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 erratically, randomly and be where they do not expect you to be. Hammer the movement keys like you mean it. Note that the anti-lag, action-queue may cause you to keep moving after you've stopped said hammering.
Be clicking on your opponents sprite before you close in on them. There is a slight delay on each movement. That delay let's you interact with things before you see yourself standing next to them.
Do not wait for your opponent to come to you. The aggressor holds the advantage because of the way movement works.

Know when to run

Do not stay in a fight where you have lost the upper hand. Do not stay when the opponent has reinforcements coming. Retreat, regain the advantage and strike back.

If you are depending on tasers, batons, flashes or other items which can wear out, retreat to recharge them.
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 don't know what is happening off-screen. You could run into bombs or other hazards. Pick your time to follow, maybe use an alternative route to where they could be going.

Winners do not fight fair

Have a secret trick, a last resort item. They can't defend against that which they do not know will attack them.

Don't let your opponent know what weapons or defenses you have. Hide your thermals or sunglasses behind masks and big hats. Pocket your weapons. Drop and run from your pipebomb instead of throwing it.
Cook grenades. The primers on grenades and explosives are dangerously short, and choosing to throw can take a faithful moment or two if the server is busy, but a grenade thrown too early can still be avoided. Practice cooking foam grenades to get a feel for the timer.
Strike when your opponent is distracted. Wait for them to be in conversation or for them to literally have their hands full with something else.
Use drugs. Take a sip of coffee, robust-eez, a medikit patch or a bite out of chocolate 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. Have a backup plan if something goes wrong and your original exit is blocked. Don't enter a room you can't get out of on your own be that using tools, a fire extinguisher or going through disposal.
Prepare the area as necessary for what you are trying to achieve. Cut cameras, shock doors, lay glass on the floors, make a hole into space, wet the floors, poison the air, set up mines, prepare bombs.
Disposal chutes are your number one get out of jail free-card. Always be ready to run to one and set it to flush while diving inside.
Closet and disposal chutes will hide you from the prying eyes of thermal visions and the AI. Slipping out of range and taking cover in a closet is great way to shake the detective. Note that closets make a noise when they open and shut, that makes them unreliable hiding places if people are close enough to hear you even if they can't see you.
Many bushes on the station can hide a standing person. These are great for ambushes, but bad for sustained hiding as you can easily be spotted on inspection.

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.

Tabling

Grabbing a person and successfully grabbing them again creates an aggressive grab. Aggressive grabs can be used on tables to put your opponent on them. A tabled opponent is stunned for a longer period of time. You will obviously be unable to table a moving opponent, but one caught unaware can be quickly be wrestled.

Surgery tables work a bit differently. People can be put on them with a single grab, but they can also get up again by clicking their Rest button. Make sure you opponent won't be able to get up if you intend to operate on him.

Speaking of surgery. It can be done on tabled opponents on regular tables provided that they are knocked unconscious. This is a great way to take an opponent out of the equation for good.

Disarms

The Disarm intent is by far the most robust setting. Every click on another person grants a random chance to pry their weapon away or push them to the ground. It could take several tries to be successful, but you can cut some of your losses here by moving well in order to land more disarm attempts on your opponent than he is able to land hits on you.

Loss of arms

Having one arm does not impair you much. You will still be able to robust with the best of them. It also makes it impossible to put handcuffs on you.

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. It is hands down the worst punishment you could visit on your fellow robusters. Armless people can also be pulled around like they were handcuffed.

Dodge lasers

Resting prone on the floor will make taser bolts and lasers fired from two tiles or further away pass over you. If an opponent is within one tile of you and using Harm intent, he will still hit you with a pointblank shot. Note that the AI turrets, artifact lasers and pod weapons can not be dodged by going prone.

Standing up from a resting position grants you a few seconds of prone movement. It is effectively a running slide. This trick can be used to slide under other players or to run through taser bolts and lasers.

Body throw

A standing person can be grabbed and smacked against any adjacant item for minor brute damage. It is not useful apart from opening doors with their ID, but it looks impressive. A prone person can be grabbed and thrown across the screen. Knocking someone down and throwing them out an airlock is the fastest and most reliable way to kill someone. Throwing someone into a shocked door is also a fast way to take them out as well as for checking if the door is electrified in the first place.

Stun gloves

These are not exclusively made from insulated gloves. Any glove can be a stun glove as long as you are stubborn enough to make it into one. Stun gloves are excellent last-ditch tools to make an opponent drop what he's holding or giving you a chance to run away. Note that you can carry with you the item necessary to charge the gloves, letting you re-use them multiple times.

Space walking

Standing on a space tile will quickly cool you to minimal movement speed, give you burn damage, and it could make you slip in a random direction. This does not mean space is off-limits. Space is some times the perfect place for an ambush or an unexpected retreat. You can walk for roughly a screen's length in space before the damage will overpower you. With proper preparation, that can be enough to reach another safe area or a get-away pod. Also note that with the current health system, you can keep moving with critical damage to cross even more ground even though it is a really bad idea to do so.

The space catwalks in the middle of the station allow for safe movement outside without actual spacesuits. You will lose your speed due to the cold and take some minor damage, but you can stay on them indefinitely as long as you have an air supply. Use this to quickly move between QM and Waste Disposal, or to and from the backside of EVA.

Disposal diving

Hiding in disposal chutes is just scratching the surface of the disposal systems true utility. You can drag other people inside a chute by clicking and dragging their sprite over the chute. This can even be done while you are hiding in the chute yourself. Any movement while in the chute will cause the person to eject and be stunned for a very short time. They have a couple of seconds of movement before a short stun kicks in after being ejected, and you should be careful that they don't run off and hide in a bush during this period. If you drag a person inside the chute just as you exit from it, you will recover from the stun before them.

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 operate 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.

Multiple uses of a disposal chute will pump all the air out of the room, although the chute has to reload its pressure between each use. Keep this in mind so you don't unintionally sufficate yourself or everyone in the room.

Engaging the disposal will send you through the pipes to the waste disposal area. Most jobs have access here and can safely exit. If you are stuck, rest on the ground and stand up again to temporarily be able to slide under the barrier on the conveyor belt.

Aside from the regular disposal chute, there are several specialists chutes. These go between hydroponics and the kitchen, the kitchen and the bar counter, medbay and the medbay morgue, and waste disposal and the medbay morgue. They all lead to rooms with job specific access IDs.

Changing around the right sections of disposal pipes can make disposal send you through the pipe and out of a blue mail-chute.

Ranged weapons

Core rule: You can only click a spot you can see in order to fire in that direction. The dark is the biggest disadvantage to ranged weapons. A common practice is to click behind your intended target provided you can see anything to click there. This gives you a controlled shot even while moving.

Hitting a moving target can however be tricky. With the current anti-lag, action-queue system, clicking a target with a gun means you will fire in his direction when the lag stops. This is important! You can be below a target when you click on him, the two of you can run around eachother while the server experiences some minor lag, and the shot will go directly towards his new position from your new position when the lag clears.

Know when to directly shoot at the target and know when to aim for the background instead. Aiming for the background is better for leading your aim, while clicking the the target is better when you think he won't move a lot at a time.

Fighting in a crowd

Fighting an opponent in a crowd is ill adviced, but can happen from time to time. Keep in mind that if you fight while on Help intent, you'll be able to run through any bystanders who are also on Help intent. This is great for retreating or for putting bodies between you and an opponent with a ranged weapon. Note that it is unreliable because not everyone are on Help intent.

Harm intent is necessary to use stun gloves and to fire guns point-blank. That means you will have to endure bumping into people if you want to keep your weapons ready. Consider switching to Help on the fly if you have to pass through a bottleneck of people to reach your target.

Dining Robustly

The following food items are useful and easy to aquire. 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 makes you recover from stuns faster and it restores your body temperature, but it also gives away that you've been drinking coffee because you'll twitch around. It can also make you addicted to coffee.
Robust-Eez has a higher chance addiction rate than coffee, but it will make you recover from stuns much faster.
Happy Elf Hot Chocolate will randomly make you run really fast for short periods of time. These random bursts of speed override any mobility problems you have from damage.
Lime-Aid makes you sober.
Orange-Aid will fix your eyes if your vision is impaired from welding.

Robusting Byond

There will be unexpected events. Things that shouldn't happen, but for whatever reason occured anyway. Some of them can be reliably triggered, others are entirely out of your control. To be robust is to be prepared for Byond itself trying to get the better of you. This is not about abusing Byond or glitches in the game. This is a heads up on what you could run into as you go about minding your business in a very robust manner.

Space Wind

Old space wind was a result of actual atmosphere leaking from the station into space. This created suction that could pull you into space. It was removed. What remains is something else, a ghost of what was. Occasionally you will be inexplicably pulled in one direction while you are on a space tile. It is best to retreat to the station as that seems to nullify it if this happens to you. Failure to recover will mean that no matter where you go in space, you will still be dragged in that one direction when you stop moving.

Running through projectiles

People and projectiles will occasionally move in a way that makes it look like they were hit. Keep a close eye for telltale signs of a stun going into effect before you assume that your opponent was actually hit.

Stun effect delay

Knockdowns, slips and stuns some times take a few seconds to go into effect. This period of almost-stun is weird. Blast damage can occasionally be out-run, items can occasionally be used, disposal diving may work. This is why you should approach stunned enemies with caution until you can be sure the stun is in effect for real. It is also quite normal that stunned people remain standing on their feet even if lost their items and can't move.

Table stun-immunity

You are not supposed to be able to perform an action will stunned. Byond doesn't always care. Some times after a tabling, your opponent or you will be able to interact with the world even though a stun was previously and should still be in effect. It is rare and it's impossible to force this to happen, but you should be aware that it's a thing. This will either last for a few actions until the opponent becomes stunned for real, or the stun will never take hold. If your opponent starts moving after he's supposed to have been tabled, back up and re-assess your chances to fight him again. Alternatively, he could be high on stun-immunity drugs.

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