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. 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, flashes that use ammo or power charges.
• 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 something else.
• 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. 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. Camera coverage varies across the station. Some areas like the Observatory haven't even got any cameras at all. 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 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, 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.

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. Tabling someone will stun them for a long time. Someone caught unaware can be quickly be wrestled in place.

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.

Disarms

The Disarm intent leaves something to be desired after the stamina system was introduced. You automatically block some punches and grabs while Disarm is active, but it is unreliable as an actual disarm. If you wish to disarm someone, it is better to punch them in the groin. 5 direct hits always stuns the target unless they're using stamina enhancing food or drugs. You can also disarm people by hitting them over the head with a dinner plate, or by throwing a basketball at them.

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.

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. Note that the artifact lasers and pod weapons can't be dodged this way.

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 and run through taser bolts.

Body throw

A standing person can be grabbed and smacked against any adjacent item for minor brute damage. It looks impressive and can open up doors their ID has access to. A prone person can be grabbed and thrown across the screen. 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.

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. Disarm doesn't work with stun gloves, but disarm is bad now anway. Keep a spare power cell in your backpack to recharge your gloves.

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.

The catwalks between the QM and Waste Disposal allow for safe travel between the north and south part of the station without spacesuits and internals. You can stay on them indefinitely if you bring air.

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.

Multiple uses of a disposal chute will pump all the air out of the room. Keep this in mind so you don't unintentionally suffocate yourself or everyone in the room. Also remember that the chute has to recharge between each time it's flushed.

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 and stand up again to prone-slide under the plastic flaps 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.

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.

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 occurred 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. It your enemy didn't drop his items, the stun missed.

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.

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. Doctors rarely have the faintest idea what they're doing, 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.

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.
• Obesity does not play nice with the jump ability.
• Hulk wears off without the muscle gene.
• Suffering seizures in a disposal pipe can stop your movement through the pipe.
• The radiation mutation will also constantly give you toxin damage and minor burns.
• 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, or you could use the mining shuttle at the outpost itself.

Supplementary Video

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