Pacific Drive – Useful Tips and Tricks

Tips and Tricks

• Doors with chains can be opened with both impact hammers and the prybar.
• You can only scan the junctions that have a number in a blue icon on the left side of the junction name. That number is the required amount of core energy required to open the gateway. Note, this is not the number of cores you need to collect. As well, if you scan the farthest junction, it will automatically scan all the potential routes to that destination, saving you scanner charges.
• Friendly Dumpsters will spawn out in the wild.
• The abandoned wreck that you see when escaping through a gateway back to the garage will eventually get replaced with a box truck – less potential for scrapping, but it will be filled with items in the storage compartment.
• Decals and Paint can be deconstructed in the matter deconstructor. Chemicals, Fabrics, and Pressurized Containers. Plastic may also be an outcome.
• Take the long way if the short way takes you through an increased electric damage junction. It’s not worth it.
• You only need one pneumatic locker.
• Car parts that the friendly dumpster spits out that is marked as “essential”, cannot be scrapped for materials in the matter deconstructor. Putting the part on your car and doing a run will remove the essential tag, allowing you to scrap it.
• Hoard your thermosap crystals.
• Tourists will not attack you. They are only an explosive obstacle. Watch out for the electrified ones.
• You automatically regenerate to 10% health. With canned food, and a few health kits, you can survive in the red instability storm for long enough to find gas in an abandoned vehicle when you run out of gas ten meters from extraction.
• The Ion Shield will be your best friend. Wind turbines should be enough to power it perpetually, as well as the headlights.
• Tires have much higher durability than your car body parts, you don’t need to worry too much about them.
• Insulated headlights should be your go to. Especially if you’re going through those blasted electricity junctions.
• Don’t bother crafting armoured doors or panels. Just steal them from Abandoned Squires with the liberator.
• You can find dumpster pearls in pneumatic tubes in the wild.

Starting Tips

On the route map pay attention to all details, including the name of the junction’s area at the top. Can help massively knowing what environment you’re about to go into when you get familiar with all their names as they RNG reroll.

Be wary of junctions with “Dead End” at the top of their list, do not enter these, they guarantee death. The ones you want to go for are ones that mention a “kLim” amount, these are ones you can safely go back to the garage from.

Parts wear out over time but do not necessarily become useless, I recommend getting the deconstructor upgrade for your garage as any crafted items you throw in there will typically throw out about half-ish of their resources. Useful to do especially mid-to-late game to preserve resources.

Do not fall for the game’s trick of Perpetual Stability condition, all story missions have it and it prevents the natural time limit storm from coming in but it reinforces bad behavior, you generally want to get comfortable going into and leaving a junction within a 10-20 minute mark and only extend that if you really need to. It’s an extraction rogue like, you’ll have plenty of runs to gather more resources, you do not need to 100% loot everything in a junction.

That being said if you really do want to abuse the perpetual stability condition go for it, just be wary of crashes and the fact that you cannot save mid-junction (due to limitations the devs cannot add this in any capacity). So if you die, crash or just have to leave the game you’ll lose that hour+ of looting the same junction and either be back at the garage in case of death, or back at the start of the junction with all the items in the area rerolled.

Speaking of: The game does save when you enter a junction, so if you do have to leave for whatever reason, either open a gateway to head back to the garage or speed out of the junction and head to the next one, once you enter it’ll be all saved and good, reloading will bring you back to that point safely.

Also this guy has a lot of beginer tips i wish i knew before i started playing worth a look: