Into the Breach - Environmental Interactions

Reference list of rare/unexpected environmental interactions, or anything ambiguous in the game.

Other Into the Breach Guides:

Contents

Interactions

All credit goes to JON!

Repairing:

Removes ice/fire/ACID as well as just healing you. Simple, but some people don’t realise this until playing the Frozen Titans

Shields:

Shields work on the train to save it from attacks, but not from crashing into stuff
Shields prevent you from catching fire, being frozen, or being covered in ACID, but won’t remove these effects. You’ll keep taking fire damage inside the shield until you repair
You can shield the Vek although you almost never will want to

Fire:

Buildings never take fire damage, and aren’t considered to be “on fire” for damage from the flamethrower weapon, even when their tile is on fire
Set pieces like the earth mover or terraformer can catch fire and will take 1dmg per turn. Renfield bombs are apparently immune
The train is also immune to fire
Fire instantly melts frozen water tiles into regular water tiles in one hit

Ice:

Puts out units/tiles on fire
Freezing interrupts attacks, even if the unit is unfrozen again on the same turn
Frozen flying units will fall into chasms and die, but not into water – seems a bit inconsistent
Freezing the earth mover will stop it from automatically fixing chasms (usually good)
Freezing the satellites stops them from launching. Unfreezing them leaves them still with an “interrupted attack” on the current turn, but they’ll try to launch on the following turn
Freezing the train stops it from moving but doesn’t stop you from completing the objective (very helpful)

ACID:

Smoke:

Interrupts attacks for the turn, even if the unit is moved out of smoke again
Prevents satellite launches since these are an “attack”, but won’t stop the train

Rusty Hunks:

Since artillery can’t be fired off the map, you can’t create the smoke tile behind you from certain positions using Rocket Artillery

Zenith Guard:

Blitzkrieg:

Electric Whip, before the upgrade, doesn’t chain through or damage buildings at all. Always chains to and damages stuff like earth movers or silos, avoid these missions. Solar panels, defense labs, etc, which are treated as buildings, are safe.

Steel Judoka:

Flame Behemoths:

Frozen Titans:

Spartan Shield does nothing to bosses like the Firefly Leader and Scorpion Leader (possibly it changes the order of attacks on the Scorpion Leader, but this would only affect yellow psion explosions and I don’t know how to see the order anyway)

Hazardous Mechs:

With Hydraulic Legs, leaping into acid applies ACID to you before the self-damage is applied, doubling it
Viscera Nanobots heals you before the check for a pilot death. You also can’t go into negative HP, so overkilling yourself with self-damage and/or recoil is safe, you’ll still heal up to 1hp or 2hp.

Shell Scions’ passive (purple) is nullified by ACID (listed there, but quite important so listed twice)
Centipede spitters’ projectiles hit the end tile of the map if unobstructed, allowing them to hit stuff either side of it too
Killing the Soldier Scion (green) causes all enemies to lose 1 current HP, not just max HP, which kills enemies at 1HP
Burrowers put themselves out when burrowing, meaning you have to keep setting fire to (or damaging) them every turn. They’re very strong against the Flame Behemoths.

Gana – if a red psion is out, deployment damage you do to other units will be healed in the initial Vek turn
Isaac – if you have very high grid defense, when you’re in a desperate situation that requires it you can try doing attacks that cause collateral on the building grid and hope for resists, then use the resets if you cause damage. Works without Isaac but much better with him.