearms that require Intermediate Gun Repair Kits, which are non-renewable as of the Dark Energy update. The Magbow is a much more affordable alternative.
  - The 1.0 full release adds the ability to upgrade military weapons, removing their biometric locks in the process, but the overall scarcity of their ammo and need for non-craftable weapon repair kits to fix them still make them less desirable than the better tier craftable weapons you can make. Automatic weapons are particularly inefficient; the SMG takes close to a full 18-round mag of gunfire to kill a single Order soldier (who can be taken out with a handful of accurate headshots from the pistol instead, using the same 9mm ammo), and while the two assault rifles are a bit stronger, their 5.56mm ammo is quite rare and you only get a few rounds per ammo drop from slain enemies. A single full stack of 5.56mm ammo (which you'd have to farm 15-20 soldiers to acquire) only lets you kill about 2-3 late game grunt-level enemies before it runs out.
- The GATE Security Carts found in the later sectors are this for players playing solo. Their main draw is being able to transport up to four players at once, which is helpful in multiplayer - if you're playing alone, however, you're generally better off just using the forklift, which is available as early as the maintenance sector, requires only one Power Cell to activate as opposed to the annoying crafting tree for a hotwire kit, is smaller and easier to drive through tight corridors and contains 8 more vital inventory slots for transporting materials around. Even platform carts, which have the same inventory capacity, are more easily craftable, less cumbersome to steer and maneuver through the facility, and can be pushed up stairwells. This doesn't really apply to the SUVs in Hydroplant, however, due to having a very large storage capacity and the ability to basically get from one end of Hydroplant to the other (provided you opened up the doors to the warehouse in the middle) and backtracking to Security much faster than on foot.
- Large Storage Crates provide two more rows of storage than Medium Storage Crates, for a total of 42 slots. Like the Small and Medium Storage Crates, they can be named for easier sorting, and the name will also be displayed on the surface of the crate itself; however, unlike its smaller counterparts, the front of the grate is a huge metal grille instead of a flat surface, so the name of the crate ends up on a tiny metal stripe on the top of the lid. Meanwhile, the medium crate gets to have its name printed in a nice and large font right at the front. You can paint the large crate, but it only changes the colors of the lights on them - far more difficult to identify than medium storage crates, which completely change color. This isn't even accounting for the fact that each crate has a larger footprint than the last, meaning that the small crates are technically the most space-efficient (though it is harder to find stuff when you have tons of separate crates). Due to this, some players would rather use a larger number of medium crates over large crates, or wait until they have the resources to build compact storage crates.
- The power services building is in a beautiful location, has plenty of space, and the main building feels very home-y with a built-in living room, kitchen, and restrooms, causing many players to build a base there. Unfortunately, as of the Dark Energy update, raids can spawn inside the building, meaning that you'll have to fortify your base much more than usual if you want to live here.
- By upgrading the Antique Shotgun, you can return it to some of its original power by turning it into the Polished Antique Shotgun. The Polished Antique Shotgun has a small chance to deal a whopping 10,000 damage, enough to basically one-shot anything that the gun is pointing at when you pull the trigger. However, this "critical" shot has a mere two percent chance to activate, and there's no biometric lock to remove because the Antique Shotgun never had one; not to mention, you might kill your teammates or destroy stuff you didn't mean to destroy because the range of the critical shot is so massive. The upgrade also doesn't give the shotgun's standard shots any damage buffs, so the only benefits to upgrading the shotgun is the critical chance and durability. This means that the advantages to upgrading the Antique Shotgun are less pronounced than those of other weapons.
- Upgrading the Energy Pistol turns it into the Laser Pistol, which is three times as powerful. However, it also changes it from requiring normal electricity into laser power. As stated later under Boring, but Practical, the Energy Pistol's usage of normal electricity over laser power is one of its biggest strengths, especially when paired with the incredibly useful Crystalline Vial trinket, which can recharge electricity passively. The laser Pistol requiring laser power makes it much less convenient to use - while it can still be powered with the hand crank, it's an absolute slog. It turns what used to be a weak, yet incredibly handy backup weapon into a stronger, yet relatively underwhelming one.
Badass Bookworm: As the game goes on, the playable scientist will naturally not only have amassed vast amounts of knowledge, but also amass a very large bodycount of aliens, otherworldly entities and lots of fanatical soldiers.
Badass Normal: The protagonist qualifies at the start; you'll have little more than cobbled-together equipment to keep you alive, fed and healthy as you face down invading multiversal aliens, to say nothing of the Order. As you advance through the tech tree and craft new, more advanced equipment using anomalous materials, you'll become an Empowered Badass Normal.
- The Order themselves also qualify. They were able to successfully invade the Cascade Facility and seize control of most of it, at least for a time, despite being comprised of normal humans with no anomalous artifacts to harness and no genetic enhancement or magical abilities. No small feat, considering that GATE had a well-equipped internal security team, the Cascade Facility's defense systems, a force of heavily-armored security robots, and the Gatekeepers on their side. Going by the Perforation leading to the Rise Facility, the Cascade Facility is presumably not the only GATE Installation the Order were able to invade. Unfortunately for the Order, it proves to be a Pyrrhic Victory at best, and a literally-apocalyptic blunder at worst.
Bad Future: Anteverse 23 isn't an alternate dimension, it's one of Earth's possible futures - the end result of GATE accidentally releasing IS-0102 on humanity and causing a Zombie Apocalypse. The Botanical Wing has portals that lead to a desolate version of the facility which contains only Anteverse 2 fauna and a few logs from Dr. Riggs. Eventually you get teleported to a different location within a Great Wall-like complex and several unique Gatekeepers with their guns trained on you, who are told to let you go because a temporal break is infinitely worse. It is also apparently not the first time the player has visited from their point of view.
Bag of Holding: While there is a weight mechanic and each backpack has its own weight reduction stats, the size of the items themselves (whether it be furniture or weapons) can still fit into, say, a basic school backpack as much as it can fit inside either a military backpack or one housing a pocket dimension.
Battle Trophy: Certain enemies have an amount of how much you have to kill before unlocking a journal entry and being able to create trophies. For example, killing at least 1000 pests will let you create a taxidermized pest trophy. As a holdover from Core Keeper, the enemies from the Enroachment can drop figurines of themselves as rare drops.
Big Bad Wannabe: The Order are seemingly set up as the biggest crisis of the GATE catastrophe, being a hostile, outside military force who invaded, gunned down scientists and staff indiscriminately, and stole the Dark Lens, setting them up as the apparent main antagonists. By the time the player character reaches Reactors, it's clear the Order have completely lost control of the situation; the various entities and anomalies are wreaking just as much havok on them, they've been handily-beaten by the Gatekeepers at nearly every turn - even losing the Dark Lens to them - and by the time the player reaches their inner sanctum, the player is likely so skilled and geared that even the Order's Elite Mooks pale in comparison to the Gatekeepers fought prior. Ultimately, despite being the primary instigators of the GATE catastrophe, the Order stop being major players in it long before the end.
Big Creepy-Crawlies: The Core Keeper crossover adds a "Hive" of enormous larva in Manufacturing West, especially Nyth the Gluttonous who's the size of a barge. There's also the Scuttlebugs introduced in the Mycofields, which are the size of dogs. To a lesser extent, there's the Crystalisks, which aren't quite insectoid but are definitely spider-like, and the Reaper, which is somewhat insectoid and has mantis-like arms. The Tarasque and Behemoth are interesting semi-examples, as they're slightly bug-like with armored, beetle-like bodies. They're microbes in their home anteverse; however, a scale disjunction causes them to end up gigantic.
Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: While Dr. Manse doesn't quite believe that it is actually the legendary monster, the "Yeti" is a mini-boss in the portal world of Voussoir, guarding the exit portal. The "Bigfoot" also shows up as a boss in the Residence Sector.
Bizarre Alien Biology: The various alien lifeforms from Anteverse II, which form the majority of the enemies in the facility, are all actually part of the same species despite being massively different from one another, with Dr. Manse describing them as being able to change what form they take once they reach adulthood through some unknown means.
Black-Hole Belly: The player can invoke this because you can eat and drink even when the respective meters are full. Want to drink 100 barrels' worth of water totalling 1,000 liters and weighing one metric ton? Sure, why not.
Blackout Basement: The facility powers down at night, leaving only emergency lighting active that gives many sectors this appearance. Almost literally with the Security Sector, which has been rendered permanently out of power and is pitch-black at all times of day.
Blue-and-Orange Morality: It doesn't become apparent until later in the game, but the Order - being the descendants of a Gnostic cult - believe that material reality is a prison for humanity's immortal souls. As such, they believe that indiscriminately slaughtering defenseless GATE employees is "freeing" them from this prison, and thus they have no qualms with murdering innocents who pose them no threat. Several Order emails further elucidate this, and Breachers may even say "I will free you!" while trying to blow you away with a shotgun.
Boom, Headshot!: Striking enemies in the head, whether with a melee or ranged weapon, generally deals increased damage. Some enemies, like Order Soldiers, are wearing helmets, but they can be knocked off by hitting their heads with the right weapon type.
- In general, the head is the only vital part of the body; when the limbs' health is depleted, damage on them goes to the torso, while damage to the torso goes to the head when the torso's health is also depleted. If the head loses all of its health, the target dies. Going for a direct hit still deals more damage, however.
- Player characters have segmented damage, too, and while most enemies aren't skilled enough to aim for the head, the few hits that *do* will hurt a lot more than ones that don't.
Boring, but Practical:
- The Vacuum is a highly versatile and convenient tool, capable of not only quickly destroying any breakable resource (crates, monitors, printers, etc.) without using up the durability of your melee weapon of choice, but also collecting all the items from said breakables near-instantly. It can also be used to suck up Pests and launch them at other enemies. If all that wasn't enough, it doesn't need to be repaired at all, just recharged.
- The platform cart is easy to build, and easy to control. It's a quick and simple way of allowing the player to carry far more than they can usually carry without having to worry about weight, since they can just dump their heavier items on the cart, which is unaffected by weight. There's also a cart recall button at Warren's kiosk that allows the world host to teleport all carts to the office sector if you had to abandon your carts somewhere. Averted with later patches, where the cart now has its own internal weight limit; if overburdened, the cart slows to less than that of the player's walking speed. The Forklift and other vehicles don't have this restriction, making them much more valuable for cross-facility cargo hauling.
- Soups can be made very early on, never go bad, can't be burnt, and provide tons of portions for the amount of ingredients they require (only requiring a hefty amount of water each time). These attributes often make them more useful than some of the later "fancier" foods, such as the tartines or the grilled cheese sandwiches.
- Batteries nullify the biggest hurdle of night-time - that all the power outlets go out. If the player has enough batteries, then they can easily last the night, as nearly everything that requires power only needs a single makeshift battery to last the night. Even though batteries become less efficient if they're daisy-chained, makeshift batteries are easy enough to make that some players simply make tons and tons of batteries (one for each of their appliances) to offset the efficiency issue. Makeshift batteries are generally all you need, with other battery types being more situational - industrial batteries only have double the charge of a makeshift battery but are somewhat more troublesome to make in early to mid game and not worth wasting power cells on until they're in much more plentiful supply. Carbon batteries can easily power a single plug board's worth of appliances with power to spare, and a quantum battery can easily power two, though in practice you may as well just use two carbon batteries instead if you don't need the in-built shielding.
- Feeding the coworker is inefficient in the early game - the player will probably not have much food to offer, and the coworker only gives pens and occasionally staplers, which are abundant in the office sector early on. Later, when staplers become incredibly important resources, the player likely has easier ways to defeat security robots and can accumulate copious amounts of drinks. Many players will find themselves offering drinks to the coworker whenever possible, hoping that he drops a stapler for them to use.
- You can build makeshift toilets pretty early on and put them anywhere, but there are also portal toilets that are rather advanced and require laser power. While the portal toilet is good for relieving your continence meter quickly and can warp you to Some Distant Shore for some optional goodies, the makeshift toilet has the advantage of being the only toilet able to collect your feces, which can be retrieved and made into soil bags. For anyone hoping to build garden plots, aquariums, or certain types of traps, this is a godsend. It becomes less important when/if the player tames a Skink in Reactors, since pet Skinks left to roam the base will produce more feces than one could ever need.
- Fishing is relatively slow in Abiotic Factor compared to other games, but the fish can be butchered for at least two fillets and other useful items like fish oil. If you don't feel like feeding the coworker for staplers, Raw Antefish Fillets can be traded with Warren for an infinite supply of staplers as well, [[spoiler Chordfish and Inkfish can be acquired in Flathill and the Nightrealm, providing a renewable source of Symphonist materials and Night Essence, respectively. A maxed-out fishing level also renders you safe from the Darkwater Beast. In short, while it may not be thrilling, fishing provides slews of cookable food and valuable resources for little investment beyond time.
- The humble throw net does no damage, but stuns most enemies that they're thrown on for a few seconds at least. Smaller enemies such as pests can be stomped into oblivion when netted, and larger enemies will stop dead in their tracks, allowing you to get a few shots in for free, especially if you're on multiplayer. A single cloth scrap can be crafted into several throw nets, and they work even better with a net launcher, which adds a small amount of damage and a slight stun effect to every net.
- The pipe pistol is one of the first firearm-type weapons you can craft, and while it isn't terribly fancy compared to the firepower you can loot off the Order soldiers and it has a small firing delay that can be difficult to get used to, it deals fairly hefty damage especially for the point where you can first acquire one, is much more accurate than the shotgun-like Scrapshot and has less damage falloff at longer ranges, can be easily repaired with common tech scrap, reloads comparatively quickly even without having much experience in the Reloading skill and its ammo can be crafted with fairly common materials and scrap. Its shots also have a chance to cause humanoid or alien targets to bleed, which does steady damage over time until the target dies, making it useful even against the Order soldiers and Exors later on. Its only notable shortcomings are that its ammo only stacks up to 20 in your inventory, it lacks a flashlight attachment unlike other firearms (which is mitigated by other hands-free craftable light sources later on, such as headlamps) and it's not very effective against security bots. [[spoiler: It can later be upgraded to fire an explosive bolt that hits reasonably hard for when it's available, while using the same ammo and having the same perks as before, letting it remain useful even in the mid-to-lategame.
- The Security pistol is the first proper firearm the player can acquire. While it starts off as Awesome, yet Impractical, gaining enough levels in accuracy and reloading skills, plus generally just advancing through the game, turns it into this. There are other firearms that are more potent and more impressive, but they are locked behind a bio-metric lock and need the use of bio-metric arm wraps in order to be even used, except for IS-099 aka the Antique Shotgun. Meanwhile, the security pistol has no such problem; while a bit clumsy and clunky at first, it can become a mainstay thanks to a variety of factors. It's a one-handed pistol so it can be used in conjunction with any shield, it can have an attached flashlight making it a good light source AND weapon at night or in darker areas, and 9mm is one of the most common ammo types to acquire. With the weapon/armor upgrade system introduced in the 1.0 update, it can also be upgraded for better damage and capacity, allowing it to stay competitive through the mid-game and even the early late game.
- The Energy Pistol is the first laser-based weapon you can create, and is crucial for fending off the Reaper when you first enter the Security Sector. It fires very quickly and has incredible range, and is reasonably accurate and powerful. However, even after you get access to stronger laser-based weapons, the Energy Pistol is still one of the most reliable weapons to have due to the fact that it uses normal electricity rather than laser charge like its bigger brethren, meaning you can charge it on a normal charging station, passively via Crystalline Vials, or instantly on the go using Field Batteries - and if that wasn't enough, there's a hand crank on the side that you can use to charge it manually! Essentially, you've got a ranged weapon that never runs out of ammo. It can be upgraded into the significantly more powerful Laser Pistol, which does use laser charge but by the time you've upgraded it you'll likely have a Laser Collector anyhow, and it can still be hand-cranked.
- Around the time the player gets access to the Security sector and Canaan, they gain access to both the Lodestone Crossbow and the Magbow. The former is a repeater crossbow that uses the same type of easily-crafted bolts as the Makeshift Crossbow available very early in the game, can hold multiple bolts at once, reloads quickly, and does great damage for when it's available (it can even use alternate bolt types to make it adaptable to many situations.) The latter is a scoped, long-range crossbow that shoots rebar bolts, has very little drop, and deals exceptional damage - only slightly less than the Wessex sniper rifle, but without the need for special gear or the slow reload. Both are superb ranged weapons for a scientist that doesn't want to make the gear commitments to wielding firearms, and can be reliable all the way into the final areas.
Borrowed Biometric Bypass: The Order uses biometrically-locked guns, so you won't be able to use them just by taking one off a dead soldier. However, you can bypass these by constructing the Bio-Metric Armwraps... by collecting a bunch of Order soldiers' severed arms. These armwraps can be upgraded for more defense, and eventually upgraded once more to bypass the biometric locks on Gatekeeper guns.
Botanical Abomination: The Bogmen of Canaan are some sort of beast made out of a combination of flesh and plant matter.
Breakable Weapons: Most furniture, tools, armor, and weapons in the game have a green meter that indicates their durability. Furniture loses durability when attacked (or in the case of fish traps and beehives, when they produce resources as well), but can be repaired simply by hitting them with a hammer. Tools, armor, and weapons lose durability when used or if the player dies, and can be repaired at a repair & salvage station or with duct tape. Completely depleting the durability on furniture causes them to break into components, while tools, armor, and weapons degrade into a "broken" state - melee weapons will still be usable but less effective, but ranged weapons will become unusable and armor will no longer protect the player.
Can't Move While Being Watched: Beginning in the Labs sector, a creature called the Leyak creeps slowly towards one player at a time, but freezes in place when the player that can see it looks directly at it, and disappears after being stared at for a bit. If it gets close enough, it enrages, continuously attacking the player until they are dead or they manage to get away from them. They can also be warded off with x-ray emitting devices, such as defensive towers and handheld lamps. Later on, a variant called the Krasue will start spawning. It will freeze the player after a short time, but can be stopped by staring at it or flashing it with a stronger x-ray.
Cavalry Betrayal: The Gatekeepers turned on GATE after the Order removed the Dark Lens. As such, only a handful of them are still friendly to the player. That being said, the Gatekeepers guarding Intrados have a pretty good reason to fight you, leaving it ambiguous if the entire organization has gone rogue, or if it's localized to the Gatekeepers still trapped in the Cascade Facility.
Chest Monster: IS-0247, the Moving Box, is a creepy cube made out of the same organic porcelain that the Composers compose of, running around on unsettlingly-humanoid legs and opening up to reveal a Stomach of Holding. However, it's completely harmless and helpful as you can use it as an emergency storage of sorts, and it will pick up loose items on the ground.
Clarke's Third Law: The Gatekeepers definitely feel like combat magicians, especially next to the more traditional and realistic Order Soldiers. Some of the Gatekeeper classes are even named after mystical beings - however, it seems like they're simply using highly advanced technology.
Closed Circle: The player's primary goal is to escape the Cascade Facility, and they are forced to push deeper and deeper into the facility as every exit to the surface they investigate turns out to have been destroyed by the time they reach it. On multiple occasions they manage to find portals that lead to other Gate facilities on Earth, but for various reasons leaving these locations is impossible (Flathill is heavily barricaded and a clear path out of town doesn't exist, Rise is currently locked down by the Order and the lower floors are inaccessible, Voussoir is in the middle of a snowy mountaintop and the players would die of exposure if they just tried to walk down the mountain, Shadowgate and the Praetorium are isolated, heavily guarded locations, and Albatross is in the middle of the ocean) and the player is forced to return to Cascade and keep going. Even in the end, after unwittingly helping IS-12, "he" walks back on his agreement to help the player character escape, leaving them stranded in Cascade and its anteverses with no apparent way out.
Collect-a-Thon Platformer: One of the bonus Portal Worlds, Space Queen, takes place in an arcade machine hosting a video game styled after Banjo-Kazooie. In it, you can collect Royal Coins and Royal Crowns, which naturally float in the air while spinning. Collecting seven out of eight crowns is necessary for leaving the portal world, and both items can be used for decoration or scrapped for useful materials. This Portal World operates on several special rules, such as giving the player a Double Jump, eliminating fall damage, and rendering most enemies within the area immune to conventional damage, but vulnerable to being jumped on.
Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
- The various Peccary subtypes are this. The spore-emitting Mushroom Peccaries are green, the long-range attacking Peccary Sows are blue, and the powerful Alpha Peccaries are red.
- Security Robots are blue, Containment Robots are purple, Defense Robots are red, and Corrupted Robots are dull gray and brown with overgrowth. The friendly Waterbot is white and gold.
- With a few exceptions, red doors are generally always locked and cannot be opened under any means. Yellow doors can generally be opened but usually only from one side or require hacking. Other-colored doors such as blue and gray doors are always unlocked^note.
Combat Resuscitation: In multiplayer games, running out of health from enemy damage will knock the player down, at which point they have exactly sixty seconds to be revived before bleeding out. This also applies to enemies: Order soldiers will be knocked down the same way (unless you defeated them via headshot), requiring players to "finish off" the soldier - if there's an Order Medic nearby and the downed soldiers aren't finished off, the Medic will quickly pick them back up.
Commonplace Rare: Alpha Peccaries are the strongest of all Peccaries, and killing them is the only way you can get their Peccary Alpha Skulls. They have an extremely small chance of spawning in place of a Peccary Sow, and their skulls are the only way to make Red Paintbrushes. This makes Red Paint arguably the most difficult color paint to acquire due to it being a Luck-Based Mission to an insane degree.
Convection, Schmonvection: Played with; within Manufacturing West, you can find several areas that have molten material flowing, but even standing near them won't damage you. It's a different story with the Mycofields Portal World in Cascade Laboratories - not only is the area covered in all sorts of fungus, there's also rivers and waterfalls of molten material. This makes the entire portal world so hot that the playable scientists cannot survive without proper attire.
Cooking Mechanics: The game has prominent food and water meters. The player will be required to cook food and obtain water to sustain themselves; they'll probably start by chopping up enemies such as the Pests and Peccaries and cooking their meat, or buying snacks and drinks from vending machines. Later on they can acquire the resources to boil and decontaminate water, and create more elaborate dishes including a large variety of soups, and even hamburgers and tartines. Reaching level 10 in the cooking skill lets you have not only more recipes but also access to the convection open and baking recipes, opening up even more options.
Corrupted Character Copy: While the HECU isn't exactly what you would call good people, the Order however make them look like sane saints in comparison. They're a fanatical non-government paramilitary organization that is at odds with GATE and more or less commit a terrorist attack on several GATE Facilities, leading to many civilain deaths. Whats even more damning is that they end up CAUSING the game's equivalent to the Resonance Cascade by removing the Dark Lens, unlike the HECU who were sent to try and contain it while killing anyone involved to cover it up. Meanwhile the rampant destruction and killing by the Order only leads to many contained anomalies and creatures being let loose, causing many deaths from both sides, and possibly even more if said anomalies end up escaping to the outside world. Meaning that in their zeal to try and "save" the world from GATE and their research, they might as well have actually damned it instead.
Cosmic Horror Story: The planet has had regular contact with anomalous phenomena for millennia, the inhabitants of a variety of Anteverses are hostile or plain inscrutable in their views and GATE attempts to contain and occasionally exploit what they can find. One Anteverse has even sent a weapon that is predicted to eventually destroy the universe over an incredibly long period of time. The ending leans fully into this, where the Eldritch Abomination bad guy wins and the barrier between Earth and the other Anteverses is shattered, allowing all sorts of entities and phenomena to pour through. It's not completely hopeless though due to the implication that humans have survived in the Bad Future if the chrono-rifts in the Botanical Wing are anything to go by.
Covers Always Lie: On the game's splash screen◊, there's a Pest lashing out with its tongue. While Carbuncles (which turn into Pests) do this, Pests only ever attack with the spikes on their bodies.
Critical Encumbrance Failure: The inventory has a weight system indicated by a bar meter, and every item has a carrying weight. Naturally, smaller objects like paper won't weigh much, but furniture can fill the weight meter much faster with just a few items. If the bar fills to the yellow, the character will be slowed down, but gain strength XP as they move. If the bar fills to red, then they won't regain stamina. If the bar fills to DEEP red, they'll no longer gain strength XP AND they won't be able to jump without taking breaks for a moment after landing. That said, there are no consequences from filling the bar further, so if carrying one fridge brings your weight bar to red, there's no difference between carrying one fridge and twenty fridges.
Crosshair Aware: Order Snipers can be seen waving the lasers from their weapons if they're in the area, signifying their presence to the player. Order machine gun emplacements also have a large light beam emanating from their stations.
Crowbar Combatant:
- Wouldn't be a Half-Life inspired game if it didn't have one, however it's only available once the player reaches Manufacturing West. Unfortunately due to the playable scientists not having access to the HEV suit, it is classified as a heavy weapon and is obviously slow and cumbersome but hits hard. Amusingly even the Flavor Text references its depiction in Half-Life
  "A solid piece of steel, but not something you could just swing about with one hand."
- If the Crowbar isn't enough, scientists can also create the "Crowbar 2.0", a much meaner-looking crowbar that deals a whopping 75 damage. Still attacks very slowly but once it hits, the enemy will absolutely feel it.
Crossover: In the "Dark Energy" update, the boarded up mines in Manufacturing West open up to reveal a Larva Hive from Core Keeper.
Damage Over Time: Certain enemy attacks will inflict a bleeding debuff to you, which causes you to slowly lose health. This can be treated with bandages. You can also suffer "severe bleeding" from stronger attacks that causes you to lose even more health over time. Bandages only have a chance to heal severe bleeding, but the upgraded tech bandages is guaranteed to heal it (you can also use the Hex Armor's set bonus). You're also able to inflict the bleeding status effect to enemies with certain weapons. It's also possible to set enemies on fire (with three different flavors: regular fire, 'holy' fire, and plasma), which works similarly.
Dark Action Girl: Some of the Canaanites are female. The shotgun-wielding Gatekeeper Witches are the only other female humanoid enemies you'll come across; you'd never be able to tell that they're women if it weren't for their voices, though.
Deadly Disc: The Grinder is a weapon that launches sharp-edged discs, letting you deal sharp damage to enemies from afar. When hitting a surface, the discs will ricochet around multiple times until they either hit something or break. Be mindful that these bouncing disks can damage the player. The Grinder can also be turned into a turret, allowing for a deadly disc-launcing base defense. The "Dark Energy" update introduces two more discs it can launch, the Lodestone Disc and the Plasma Disc.
Deadly Rotary Fan:
- Throughout the facility, there are rotary fans that can kill the player if they're not too careful; however, they become stationary during night time when the power goes out. They usually lead to locked-off rooms, especially if they're inside an Air-Vent Passageway.
- The aptly-named Chopinator is a constructible giant fan that would do Father Grigori proud. It will slice and dice anything that dares to get near it while it's powered up.
Deface of the Moon: Canaan's moon has an inscrutable design carved into its surface; how this happened is never elaborated on.
Deflector Shields: Gatekeepers use these, but they're not active while idle. If you can get a sneak attack in, you can deal some heavy damage to them or even kill them outright before they have a chance to activate their shields. You can also make these for yourself if you can fix up a hardlight shield generator.
Deployable Cover: The Drop Shield can be thrown on the ground to deploy a force field that blocks projectiles from the front, yet you can also shoot through the rear.
Developer's Foresight: If you manage to find a room of the map that's very unorthodox to get to, yet has a decent amount of space, chances are the dev team already figured it out and placed an outlet there to encourage you to try building a base. Some locations are truly out of the way, but fear not - the dev team has already been there and considered it.
Did Not Think This Through: The Order really screws everything up by removing the Dark Lens, unleashing a portal storm on the entire facility, if not the entire world, all because they were more concerned with destroying GATE's creations and stopping their research at all costs without considering the consequences of doing so. It also results in a whole lot of them getting slaughtered by extradimensional entities and the survivors trapped in the facility along with everyone else.
Dr. Hammond: The dark lens! They removed it, but did not comprehend the effects!
Difficult, but Awesome:
- Laser power, once unlocked, is the most efficient power source in the game. With intelligent usage of splitters and batteries, a single outlet can be used to power an entire base 24/7 with energy to spare. However, building laser equipment requires rare items that take some effort to gather, including the Gold-Plated CPU that only drops from Defense Robots. This makes laser power cost-prohibitive until the endgame, and you'll have to put some thought into how you structure your power grid instead of plugging in a deployable and forgetting about it.
- The Long Jump Pack requires a Jetpack to make, but is more of a sidegrade than an upgrade. While it has more inventory storage, it can't go as high as a jetpack, and only has enough power for about three midair jumps before you're forced to land and recharge, which might cause you to take fall damage. However, it does recharge in the middle of jumps, so if you can get a good rhythm going (preferably while holding the Gravity Dampener), you can cover vast distances even faster than any of the vehicles in the game.
- The closest science-based weapon to a sniper is the Magbow, which has a scope and fires rebar bolts. Due to the weapon averting No "Arc" in "Archery" and Hitscan, on top of the inherent aiming sway, properly lining up a shot with a moving enemy's vitals while also accounting for gravity and travel time can be difficult. Master it, and you'll be an assassin one-shotting Order Soldiers with headshots without them ever engaging with you.
- Heavy Weapons are slow as molasses, making it tough to land hits while the enemy is trying to kill you. Once you get their attacking rhythm down, though, almost nothing in melee hits harder, and it's very satisfying to see an Order soldier or Exor go tumbling head-over-heels from being clocked with a crowbar or pickaxe.
Door to Before: Plentiful. Almost every area will have a door, vent, elevator, tram, or other means of access that's locked off until you find the way in and unlock it, making subsequent trips to and through the area quicker. The facility is suprisingly-interconnected - it's not uncommon to find doors back to, say, Offices or Manufacturing even as far as Residences.
Double-Edged Buff: A few. For example, eating a Greyeb (or Greyeb Chowder) grants a buff that provides damage reduction in exchange for the Leyaks spawning much more frequently on you.
Downer Ending: Much like the original Half-Life, things end badly for you and the world. IS-12 tricks you into summoning IS-0117 to Earth, and even though you manage to defeat it, it looks like that was All According to Plan, and IS-12 successfully manipulated you into breaking down the barriers between worlds, opening the way for his "master" (heavily implied to be Anteverse II, of which IS-0117 was just one "node") to assimilate your Earth. It is heavily implied the story will be continued in later DLCs or expansions.
Drawback-Mitigating Mechanic:
- The Greyeb fruit and Cosmato Salad Wrap (which is easy to make with a bit of farming and fills both hunger and thirst substantially) both bestow the "Temptation of the Flesh" buff and the Greyeb Chowder bestows "Desire of the Flesh", both of which reduces damage taken but makes the Leyak and Krasue appear more often. This drawback can be negated entirely by using Containment Unit: 91 to contain the Leyak and later the Krasue, with proper containment maintenance (which only requires farming Greyeb and/or ice cream and checking up on the meters every few days) you can take advantage of either buff with zero issues.
- Military weapons require Borrowed Biometric Bypass to use. The relevant gear items require high accuracy levels to unlock, and they take up a valuable armor or trinket slot. The upgrade system largely helps to do away with this, since upgraded military weapons lose the biometric lock entirely, though this changes their properties, as well; for example, the upgraded SMG deals fire damage, which may limit its effectiveness against certain enemies.
Duct Tape for Everything: Not only is duct tape useful for crafting, but it's also used to repair weapons and tools without the need for a Repair & Salvage station.
Ear Worm: IS-0078, the aptly-named Earworm, is this. It's existed since at least 300 B.C. and GATE refuses to describe, write down, or identify the melody. It causes insanity to anyone who gets it stuck in their head, and the phenomenon is described as a "sonic entity", implying that it's alive and reproduces like a virus by influencing people to play the melody.
Eat Brain for Memories: Implied with the description of the human brain item, which you get from salvaging human skulls. Eating a human brain increases your experience gain rate for a few minutes, although you'll still suffer the same nausea that eating human meat causes in the game.
Elaborate Underground Base: The Cascade Research Facility is huge and almost entirely subterranean; areas like Hydroplant are so massive that one could mistake them for outdoors if they didn't look up and see the cavern roof far, far above.
Elemental Rock–Paper–Scissors: Enemies have resistances and weaknesses to certain damage types. Taking advantage of these weaknesses can cause enemies to go down more quickly, and stagger them to interrupt their actions. One of the earliest examples: the various Security Bots are extremely vulnerable to Electricity damage, and can be easily stunlocked by the Electro-thrower or a nest of Tesla Coils. The Defense Bot in Hydroplant downplays it due to lacking the weakness, and the Corrupted Bots in Reactors avert it entirely, due to being resistant to Electricity.
Encounter Repellant: Placing a crafting table will prevent all enemy spawns in an area, but also make that area susceptible to raids if you're nearby. The table also needs to be powered, so if you want to suppress spawns in an area without outlets, you can use one of the late-game suppressors: Pest Scarecrows for basic Pests, Exor Fetishes for the Exor variants, and Radio Scramblers for Order Soldiers. A powered Symphonist Scarecrow will also turn away all Symphonists.
Energy Weapons: Progressing through the Security sector will grant you access to the Laser Pistol to help banish the Reaper. Once you get to the Neutrino Detector in Hydroplant, you can gain access to the materials that allow you to create more potent laser weaponry, such as the Laser Katana and the Deatomizer, a laser cannon.
Evil Is Visceral: The Flesh Dimension (Anteverse XXXIII) is the origin of the Leyak, a creature with bare organs and a flesh-covered skull for a head. The associated Greyeb is also indicated to be a flesh-based plant, with its fruit being a bundle of eyes and tangled optic nerves. It's downplayed for the Krasue, who looks less gory than the Leyak courtesy of its completely blue coloration.
Exact Time to Failure: If your hunger, thirst, or fatigue meters run out completely, a timer of sixty seconds will start - if you don't correct the issue, you will die immediately as soon as the timer ends. Same for when you're knocked down and need another player to help you up. It also happens if your continence meter runs out - although the result is less lethal but more embarassing.
Experience Booster: The Pet Rock trinket increases your experience by 15% for the lowest-levelled skill you have, while the Kylie trinket increases the experience you get by 10% for ALL skills. There are also certain consumables that increase the experience gain on certain skills for a period of time, and equipment that does the same thing.
Expy:
- The game's unabashedly inspired by Half-Life, so it's not surprising that the enemies you find in the facility can be a bit familiar:
  - The Carbuncle is one to the Barnacles, as stationary enemies that latch onto you with their tongues. However, unlike the Barnacles, Carbuncles don't actually pose a direct threat due to simply being that weak and can just be stomped to death - they also prefer to be on the ground and walls rather than the ceiling.
  - The Pest is one to the Headcrab, as a small enemy that attacks by leaping towards you at high speed - unlike Headcrabs, Pests do not cause zombification, instead simply hurting you with the spikes on their body.
  - The Exors are near identical to Vortigaunts, being humanoid aliens capable of generating lightning attacks from their hands and make liberal use of teleportation. Exor Warriors encountered later take on aspects of the Alien Grunt enemy, being tougher, more mobile, and firing slow-moving projectiles from an organic Arm Cannon. Later in the game you can speak to a non-hostile Exor who further expands on the similarities, showing the Exors are also pawns being driven to attack Earth by an Eldritch Abomination controlling them.
  - The Order as a whole are a reference to the HECU, being human military enemies that show up to 'cleanse' the Facility (though they're a religiously motivated non-governmental military organization, unlike the HECU, which is explicitly US military). Bonus points for them also showing up only later in the game, after you've fought through exclusively alien creatures. With GATE's influences from SCP Foundation, the Order also has quite a few similarities with the Chaos Insurgency.
  - The Crystallisks reference the Black Ops Female Assassin, being hit-and-run glass cannons with cloaking devices. They even act as a fourth-party faction in combat; fighting aliens, soldiers, and the players equally. Another Expy for the Assassins shows up in the last couple areas of the game in the form of the Order Assassins, who run around at high speed, evade with flips and cartwheels, and attack with a flurry of throwing knives.
  - The Deatomizer is effectively a Gluon Gun with an amped up alt-fire that increases both the damage and energy drain of the beam.
  - The final and arguably best full body suit in the game, the Excursion Suit, is an uncolored stand-in for Gordon Freeman's HEV suit. It improves your speed, stamina, aim, general environmental resistance (with protection against radiation, heat, and cold), and includes a double-jump function.
- The Composers are very likely inspired by Sirenhead, as they are giant, lanky humanoid creatures that show up in a fog-shrouded areas and make hellish noises. The area they appear in, Flathill, is a pretty clear expy of Silent Hill. They also have some influence from Lethal Company's Forest Keepers, being large, deceptively-fast Horned Humanoids with ground-shaking steps who will devour the player if they catch them out in the open.
- GATE draws as heavily from the SCP Foundation as it does from Black Mesa. It is a multinational organization dedicated to researching anomalous entities and phenomena. They have enough pull with local government to cover up the disappearance of an entire town as a "chemical spill," and multiple Elaborate Underground Bases around the globe.
Failed a Spot Check: If you try shooting an enemy with a projectile and miss, the enemy will turn to notice where the projectile struck... and that's it. They won't bother investigating further, and will return to their normal routine after a few seconds. This includes if the projectile strikes another enemy, which means you can kill an Order soldier and cause him to scream loudly as he dies, and his nearby buddy will simply turn to look at him for a second before brushing it off completely.
Fake Longevity: Progression in almost every single sector will involve blocking further progress behind an item or an additional keypad hacker tier, requiring the player to scavenge for the unique supplies that are present in the sector and backtrack back to base to create the necessary items (if they do not require even more supplies that are found in other sectors) and come back to progress further. This is most prominent in the Reactor sector which requires a keypad tier, several instances of a crafted radioactive item using the sector's materials, a vertical mobility tool and eventually a significant number of a special type of grenade, all at different points.
- This is also notable in Cascade Laboratories where further progress is gated by inserting 4 Leyak essences, which can only be acquired by crafting either an X-Ray tower or an X-Ray lamp and waiting for the Leyak to spawn at least a few more times.
Fairy in a Bottle: Wisp-like entities called Anomalies will spawn at night. You can catch them bare-handed, but the chance is extremely small; instead, it's much more feasible to use a test tube on them, which guarantees a catch. Either way, the result is an Anomaly trapped in a triangular vial. They can be used to craft compost or a few other devices, or traded to the Blacksmith or Marion. However, they will gradually die over time, leaving behind empty test tubes.
Falling Damage: Falling from too great a height will damage the player and potentially break their leg(s). This doesn't happen if the player was launched by a gaseous nest or jump pad, as these usually send the player higher than their falling tolerance. The bionic legs can also help prevent the breaking of legs when falling, although it obviously won't stop the fall damage taken nor save you from fatal heights.
Fatigue Mechanic: There's a fatigue meter that decreases over time; to restore it, the player has to rest in a chair (which only restores it slowly and partially) or sleep in a couch or bed. Unlike most examples of this, letting the fatigue meter running out entirely will kill you.
First Day from Hell: Downplayed, while the player character has worked for GATE before, the introduction explicitly shows it's their first time in the GATE Cascade Facility. However, their first day involves escaped aliens, anomalies, entering different worlds both alien and somewhat familiar, and fighting against fanatical paramilitary soldiers killing most of their coworkers and causing all sorts of havoc and horrors. If that wasn't enough, a paranormal mercenary group that was meant to help them turn on them and the other researchers instead.
Fishing Minigame: You can build a fishing rod and fish in almost any sizable of liquid in the game, even swimming pools, fountains, and pools of nuclear waste (they ARE all alien fish, and apparently have arrived via teleportation from various anteverses). It's completely optional, though the fish can be butchered for fillets and also some otherwise unobtainable materials that can be used to make useful items.
Five-Second Foreshadowing:
- The first third of the tutorial proceeds smoothly before the security officer in charge of your orientation starts dealing with interruptions by confused radio chatter. A few minutes of learning how to craft later, the entire facility plunges into chaos.
- The introduction to the Labs has the player pass through the Leyak's containment, with a nearby recording from Manse and an email terminal explaining the creature's properties and behaviour. Rather than attack you later, the Leyak starts hunting you down right then.
Foreshadowing: An Order email found in the Control Center describes a Gatekeeper Jotun as "one of GATE's Condottieri," an antiquated term for a mercenary captain. This serves as an early hint that the Gatekeepers are mercaneries who have their own agenda, one that isn't necessarily in line with that of their employers .
Fun with Acronyms: GATE, the organization that owns the facility the game takes place in, stands for "Garrick Advanced Technology Enterprises"^note"Garrick" refers to GATE's founder, Dr. Annette Garrick. The various robot types also have codenames with acronyms:
- Security Robots have the codename "G.A.S.S.", standing for "GATE Automated Security Sentience".
- Containment Robots have the codename "G.A.I.A.", standing for "GATE Automated Immurement Automaton".
- Defense Robots have the codename "G.A.D.D.", standing for "GATE Automated Defense Droid".
- Expedition (Corrupted) Robots have the codename "G.E.A.R.", standing for "GATE Expedition Assistant Robot".
Fungi Are Plants: The Anteverse Wheat is said to actually be a fungus instead of a plant, but it grows just like any other plant in the game. Justified as it's an alien fungus with different properties.

G-L

Gameplay and Story Integration:
- Security Bots drop a whole bunch of useful tech-related goodies that you'll need to progress through the main plot. They also drop an assortment of soda ordinarily only obtainable from vending machines. Why? Their nightly duties include keeping them stocked!
- IS-0017, the Amnesia Threshold, is a wooden doorframe that wipes the memory of anyone who walks through it. Although it's been in the game since the beginning, the Cold Fusion update allows it to be accessed, where it acts as a way to reset your character's traits.
- The "Defense Analyst" role the player can select during character creation makes you a member of the Security team instead of a scientist. The description also says that there's a small rift between you and your egghead colleagues. While the role comes with a massive increase to ranged weapon XP gain, when you take it you'll also be locked into taking the "Slow Learner" trait that reduces your other XP gain and prevents other players from teaching you crafting recipes, meaning you actually will fall behind other players in your intellectual skills.
- The refrigerator has two upgrades, the hazard fridge and the freezer, which prevent radiation leakage and spoilage, respectively. They have fewer inventory slots than the standard fridge for balance purposes; these are explained as the extra radiation shielding/thermal insulation thickening the walls of the container, reducing its storage capacity.
- Raw Greyeb grants you the Temptation of the Flesh debuff, while Greyeb Chowder grants the stronger Desire of the Flesh; anything else involving Greyeb doesn't grant either debuff. The exception is the Cosmato Salad Wrap, which grants the former as of Cold Fusion. This is because it's just a salad wrap made from Greyeb, Tomatos and Space Lettuce, all as raw as they were before being put together.
Gameplay and Story Segregation:
- It's said that the Anteverse II creatures are going mad with hunger, since Earth's universe has a different level of entropy which causes them to get hungry faster. However, your character doesn't lose hunger any more slowly in the Anteverse II portal worlds.
- Snipers have a chance of dropping light gun repair kits. This is despite the fact that the Wessex Snipers they use require intermediate gun repair kits to fix.
- To prevent cheesing Portal Worlds, Jetpacks and Long Jump Packs are disabled until you can clear them for the first time, explained as them requiring a calibration period to adjust to the new portal world. This happens even if said portal world is on Earth in the same universe, such as Flathill or Voussoir. The entirety of Residences disables their use entirely, even after you've completed it.
Gone Horribly Right: The Order invades the Cascade Facility to stop their research and destroy everything they've been working on. They accomplish these objectives, only to find that they are woefully incapable of containing the fallout they've just unleashed.
Goomba Stomp: The Space Queen portal world in the arcade machine, based on early 3D platformers, have enemies that can only be defeated by hopping on their heads.
Gotta Catch 'Em All: Aside from journal entries and soup recipes, the game includes several collectible sets that do nothing besides player satisfaction:
- There are various figurines strewn throughout the game. Some are one-off, like the Blacksmith Bobblehead, while others like the Exor Figurine are found in portal worlds and are therefore renewable. Others are models of vehicles, like the Forklift Replica from the Far Garden.
- The player can find and collect various paintings and photographs, again some being unique and some being renewable.
- Every fish in the game has at least one "rare" variant that requires bait to catch. While these rare variants give double the resources when butchered, the player may opt to display them instead - they can create an aquarium which will prevent the fish from spoiling, and the fish can even be seen swimming inside.
- The player can grow various colors of Antelights. Some colored seeds are easy to find, while the Radiant Antelight requires three rare types of seeds to craft. Growing more seeds to craft the rarer types is also a Luck-Based Mission since sometimes, scrapping an Antelight only gives you one seed, meaning that you'll have to grow it all over it again.
- There are various television sets in the facility that each play a different video.
- To a lesser extent, there are various colored hard-hats, lab masks, and other items you may feel inclined to collect.
- The Space Queen portal world, being styled after a Collect-a-Thon Platformer, contains Royal Coins and Royal Crowns to collect. Grabbing all 25 Royal Coins opens a secret cave that unlocks the Lamogi Sunglasses for character customization.
Gradual Regeneration: In addition to the passive Regenerating Health, using a healing syringe will grant a buff that increases the healing rate. The Healing Briefcase and Dioxohealer upgrade to the Crafting Bench also increase health recovery rates.
Gratuitous Katana: One of the strongest of the sharp-type melee weapons is the Laser Katana, which combines this trope with Sword Beams. What's even more gratuitous is that one of the materials needed to make it is a regular European-style sword taken from the Furniture Store anteverse.
Gratuitous Latin: Half the time, enemy soldiers from the Order will be speaking Latin in their voice lines. Considering they're a Church Militant organization, it makes fairly decent sense.
Gray-and-Gray Morality: Of the main factions in the game, none can really be considered morally superior to the others.
- GATE is a highly secretive organization dedicated to researching groundbreaking-but-dangerous anomalies and technologies. Doctor Manse laments the bellicose mindset of 'the board' while discussing their research on the Peccary, musing that they'll only want to weaponize the beasts. Flathill is a good example of the potential fallout of their research, and they have no problems silencing a former resident of the town because he was getting too close to uncovering the truth about what happened (though there's implications the resident in question is the dude in the Composer disguise you meet in Flathill and all GATE did was just discredit him). An audio log from Dr. Manse found in the Security Sector also confirms that Anteverse 23 is not an alternate dimension - it's Earth, in a Bad Future where GATE accidentally unleashed IS-0102 upon the world. Manse theorizes that it's only a possible future, but it still illustrates the potential fallout of GATE messing with forces it doesn't fully understand.
- GATE are opposed by the Order, Church Militants who have no problems with torturing or killing civilians, throwing the entirety of the Cascade Facility into chaos, or otherwise doing whatever they have to do in order to shut down GATE's research for good. Neither side comes off as having the high ground morally. GATE at least tries to contain the anomalous stuff they discover to minimize damage and loss of life - and the containment failure only happens because, in their zeal to shut down GATE's operations, the Order screwed everything up by removing the Dark Lens. Later areas of the game are rife with the bodies of unarmed GATE employees who were clearly gunned down in cold blood by Order soldiers, especially the Control Sector.
- The Gatekeepers are the most ambiguous faction in the game, but at the very least, they're inveterate transhumanists who are just as cult-like in their outlook as the Order. Most of their available units represent a different means of dehumanizing oneself. Jotun are enhanced by genetic modification and cybernetic implants to the extent that they barely still qualify as humans; Mystagogues and Witches are said to be so tangled up in their own respective enlightenments that they're hardly even capable of communicating with normal humans. Even the Sister of the Unlost is either unwilling or unable to speak in anything other than frustratingly-vague pseudopoetry. The jury's out on how malicious they actually are, though, and there's as much evidence to suggest they're selfish traitors as there is to suggest that they're desperately trying to clamp down on the containment failure before it ends the world.
Greater-Scope Villain: An organization or individual known as Keystone is alluded to by Dr. Manse and some other high-ranking members of GATE. Little is known about them so far, but the context makes it clear that GATE answers to them, not to any government.
- An as-yet-unseen entity known only as The Puppeteer is implied to be behind the Composers, the Symphonists, and the fog phenomena that's overtaken Flathill. It may well be the ruler of Anteverse 1, the first alternate dimension GATE was able to establish a stable Perforation to. The only mention of it in the game thus far comes from the Porcelain Tablet that can be obtained while fishing in Flathill, or occasionally as a rare drop from Symphonists. The Order seem to be more well-acquainted with it, as contacting it is one of the charges leveled against GATE in the First Day trailer.
- Whatever entity is behind IS-0117 and the thing pretending to be Dr. Cahn definitely qualifies. So far, the only things we know about it are that GATE is terrified of it, it has predatory designs on our universe, and it's tied to Anteverse 2 in some way.
The Grim Reaper: The Reaper absolutely looks like one, and certainly lives up to is aesthetic by being basically invincible and trapping unfortunate souls in the Night Realm. It can be banished with the use of lasers, but it'll come back very quickly.
Grows on Trees: At the Rise facility, you can find something called an "Egg" that just looks like a large blue egg. They have shells like eggs, cook like eggs, and can be used in recipes that usually use eggs. Turns out that you can scrap it for "Egg Seeds" and plant them, which grows nests of eggs. Justified in that it's probably just an alien plant that grows fruit that happen to be similar to eggs.
Guide Dang It!:
- The game's crafting system encourages you to try to pick everything up at least once, otherwise you might miss out on useful ideas and items.
- Getting the Kylie Muir trinket involves an underwater section of the Hydroplant, hidden behind a few crates in the Dock, which is easy to miss if you decided you don't want more of those resources.
Hammerspace: The Void Pack and Pocket Dimension essentially work off of this trope. The latter is currently the most spacious backpack, adding as many inventory spaces as the UI can allow.
Hamster-Wheel Power: You can tame a pest using the pest trap and some nachos or Anteverse Wheat. After that, you can shove it into a device called a "Pest Wheel". It even has a power cable on it that allows you to hook it up to a machine to give it power in a pinch.
Hard Light: The Gatekeepers use these, either as full-body barriers or projected walls in front of them. If you defeat them and obtain some drops, you're also able to make these for yourself, including an arm-mounted "wall" variation and a full-body barrier variation, as well as use them to make bridges and droppable barricades.
Harmless Enemy: In the Praetorium portal world, there are Order members called Archivists that do nothing but run away scared.
Harmless Freezing: You can make Slushie Bombs that can be thrown to temporarily freeze enemies in a small radius. If you're caught in this radius, however, you'll freeze yourself.
Hand Cannon: The Captains not only stand out thanks to their red berets but also for their revolvers called the Talagi Magnum. They hurt a lot if they get a good shot at the player. There is also the rare chance that they will drop these revolvers upon death, however they necessitate the use of bio-metric armwraps to be used. Once available and equipped, they are one of the strongest weapons in the game as they deal a whopping 100 damage, and any unfortunate enemy upon the wrong end of its barrel will absolutely feel it.
Hazmat Suit: A full selection of protective full-body suits are available, ranging from the original-flavor Hazmat which protects against both radiation and airborne infection, the shiny aluminum Fire Proximity Suit which protects against heat and fire, the Rat Suit which is a copy of the hazmat suit that more resembles a military NBC uniform, a Diving Suit which is a frogman suit that lets you swim faster and breathe underwater, the Beekeeper suit which (obviously) protects you from bees, and the Sapper Suit a variant of the Rat Suit that's more for protecting against explosives rather than hazardous materials.
- Interestingly, the game plays them far more realistically than most video game examples by obstructing the edges of the player's view and applying the "Stuffy Suit" debuff that reduces your movement speed and causes your thirst to deplete faster, discouraging the player from wearing it unless the hazard they protect against is actually present.
Healing Herb: Anteverse Wheat is said in-game to possibly have healing properties. Sure enough, they're used to make healing syringes and healing briefcases.
Heavily Armored Mook: Gatekeeper Jotuns are huge, heavily armored juggernauts that resemble a cross between a Space Marine and Frank Horrigan, armed with an energy minigun and a forward-facing energy shield that needs to be brought down before they can be damaged.
He Knows Too Much: An email found in Flathill implies that a displaced resident of the town was assassinated to cover up what happened there. This is presumably the same person with a String Theory board in his garage. Though he could also be the weirdo wearing the Composer disguise that you meet right before your first Composer encounter, which implies the GATE researchers simply had him either discredited or he somehow survived the assassination attempt. An email you find in Shadowgate implies the String Theory resident was either killed or captured by the Gatekeepers, while Marion (the guy in the Composer disguise) was dismissed as a harmless kook Not Worth Killing, presumably because his conspiracy theories were too inaccurate to be a threat.
Helpful Mook:
- The Coworker, a passive entity that appears at night. You'd be forgiven for thinking that the nocturnal weirdo crawling around on all fours Exorcist-style and talking about how we've all got larvae to feed is an enemy, but he's quite harmless. If you feed him, he may return the favor with a random office-type loot item. Since he'll eat absolutely anything edible other than human body parts, this is usually a good trade-up, and allows him to function as a kind of garbage disposal.
- The Moving Box is a creepy but friendly Chest Monster who picks up items dropped on the ground. It has a small inventory you can access, which could be useful for storing emergency supplies.
Hub Level: The Office sector is this, with easy access to every other sector and generally weaker enemies than what you'll encounter in most locations.
Human Resources: Defense Robots have a rare (1%) chance to drop human skulls, implying that GATE resorted to less-than-orthodox means to get them working.
Humongous-Headed Hammer: While the Thermal Mallet and Sledgehammer have reasonably sized heads, the Explosive Sledge and Impact Hammer have very large hammerheads, mostly because said heads are actually loaded with machinery that can either explode or add an extra pneumatic kick to your swing.
An Ice Person: IS-0091-B, the Krasue, is an ice-themed variant of the Leyak that only appears in cold environments. If you don't scare it off within ten seconds, it freezes you solid. If you can contain it, it requires ice cream to keep it contained rather than Greyeb like the standard Leyak.
Impossible Item Drop: Some craftable items, upon being scrapped, will give you back an item that you never used to build it. For example, salvaging a Pocket Dimension will give you an Ion Battery, even though you didn't use an Ion Battery to make it. This is most likely because the recipe originally called for an Ion Battery before it was changed at some point in development.
Improvised Armour: Just like with the weaponry, the starting armor and even higher tier armors are just cobbled together from all sorts of materials. Special mention goes to the Employee of the Month set, which consists of hardcover books and thick magazines duct-taped to your limbs, a disassembled filing cabinet as a chestplate, and a modified frying pan for a helmet.
Improvised Weapon: Most of the gear you'll be using to defend yourself is either pieces of furniture (desk leg), heavy tools, or more commonly just cobbled together from whatever you're able to scavenge from the GATE Facility. A good example is the Pipe Club, which is exactly what it sounds like - several sturdy pipes superglued together, with a big metal pressure gauge as an improvised mace head. The later-game crafted weapons are really just more sophisticated versions, as you're essentially improvising railguns, IEDs, and laser pistols out of stuff you found in a Mad Scientist Laboratory.
Inexplicably Preserved Dungeon Meat: All food items you find out in the overworld are perfectly fresh, including fresh apples on the ground in Canaan, un-melted buckets of ice cream in abandoned towns with no refrigeration, and cooked porkchops that have been sitting on trays for God-knows-how-long. Naturally, they all start decaying the second you pick them up.
Infinity -1 Sword: The Deatomizer is a laser cannon that can be overcharged to deal immense damage at the cost of burning much more quickly through its stored laser power and is available during Hydroplant. The fact that it packs such a massive punch and also uses replenishable laser power makes it a good weapon for the rest of the game. Many enemies in Reactors, however, have shields that take less damage from lasers, so it is a good idea to pair it with another weapon when facing them.
Infinity +1 Sword: Not a weapon, but rather a piece of equipment, the Excursion Suit is an optional full body suit armor that requires a long list of materials to make^note and is only available in the final stretch of the game before the Final Boss, conferring double jumping, increased movement speed, decreased stamina use, increased accuracy and some radiation resistance.
Instant Container: Some foods provide a container upon creation, such as the bowls of Fr-eyed Rice. Especially noticeable with some of the baked goods, which generate entire baking trays from nothing.
Interchangeable Antimatter Keys: There are few types of locked crates in the game, and each one requires a specific type of key to open. Naturally, any key can unlock any crate as long as the types match, and also naturally, each key is only good for one use. Some keys, however, have other uses, such as trading or crafting.
In-Universe Game Clock: An unusual variant of the trope: since almost the entire game is set in an underground facility, a day and night cycle wouldn't normally matter - instead here, when night-time arrives, the Facility enters a 'power conservation' mode, shutting off all the lights and power sockets as well as freeing dangerous Security Bots all over the place.
Invincible Boogeymen:
- At a certain point in the game, your progress unleashes the Leyak, an indestructible Flying Face that selects a random player to "haunt" every few in-game hours. It cannot be permanently stopped; however, you have two defenses against it - staring at it causes it to stop moving, vanishing after a few seconds. X-ray emitters can also make it de-materialize, but it will eventually return. If you get too close to it without the latter, then it will attack, and the former option stops working. Your only choice then is to run. The Halloween Update provides at least an additional method by containing the Leyak in a glass confinement unit, effectively removing it from play, but this will only work for as long as you keep the confinement unit supplied with "biological reinforcement" semi-frequently otherwise it'll escape... and it still needs to be lured into the thing. And just when you thought you've finally stopped it... a second Leyak, the Krasue, will start haunting you in cold environments.
- In the Security Sector, you encounter the Reaper, a cloaked figured with two scythe-like arms in the style of The Grim Reaper, which is a significantly more aggressive entity that doesn't take any real damage (it can flinch if it takes enough damage and even seems to bleed, but in reality it's basically invincible), and one of Dr. Manse's logs indicates that nobody's figured out how to take it down. It will continuously patrol in the player's current area, and when the player is heard or sighted, they will aggressively give chase, both attempting to attack and grab players to send them to its portal world, the "Night Realm". If players fail to sneak around it, the only way to escape is to either flee the area, use one of the Reaper's portals to escape into the Night Realm where it won't give chase, or use a laser-based weapon to banish it for a short time, which resets it back to its neutral patrol state but it returns within a minute.
Invisible Wall: Not many, but they can be found here and there.
- Areas like Flathill are surrounded by invisible barriers, so even if you have the jetpack or something that would allow you to scale the fences, you won't be able to leave the fog.
- Even though it looks like you can jump out of trams, there are walls that block you from jumping out/warp you back into the tram.
- The Night Realm has invisible walls that prevent you from simply flying around the maze-like layout with a jetpack.
- The Hydroplant Sector overlooks the Power Services area. Trying to jump down to Power Services from the Hydroplant will kill you, but trying to climb up to the Hydroplant from Power Services will see you stopped by an invisible ceiling.
- There are various parts of the facility's cave roof that look like sunlight is shining through. Since your goal is to escape the underground facility, what happens if you try to aim a hardlight bridge all the way up there? Sorry, you and the bridge will both get stopped by an invisible ceiling.
Jar Potty: Warren, the security guard stationed at the main lobby's kiosk, is very adamant on not wanting to leave it - to the point that you can actually find a plastic bucket full of his waste on it. Also, in the Hydroplant Sector, one of the areas that has an Ornate Crate has two military cots, a bucket on the corner and soil bags, implying that whatever Order soldier was stationed up there had to make do with those instead.
Jet Pack: Players can eventually craft these once they've made their way to Reactors. They make traversal much, much easier, but don't hold quite as much inventory space as other backpacks and need to be recharged every so often. Also, any Anteverse where they could potentially be used to sequence break causes them to stop working to 'recalibrate to the new atmosphere' until you've completed the level the normal way. Before that, reaching the Hydroplant and gaining access to materials in that area allows the player to craft the Long Jump Pack, which allows the player to Double Jump. While it doesn't reach as high as the Jet Pack, the Long Jump Pack allows the player to move laterally much more effectively and quickly if paired with the Gravity Cube. Before the 1.0 full release the Jetpack was needed to craft the Long Jump Pack, but now they've swapped around.
Just Add Water: Given that it's a survival crafting game, many crafting recipes are simplified, fantastical, or both. Want to build a wall-mounted lamp? Just combine a metal pipe, some electronic scrap, and some glass. Don't ask how you're able to shape the light bulb or metal without any heat. Interestingly, many of the makeshift items you create have their components clearly identifiable - for example, the fishing rod has a ruler as its pole and two telephone receivers as the grip and reel handle.
Knight Templar: The Order are an entire faction of Knight Templars. They are entirely convinced that GATE and their research both need to be destroyed utterly, and most of them remain convinced of this even after their bumbling unleashes a potentially-apocalyptic portal storm on Earth and traps everybody in the Cascade Facility. The only Order member who seems to be capable of asking questions before they start shooting is Hasta Tria, a high-ranking Lab Rat who wants to escape and warn his superiors that they don't know what they're messing with.
Kung Fu-Proof Mook: The enemies hailing from the Space Queen arcade machine are immune to normal attacks, and are only vulnerable to being jumped on.
Land Down Under: The Cascade facility is located in the Australian Outback. The tutorial's introduction features a brief drive across the surface; between the driver being on the right rather than the left (a consistent feature of vehicles in the facility itself), roadsigns warning of kangaroos, the large number of Australians staffing the facility, and the large number of deadly monsters roaming around, any Aussie players are sure to feel right at home.
Laser-Guided Amnesia: IS-0017, the Amnesia Threshold, is a doorway that causes people who walk through it to forget days up to years of their memories. The amount of memory it wipes is dependent on the speed someone moves through the doorway and the time of year. In the Archive Interview video for IS-0017, a GATE researcher walks through the doorway and immediately forgets why he's there or who his colleagues are. It's an exaggeration of the real-life phenomenon of people forgetting what they were just doing when walking through a doorway. Also, as detailed under Gameplay and Story Integration above, the Cold Fusion update allows players to use it to reset their jobs and skill points, but also resets all their skill levels to 3^note.
Laughing Mad: The Gatekeeper Witch who makes an annonuncement over the PA system the first time you enter the Reactor Sector. She's way too happy about the containment failure. This is especially notable, as the only other Witch who says anything to the Player is the eloquent, enigmatic, collected Sister of the Unlost.
Witch: (Evil Laugh) Good MORNING, CHILDREN! What a beautiful day in the depths of creation! Your fate is our concern, so PLEASE, have an extraordinary 24 hours. Whether you live to see another day...or NOT!
Lightning Gun: The Electro-Thrower, as the name implies is pretty much the lightning equivalent to a flamethrower, with its description detailing it as a supercharged electricity-throwing short-range cannon.
Living Drawing: IS-0042, the Lost Dog, appears to be some sort of life-form that's able to spread from painting to painting, causing a dog to appear in it when there was none originally. IS-0235 (the Tape Wisp) and IS-0307 (the Game Sprite) are similar but inhabit video cassettes and devices, respectively.
Living Weapon: You'll eventually meet friendly creatures called Skinks, which you can refashion into acid-spitting cannons (that you can pet) fueled by radioactive waste. Later you'll find that all of the Anteverse 2 creatures are this, as they've been created to invade other anteverses by IS-0117.
Logical Weakness: Security Bots are very dangerous, but their AI is specifically mentioned as being so simplistic they can't even be given basic IFF functionality. This is why they attack employees as readily as they do intruders. For the same reasons, they aren't smart enough to avoid traps, even really obvious ones; they will happily blunder through an obstacle course of traps to try and reach you. Just make sure you have enough traps that they can't face-tank all the damage. Later, if you can open up a Security Crate, you can get the Night Pass, which causes the security robots (and their stronger counterparts) to ignore you unless you provoke them.
Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Shields are a gear item that have their own slot near the armor slots. It can defend against all non-energy incoming attacks, including gunfire. Blocking attacks completely negates all damage for their respective types, instead transferring the damage to both the shield and the player's stamina bar instead. As of Cold Fusion, they also vary in weight which change how much damage they can block at once; a dinky little cafeteria tray is just as effective at blocking swipes as a heater shield embued with alien portal-inducing energy, but you'll need a riot shield if you want to block a shotgun blast.

M-R

MacGyvering: To a degree that would do the original MacGyver proud. The protagonists are highly-educated, intelligent men and women of science, so it's not surprising that they prove very resourceful when put into a life-and-death situation. Makeshift armor and weaponry, improvised tripmines, shock traps, crossbows, and explosives, and scrap-metal energy bricks are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the things you can craft.
Magical Eye: The Mystagogues are the most "magical" of the Gatekeepers, constantly hovering and using flames to attack. They are surrounded by Mystagogue Eye drones that provide combat support. Mystagogues themselves have one glowing eye in their helmets, and these can be harvested if you scrap their severed heads, revealing that their glowing eye is identical to the ones dropped by their drones.
Magical Particle Accelerator: The Synchrotron is a giant particle accelerator in the Manufacturing Sector, and the player is required to "overload" it to continue. When the player does manage to overload it, it creates a miniature black hole, which carves into the surrounding area and destroys the Synchrotron in the process, opening the way to the Labs sector.
Magic Mirror: The World in the Mirror is a portal world accessed through a mirror. It leads to an underground bunker below an endless grassy field under a blue sky. There's not much in it besides said underground bunker and a GATE control box with a single power outlet, so it's essentially a large open area to build a base with no risk of invasion.
Magnetic Weapons: A Power Cell and some scrap, and you can craft man-portable magnetic firearms that are capable of taking down fully-armored soldiers! In 1993, no less! Later in-game you can also create a crossbow that launches bolts made of rebar using magnets.
Mêlée à Trois: The extradimensional creatures, Order soldiers, and Gatekeeper soldiers are all hostile to each other as well as to the player. Additionally, creatures from different dimensions will be hostile towards each other, as can be seen with creatures like the Symphonist or Crystallisk, who will attack Anteverse II creatures as well as humans.
Metal Slime: The Lab Rats are arguably this. They appear much less frequently than their Order brethren; unlike the soldiers, they spawn alone rather than in groups. When encountered, they opt to flee rather than fight, dropping a variety of useful but basic materials as they run - they'll only fight back after being attacked, and even then, they tend to only land a single strike before running again... and they can run at least as fast as an unaided player. If you can immobilize them with a net and kill them with a blunt weapon, they'll drop their Rat Pack, which is the biggest backpack obtainable at the point that they're first encountered. Even after the Rat Pack loses its place to bigger backpacks, they still have the important role of dropping basic crafting materials - in fact, as you progress through the game, they'll start dropping more advanced materials that you'd otherwise have to go out of your way to get, all while spawning in earlier-game locations.
Mighty Glacier: Security Bots are big, tanky, resist blunt damage and have hefty attacks that can stun players, but they're also slow enough that you can easily kite them around, either running away from them or leading them into traps they won't even attempt to avoid.
Money for Nothing: While you can collect money in this game, it doesn't show up often, and the only things to spend it on are slushies, coffee, sodas, and snacks from vending machines. While slushies are useful for slushie bombs and some snacks can be used to cook with, none of these are ever required to progress the game. Makes sense, as you're trapped in an underground facility and cut off from the rest of the world, and survival is more important - you'll probably find yourself bartering with the in-game traders for supplies far, far more often.
Mook Maker: The player is able to build a "pest teleporter", which teleports a pest onto it when enough anteverse wheat is placed in its hopper. Since pests can be tamed, this allows the player to tame pests in places where they otherwise don't spawn.
Mundane Utility: The X-ray Lamp is a hefty two-handed device used primarily for extracting the essence of semi-insubstantial enemies like the Leyak and Reaper. It can also function as an impromptu, if distorted, emergency flashlight.
New Resource Midgame: Initially, all your devices require electricity to function. As you progress through the game, you can create stronger batteries, bigger plug splitters, Crystalline Vials and Field Batteries that recharge your items on the fly, and portable battery chargers. At that point, you might think that your power issues are done with... and then you're introduced to devices that require laser input to function. Laser devices can't be recharged with electricity, meaning your Crystalline Vials and Field Batteries don't work on them, and normal charging stations and outlets are of no use. You'll have to start setting up a system of laser emitters, beam splitters, reflectors, and laser collectors to power your new laser-based weapons and deployables.
- To a lesser extent this is happening constantly with new crafting resources as the player progresses through the game. Each area of the faucility and portal world introduces at least one new resource (and more often than not several) that is usually required in a significant amount to unlock access to the next area.
N.G.O. Superpower: GATE has multiple secret facilities around the world, covered up the disappearance of an entire township as a 'chemical spill', and wields immense scientific and technological prowess. Dr. Manse outright muses in one audio-log that the only other group on Earth who could actually go toe-to-toe with GATE and win is the Order. This comes with the territory of being an SCP Foundation Expy.
No Biochemical Barriers:
- About 95% of the food items in this game, including the recipes, contain at least one alien ingredient. While raw alien meats can give you food poisoning as expected (as well as a bit of radiation), alien vegetables (except for the Egg) are perfectly safe to eat off the plant, even the gross meaty eyeball-pomegranate-things.
- Neatly averted with one email that discusses IS-0173, the Pest. The Pest and its relatives hail from Anteverse II, whose defining characteristic is that all energy is slower than in contemporary reality. The Pests, Carbuncles and Peccaries found in our world are so hostile because they're being driven mad with hunger since they evolved with faster metabolisms.
- On the other hand, said Anteverse II enemies have no problem surviving in Earth's atmosphere, and the player characters have no problems surviving in Anteverse II aside from the occasional environmental radiation or heat. In addition, Pests love nachos and have no problem eating them. Possibly justified for the Anteverse II creatures, as they're bioweapons engineered specifically to adapt quickly to other universes so that they can be invaded and taken over.
- The Coworker will also eat most edible items, despite definitely not being human and also likely not being from Anteverse II.
Nobody Poops: Utterly averted: 'continence' is one of the survival bars alongside hunger, thirst and fatigue, turning the various toilets around the facility into a precious commodity for continued exploration. Avoid taking care of your continence enough, and, well... hopefully you made your character with brown pants.
Non-Indicative Name:
- The Cooking Pot's recipes are called 'Soups', making you assume that you can only get food from them - but you also obtain items that are definitely not edible from them, like solder, that are still counted as 'soups'. In a more mundane example, you can also just cook rice in a pot yet the game still identifies the recipe for it as soup.
- Power outlets in the game are referred to as "sockets" but actually come in the form of plugs on extendable cords.
- Butchering certain fish will give you an item called an "Antejuice Sac". While they're ostensibly filled with liquid antejuice, there's no way to extract the juice, and the sacs' uses^notecrafting bleach do not overlap at all with the fluid's uses^noteapiculture, cooking, drinking.
- Despite their names and appearances, Plutonic Blood and Plutonic Carapaces do not emit radiation (although they can be crafted into Transuranic Superalloys, which ARE radioactive).
No-Sell: The enemies at Voussoir, being acclimatized to the cold of the alps, are naturally immune to being frozen. In general, the game's damage type system causes certain enemies to be immune to certain damage types; for example, Symphonists are immune to electricity.
No Snack for You: There are various vending machines around the facility that sell snacks or drinks for $1, as well as slushie machines and coffee machines. However, they can reject your money if they run out of stock, or sometimes just randomly.
Not Completely Useless: Gastro Medicine borders on Joke Item territory. To craft it, one must go out of their way to obtain honey, which requires either destroying dangerous beehives or building your own and providing them with antejuice. After crafting it, you'll find that it cures a grand total of one status condition: borborygmus, which can only be obtained if you actively choose to consume an item called bad soup. Needless to say, most players will never be in a situation where they need Gastro Medicine.
Nothing Is Scarier: The concept behind IS-0700, "The Presence." Initially discovered in a janitor's supply closet, it's not clear if the Presence is alive, aware, or even hostile. The only thing the player experiences when entering its containment chamber is a dark room with a constant low, indistinct noise - not unlike wind across a microphone or an inner ear rumble. Mechanically, the Presence is completely harmless, and its cell ironically makes for a decent spot to build an outpost. In-Universe, its effects are described as "unbearable," and the janitor who discovered it is on unspecified medical leave.
Not Using the "Z" Word: Parodied. One email conversation that can be read after escaping the Furniture Store involves a scientist named Kathy deriding her colleagues for referring to people infected by IS-102 as "zombies", finding the term to be a bit cliche. Her coworker fires back that for the lack of a better term, that's pretty much what they exactly are, even referencing the film Night Of The Living Dead (presumably its 1990 remake).
Obvious Rule Patch:
- The Jetpack and Long Jump Packs are disabled in Portal Worlds until you complete them for the first time, explained as an "equipment failure" from the pack needing to calibrate to the new portal world. Out-of-universe, it prevents players from sequence breaking to breeze through the portal world on their first run.
- Beehives don't work if you put them too close together, explained as the bees being "too busy fighting with their neighbors" to generate honey. This forces the player to dedicate a good-sized area to beekeeping instead of just cramming a bunch of them all as close as possible. Fishing traps have the same issue.
Old Area, New Enemies: As you progress through the game, later-game enemies will start to spawn in earlier-game areas. This allows you to defeat them for resources without having to make the trip back to the sectors they usually spawn in.
Ominous Fog: Flathill is shrouded in a thick blanket of obfuscating white fog. You don't need to worry about the fog, you need to worry about what's hiding in it. Collecting the Power Cells in Flathill will cause the Fog Phenomenon event to begin occurring every few in-game weeks within the facility. Although, the fog becomes rather beneficial and return trips can become less tedious if one equips the Fog Lantern trinket.
One-Hit Kill:
- If a Composer grabs the player, they'll eat the player whole, killing them instantly. On the other hand, once you get the Rocket Launcher, you can turn this around on them because the rockets bypass normal damage calculation to destroy them in a single shot.
- Sappers will attempt a Suicide Attack if you take too long to kill them. If you're caught in the explosion, it'll instantly take you out.
Only Six Faces: There are 12 head options for character creation, and all NPCs in the game, including major story characters, use one of these heads, although having different hair also expands the ability to make them look different from each other.
Organ Drops: A vital part of the game's crafting and food systems is butchering corpses for parts. Pests and peccaries for their meat^noteBe mindful however that they are quite radioactive, security bots for their hardware, Exors for their teleportation-enabling hearts and quills, Order soldiers for their skulls, brains and arms...
- Symphonists (and Composers, once you're able to kill them with rocket launchers) can also drop an organ called an "organ" which, befitting their musical theme, is essentially a small organic pump organ instrument.
Organic Technology: The Lodestones are partially made out of flesh. The archive video on Deep Field's Youtube channel indicates that the Lodestones are theorized to be from Anteverse XXXIII, the Flesh Dimension.
Outside-the-Box Tactic: In order to open the portal to the Rise facility, you need to enter the Laser Lab in the Labs Sector and hit a purple portal with a laser beam. There's a laser beam right next to the portal and schematics for the laser reflector nearby, suggesting that the "proper" way to do the puzzle is to place a laser reflector in just the right place to deflect the laser beam into the portal. However, you can also come back later with the Energy Pistol weapon or anything else that shoots lasers, and simply aim at the portal and fire - it works just as well.
Peninsula of Power Leveling:
- Security robots are considerably tougher than other enemies, and defeating them and obtaining their CPUs is required to craft certain items needed to progress. One particular security bot in the Office sector near the Flathill portal world entrance, however, happens to respawn just a short ways down the hall from a water spill electrified by a hanging wire. Since it runs straight towards you when aggroed, with some careful platforming it can be goaded into this electrified water spill, where it will continually take damage and eventually die trying to reach you, dropping its CPU. This trick can be repeated once the security bot respawns to farm as many CPUs, soda cans and metal scrap pieces as you need. A similar strategy can be used later on in the Hydroplant, where an incredibly-dangerous and upgraded defense robot can be lured into a warehouse and tricked into a fight with a Composer, which cannot be killed.
- Once you reset the security system in the Control Center, the turrets immediately turn on the Order soldiers that have hunkered down there. Not only does this allow you to claim a large safe area filled with valuable resources as a base and loot their corpses, there is also a Breacher who respawns in a small server room next to the main atrium. While powerful, he can be lured out of this server room directly into the main area, where he is rather quickly gunned down by the security turrets. This can be repeated every so often to farm for shotguns, shotgun shells and human soldier arms needed to craft an item to wield said shotguns.
- Fortitude can only be levelled up by taking damage - fortunately, there's an electrified pool of water near a check-in station on the third floor of the Office Sector. Simply offload all your items so you don't lose them and all your armor so they don't break, set your respawn point to the check-in station, and jump in the water until you die. Respawn, and repeat ad infinitum.
- Symphonists are extremely dangerous enemies to encounter, but are completely blind and won't react to you at all if you simply sneak by them while crouching. This means that you can pretty safely and easily grind your crouching level around them - just hold the sneak key and move around for as long as you feel like. If you want their drops, you can also lure one to the aforementioned security turrets when they spawn during a fog event (but not the electrified water, since they're immune to electricity).
Player Nudge: In the Reactors, the player is tasked with fixing the four titular reactors: Dusk, Gale, Cloud and Mist. Dusk is the first reactor accessed, Cloud is the first of the latter three you'll pass by, and Mist is found at the end of the left tram's track. By contrast, Gale has no direct means of accessing it as the right tram ends before reaching its station. That's where you'll find Hank, who is feverishly trying to build a bridge over to Gale Reactor, indicating that bridging is one of the only ways to get to it.
Power at a Price:
- Drinking coffee will restore your fatigue meter, but also decrease your continence meter^note.
- Greyebs and Greyeb Chowder increase your damage resistance, but causes the Leyaks to show up far more often. This can be negated by containing them.
- The Reactor Armor increases your movement speed and health regeneration, but only while you're irradiated. The more irradiated you are, the greater the bonuses.
- The Corn Husk Doll reduces your hunger drain, but also your max health.
- Wearing heavy armor slows you down, but gives you Strength XP. Likewise, Hazmat suits and the like provide protection, but causes you to dehydrate faster.
Power Nullifier: Null Grenades are used to short out the hardlight barriers in the Shadowgate portal world, but they can also be used to shut down the hardlight shields of the Gatekeepers.
Powerful Pick: When entering Manufacturing West, the pickaxe is one of the new weapons that can be found inside. Progressing further will allow you to craft the Carbon Pickaxe, stronger than the normal pickaxe and uses less stamina when swung.
Power-Up: Every positive effect is temporarily granted by consuming items or based on specific equipment. Unusually, there is one permanent power-up - touching the Sun Disk provides a permanent boost to cold resistance, making it easier to progress through the frozen-over Residences. It's also heavily implied that the player is also spreading this upgrade to the NP Cs they run into.
Power-Up Food: Most of the soups that the player can cook give some passive buff, such as reduced hunger and thirst drain, increased XP gain in one or two categories, or increased carrying capacity. The Greyeb and Greyeb Chowder gives the player damage reduction, but causes the Leyaks to attack more often. Certain foods also give out buffs, such as the apple pie, where a slice of it can help your recover your health faster.
Puppeteer Parasite: One of Dr. Manse's audio logs mentions that IS-0139, the Crystalisk, is actually the host for a swarm of microscopic spider-like crystal parasites. It's unclear to the Gate scientists whether the Crystalisks' hostility is innate to them or a sign that the parasites are influencing them to become more violent.
Purely Aesthetic Gender: The player can choose their "gender" by selecting one of two voices, and design their character to be either male or female-presenting; however, the player is free to avoid conforming to any gender, and it has no effect on gameplay.
Random Drop Booster: The Spuddy trinket increases the drops you get from defeated enemies, while the Sigil of the Hearth maximizes the ammo dropped from Order Soldiers on top of giving you an in-combat speed boost.
Regenerating Shield, Static Health: Although health also regenerates slowly, you're eventually able to create a "Hardlight Shield Generator"^note, which is able to project a defensive barrier which breaks after sustaining some damage, but does recharge over time much faster than your health.
Religious Bruiser: The Order is a highly-organized, well-equipped paramilitary organization, and their use of religious language and terminology strongly implies they are, on some level, Church Militants. The Story Breadcrumbs available concerning them imply their organization is rooted in Gnosticism, an idea supported by their use of Gnostic iconography. They oppose anybody who would propagate the spread of chaos or delve too deeply into forbidden knowledge. Naturally, this brings them into conflict with GATE.
- The residents of Caanan are all fanatical members of the Lodeite cult, which worships a piece of alien tech called the Lodestone. Every single one of them is also homicidally suspicious of outsiders and will attack you quite effectively despite being armed only with farm tools and crossbows.
Remote Vitals Monitoring: If you have a high enough cooking level, you'll be able to see your fellow players' thirst and hunger meters. Likewise, if you have a high enough first aid level, you'll be able to see their medical debuffs.
Renegade Splinter Faction: The Canaanites follow an unorthodox form of Gnosticism based on the Order's belief system. This is the result of Niketas's independent interpretation of what he heard from an apostate Inquisitor. An email found in the Security Sector even suggests that the Order thinks Niketas could have been an outstanding recruit under the right circumstances.
Respawning Enemies: Areas repopulate with enemies at a relatively steady rate, about every day or so.
Rewarding Vandalism: Be it breaking apart boxes for the contents or the wooden planks they're made of or smashing aparts computers to scavenge the components, vandalizing the facility is well-rewarded. Furniture can also be destroyed with either a weapon or a hammer for their materials.
Rock Monster: Crystalisks and Power Leeches are made out of gemstones. Composers, Symphonists, and the Moving Box (and the Chordfish by extension) also seem to be made out of some sort of organic porcelain.

S-Z

Science Hero: The player character being a scientist is not just for flavor - a major mechanic is creating new inventions to craft and getting inspirations for said inventions by picking up new materials and items. This is enforced by the developers, explaining the game's bias against military weapons and preference towards scientific weapons.
Scientist Video Journal: The player can find numerous holograms of Dr. Derek Manse throughout the game, which provide information on the world or hints at what to do, or how to deal with certain enemies.
Schizo Tech: The game takes place in 1993, according to your PDA, but you'd never know it to look at the GATE Facility. Autonomous bipedal security robots, inter-dimensional teleportation, Magnetic Weapons, and other advanced technology exist side-by-side with CRT monitors, pagers, and computer banks. One of the emails even has Abe and Janet discuss the uprising technology known as the "world wide web," found through a terminal in an area that houses four super-powered reactors while the player has access to teleportation, Hardlight and laser blades!
Schmuck Bait: There's a great variety of useful soups that you can cook in the pots, but if you decide to fill the pots with poisonous and dangerous ingredients like plastic, lead bullets, or broken glass, you'll get something called toxic soup or killer soup. Take a wild guess what it does when you drink it.
- Poop Soup is a variant of Toxic Soup made by cooking a bag of feces in your soup. The item's description will even ask you to reconsider by stating "Please don't cook this." Ignoring the suggestion and doing so grants the cooked version with the description, "Oh wait, you did." along with, "What on earth are you thinking?!"
Sea Monster: The Darkwater Beast resides in the murky waters of the Hydroplant, and has unpredictable behavior. Sometimes it ignores you, sometimes it attacks. Having maxed-out fishing will cause it to go passive.
Sequel Hook: After beating the final boss, Janet mentions losing track of Abe and setting off to find him, and Dr. Riggs invites the player to join her at some other "cozy" anteverse. The Sister, while cryptic as ever about it, says that this is not the end of the story despite the scientists' role having been fulfilled.
Sequence Breaking: If the player knows how, they can skip certain sections of the game outright, such as getting into Silo 3 without going to Far Garden first through a vent. The Jetpack makes this even more pronounced; see something far off, or a wall? You can just fly over. Downplayed for portal worlds, as Jetpacks and Long Jump Packs are disabled on their first runs of each world specifically to prevent this, though it becomes possible on subsequent runs.
Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: Many of the entities have their own separate factions; from the Order Soldiers, Security Bots and Gatekeepers, Immurement Subjects from different Anteverses, and much more. That totals to about five or more separate factions you'll come across frequently and they're all just as hostile towards each other as they are to the player. There's also a Composer in the Hydroplant that will try to kill anything that it sees entering the warehouse that it's trapped in. Having trouble with the Defense Robots? Lead it to the Composer!
Shield-Bearing Mook: Rooks are Order Soldiers who prefer attacking with knives while defending themselves with large riot shields. You can shoot them in the legs, but after a while they'll start crouching to protect themselves fully. Fortunately, their shield can be penetrated by projectiles with elemental effects, which includes everything from fire bullets to acid darts.
Shop Fodder: As of the Dark Energy update, Axle Grease and Tiny Gears have absolutely no use (not even for crafting) aside from being exchanged to the various traders in the game.
Short-Range Shotgun: This applies to all three shotgun-type weapons. The Scrapshot, Antique, and Romag shotguns all have high spread but exceptional burst damage at close range, with the ability to take out most human enemy types with a single well-placed headshot regardless of your accuracy level, making it ideal for stealth kills and ambushes.
Shotguns Are Just Better:
- The Antique Shotgun (IS-0099) is an old break-action shotgun which at one point was responsible for vaporizing an entire cone in front of it roughly equivalent to one-and-a-half square kilometers! You can actually get your hands on it in the Containment Wing, but (un)fortunately the powerful effect was one-time and it only functions as a normal (if effective) shotgun in the present. As of the Cold Fusion update, however, you can restore it to some of its former glory by upgrading it into the "Polished Antique Shotgun", which gives it a 2% chance of dealing ten thousand damage in a massive range in front of it (for comparison, this is over eight times as strong as a rocket launcher and over three hundred times stronger than the Antique Shotgun's normal output).
- The Romag shotgun is the main weapon for the Breachers of the Order, and mixed with their heavy armor can make them a very deadly enemy. The shotgun is a rare drop but if acquired while also having access to the Bio-Metric armwraps, then the player can make use of it. While it's weaker than the Antique Shotgun, the Romag having the ability to load six shells and having decent-damage means it's still a potent scattergun.
- Gatekeeper Witches all wield unlootable shotguns. Witches in particular are the most unique of the Gatekeepers as they only appear as enemies in the second last Portal World, Shadowgate, meaning that they're going to be the last Gatekeeper type you'll come across.
Shout-Out:
- Since it wears it's Half-Life 1 inspirations on it's sleeve, obviously there's going to be quite a bit.
  - The player character is an obvious Expy of the Scientists from Half-Life 1. Some of their needs-related dialogue is taken directly from their GoldSRC counterparts, including the memetic "STAHP!" voice-line when harmed.
  - The tooltip for the Healing Syringe is "Hold still, this won't hurt a bit." This is one of the lines scientists may say when healing Gordon in Half-Life, and the Healing Syringe itself is virtually identical to the syringe of medicine they take out to do so.
  - Upon arriving at the Neutrino Detector in Hydroplant. A female French scientist will beckon the player, those who understand the language or translate it will find out that she says "Don't shoot, I'm part of the science team!"
  - The "Dark Energy" update introduces the Long Jump Pack which is transparently based on the Long Jump Module.
  - One email about Anteverse 2 mentions that many of the science team refer to it as "Planet X", a probable reference to Race and Dimension X from Half-Life: Opposing Force.
  - The Skinks are similar to both the Shock Roach and Spore Launcher from Opposing Force. Like the Shock Roach, they're small enemies who can be picked up and used as living weapons under the right circumstances; mechanically, they're something of a combination of both - they shoot damaging acid with a slight splash radius like the Spore Launcher, but their projectiles are quite accurate and focused like the Shock Roach. You can also pet the Skink in the same way as Adrian Shepard pets the Spore Launcher.
  - Anybody who's played Half-Life 2 will find themselves telling Order troops to pick up that can as they belabor them with the Tech Sceptre, Abiotic Factor's answer to the Combine Stun Baton.
  - The Deatomizer is reminiscent of Half Life 1's Gluon Gun - it's a continuous-fire, late-game weapon that must be wielded two-handed, and is powerful enough to gib most enemies with enough exposure. The weapon's alternate firing mode makes the comparison even more clear by giving the laser beam a blue corona around it that strongly resembles the Gluon Gun's beam.
  - The Quill Rifle is effectively a mash-up between the Hivehand/Hornet Gun from Half-Life 1 and the Needler of Halo fame. Like the Hornet Gun, it's Organic Technology that needs to be liberated from an alien menace before the protagonist can use it, and it fires homing projectiles. Visually, it closely resembles the Needler, right down to the way reloading it causes a fresh batch of quills to bristle menacingly from the weapon's chassis. Sadly, you can't pump foes full of quills and watch them blow up this time.
- The Flathill Police Department cruisers seen in the eponymous town have "Quiet, calm" as the department's slogan. Silent, one might say.
- The Flathill Starcade features several. There are arcade cabinets and posters for other games created by devs from Deep Field Games: Unfortunate Spacemen, The Dead Linger^note and DETOUR^note.
- Escaping Anteverse 23 aka The Furniture Store will earn the achievement called "No More Room in Helmholtz" a reference to the classic zombie film Dawn of the Dead (1978). Given the game's love affair with Half-Life, it may also be a shout-out to the Source mod No More Room In Hell.
- One email conversation that can be read after escaping the Furniture Store, name drops Night of the Living Dead (1968) when a scientist is deriding his coworker for thinking that calling the natives of the Furniture Store as zombies is cliche.
- The bionic legs armor references the iconic narration of The Six Million Dollar Man.
  "Stronger. Faster. Eh, you know the rest."
- IS-0235 aka the Tape Wisp is shown inhabiting a still from one episode of The Simpsons (specifically Homer the Heretic).
- The Voussiour facility is a base located at a snowy secret location that has been infiltrated and overrun by a bunch of winter soldiers wearing balaclavas and armed with Famas assault rifles. Sound familiar?
- IS-0513 also known as the Hate-Inducing Table, is based on the "Ugly Table" inside joke from Gloomwood. Not only from its appearance being identical to the "Mahogany Sidewood Tables", but also a visiting GATE executive named "D. Oshry" being affected by it as shown in a email.
- Gatekeeper Jotun are Space Marines in all but name. Superhuman killing machines who tower above their peers? Check. Members of a pseudomystical military cult? Check. Incredibly traumatic initiation process that many candidates do not survive? Check. Clad in intimidating, badass power armor with a skull-like visor-and-rebreather? You better believe it. The Compendium even describes them as being "eager to excel within Gatekeeper ranks, to assert their force on an immense and equally violent universe," while the official wiki describes them as the Gatekeepers' "bulwark against the terror." To top it all off, they wear a Purity Seal on their armor.
- IS-1057, the Yellow Paint, is a parody of certain games' tendency to overuse yellow-colored paint to mark objects of interest, even when it doesn't really make sense why that paint would be there. The number, 1057, also spells out "lost" in Leet Lingo, since yellow paint is used in those situations to help out players who are lost.
- The Reactor Armor set, one of the endgame armor sets, greatly resembles Final Boss Xan Kriegor's armor from Unreal Tournament.
- The Famas-style Patois assault rifle can be upgraded to fire plasma shots, making it into a weaker, higher fire-rate version of the Famas plasma gun from Perfect Dark Zero.
- The Yeti Helmet doesn't have the eyes and nose of the animal, making it look almost exactly like the head of a Shambler from Quake I.
Skewed Priorities: As Waterbot was built to water the plants in Power Services, he's quite happy to see so much growth in the area since the portal to Den da'ko Yeer opened up, and believes that everybody who went through said portal is happy to be there as he hasn't recieved any negative feedback. In reality, the personel who went through the portal didn't give any negative feedback because they died. He's also completely unaware of the current apocalyptic circumstances occurring around him.
Slippy-Slidey Ice World: The Space Queen portal world has ice physics.
Snowlems: IS-0127, the Living Snowman, seems to be this.
Story Breadcrumbs: Playing through the game will only give you a surface-level understanding of the universe(s) that this game takes place in. If you want the full picture, you'll have to talk to NP Cs, read e-mail terminals, and listen to Dr. Manse's holograms for tidbits of information and piece them together.
Status Buff: There's a great variety of buffs in the game that can be obtained by certain consumables (most notably soups) and armor.
Stealth-Based Mission: The second Portal World and a mandatory part to continue the story is Flathill, a shrouded town filled with giant Humanoid Abominations called Composers. The game outright tells you that your weaponry will NOT work on them and tells you to avoid them at all costs, requiring learning their patrol routes and carefully sneaking past them, as they can see but not hear you. Any return trips after acquiring the power cells also cause Symphonists to spawn, but they can be killed (though they are tanky as hell, so it's not recommended early on, unless you really want the resources they drop), but they're blind and can be easily avoided by just not making noise.
Subsystem Damage: The player, as well as enemies, have separate health pools for their head, body, and limbs. When the health of one system has been depleted, damage is transferred to other parts instead. Scoring head strikes on enemies usually deal extra damage. This has different consequences for players and enemies:
- Since enemies generally don't wear armor, it basically means they have one big health bar with their head being a weak point, since the extra headshot damage transfers to the other body parts.
- Players can wear armor, but if they leave one body part exposed (or if the armor breaks), then that body part becomes a weak point, because the unarmored damage taken to that body part will be transferred in full to your other areas.
Suicide Attack: If you take too long fighting a Sapper, it'll pull out bombs and try to run into you. This kills the sapper, and you as well if you're caught in the blast.
Supernatural Fear Inducer: By planting Nyxshade Seeds, you can grow plants that produce something called Kerespheres - grenade-like fruits(?) that scare away most smaller enemies. It doesn't work on bigger beings like Composers or the Yeti. Logically, it also doesn't work on zombies or robots.
Sword Beam: While you would expect the Laser Katana to be some kind of Laser Blade, instead it releases laser beams at a wide arc with every swing◊. This allows you to not only unleash laser-type damage, but also hit multiple enemies at once.
Take That!:
- IS-1057 is a jab at the trend of yellow paint being used to guide players in other games. It's a mysterious manifestation of yellow paint on nearby surfaces that appears only to those who are currently lost, and directs them to their destination. It does exactly that in gameplay, as its cell is covered in paint and leads to the entryway of the Dirac block.
- The pricing announcement video takes several pot shots at AAA game pricing and Nintendo in particular for the infamous $80 price of Nintendo Switch 2 games.
This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: Using an X-ray lamp is not much more efficient than just using a flashlight, on top of being more difficult to acquire. However, there are exactly three situations where an X-ray lamp's unique properties are useful: scaring away the Leyaks (and causing it to drop an Essence), pissing off the Reaper (causing it to drop a Night Essence), and scaring away the Darkwater Beast. That said, all three of these can be avoided through other methods (the Leyaks can be sealed away in a containment unit, Night Essences can be obtained in more limited amounts in the Night Realm and from butchering Inkfish, and the Darkwater Beast will ignore you if you have maxed-out fishing), meaning that the X-ray lamp will become pretty useless afterwards aside from looking cool.
Throw-Away Guns: A variant. The first craftable firearms: the pipe pistol and scrapshot, are single-shot only and usually come with lengthy reload times to boot. There's nothing stopping you from crafting multiple of these ranged weapons, filling up the hotbar with each one, and then cycling through each firearm after every shot. Practically just roleplaying the legend of Blackbeard with a belt filled with half a dozen guns.
Time Dilation: IS-0014, the Time Brake, is a porcelain artifact that causes time to slow down in close proximity to it; the closer you are, the slower you move. Fortunately, in-game, it's locked away in its containment cell and is too far away to have any effect on you. However, in its archive entry on Deep Field's Youtube channel, a turnaround of it was recorded at close range; sure enough, the bottom-left hand corner indicates that it took several days to record the fifteen-second video, meaning that at that distance, time was slowed down by over seven thousand times.
Timey-Wimey Ball: The Anteverse rifts are usually not just tears in space but also time, and occasionally they are all "reset" to a specific point of time in each Anteverse they're connected to, which is mostly used to justify the respawning resources and enemies in those locations, but Fridge Logic starts to happen when the locations are not only in the same universe but also contain characters that will eventually leave the locations. In-Universe Dr. Manse expressed his discomfort at the idea of time rifts and was about to shut it down but he was urged by the CEO for an unknown reason to continue researching it.
Token Good Teammate:
- You can first meet a Lab Rat named Hasta Tria in Manufacturing West. He doesn't want to fight and only wants to escape the facility and inform the rest of the Order about the dangers of messing with the spacetime continuum.
- At the entrance to the Security Sector, you'll first meet a passive Gatekeeper Witch named the Sister of the Unlost. Later in Reactors, you can find her with a Jotun, Mystagogue, and (sleeping) Chieftain, all of whom are non-hostile.
- In the Power Services garden right before Reactors, you can meet K18, also known as "Waterbot". Despite looking just like its Killer Robot brethren, down to having a cannon for a right arm, it's completely harmless and only helpful, and the cannon appears to have been modified into a water hose.
- Within the Village Den da'ko Yeer, you can meet a passive Exor named Kin Haak Jaal da (who can apparently speak English) who gives you a set of recipes for armor.
- Played with with the Big Larva in the Encroachment. It has a core on its forehead and won't attack under any circumstances, although it won't be friendly towards you unless you wear the Larva Suit. If you do wear the suit, you can converse and trade with it.
- To a lesser extent, there's also a Pest in Manufacturing West in front of a vending machine. Unlike other Pests, it won't attack if you pass by. Of course, it'll start behaving just like any other pest if you attack it.
Traveling Salesman:
- If you heal Grayson with a bandage, he'll drop by your base sometimes if you have a powered Repair/Salvaging Station, giving you the opportunity to purchase ammunition and construction equipment from him.
- After you open Manufacturing West, Marion (the guy from Flathill wearing the Symphonist Armor) will start spawning around the facility near Cacophonous Crates^note. You can also place down a Symphonist Scarecrow to allow him to spawn anywhere; if you place it at your base, he'll drop by from time to time. He has a variety of useful wares to trade, including porcelain keys and other Composer-related items. He also gives you reinforced hoses for tiny gears that have no other use, and he somehow has infinite specimens of IS-0052 (Gravity Dampeners) and IS-0099 (Antique Shotguns) to trade, although he'll only trade one per spawn.
- Dr. Carson becomes available after opening the Security Sector. She trades for a variety of items related to cooking, and can spawn in kitchen areas or at your base if you have a powered Chef's Counter with a Cheffigy upgrade. She's also got four special types of coffee that help increase your temperature, which can be useful for cold environments.
Triangle Shades: Come the "Christmas" update, a pair of sharp triangular light blue shades are added into the game. They're worn by the Lamogi figurine and the Bigogi^note; to unlock it for character customization, the players must collect all 25 Royal coins around Space Queen, which unlocks a hidden room with an interactable frozen Lamogi wearing them.
Underground Monkey: Some early-game enemies have stronger later-game equivalents, usually starting from when you enter the Labs Sector.
- The Pest's strong equivalent is the Electro-Pest, a Cyborg pest which has slightly more endurance and outputs an electrical discharge every other time they jump, which can stun the player if they're too close. Upon the release of the "Dark Energy" update, a new version called the Volatile Pest is introduced, an Action Bomb variant of the Pest line.
- The Peccary has Peccary Sows, Alpha Peccaries, and Shroom Peccaries. The sows have a projectile attack, the alphas are much stronger, and the shrooms can emit spores. All are Color-Coded for Your Convenience, with the latter not only having a different head shape but is also covered in fungus.
- The Exor Monk has the Exor, which are larger, stronger, and have an organic Arm Cannon that fires quills. They can be identified by their glowing green color. The Armored Exor are more armored and glow red instead, not only firing quills but also area of effect shots. The Exor Cha are introduced in "Dark Energy" and wield spears in combat.
- Security Robots have a stronger variant in the purple-colored Containment Robots, which can move faster via running, and grab anything it sees as an intruder (which includes both the player and Order soldiers) to transport them into a holding cell while giving them a broken leg in the process. The red-colored Defense Robots are the even stronger variant, essentially becoming walking artillery pieces with their grenade launchers that can launch multiple types of explosives in quick successions, allowing them to easily defeat not only Order soldiers but the playable scientists as well. There's also the incredibly-dangerous Corrupted Robots, who attack with acid and are aggressive even when you hold a night pass.
- For the Order soldiers, you've got the Breacher, who are even tankier than the pistol or SMG-wielding Grunts and wield shotguns.
The Unfought: Several immurement subjects, like IS-0122 and IS-0127, are described as dangerous, and information about them can be found throughout the facility. However, while you can encounter them in their containment cells during gameplay, they are safely locked away and cannot be interacted with.
Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay:
- Unlike most other games in the genre, boiling 1000mL of dirty water in a pot will give you a quarter that amount of clean water. Well, you're boiling it in an open pot; it figures that a good portion of it will be lost to evaporation.
- Most games allow players to wear full-body hazmat suits and the like with no penalty. Here, they're cumbersome and stuffy, causing the player to lose more hydration while they're being worn.
- If you dive into the water, you'll find that you can see maybe three feet ahead of you in murkier waters. Even in clear water, your vision will become significantly impaired. If you want to see underwater clearly, you'll have to put on goggles.
- Usually, if you're lacking a tool in other games, you'll need to find that tool, but not here. Many basic tools have makeshift alternatives - need a screwdriver? Forget finding one; just hammer a pipe until one of the ends is flat, like any REAL scientist would.
The Unfought: Emails and lore entries you can read indicate that other Anteverses are also controlled by powerful entities like IS-0117/The Wayseeker, with the Anteverse I entities being controlled by a being called The Puppeteer, while the Lodestones and Flesh Dimension are instruments of an entity or entities the Order refers to as the Sangamor. Neither of them play any direct role in the game's story, which is focused on the machinations of Anteverse II.
Unfriendly Fire: Order soldiers can accidentally shoot each other in tight quarters, especially if one of them is blocking a doorway. A player with a shield and the F.O.R.G.E set can easily take advantage of this if they find themselves up against a squad. Same goes for the Order Soldiers at Voussior, especially the shield-bearing Rook who will usually be right in front of you to block you with their riot shield, but can soak up bullets from their comrades.
Unrealistic Black Hole: In order to escape from Manufacturing West into the Labs sector, the player deliberately overloads a giant particle accelerator called the Synchotron, causing a black hole to appear and destroy a sphere of rock to open a path to the Labs before quickly dissipating. Later, the player can craft [REDACTION] Grenades, which explode into temporary black holes and destroy any furniture or enemy too close to it (along with their drops). It'll also kill the player if they're not careful.
Unusable Enemy Equipment: Zig-zagged. Order soldiers and Canaanites will drop their weapons and gear for the player to use, but Gatekeepers generally don't, aside from a few exceptions such as the Neophytes' Night Vision Goggles.
Useless Useful Spell: The game provides many options for gameplay, but some are only useful for multiplayer.
- As stated above under Awesome, but Impractical, the GATE Security Carts are pretty underwhelming in singleplayer.
- Marion is able to trade Gravity Dampeners and Antique Shotguns, which are otherwise one-of-a-kind. While this is useful for multiplayer, it's not helpful for singleplayer where both items are easy to find.
- Some skills have perks at certain levels that allow you to see other players' statuses, which are naturally useless when playing solo.
- The Brain Sync acts as a sort of knowledge database to pool everyone's crafting recipes and journal entries. Pretty useful in multiplayer, not so useful when you're the only one using it.
- The Employee Locator is an aversion; it highlights fellow players, allowing you to easily track them. While this sounds like it'd be useless in singleplayer, it also has the ability to highlight NPC scientists, which can be useful for progression.
- A number of skills and their perks fall under this:
  - Fishing is a decent source of extra sustenance and materials but the minigame itself is tediously slow and repetitive, notably it's also the only skill without a unique level 20 effect (Cooking slightly improves cooked food every 5 levels) and instead its final perk at level 15 prevents one enemy in the entire game from attacking the player.
  - Although healing items ARE important the First Aid skill is primarily useful for multiplayer and the majority of its perks affect teammates instead of the healer, the most useful perk for the player (Combat Doctor, which doubles the speed at which medical items are applied) is unlocked at level 15, which is unlikely to be reached in a playthrough unless you are the sole healer in a group while having the Epimedical Bionomicist job.
  - The Reloading skill stops being useful once you gain access to laser weaponry, which are generally superior thanks to their lack of durability consumption, more efficient inventory space due to not requiring ammo and being easier to replenish, and notably they do not have to be reloaded.
- Field batteries are somewhat expensive to craft (including requiring three Leyak Essences), and requires honey which forces the player to go out of their way to harvest beehives (while avoiding getting stung) and maybe also find antejuice to raise them if they want a lot. While you do get three per craft, you'll find that each battery only restores 50 units of electricity - a tenth of a flashlight. This is more useful for certain weapons which have relatively low capacities, but many players opt to simply carry a Crystalline Vial or even a Charging Station - the former is slow and passive while the latter requires setup, but many still find them more convenient than the hefty cost of the field batteries.
Video Game Caring Potential:
- Ever since the game first launched its Early Access versions, Grayson the Materials Engineer could be seen bleeding out near the entrance to Manufacturing. The full release gave you the option to offer him a hand; if you heal him with a bandage, he'll become a Traveling Salesman and open up the opportunity to purchase a variety of useful ammunition from him.
- In a hidden area of the Hydroplant, you can find the disembodied brain of Kylie Muir, a cancer patient who was removed from her body in order to transfer her consciousness into a digital format, until the Order attacked and interrupted everything. You can bring a hyper-dense neural chip to free her from her prison (turning her into a trinket in the process), then bring her to Waterbot who will allow her to speak again. None of this is required for progression, but equipping the Kylie trinket will give you a companion who offers encouragement, warns you if the Leyak is nearby, and wishes you goodnight when you go to bed, as well as give you a sweet 10% EXP gain. In Residences, you can finally put her into a physical body in the form of an inert security robot, and in return she'll help you in the final battle against the Wayseeker.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: You can also just dump the Kylie Trinket in a storage chest and forget about her forever, confining her to another prison. You monster. This veers into Stupid Evil since the trinket in question is one of the most useful in the game from the get-go and can be upgraded even further.
Video Game Tools: Assembling deployables after putting them down is a major part of the game, and requires a screwdriver or one of its upgrades. You'll also put together an upgradeable keypad hacker to get past certain locked doors. Of course, there's also the standard portable light source, which may be a flashlight, a headlamp, night-vision goggles, or even a giant X-ray emitter.
Violation of Common Sense:
- How do you train up your Strength stat? There's weightlifting gear in the gym near the Data Farm. Which you can't use. You don't build Strength by setting about enemies with a big old club, either; apparently swinging around a hefty improvised metal beating stick doesn't do much for one's muscles. The only way to build Strength is to load yourself down past a certain encumbrance threshold (either by loading up with heavy armor and/or just plenty of stuff in your inventory), something the game actively punishes you for doing, there is an upper threshold where your encumbrance doesn't provide experience at all, so it's a bit of a balancing act.
- Likewise, the only way to raise your Fortitude level is to take damage. There are no other methods - go stand in an Order Grunt's line of fire or step into electrified water if you want to actively level your Fortitude.
- To relieve your continence meter early-game (before you have the resources to build makeshift toilets), you're supposed to find facility restrooms and use the toilets there. However, these toilets don't allow you to collect your feces, which is used to make fairly useful soil bags. This means that players who are planning ahead to stockpile soil bags will deliberately crap their briefs so that they can collect the crap for later use. This costs one plastic scrap and gives you the "stinky" status effect, but both of these are so negligible that the benefit of collecting poo bags often outweighs the cons.
Visual Pun:
- Throughout the game, a recurring piece of generic scientific equipment is a large machine that's visually based on the Swiss-type family of CNC Lathes. Several of these machines can be found in the Voussoir Facility, which is located in Switzerland, making them literal Swiss machines.
- There's an item in the game called the Heater Shield, which is a shield with a built-in heater that keeps you warm. A "heater shield" is a real-life type of shield similar to a small kite shield, named after its resemblance to a heating iron. The in-game Heater Shield is about the shape and size of a real heater shield, making it a heater shield that's an actual heater.
- Composers and Symphonists have an organ simply called an "organ", which appears to be what they use to vocalize. It has something like a bellows on one end and a series of tubes on the other, making it a musical pump organ as well.
Weird Weather: You would think weather events won't happen in the game due to it taking place in a subterranean facility, but it does start happening after certain event flags. Each weather has an associated button somewhere in the facility that immediately ends the event.
- The most "normal" of the weather events is fog, which shortens your visibility radius. You first encounter the fog upon entering Flathill, but it can start occurring in the facility afterwards, spawning Symphonists in certain spots. Even this fog is abnormal, as it's caused by the Composers and Symphonists from Flathill, and equipping the Fog Lantern gives you a stamina buff. You can eat Fogiri to increase the chances of fog happening, and the button to end this event is near the Flathill portal.
- A radiation leak can also occur, blanketing the facility in green mist that causes you to become increasingly irradiated, requiring you to find radiation protection. The button to end this event is in Manufacturing West, in a room near the irradiated area.
- In addition, there might be a deluge of airborne alien spores, which increases the temperature and inflicts a spore infection if you don't wear the appropriate gear. The button to end this event is found in the Mist Reactor's control room.
- Blackouts might occur, caused by parasitic power leech creatures (IS-0211). The large power leech must be killed to stop this event.
- A black-colored fog might cover the facility, causing Shades to appear. If they manage to touch you, they can summon the Reaper outside of the Security Sector. To end this event, the player must sit on one of the Night Thrones.
- A cold snap might occur, causing the temperature to drop. This causes the entire facility to become vulnerable to the Krasue, as well as requiring you to warm yourself.
Weird World, Weird Food: Almost all of the food ingredients in this game are extraterrestrial, be it meat cut from an alien beast, alien vegetables or fruits, alien fish, or even alien milk sacs. Cooked recipes almost all contain at least one alien ingredient somewhere; the description for the Cooked Fries, one of the few recipes that don't contain any alien ingredients, lampshades this:
Cooked Fries tooltip: Proof of your enduring humanity.
Whole-Plot Reference:
- The game's plot, graphic style, and concept are heavily inspired by the first Half-Life, right down to the name of the facility referencing that game's "Resonance Cascade".
- Abiotic Factor's gameplay formula draws heavily from SCP – Containment Breach. A hapless Action Survivor attempts to survive and escape from an often-lightless facility dedicated to researching anomalous entities that may either help or hinder them.
- A town with "Hill" in the name that's shrouded in thick, obfuscating white fog and haunted by terrifying monsters? No, we're not talking about Silent Hill, we're talking about Flathill.
Who Would Be Stupid Enough?: One of the emails found in Flathill involves a scientist reassuring a co-worker that the batteries powering the containment field around the town are good for at least a month, and that nobody would be crazy or stupid enough to take them out prematurely - let alone all three of them! Guess what you're there to do?
Womb Level: Anteverse XXXIII is named the "Flesh Dimension", and has connections to the Greyeb, IS-0091, and IS-0098. You don't get to visit this world, although the description of the Accursed Hood implies that at some point you'll be able to enter the Flesh Dimension and trade with its inhabitants. Holding a Lodestone also causes the dream minigame to appear in a world of flesh, most likely Anteverse XXXIII.
Wrench Whack: The tutorial's starting weapon is a pipe wrench, but once properly in-game. They can only get access to it once they make their way to Manufacturing West. It's a direct upgrade to the desk leg and pipe clubs found and created in the office sector.
You Can't Fight Fate: Implied by the Sister Of The Unlost, who resorts to cryptically warning the player about it but also claims that even she doesn't fully know what fate will come up with next. This is also enforced by the Mysterious Voice in the Bad Future when she lets the player go back in order to avoid a temporal break.
Your Mind Makes It Real: A variant. IS-0093 is a virus recovered from a Russian laboratory in 1973 that only infects anybody who believes it exists. This makes its containment in the facility paradoxical and confusing; only those who don't believe it exists can enter its containment, vaccination is impossible as that would require acknowledging that there's a disease to vaccinate and research is all-but impossible as in order to research it one has to acknowledge that it exists to take information on it.
Zombie Apocalypse: Anteverse 23 (the Furniture Store) appears to take place in one caused by IS-102/The Love Potion. There's even a television showing an emergency broadcast that spouts the sort of warnings one would expect in the starting days of a zombie apocalypse, or possibly an Analog Horror series. According to Dr. Manse, it's not an Anteverse at all, but an alternate timeline or possible future of Earth.

Abiotic Factor

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Video Game / Abiotic Factor 6 Following

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Abiotic Factor

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