Guide: Lab Challenge

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WARNING: This page may contain spoilers and ruin the joy of adventure.
Remember, the fun of a lab challenge is figuring out how to survive and get out. This guide can spoil the experience!

Character generation

The Lab start scenario grants 8 extra points for character creation, which can be spent on useful stats and skills. Remember that stats are more important than skills and the lab is full of skill books for you to train on. Consider taking the opportunity to get a 9 in Perception (for more powerful night vision) and a 14 in one other skill, preferably Intelligence or Strength. High Intelligence will massively benefit you in the short term as you install bionics and hack into secure doors, but Strength will benefit you in the very long run for HP, carrying capacity, and melee damage.

The most important skills for a Lab start are Computers, Electronics, First Aid, and Mechanics, especially if you are a Broken or Failed Cyborg who needs to uninstall your Leaky Bionic at the autodoc. If you are a Cyborg, you need to train these four skills as high as you can unless you have the Safe Autodoc game mod. You do not need to invest in Cooking, since it is easy to find lab skillbooks that can train your cooking as high as 10.

It is recommended that you begin your Lab Challenge with a Computers skill of at least 5--higher is better--and a few remaining points in Electronics. 5 Computers and 5 Electronics is a fine start. Tailor your starting skills to your personal taste. Other suggested options include a point or two in Mechanics or Dodging. If you invest in First Aid, raise it to at least 3 to start out or the investment will be useless due to the available skill books in the lab.

An 8 in Computers will enable you to reliably hack into any door in the lab. This skill level can be achieved during your lab run if you get good books (namely, SICP) from the lab libraries and bookshelf rooms.

A 4 in Electronics will unlock the EMP grenade recipe (cheap and useful for destroying robots and 9mm turrets), atomic lamp (a permanent light source), and the electrohack (which also requires 1 in Computers, but allows a chance to easily escape).

A 5 in Electronics will unlock the electric jackhammer, which can be used not only to escape, but to rob the entire lab. However, crafting the jackhammer is rather hard, as it requires a welder (2 mechanics at start or 3 for autolearn), 3 heating elements from the ovens in lab living areas, welding goggles (semi-common drop) and a set of tools.

At least 2 points in cooking are necessary to escape the lab using crafted explosives.

Choosing a Good Beginning

The benefit you reap from a Challenge--Lab start often depends on what kind of lab you spawn in and where it is. Unless you believe in attempting whatever situation fate gives you, you will find great benefit from repeatedly restarting your run until you spawn in a good lab. On the last screen of character generation on which you name your character, press the slash (/) button and select the third (3) spawn option, "Bottom of the Lab". This will spawn you in the deepest "treasure room" (also called the "Finale Room") of the lab, which will give you valuable info about your lab with very little risk (The hardest room to escape is the Mutagen Lab, which you can usually get out of by keeping the mutagen vault or cubicles between you and the security bots).

Now that you have spawned in the lab's final room, you can assess whether this is a great spawn location. A great starting lab has as many of the following things as possible, in descending order of importance:

  • THE LAB IS NOT CLOSE TO AN ANTHILL. Anthill tunnels will intersect with your lab and make it an absolute nightmare to survive in the early game. Unless you want a special challenge, an ant-infested lab is not worth the effort.
  • The lab is deep. Use your map (M) and the (<) and (>) keys to figure out how many floors are between you and the surface. A good lab is four to five floors deep. Remember that if your lab is under a different structure like a house or prison, the first floor underground is not part of the lab, so leave that off when you count. (You might think a shallow lab is easier to escape, but that means you have much fewer resources to loot and escape with.)
  • The Finale room you spawn in is a Rare Firearms Vault, Mutagen Lab (with generic or your favorite type of mutagen inside the tank), Rare Bionics Vault, or Purifier Smart Shot Vault. The other possible rooms are probably not worth it for your first lab; if you spawn in a useless Sub-Prime Portal room, you might as well restart immediately.
  • The Finale room has a Science ID Card on the floor next to the treasure (Mutagen Labs do not have one of these, but have lots of other goodies if you like mutating).
  • The lab is in the countryside, not in the middle of a city or other dungeon structure (like a prison). Alternately, the lab is under a house not far from the edge of the city or with a Butcher Shop nearby (which is useful because it contains a butchering rack you can use to finish making your preferred mutagen; this may be necessary for mutation categories such as Spider, which requires proper butchering to obtain spider chitin).

Planning your Lab Run

Once you have found a good spawn, you should consider your strategy based on what you seek to gain. The Lab challenge is beneficial not just for the extra stat points, but for the advanced gear, supplies, and character upgrades you can obtain right at the beginning of the game. Here are some questions to consider:

  • Do you just want to take your free stats and leave as fast as you can with whatever you find on the way? You may be more likely to survive if you do so.
  • Do you want to install the bionics you find or uninstall the faulty ones you start with? You'll need to find your lab's libraries and obtain the required skills as well as some stimulants like Adderall to boost your chances of surgical success.
  • Do you want to use your lab's considerable resources to brew your preferred mutagen so you can exit the lab as a post-threshold transhuman? Labs are possibly the easiest places to perform controlled mutations since they have many Cooking skill books and almost all the ingredients you could need to brew mutagen.
  • Is the lab secluded enough that you'd want to convert it into a permanent home and build your farm and fortress in the countryside around it? Labs could potentially make great homes with their roomy interior, abundance of permanent light sources, premade living quarters, fortified exterior, and access to autodoc and bonesetter (Mr. Stem Cell) machines. If a swamp or river is nearby, you will have an abundance of fairly easy meat to hunt for sustenance.
  • Finally, do you want to (mostly) clear the entire lab and strip it for scrap and supplies, giving you a huge and relatively safe head start on building your dream vehicle? After all, you'll need something to cart around all that loot you brought with you.

The answers to these questions will determine the difficulty of your lab run, how much time you spend before first leaving the lab, which finale room is best for you to start with, and how thorough and risky your methods will be. If you plan on clearing the lab thoroughly, you will have to be that much more wary of walking carelessly into ambushes and deathtraps.

General Procedure

A Lab start can generally be divided into five parts, with an additional first step for Experiment Cell starters:

(0. If you chose to spawn in an Experiment Cell--escaping the Zombie Brute that spawns in the beginning);

1. Escaping the finale room (or finding and identifying it, if you chose not to spawn there);

2. Locating the exit and the safest routes between floors;

3. Acquiring the equipment necessary to defeat the two things standing between you and freedom (see #Escaping below);

4. Gathering the loot you've acquired into one well-lit room on the floor below the exit, then doing any optional things you decided to do; and

5. Defeating the main gate defenses to exit the lab.

Items to Look Out For

The following is an incomplete list of important items you may find in your travels around the lab. You should pick these up or put them in your stash if you find them.

Weapons

  • pipe (Found by smashing lockers, display racks, or refrigerators. Get one of these as soon as you can and craft a makeshift crowbar using it and a chunk of steel or scrap metal, both of which are also dropped by lockers and display racks.)
  • golf club (found in dormitories)
  • machete (A solid melee weapon occasionally found on counters and laboratory cubicle counters.)
  • tonfa (a light club found in conference rooms with L-shaped tables)
  • baseball bat (found in dormitories)
  • 2-by-sword (This one is only crafted out of two-by-fours, but is included in this list as your go-to weapon against Shocker Zombies.)

Clothes

Bags

Books

Tools

Medical Supplies

Consumables

Barracks Exclusives

Other items

Monster Drops

  • Dragon skin vest (Dropped by Zombie bio-operators)
  • blade (sometimes dropped by manhacks)
  • batteries (sometimes dropped by robots)
  • Bionic CBM's obtained by dissecting Zombie Scientists, Zombie Technicians, Shocker Zombies, Shocker Brutes, and Zombie Bio-operators. (Use an X-acto knife or scalpel for best results.)
  • Guns
  • Ammunition
  • Cash Cards
  • Tools
  • Food
  • Medicine

Escaping

The main entrance of a lab is secured with two defenses: a Card Reader that accepts Science ID Cards, and usually a 9mm turret positioned by the door--usually on the interior side of the door. In basement-type labs, the 9mm turret may be absent or on the exterior side of the door.

Therefore, you need two things at minimum to escape the lab: something to defeat the sentry turret, and something to defeat the card reader.

Defeating the Sentry Turret

Most of the time, you must first deal with the main gate turret before being able to access the card reader. Fortunately, this is a simple task, given the right materials.

EMP Grenades

EMP Grenades are easily craftable with a small investment in the Electronics skill and will usually destroy turrets in a single blast. Depending on the layout of the top floor of the lab, it may be difficult to throw the grenade far enough to safely hit the turret. You may want to have a high Strength skill and a copy of The Art of Pitching from a lab library.

A very safe method of dealing with any turret is to Xpeek around a corner and throw a grenade.

Guns

The RM13 Plasma Rifle found in the Rare Firearms Vault finale room is more than powerful enough to destroy the main sentry turret and most other strong enemies you come across. This is why the Rare Firearms Vault is a highly desirable finale room to spawn with. Since the rifle uses a UPS, you will need to carefully conserve your supply of batteries and make every shot count as you ascend through the lab. Aiming should not be a problem when you get to the main entrance, as standing on the entryway stairs with the door open should keep you far enough away from the sentry turret for it not to shoot you. You will need one to three shots--two on average--to destroy the main sentry turret.

The other method of acquiring a gun to use on the main sentry turret is to break into the armory magazine found in a lab barracks. This will require a high Computers skill (preferably 8) and a barracks generated without strong enemies defending it. Though other guns and ammo can be found on zombies or lying around the lab, it is unlikely that you will find a matched set of guns, magazines, and ammunition to make a working and loaded firearm from those sources alone.

The Luddite Method

(THIS SUBSECTION MAY BE OUTDATED FOR 0.D (Danny).)

i.e. Furniture + Throwing Sticks. This requires the top floor to have unlit tiles outside of the stairwell doors, as you cannot construct on the stairs or the open metal doors. You are to haul enough materials to construct a sight-blocking piece of furniture, such as a dresser, just outside the stairs, aligned with the turret. Grab it, and push it next to the turret while using it as cover. smash any overhead lights that may be inbetween the dresser and the stairs. This should create tiles unlit by the turret 3 spots away, from where you may whittle it down with impunity with inferior weapons thanks to the lesser range penalty. Given the abundance of wooden furniture, throwing sticks are the most economical choice, but at 1 to 4 damage per hit it might take a while. This method of course can be used with guns in case you're stingy with ammo. Arrows and crossbows should work, but given the turret's resistance to cutting, you might need mid-tier ammunition or weapons. (Note: In 0.D (Danny), dressers no longer block line of sight. Bookcases still do, but may be too heavy to move.)

Defeating the Card Reader

The topmost level of the lab has a card reader controlling the main door. If you manage to activate it with a science ID card or an electrohack, the doors will open.

Science ID Card

There is a guaranteed science ID card in most of the possible finale rooms that can spawn in the lab, including the Rare Firearms Vault. You can also find one very rarely lying on a table, desk, or counter as random lab loot. Take care that the ID is not destroyed by explosions before you pick it up.

Electrohack

This is the easiest way to escape if you have the required skills. Crafting an electrohack requires a 4 in Electronics and a 1 in Computers. If you are lucky, you may find one lying around in the lab. An electrohack requires batteries to work. Usea it on the Card Reader to attempt to open the main door. If the hacking attempt fails, the card reader may disable itself like any other console, so make sure you have raised your Computers and Electronics skills as high as you can get them before you attempt the hack. Stimulants like Adderall also raise your chances of success, but are generally not needed and are better saved for any bionic surgery you need to perform on yourself. An EMP grenade (4 electronics) may also open the main door and likewise it may also fry the reader instead of activating it.

However, if your lab is under a basement rather than being a standalone lab, there may be an active 9mm turret waiting for you on the other side of the door, and hacking the door will not deactivate it! Therefore, in "secret basement"-type labs, it is recommended that you use a Science ID card to escape, which should disable the sentry turret outside the main entrance.

Alternative Methods of Escape

With luck and ingenuity, there are a few ways for you to bypass the main gate and its sentry turret entirely.

Teleporter

A Teleporter is a rare drop that pretty much guarantees escape. Just use it on the topmost level, preferably at night. Note that this is almost certainly a one-way trip since the gate will be locked behind you unless you take a Science ID Card out with you. If you have one and wish to use it to open the lab, it will open the gate from the outside and disable the sentry turret inside.

It is possible to gain a "guaranteed" teleporter by disassembling a teleport pad, but disarming a teleport pad is fairly risky and requires a moderately high Trapping skill. Trapping skill books may be found in lab libraries.

Explosives

Concrete walls will require powerful explosives to destroy. The easiest "serious" explosive to craft is the dynamite, which requires 7 cooking and a chemistry book. The chemistry books found in the lab require a Cooking skill of 5 to be read. The biggest challenge, therefore, is leveling your Cooking skill to 5 to be able to learn from the book, finding (or crafting) a chemistry set, and finding the book itself.

The Lab Technician profession starts with the chemistry set, which solves one of the issues immediately. Most chemical cooking recipes that can be used in the lab require the chemistry set. However, some Cooking recipes require ingredients that may be rare in the lab.

Possible skill progression from 0 to 5 can look like this:

  • Level 0: clean water
  • Level 1: human broth
  • Level 2: superglue, acid water
  • Level 3: zombie pheromone
  • Level 4: ammonium nitrate, hydrogen peroxide, lye powder, concentrated acid

Note that level 1 is particularly devoid of any easily craftable recipes. This makes starting with Cooking at 2+ a good idea if you wish to use explosives to escape.

Once you have a Cooking skill of 7, you can craft dynamite. Dynamite is powerful enough to break concrete walls. To improve your chances of success, use the dynamite in constrained spaces - the less room it has to expand (especially directly at the center of the blast), the more likely it is to destroy adjacent walls. You can construct bookcases to surround the space where you'll place the dynamite.

After placing the dynamite, RUN. The explosion radius can be pretty big. Try to go downstairs or close doors behind yourself.

Digging Out of the Lab

It is possible to craft the electric jackhammer to (quite messily) pierce the concrete walls of the lab's upper floor. This is a somewhat complex process:

1. Acquire welding goggles, eclipse glasses, or the equivalent bionic.

2. Make sure you have the required skills to craft the electric jackhammer.

2. Install an Integrated Toolset bionic or acquire a wrench, screwdriver, hammer, soldering iron, solder, and makeshift welder (which is crafted from common electrical ingredients found in the lab, plus three heating element acquired by smashing ovens).

3. Acquire or craft a small electric motor and the other, more common parts to craft the electric jackhammer.

4. Craft the electric jackhammer and load it with batteries.

5. Use the jackhammer with the (a) key on the outer walls of the lab on the upper floor. Have high HP and wear something on your head (preferably a hard hat or army helmet) to survive a possible cave-in as you break the wall.

The jackhammer can also break through all locked doors and walls in the lab. If you break into a secure area, have EMP grenades or guns on hand and stand diagonal to the door so you are not shot by 9mm turrets that spawn as you force your way in.

Escaping Through the Subway Tunnels

If you are exceptionally lucky, your lab will spawn with an underground train station attached to a network of subway tunnels (Unfortunately, the trains are inoperable as of game version 0.C Cooper). If you find such tunnels, simply gather your things and hike the tunnels on foot until you find your way to the surface. Advice on surviving in underground rail tunnels is beyond the scope of this guide.

Climbing

(THIS SUBSECTION MAY BE OUTDATED FOR 0.D (Danny).)

If playing in Z-level mode, you can climb up with <. This will require you to remove the roof first, then prepare something to function as a makeshift ladder. The roof can be removed by explosives or fire. Any adjacent unpassable terrain or furniture (for example, walls and bookshelves) help with climbing, but you may need to nearly surround yourself with those to actually be able to reach the roof. (Note: in 0.D (Danny), the corridor the player emerges into, with the main doors and turret, has a roof, but the side rooms normally do not.)

Once on the roof, you can just walk down to an edge and examine it to drop down safely.

Safety

  • You can tell a room has a turret because it will have lit up walls. Big rooms can have turrets far from doors, but those won't see you if you don't have a light source and stand in the darkness while opening the door.
  • Peek around corners X if there are no walls/doors.
  • You can tell room has mobile creatures in it by knocking on (smashing) its wall and waiting for reaction - zombies will hear the knock and get angry and start whacking the wall, robots will start moving around.
  • Metal doors can take all zombie hits (except hulks, they can very rarely spawn in hard to break in places like Armories), so if you see something scary, just close the door and get away.
  • Bionic room computers can spawn security bots on failure. Other computers can only zap you, shutdown or spawn manhacks (which are harmless and can drop combat knife).
  • Skitterbots are dangerous if you have low dex, low melee skill and bad weapons. They have quite a bit of armor, so light weapons aren't all that good against them. They have no light source (unlike manhacks or turrets), so telling them apart from zombies requires being close. They're significantly faster than your walking speed (comparable to dog speed) and hear well. Leading them into dissectors or blob pits works well.
  • Manhacks are hard to hit, but rather weak. They also have hit and run flag, so they'll disengage after every hit. Just hide in the darkness if you don't want to fight them. You can train bashing and melee by missing them with a plank. If you started with 4 electronics, you can detonate EMP grenades in your own inventory to take out nearby manhacks.
  • Broken cyborgs are great punching bags. You can miss them with heavy weapons (10 bashing or more) or hit them with light ones (a 0 dmg item will train bashing, but won't deal damage unless you're hulk mode strong). If you've got 0 torso encumbrance and didn't gimp yourself by lowering DEX, you will dodge most of their hits and even those that hit are very weak.
  • Zombie bio-operators are highly dangerous zombies with zapback defense (like shocker zombies) and a knockdown attack. Zapback makes it so that the best weapons can't be safely used against them - you'll need something purely wooden (or purely plastic). They are also heavily armored and hit accurately. It is possible to beat one up with a plank without high skills, but without a good armor or huge (18) dexterity, it is very risky. Lead them into dissectors or blob pits (note that blobbed bio-ops no longer drop CBMs when butchered).
  • Turrets just stand there and wait for you to come. You don't need to kill any of those, not even the "boss turret" on 0 z-level. They have really good armor and (at this point in game) incredibly powerful burst attack. Their light radius is pretty huge, making non-grenade weapons impractical. If you start with 4 electronics, you can safely destroy them with EMP grenades. Or with Night Vision and a powerful enough gun, you can one-shot them from the dark.
  • Security bots don't spawn unless you do something stupid or reach the finale. If you see one before it sees you, throw items behind it to lure it away, then run. Don't let it see you, not even from afar - it's a turret on wheels (without a flashlight). You can't lead it onto a dissector (non-organic enemies are immune). You can lead it into a blob pit or make it waste ammo by shooting through armored glass (its 9mm SMG will not pierce the glass).

Robots can't smell you, but some of them can hear stuff. If you see/hear a dangerous bot creeping around, stand still and throw something to lure the bot away.

Food

Generally, there is enough food in the lab to survive until you escape as long as you use your time wisely and do not prematurely mutate. If you wish to mutate before leaving, save it for just before you move out of the lab. Getting the Carnivore mutation before you are ready can be a death sentence unless you have purifier serum.

  • Human corpses and mutated limbs are nutritious, but the morale penalty from eating them will stack (unless you took cannibal) and prevent crafting. If you get famished, cut up one of those naked corpses, cook it all up (make sure you cook enough before starting eating) and eat until full. It's a good idea to eat before sleep - even if you get -400 morale, most of it will go away before you wake up.
  • Water is common and there are rooms with infinite water, so thirst is only a problem if the RNG hates you or if you fail to secure your water supply before grinding your skills. Various beverages are ubiquitous in office and living areas of the lab.

It is generally simple to obtain a hotplate or chemistry set to cook with (in fact, some professions spawn with the latter). Chemistry sets spawn in laboratory cubicles and Mutagen Labs, and the batteries to power them are most often found in crates. If you must cook food over an open flame, use a filter mask, keep the flame tiny, and stand far from it. You'll still choke on smoke, just much less. Remember that ovens can safely contain a fire.

  • Chunk of tainted meat will debuff and hurt you, cause vomiting and pain and generally be very unpleasant. Don't eat it all at once or you risk vomiting it all back up. One piece of tainted meat usually takes 2 minutes to be fully digested. If you have a Royal jelly, you can gather a lot of tainted meat, eat it all at once and then cure the poisoning with the jelly.
  • If you started with Herbivore mutation, you'll need to subsist on blob globs, veggies from farm rooms, veggie dishes from refrigerators, or vending machine food. It is actually possible (more - feasible) to survive on blobs until the escape. Lead things into blob pits, kill big blobs, then lead small blobs into pits once again to maximize glob harvest.
  • The Poison Resistance trait will help a lot with poisonous food, making zombie meat and blobs nearly safe to eat. The Strong Stomach trait will help with vomiting (this is one of the very few cases where this trait is useful, though it is still not generally worth the point expense).
  • If you are extremely careful and attentive, you can farm Fungaloids for their edible fluid sacs if you are (un)lucky enough to have Fungaloids loitering about. They will, of course, make a huge mess of your lab, though, so this should be a last resort. It is better to exterminate them and search the vicinity of their shimmering portal for the elusive and nutritious fruit of the Marloss Bush, which occasionally grows near the fungal portal. Yes. Yes, of course we should.

Enemy Encounters

In order of threat, from lowest to highest:

  • Breather (Extremely rare)
  • Small Blob
  • Zombie
  • Zombie Dog (Often in groups of 3 in kennels, with one already loose)
  • Blob
  • Fungaloid (Fungal portals can spawn during level generation alongside fungaloids; if you kill them all, they will not propagate. Beware of getting a deadly fungal infection, though! Fungicide is rare in labs, so don't spend too much time killing Fungaloids unless you have some. If you get a fungal infection, eat fungicide until the infection disappears ("You feel a burning sensation under your skin, and then it subsides."))
  • Insane Cyborg (Good for practicing your melee skills, since they are tanky but do very little damage if you are wearing decent clothes.
  • Hazmat Zombie
  • Giant Web Spider (3ish spiders spawn in webbed-up rooms.)
  • Zombie Scientist
  • Zombie Technician
  • Manhack
  • Skitterbot
  • Albino Penguin (very rare, and passive unless attacked.)
  • Crawler
  • Shocker Zombie
  • 9mm Turret
  • Zombie Soldier (0-3 can be found in a Barracks)
  • Zombie Brute (one spawns guaranteed just outside an Experiment Cell)
  • Security Bot (spawns in the treasure room on the bottom floor, occasionally after a failed door hack, and VERY rarely in random places in the lab.)
  • Sewer Gator (Deals very high damage unless you are a Broken Cyborg. Has the ability to give you a guaranteed deep bite.)
  • Giant Naked Mole-rat (One occasionally spawns loose on a floor; listen for "SMASH!". They deal devastating melee damage and destroy everything in sight, but can be taken down by a few gunshots.)
  • Zombie bio-operator (This creature is the answer to the age-old question: "How dangerous would an electrified zombie cyborg super-soldier be?" The answer is, "Exactly as dangerous as it sounds." At least it has no ranged attacks. You will generally need to shoot it several times with a high-powered firearm before it goes down. If you kill it, you can dissect it for valuable bionics and loot its corpse for top-of-the-line military gear. If that's too tall an order for you, let it chase you into a goo trap and turn it into a simple blob. You'll lose all the loot, though.)
  • Shocker Brute (Rare)
  • Armored Zombie (And "armored" here means power armor. Run!)
  • Zombie Grenadier (Occasionally in barracks. If you see one in a barracks, IMMEDIATELY run and close the door behind you. If the zombie throws a grenade drone that makes it out the door, you are probably dead. Take a swing at the drone and pray. Do not engage unless you are heavily armed and armored, which you probably aren't at this point.)
  • A metric crapton of Ants, Soldier Ants, or Acid Ants (But you read the bolded, all-caps bullet point in the "Choosing a Good Beginning" section, so you won't have to deal with this, right?)


In addition to these, most types of eldritch creatures can be found caged inside a Containment Zone or a Sub-Prime Portal Laboratory, including mi-goes, grackens, krecks, crawlers, and shoggoths. Floating Eyes may be found in the cages of Sub-Prime Portal labs.

Occasionally you may encounter a room with a single cage containing a strong mutant such as an Antlered horror, Zombear, or Albino penguin. These can be safely left alone.

Landmarks

See Science Lab for a detailed list of generated areas in science labs (Article currently under construction).

The most important non-secure landmarks to identify are Autodoc Operating Theaters and Lab Hospitals, since these contain valuable healthcare facilities. If you break a bone, find the leftmost patient room of a lab hospital, defeat the enemy defending it (always a Shocker Zombie, Crawler, or Insane Cyborg), secure the area, and use the bonesetter machine (also known as Mr. Stem Cell, depending on how recent your game version is). Your bones will melt and reform over the course of a few minutes, restoring your HP as well. Do not use the machine unless you actually have a broken limb, as you may experience unpleasant side effects otherwise.

Staff dormitories come in groups of four suites and have an abundance of food and clothing in them, reasonably safe bedrooms to crash in, and kitchens with cookware and ovens to smash for their valuable heating elements. The heating elements can then be used to craft a hotplate or makeshift welder.

Locked Structures

You will find several kinds of areas in the lab that are secured behind locked doors. These areas are always on the outer edges of the floor, except for the two kinds of locked vaults. There are no keys to these rooms, but you may attempt access by hacking into the adjacent computer console or by forcing your way in with a jackhammer. If your hacking attempt fails, the console may shock you for minor damage, render itself inoperable ("The console shuts down."), or spawn a group of manhacks. If a console shuts down, your only remaining option is to force your way in once you have the tools to do so. This is why a high Computers skill is important for Lab Challenges.

  • Note: If you force your way into any of these rooms with tools such as a jackhammer, there will often be active turrets waiting for you on the other side! These turrets do not spawn if you hack your way in successfully.

Easy rooms to open

Library

Arguably the most important locked room you can find, since it contains a large number of skillbooks and two guaranteed vending machines which are usually intact. Libraries are more common in the shallower floors of the lab and are very easy to open with a moderate Computers skill (Testing shows that a Computers skill of 5 never seems to fail to open a library).

Prisoner Containment

Don't mess with the inner section where the prisoners are; they contain powerful zombies, including brutes and grapplers. The important parts are the two side rooms in the first section; the one on the left contains three lockers with good medical supplies (painkillers, bandages, disinfectant, cough syrup, inhalers, any type of pill, and first aid kits) and three tables with beverages, eyewear, flashlights, and bags. Always walk onto the two tables across from the lockers, since for some reason the contents of the tables are invisible from a distance. If you want to open the secure area for the skill experience, you can do so safely since the main door does not open automatically, but this is not necessary. The side room on the right contains lockers, various gear, and a centrifuge you can smash for copper wire.

Up to two Zombie Scientists and their manhacks can be found running loose in the main lobby of the Prisoner Containment Zone.

More difficult rooms to open

Bionic Vault

A small storage closet that contains up to 8 lockers with bionics of varying rarity. Unlike other secure doors, if your hacking attempt fails to open this room, it may spawn a security bot instead of manhacks.

Sometimes, you will find a room with two little bionic vaults in it. These are much easier to open than proper Bionic Vaults.

Advanced PEV-12 (Mutagen) Samples

A small storage closet that contains up to 8 units of any syringe, purifier serum, or mutagen serum other than Medical, Raptor, Chimera, Alpha, or Elf-a. Somewhat easier to hack than the bionic vaults.

Barracks

These are extremely valuable sources of high-storage clothing, combat knives, sheaths, pistols, and skillbooks for marksmanship, melee, survival, cutting weapons, and martial arts. There are several beds that are fairly safe to rest in if the barracks is secure.

Barracks may be empty, or they may contain 0-3 Zombie Soldiers, manhacks, 0-2 Zombie Bio-operators, or a Zombie Grenadier if you are especially unlucky. When you first open the barracks entrance, peek in quickly to determine what is on the other side. If there are zombies inside, you should close the door immediately and stay out of the barracks until you have very powerful and accurate ranged weapons. Be especially cautious around the devastating Zombie Grenadier, who possesses several ways to one-shot even a well-armored character--not the least of which is a C4-drone that can bring down the entire room. If the grenadier deploys one of these bomb drones, you must destroy it FAST before it explodes or get out of the room and close the door before the drone gets through.

Barracks Magazine

The magazine (armory) inside the barracks may be the most difficult door to hack into in the whole lab. Do not attempt to hack it unless you have a very high Computers skill, or unless you desperately need food or guns (The good news is that a failed hack rarely results in anything worse than the console shutting down). The magazine is a large storage room with lockers full of ammunition, firearms, launchers, MRE's, first aid kits, ammo magazines, and the occasional explosive or accessory. Generally, you can put together one to three working firearms (the gun, the ammo, and the ammo clip or magazine) from one barracks magazine with many other bits of gun paraphernalia left over, depending on your luck. If you force your way in, expect to fight two 9mm turrets, one near each back corner of the room.

Occasionally, you may find a Barracks broken open by a collapsed ceiling. You may find clothed human corpses in front of that barracks entrance.

Finale Rooms

Rare Weapons Vault

This is a large, square room with a 2x2 vault containing rare firearms at its center.

The vault is flanked by a dissector trap at each of its corners and is made of bulletproof glass.

This room is defended by at least one security bot and zero or more skitterbots and/or manhacks. The best way to deal with the security bot is to stand across the closed vault from it and let it try to shoot you through the bulletproof glass. After several turns, it will run out of ammunition ("You hear, "click click"!) and will become mostly harmless at that point. However, take care that it does not pin you inside the vault when you enter to collect its contents. Though it is only average in melee combat, it is more than powerful enough to trap and kill a freshly spawned player.


This room contains a guaranteed Science ID card lying on the floor to the left of the vault.

Rare Bionics Vault

Rare Mutagen Vault

Power Armor Vault

Mininuke Vault

Mutagen Lab

CVD Machine

This machine is for upgrading bladed melee weapons. Given the right supplies, it will increase the cutting damage of a given weapon by half. It seems more useful for lategame characters and is not recommended for a Lab Challenge start.

This room contains a guaranteed Science ID card lying close to the machine.

Subprime Portal Lab

As of game version 0.C Cooper, the Sub-Prime Portal does not do anything useful, but will be used in a future update. As such, it is currently useless for a Lab Challenge start. As mentioned previously, it is recommended that you not play through a game that starts you with this room.

Currently, this room's only feature of note is its high likelihood of containing a caged Floating Eye, whose drops may be useful for lategame characters. Fighting a Floating Eye in the early game is not recommended.

This room contains a guaranteed Science ID card lying close to the portal machine.

Well-stocked Autodoc Operating Theater

This Finale Room is identical to an ordinary Autodoc Operating Theater, but it contains a great many more Anesthesia Kits than an ordinary operating theater: this one contains somewhere in the ballpark of 25 to 40 anesthesia kits compared to the usual three. As such, Broken Cyborg players without craftable anesthesia game mods may find this Finale Room quite useful.

Occasionally, there may be a Zombie Brute or Shocker Brute caged inside the operating room that must be dealt with before the room can be used. It will smash the four display racks inside, but will (probably) not destroy the Autodoc itself.

Misc tips

  • Lab characters can be even better than Really Bad Day ones, because they can pick mutant traits. The only mandatory trait is Night Vision, but it's an amazing trait on everyone.
  • You don't need to fight anything in the lab. Intelligence can help with book reading, CBMs and hacking. Other stats don't help as much.
  • You can lie down on blankets to warm up. If you do it on solid rock while not tired, you're unlikely to fall asleep. If playing in Ice Lab, this is pretty much mandatory for survival.
  • Falling asleep can be hard with all the mi-gos shouting. More than doubly so in z-level mode, where you can hear them from other levels. Try to craft a noise canceling headgear.
  • "Famished" hunger status is not an emergency. Neither is "Near starving". It takes more time to starve to death from "Starving" than to get to "Starving" from "Full". Just do not try to fight when weak from hunger.

RNG can rob you of hard-earned "victory" by generating an inescapable lab, with no teleports, chemistry books with dynamite recipe, and no path from finale to topmost level, but this is relatively rare. Most labs are escapable, though not always easily. And lab escapees are generally strong characters, with better traits than regular survivors.

Notes on different versions

  • In 0.C (Cooper) the flaming eye has been nerfed. It no longer destroys terrain. It is still a dangerous monster, even when in captivity due to Teleglow, but no longer releases everything.
  • In 0.D (Danny) lighting has changed, and this makes night vision even more important. But it also makes turrets a lot harder. It can be almost impossible to escape the top level turret of the lab.
  • In 0.D (Danny) the lab walls are made of concrete, making escape much harder, but with the experimental Z-levels turned on, you can climb out of the lab, as it has no roof. The turrets can still shoot you.
  • In 0.D (Danny) dressers no longer block line of sight, rendering the Luddite method of dealing with the turret much harder. You will need either enough strength to push a bookcase, or thrown/fired weapons that can hit the turret from 16 squares away (the edge of a turret's visual range in the dark, again as of the latest experimental version).

Guides
Beginners
Intermediate
Advanced
Vehicles
Guides for specific monster types
Guides for mods
Technical
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