Guide to Being Robust

Welcome to the Dojo of Robust-Fu. You will spend many shifts as a mere apprentice, watching zen masters robust their way through life before you yourself will find true enlightenment. It is a path of violence, passion and loss. This guide can not take you there on its own, it is only a tool, but it is no mere coincidence that you have found your way here. It is your destiny to be robust.

The Tenets of Robustism

Being robust requires a certain way of life. It's not about luck, it's about control. Control yourself, control your environment, control your opponent.

Don't be clicked

Don't give your opponent the chance to click on you. That which cannot be clicked, cannot be robusted.

• Move randomly. Hammer the movement keys like you mean it.
• Don't wait for your opponent to come to you. The aggressor holds the advantage.
• Don't stand still.
• Don't let people stand next to you.

Make your clicks count

Click where it matters. Use the force.

• For ranged attacks, put the mouse-cursor in position ahead of time. Drive-by attacks are pretty straight forward as long as you line yourself up so the projectile goes where your enemy will be.
• In melee, click on your targets sprite even if he's far away from you. If you have queued combat clicks enabled, they'll be hit as soon as they come in close range to you.

Know when to run

Don't stay in a fight where you have lost the upper hand. Retreat, regain the advantage and strike back.

• Retreat to recharge tasers, batons and other energy weapons and restock on flashes, grenades, and ammo.
• If the enemy has superior numbers, retreat and wait for them to split up.
• If the enemy has superior weapons, retreat and either find weapons that can match his, or wait in ambush.
• If the enemy is retreating, don't follow blindly. You could run into bombs or other traps.

Winners do not fight fair

Have a last resort item to fall back on. They can't defend against what they don't see.

• Don't let your opponent know what weapons or defenses you have. Hide your thermals and sunglasses behind masks and big hats, put your weapons in your pockets, drop and run from your pipebomb instead of throwing it.
• Cook grenades. The primers dangerously short, but practice cooking foam grenades to get a feel for it.
• Strike when your opponent is distracted. Wait for them to be in conversation or for them to literally have their hands full with a computer or some other machine that requires using an interface.
• Use drugs. Take a sip of coffee, robust-eez, a medikit patch or some health restoring Food right before the fight.

Know your arena

Knowing where the opponent can come from and where you can hide is key to staying robust.

• Always have an exit. Don't enter a room you can't get out of on your own.
• Prepare the area as necessary for what you are trying to achieve. Shock doors, lay glass on the floors, make a hole into space, wet the floors, poison the air, set up mines, prepare bombs, etc.
• Cut security cameras; camera coverage varies across the station, but generally, maintenance areas do not have cameras. Take advantage of blindspots or make some of your own if you need privacy from prying eyes.
• Disposal chutes are your number one get-out-of-jail-free-card. Always be ready to dive into one and flush it.
• Closet and disposal chutes will hide you from the prying eyes of the AI and people who can see you behind walls, such as werewolves and those with advanced thermals. Slipping out of range and taking cover in a closet is also great way to shake pursuers. Note that closets make a noise when they open and shut, which can give you away.
• Some bushes and wall-signs can hide a standing person. These are great for ambushes.

Dancing with Robusters

Victory is not determined by first blood, nor by most blood. In order to win, you have to stun or knock out your opponent. A taser is better than a laser gun for this purpose, and a flash is better than a fire extinguisher. Damage does not win you fights.

Dodge lasers

Resting on the floor will make taser bolts pass over you. If an opponent is within one tile of you and using Harm intent, he will still hit you pointblank. You can dodge lasers the same way, though there's a 50-50 chance they'll still hit you. Note that the artifact lasers and pod weapons can't be dodged this way.

Space walking

Standing on a Space tile will reduce your speed to the slowest possible, give you burn damage, and it could make you slip when you try to move. This doesn't mean space is off-limits. Space can be perfect for ambushes and retreats. You can walk for roughly a screen's length in space before the damage overpowers you. That can be enough to reach another safe area or a get-away pod, especially if you brought some healing with you.

Catwalks protect your from Space damage. You can stay on them indefinitely if you bring air, and they're often quite dark too. In particular, on Cogmap1, the catwalk section between the QM and Waste Disposal allow for safe travel between the north and south part of the station without spacesuits and internals.

Disposal diving

Hiding in disposal chutes is just scratching the surface of the disposal systems true utility. You can put other people inside a chute by click-dragging their sprite over it. This even works while you're inside the chute. Any movement while in the chute will cause you to jump out and suffer a short stun. If you drag a person inside the chute just as you exit from it, you will recover from the stun before them. You can practically stunlock them by throwing them back into the chute.

Dropping an item while you are inside the chute will cause it sit in the chute until it is disposed of or ejected. You can also manage your backpack while inside the chute. This means you can dive into a chute, ditch contraband items, eject, be frisked, and then come back later to retrieve them.

Remember that the chute has to recharge between each time it's flushed. It takes about less than a minute.

Engaging the disposal will send you through the pipes to the Waste Disposal area. Most jobs have access here and can exit safely. If you are stuck, rest on the ground to crawl under the plastic flaps on the conveyor belt.

Aside from the regular disposal chute, there are sometimes specialist/departmental chutes. Most maps have a black morgue chute that go from somewhere in Medbay to the Morgue and another set of black chutes linking the Morgue and Chapel crematorium together. Sometimes, there's ones from hydroponics to the kitchen and the kitchen to the bar counter. They all lead to rooms that require more specific access.

You can reroute disposal pipes so a chute spits you out in another room or so it even sends you out of a mail-chute.

Ranged weapons

Core rule: You can only click tiles you can see. Clicking a black tile does not fire your weapon. Bring thermals if you have to fight in the dark, that you can at least click a person hiding in shadows.

It's common practice to click behind your intended target. This gives you a controlled shot even while moving. Hitting a moving target can be tricky however. If it lags, clicking a person will make you fire in their direction when the lag stops. That means you could be firing backwards into a crowd if the person ran around you. This is why there's a big difference between clicking someone and clicking on ground. The Click Buffer takes this further. With the clickbuffer on, all your actions are queued up. This let's you run around like a maniac and the game will still fire all your shots directly at the tile you clicked no matter where you end up standing. The clickbuffer can be fun for ranged combat, but it takes practice to get used to. Imagine that guy in Wanted who curved bullets, that's kind of like playing with the clickbuffer.

Fighting in a crowd

Fighting an opponent in a crowd is ill advised, but at least you can run through people as long as you have Help intent on (and as long as they also have Help on). It's great for retreating or for putting bodies between you and a ranged opponent.

Harm intent is necessary to use stun gloves and to fire guns point-blank. Disarm intent is necessary to block punches or dangerous grabs. That means you will have to endure bumping into people if you want to stay on guard and be ready with your weapons. Switch to Help on the fly if you have to pass through people.

Unarmed Combat

Even if you don't have a gun or blade or some such, you can still do a lot unarmed. In fact, barring special circumstances, you always have two weapons with you. They're called hands. What can you do with an empty hand?

• With Disarm intent, you can do a disarm that can shove people to the ground and shove them away if they're already on the ground and a Disarm Special that shoves people away from you. The former can also knock people's weapons away or make someone with a weapon surgically attached to them hit themselves with it.
• With Grab intent, you can grab someone, which opens up many options. You can take them as meatshield, pin them to the floor, suplex them, slam them on a table, smash them on something, or throw them into it. The intent also lets you launch yourself off a chair to shoulder-dive someone.
  • Grab intent also lets you slide-attack and perform an unarmed block, though there are ways to do these without using Grab.
• With Harm intent, you can punch people, with a Harm Special version that is easier to land hits with. If they're down and out for the count, you might kick them instead.

Disarm

Click on someone while you're on Disarm intent to try to shove them to the ground, causing them to lose 20 Stamina while you lose 10; this unfortunately can't push someone below 0 stamina. The lower their stamina, the more likely you'll succeed. If they're on the ground already, instead of standing, you'll roll them away, guaranteed.

It also has a few extra effects if your opponent is wielding a weapon. If they have a weapon or some other item in their hands, you'll also try to smack it away, potentially sending it flying away into some unfortunate bystander. (Or you.) This is a flat 37% chance, 5% if they're blocking. If they have an item arm attached, you'll also try to smack them with it. This applies both when they're standing up and when you're on the floor being rolled away. This is also a flat 37% chance, 5% if they're blocking.

Disarm takes a bit of technique to use. If you treat it like the old disarm system, or others servers' versions, and use it as your sole attack, you'll rarely disarm anybody. That's because, again, the disarm chance is actually based on your opponent's stamina. The higher it is, the lower the chances of disarming.

Instead, think of it as a "finishing move" of sorts. Start out with few punches to the face. Not only will a few direct hits sap their stamina, but if you're especially lucky, you may land a "devastating hit" that'll wipe out a huge chunk of their stamina. Once you feel they're about to be knocked out, that's when you switch to Disarm intent and proceed to murder them with their own weapon. You can also disarm people by hitting them over the head with a dinner plate, or by throwing a basketball at them.

Disarm Special

Click on a tile at least two squares away from you while on Disarm intent to shove someone backwards in an adjacent tile in the direction you're aiming, with chance of success depending on how much stamina they have. In simple terms, push them away without actually clicking on them. No chance to fling away an item, but you have much better chances of shoving someone away than shoving them to the ground.

Grab

Click on someone while on Grab intent. Click on the grab icon that'll appear in your hand or press either Page-Down or C to upgrade the grab. You have a 25% chance to fail to upgrade the grab, which goes away if you have Gamma Ray Exposure. There are three levels of grabs, passive, aggressive, and chokehold/strangehold, with the last two having increasing stamina regeneration penalties on the person grabbed. It is possible to escape grabs, see here. Grabs enable several moves.

Suplex

Click on someone while on Grab intent, rapidly click the resulting grab or spam Page-Down or C to quickly get an aggressive chokehold and use *flip (Hotkey: R) to stun them. It stuns you both for almost the same amount of time, unless you are a Wrestler, which nullifes the stun, or have stun-reducing chems, such as meth, in your system. If you have two people in aggressive grabs, you'll suplex the both of them.

Table

Click on someone while on Grab intent, upgrade your grab (press click Page-Down or C or click on the resulting grab icon in your hand), switch your intent to Harm, then click on a table. You'll slam them on the table with a satisfying *THUMP*, knocking them down for 3 seconds, 4 if it was a folding table. If you do the same, but don't switch to Harm, you'll stun them for just two.

Surgery tables work differently. People can be put on them with a single grab or by click-dragging them into it, but they can also get up again by clicking their Rest button. Stun or cuff your target if you want to operate on him.

Speaking of surgery, unconscious people can be operated on while they on a regular table. This is a great way to dismember someone or to swipe their brain.

Meatshield

Click on someone while on Grab intent, upgrade your grab to neckgrab/aggressive (press click Page-Down or C or click on the resulting grab icon in your hand). Both ranged and melee attacks targeted at you now hit the victim you grabbed instead. However, there is a flat 20% chance that attack makes you drop the grab and let go of your human shield. Unlike in the movies, the victim is still able to fight back (though they have a stamina penalty from the aggressive/neck grab). While it is certainly not "unarmed" at this point, taking someone at gunpoint (click on them with Grab while holding a gun) causes the same effect.

Pin

Click on someone while on Grab intent, then click on a nearby tile. The less stamina the victim has, and the tighter your grip when you started pinning, the faster you'll pin.

The victim won't be able to move, though they can attempt to break out of it in the same ways you'd normally break a grab (e.g. Resist key, mashing movement buttons, etc.). You also can't move and have little stamina regeneration, but you can still use your other hand to smack the fuck out of them. If you run out of stamina, you lose the pin. If you let go of the pin willingly, you'll also be briefly stunned. But then you can still *flip (Hotkey: R) to suplex.

Smash

Click on someone while on Grab intent, click on something nearby that isn't a tile. You'll hurt them smack them against the object for 2-3 BRUTE. Doesn't seem that deadly, but it has its uses if you know what to smash them against. It looks impressive and can open up doors their ID has access to.

Throw

Click on someone while on Grab intent, upgrade your grab (press click Page-Down or C or click on the resulting grab icon in your hand); if they're unconscious or knocked down, you don't need to upgrade grab. Enter throw mode (Hold down Spacebar on Goon mode, R on /tg/style controls, Delete for both) and click on a tile to throw them there. People are heavy, so you can't throw them more than four tiles away. Does no damage, but where you throw them matters a lot!

It's a good way to handle people who are breaking and entering, and if you're in the business of murder, there's a lot of potential. Knocking someone down and throwing them out an airlock into space is the fastest and most reliable way to kill someone. Throwing someone into a shocked door is an easy kill. Finally, you can throw people into vending machines to tip them over.

Punch

Click on someone while on Harm intent to, well, punch them, at cost of 15 Stamina. This does 2-9 BRUTE and drains 30 Stamina from them, with chance of landing a "devastating hit" (called a "crit") that drains more.

There are many ways to boost punching damage or give it extra effects, such as by having hulk, possessing a special limb, and drinking overdose levels of ethanol, which also gives you a flat 40% chance to shrug off a punch. Wearing boxing gloves is interesting in that you still damage the person, but drain about 55.5 Stamina at cost of not being to land crits.

Harm Special

Click on a tile at least two squares away from you while on Harm intent to punch somebody in an adjacent tile in the direction you're aiming. In practical terms, hit someone without actually clicking on them. Useful for nabbing something with a small hitbox or moving quickly. Same rules for standard punches apply, but without chance for crit, and if there's multiple targets you could punch on a tile, you'll hit one at random.

Kick

Click on someone who's down on the floor and can't move, while you're on Harm intent and don't have any arms with special punching effects, at cost of 15 Stamina, though it returns 5 stamina, indirectly making them cost 10. Kicking drains no stamina from victim, and it does same damage as punches. Wearing certain shoes, like cleats or military boots will boost kicking damage, as will having hooves.

Slide

Also known as dive kick. Click on yourself while on Grab intent or press the Resist button on your HUD (Hotkey: Z for Goon WASD, C for /tg/keys WASD), then throw the resulting block (Hold down Spacebar on Goon mode, R on /tg/style controls, Delete for both). You'll move forward a tile in the direction you threw and briefly drop to the floor but then stand up (so you'll drop whatever you're holding). If you hit somebody along the way, you'll boop them for 1-6 BRUTE, more if you're wearing certain shoes or have hooves.

Not a lot of damage but has some utility if you get creative, e.g. diving to dodge a bullet or enter a puddle of water to extinguish yourself.

Shoulder Dive

Aka, the chair flip, because it involves a chair and flipping. Stand on the same tile as a chair and, while on Grab intent, either click-drag yourself onto the chair or click on yourself to climb onto the chair. A new aiming reticle should show up. Aiming and clicking will launch you up to 3 tiles, knocking down whoever you collide with; *flipping (Hotkey: R) will launch you in the direction your character's facing, causing the same effect. More damage is dealt the farther away the target. If you miss or collide into something like a wall, you'll suffer a brief stun and a little damage.

You can do a similar thing at the corners of the boxing ring in the Gym and other places. All you have to do is click-drag yourself onto the boxing cables sprite in the corner tiles. You do not have to be on Grab intent.

Stun gloves

Stun gloves are excellent last-ditch tools to make an opponent drop what he's holding or to give you a chance to run away. While unarmed and on Disarm or Harm attack, if you click on a tile two squares away from you, you launch some sparks, though they'll be restricted across one of the 8 cardinal directions. They're same as the stun baton; they disorient, drain stamina, do miniscule BURN, and slightly heat them. Use it to slow someone down during a chase or open them up for a stronger stun.

They have up to 4 charges, so you can do this up to 4 times. Keep a spare power cell or two in your backpack to recharge your gloves. Remember, adding a charge to a stun glove takes 1500 charge, so you get more mileage out of higher capacity cells.

Blocking

Press the Resist button on your HUD (Hotkey: Z for Goon WASD, C for /tg/keys WASD) or click on yourself while on Grab intent. You'll starting blocking, which slows you down slightly and costs stamina, but you gain 20% Disorient (Body) resistance, reduce melee damage to the head and chest areas by 2, and prevent the extra damage from critical/devastating hits. Blocks also nullify Grab-intent-based attacks, at the cost of dropping the block. You can even do this while downed! (Just imagine it's as if your holding up your hands crying uncle.)

And that's all just from blocking unarmed. Every item can be used to block, providing the same benefits as a barehanded block, but blocking with certain items can also protect against one or more of the four main types of weapon damage: stab/stabbing, blunt, cut/slashing, and burn. If your block matches the attack's damage type, your melee damage protection temporarily goes from 2 to 4, reducing damage from the attack by 4. Read the tooltip descriptions to find each item's block properties.

For example, if you block an attack from a katana (does cut damage) with a kitchen knife (blocks stab and cut damage), you take 4 less damage since your block matched the damage type, reducing the damage from 15 to 11. If you try to block a welder (does burn damage) or a baseball bat (blunt damage) with the knife though, your block doesn't match, but the attack still is reduced by only 2 damage, so the welder's 15 becomes 13 and the bat's 12 becomes 10.

In addition, blocking reduces the chance of a disarm knocking away your weapon or making your item arm smack yourself from 37% to just 5%. Certain items also have special properties when blocking. For example, a cyalume saber can reflect projectiles when blocking, in addition to blocking all four damage types, a backpack (or satchel) blocks more damage if filled with items at the cost of losing some of them upon hit, and a barrier gives some explosion resistance and extra protection from ranged attacks. Again, you can read the tooltip descriptions to find each item's block properties.

Dining Robustly

The following food items are useful and easy to acquire. It's not necessary to keep them all in stock, but you should learn where to find them and when to use them.

• Donuts are available in security, crew quarters and from candy machines. Civilians heal a little bit of damage from them while officers gain double of that.
• Robust Coffee and other sources of coffee boost your stamina regeneration and max stamina a little, slightly lower duration of incoming stuns, and heat you up somewhat when you're cold, but it also gives away that you've been drinking coffee because you'll twitch around. It can also make you addicted to coffee.
• Happy Elf Hot Chocolate is similar. The chocolate inside warms you up a tiny bit, and sometimes creates sugar, which provides a mild stamina buff and a little stun resistance. It might not seem like much, but they can really stack up if you combine the boosts from coffee and cigarettes (for nicotine).
• Robust-Eez has methamphetamine, which has a higher addiction rate than coffee, but it makes you faster, provides much better stamina boosts than the previously mentioned drinks, and significantly reduces duration of incoming stuns.
• Lime-Aid makes you sober.
• Orange-Aid will fix your eyes if your vision is impaired from welding.

Dealing with it all Robustlike

It can't always go your way. Some times you have to suck it up and deal with it.

Sickness

Diseases, addictions and poisons are a part of life, and life tends to kill people. Find a medikit as soon as possible and identify the disease you're suffering from. A bad cough can mess with your flow, making you drop whatever you were holding. A bad case of the clowns is nothing to laugh at. Medical is frequently criminally understaffed and overworked, and diseased patients are considered third priority to the dead and dying, so it's important to be familiar with the common diseases and how to cure them.

Damage

Health restoration is easy to come by. Medikits are scattered through the station, food is easily accessible, the Medbay tends to be broken into. After robusting someone, make sure to check up on your health and return to top shape before you set out on another adventure. You don't want to ever remain in yellow health because that's when the first movement penalties kick in.

Should you get damaged to yellow health or lower, salicylic acid/painkiller/analgesic pills will reduce the movement penalties due to injury, keeping you at top speed for both fighting and fleeing to get better meds. Morphine does the job even better, if you don't mind the stamina regeneration penalties, as can certain speed-boosting stimulants like meth.

Suffocation damage will automatically fix itself once you get air as long as you haven't gone into critical. You can go through an airless vacuum as long as you get air before blacking out. Keep in mind that prolonged suffocation causes brain damage, which can instantly kill you if it builds up.

Mutations

Mutations can't always be avoided. Some times you might even want to risk getting them by hanging out near a radweed, smoking some awful pro-puffs or messing around with glowsticks until they break. There's other means of instant and guarantied mutations for those willing to bet it all. It's a high stakes game of balancing radiation sickness with your uncontrollable greed for power. There's closer to 40 known mutations, and barely a handful of those can actually offer something you can't already achieve with your own street smarts. If you manage to unlock one of the useful ones, you should stop there before it all goes bad.

Should you go down the path of intentional radiation exposure, make sure to have either rad treatment, anti-tox pills or a combination of Saline pills and epinephrine needles to handle the inevitable critical damage you'll take long enough to go back to the Medbay.

Note the following.

• Jumping inside something is bad.
• Hulk wears off without the muscle gene. doesn't wear off unless you get too hurt.
• Suffering seizures in a disposal pipe can stop your movement through the pipe.
• The radiation mutation will also constantly give you toxin damage
• The cloaking mutation will cause people to lose their shit.
• Fire resistance will prevent burns from electrical damage, but not the stun.
• Immolation does not come with its own fire resistance.
• Matter Eater will restore a bit of health when you eat objects.

Bolted in

A supercop or a Big Brother AI has bolted you down in a room because they had nothing better to do. Maybe you deserved it, maybe you didn't. The fact remains that you'll probably want to not be bolted in that room. You'll need to know your basic deconstruction methods and have the necessary tools to handle it. Always keep a box of tools in your backpack or full toolbelt to prevent situations like this. You might even want a pair of sunglasses or a welding mask on your person at all times if you suspect you'll be forced to do some excessive welding. Being the Captain or any other role with good access is not a guaranty that you won't find yourself stuck in a room with no exit.

Spaced

So you've been thrown out of the station. Tough luck. You'll probably die, but all is not lost yet. You now have three priorities:

• Get air. If you've been a robust gentleman, you'll own a mask and O2 tank already. If not, you have a very tiny window to operate in.
• Find solid ground. You need something to stand on, and you need it now. Either build floor tiles from metal or navigate to a structure by throwing objects around. If possible, look for a wall to quickly tear apart for metal and tiles.
• Get back. If you're still on the station level, either try to float back if you're confident in your health, or ask for help. There are plenty of pods around and a ton of assistants with nothing better to do. If you're in deep space, you'll have to navigate the Z-level to reach the mining outpost. There's a small pod parked south of its station that can get you back, as well as a few more in the diner area to its east, or you could use the mining shuttle at the outpost itself.

Grabbed

Someone is trying to get an aggressive and/or strangling hold on you, usually either because they want to suplex/throw/spin the crap out of you or slurp up your DNA like a milkshake. In the unlikely event that you are not stunned or incapacitated, and your captor only has a passive (1st level) grab on you, simply move away to break free. If they've upgraded their passive grab to an aggressive grab, and you're still not stunned or incapacitated, spam Disarms or the Resist button. These will drain some stamina, but your assailant will lose more, and if knock them down to 0 stamina or get lucky, you'll finally break free.

Loss of arms

Losing an arm doesn't impair you by much. You can still fight like normal. It only prevents you from managing item containers in your hands. A big upside is that you become immune to handcuffs.

Having no arms is on the other hand terribly unrobust. You can no longer interact with the world around you outside of bumping into things. Armless people can also be pulled around like they were handcuffed.`

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