Vehicles Guide
Introduction
Vehicles in Neocron offer runners faster transportation and strategic advantages during combat situations. Whether traversing dangerous wastelands or engaging in high-speed pursuits, vehicles are essential tools for any player looking to navigate the Neocron's environments efficiently.
Acquiring and Registering a Vehicle
To begin using a vehicle, you must first acquire a vehicle key. Vehicle keys can be obtained through purchasing from vendors, crafting via the construction skill, or receiving them as rewards from missions and quests. Once you have a vehicle key in your inventory, right-click on the vehicle key and select the "Use" option from the context menu. This action registers the vehicle to your character, allowing you to spawn and use it whenever needed.
Spawning Your Vehicle
After registering your vehicle, head outside your city's main entrance to locate an ASG Warp Garage. These are large structures marked with "Warp Garage" signage.
Interact with the ASG terminal at the garage and select your registered vehicle from the list displayed. Click the "Spawn" button. Your vehicle should now spawn in a nearby location, usually away from your direct sight.
Note: Due to in-game mechanics, vehicles may sometimes spawn in unexpected places. If you cannot find your vehicle, it might have spawned underground or in an inaccessible area. If this occurs, simply dismiss the vehicle at the terminal and try again.
Once your vehicle has spawned, search the immediate area around the ASG Warp Garage. Interacting with the vehicle will enter it, in case of multiple seaters will show up the seat selection menu (driver, gunner, bomber or passenger). When you enter the vehicle, the game will automatically switch to a third-person perspective. While you can freely spawn and dismiss your vehicles, you can only enter the desired seat when you meet the requirements listed in the info menu of the key.
Vehicle Controls
Ground Vehicles controls
The controls for ground vehicles are intuitive and resemble those found in many other games:
- Forward (W key): Moves the vehicle forward.
- Backward (S key): Brake and reverse the vehicle.
- Strafe Left (A key): Rotates the vehicle to the left.
- Strafe Right (D key): Rotates the vehicle to the right.
- Jump (Space key): Exits the vehicle.
Players familiar with Unreal Tournament 2004 will find these controls particularly similar. Vehicles are always "glued" to the ground when they move (except flying vehicles) and don't hop on uneven terrain.
Flying Vehicles controls
Flying vehicles offer greater freedom but require more skill to operate.
- Gliders operate similarly to ground vehicles except you turn with your mouse and not strafe keys. When you build up the speed and hit some uneven terrain, the Glider will start ascending. Moving mouse up and down while holding forward will make you ascend or descend. Accelerating while ascending will make you decrease your speed while accelerating downwards will increase it. Brake or turn to decrease your speed and the glider will start to gently descend until it touches the ground. Colliding with the ground with too much speed will damage, if not outright destroy the vehicle.
- Hoverbomber operates like modern VTOL, its engine thrust direction is dictated by a mouse up and down movement. The forward key will add the thrust in the opposite direction where the thrusters are pointing. Pointing the mouse directly down will thrust the vehicle forward, and pointing up will go reverse. Pointing the mouse somewhere in between allows controlling the altitude. Hoverbombers have a much higher learning curve than gliders to fly but can land and take off from basically anywhere.
Using Vehicle Weapons
If your vehicle is equipped with weapons and you are using a designated gunner/bomber seat, your reticle will follow the on-ground rules. First, hit the reload or attack key on the empty clip to load ammo. Then align the reticle with the target and wait for it to close for maximum accuracy. Once the gunner's stats match the requirements, the damage of the gun is constant and matches the damage values from the ammo tooltip. The range of the gun and reticle closing speed is dictated by the gunner's Weapon Lore stat. Driver-operated vehicle weapons can be shot from any angle, as long as the reticle is closed. Otherwise, it will shoot forwards. Gunner and bomber seats have limited angles they can shoot, requiring the driver to orientate toward the target.
Important Notes
Avoid driving into water. All vehicles, including hovertecs, are not designed for aquatic environments. Entering water will cause the vehicle to slow down greatly and when submerged they will stop and return to ASG garage. Swamp biome is especially dangerous for driving.
Dismissing Your Vehicle
To store your vehicle safely, ensure you are in the same sector as an ASG Warp Garage. Interact with the ASG terminal, select your vehicle that says 'in service' and choose the "Dismiss" option. The vehicle will return to garage. There is no need to drive directly to the terminal, as long as you are in the same sector you can dismiss the vehicle.
Idle vehicles return to the garage automatically after 20 minutes as long as there is any runner in the same sector no matter if it's the owner or not. This is useful to retrieve the vehicle that got stuck somewhere without the garage terminal, but might be annoying when parking next to dungeon entrances.
Repairing vehicles
When you dismiss your vehicle, you can pay ASG to repair the vehicle for you at the terminal. The fee vary between vehicles and depends on the severity of the damage. Alternatively, you or other people can repair it for you if they are able to use Cryton RRP-S52 Remote Repair Tool and have enough Cryton RRN-80 Remote Repair Nanites for it. The second option is useful when you have to repair the damage and can't reach the ASG terminal and at the same time, it will give experience points in Dexterity.
Vehicle destruction
If the vehicle takes too much damage, either from fire or crashing into geometry at high speed in the case of gliders, it will explode into scrap and be lost forever. Interacting with the key will do nothing, but researchers and constructors that have access to vehicle parts sold by Next Faction Supply Manager can rebuild a working key if needed however, it's usually easier just to buy a new one unless it's from faction db. There are exceptions to this rule. NEXT Quad 'Compass' NEXT Quad 'Crocodile' and NEXT Assault 4WD Chaincraft 'Reveler' return to depot instead of being destroyed and can be repaired for few thousands of credits, making them a popular forms of transportation for players.
Ground Vehicles
Air Vehicles
Bugs
When changing zones at high speeds, the character position can sometimes go out of sync and might cause infinite loading screen. Loading back after this occurs, will place the player in the default position in the zone, that is in dead middle. On gliders and hoverbombers, it will also preserve your elevation, resulting in death from fall damage. Slowing down before syncing is highly recommended until NST resolves this issue.
While driving with passengers and zoning, wait for all passengers to successfully sync, otherwise they can fall out of the vehicle and die.
