Pacific Drive – Pro Tips for New Players

While in the Garage

Сrеdit gоеs to Sinta !

If the car is scuffed when you return from a drive, make sure to open the friendly dumpster before repairing it yourself if you already have the resources to do so — the dumpster will provide more stuff (including whole panels) than if you repaired the car first.

The wreck outside the garage respawns with new parts every time you get back from a drive, including the computer & radio on the shelf right beside it. Free scrap!

You can use fuel pumps on spare gas cans if you drop the can on the ground — it’s not just limited to siphoning out of dead cars or fuel barrels.

Along with the engine, remember to turn the headlights off while in the garage! You might go into your next drive with half a tank of gas and a dead battery if you don’t. Unlike modern cars, there’s no useful (annoying) chime to tell you the engine’s off but the lights are on!

Make two saves before heading out to a drive, since going out into the world overwrites your most recent garage save! Loading the first save will send you back to the garage — useful for when you forget to bring a tool, or when you have the wrong car parts.

While Driving

Leaving the car running drains some amount of fuel, but I’ve found that most of the time, going through the motions of turning the ignition and then getting into drive does NOT make up for the negligible savings if you decide to turn off the car every time you get out of it.

Lesson: Know when not to turn off the car! Those few seconds spent trying to get it started might cost you.

It’s not as bright as the headlights & floodlights, but the dome light (inside the car, on the ceiling) can be used to visually locate the car during nighttime/low visibility scenarios, when you want to conserve battery power as much as possible.

Lesson: The dome light does not drain battery.

Nothing bad really happens (most of the time) when you take a Stable Anchor from it’s pedestal, despite the very loud and scary music sting that plays.

Lesson: Taking anchors will sometimes spawn anomalies right on top of you.

The amount of “energy” you get from an Anchor is shown by how big it appears on the map. If you already have enough energy to go home, small Anchors are very much not worth your time IF they are hard to reach, or surrounded by anomalies.

Lesson: Smaller anchors give you less energy than bigger ones — have this in mind before going for one.

I felt like this wasn’t made clear in the introductory levels, but escaping (i.e. racing towards the yellow pillar of light) is made much easier by getting to the minimum distance away from your nearest and most accessible gateway – and then starting the escape sequence. The map will tell you when you’re too close to a particular gateway to start the escape.

Lesson: Get as close as possible to a gateway before activating it.

While Dealing with Anomalies

Not all anomalies are inherently bad! However, new players might not realize this since the anomaly logs are more lore-related, rather than be actual gameplay information.

Tourists

Don’t worry, scaredy-cats! Tourists will try to get as close to you as possible, which is what might cause you to run into them, but they will never touch you by themselves — meaning if you have your back turned towards an “active” Tourist, it will eventually be right behind you, but it won’t touch you).

Lit flares, when thrown at Tourists, will blow them up. They’ll drop ThermoSap Crystals this way!

Rarely, Tourists can “ambush” you and drop a bunch of parts and tools for you to take.

Shocked Tourists can move, but their entire group needs to pass their “out-of-sight” check to do so — meaning if you can see one member of the group, none of them will move.

Hares

Hares of any type can be picked up and thrown to the ground to make them stay still for a couple seconds; more than enough time to shred them with the Scrapper. If thrown on your car, they will stick.

A Happy Hare can repair your car.

A Bolt Bunny will charge your car and not damage it, if you have a working Lightning Rod. Free battery charge!

While Modifying the Car

Out of all the upgrades to choose from, I strongly feel that better tires should be prioritized first. You might spend the majority of your time on the paved roads — but when you’re off it, that’s usually when sh#t is hitting the fan.

Lesson: Try to upgrade your tires to off-road ones ASAP.

In the early game when still using crude parts, it is much more economical to scrap crude parts and make new ones, rather than waste Repair Putty on them — since to make putty, you need Chemicals, which are a lot rarer than other materials.

Lesson: Plan your repairs according to material requirements! Some materials are much harder to come by than others.

Make sure all of the tires on your car match, as mismatched tires will cause the car to handle unpredictably on slippery or steep surfaces. If you carry an extra tire, then it should match the tires mounted on your car as well.

Lesson: Having mismatched tires puts you at a disadvantage!

Building a side rack and side storage as soon as possible is something to consider, as you can keep your repair items and first aid in there for quicker access while leaving the main rear storage free for more materials.

Lesson: Accessing your trunk storage is slower compared to accessing your side storages — something to note when in more dangerous areas where you want to spend as little time as possible outside the car.

Your battery won’t get charged from electric shocks without a Lightning Rod.

Extra Tips

A little tip to help shorten those drives:

• With how easy it is to just start and end a drive I’ve started doing shorter runs to gather specific resources.
• I’ll B line for the checkpoints to the next area if needed and then landmarks (houses, farms, lab trailers, ect.), lastly the stability anchors then I go home.
• I’ve started taking fewer and fewer general loot runs to stop at every car and grab all the loot like a loot goblin because I’m honestly running out of space after a few runs, those are the only runs where I last many hours in the zone.

More things to remember:

• Friendly tourists and cars with armored doors are a good source of reliable thermosap crystals if you having trouble getting those.
• There are usually from what I’ve found, if your out on run, if you go to gas stations or groups of ARDA research buildings there is a chance to find friendly dumpsters with free loot. Have gotten pearls and parts that have the peculiar tag, which are parts with better stats then the regular version with the downside that you can’t repair them at all.
• Road flares are extremely helpful for a variety of uses, some of which are less obvious than others. There’s lighting up the area to help scavenge car parts and indoor areas (ofc), but they can also be used to distract some anomalies like the abductors and thrown at tourists to make them explode. They’re also EVERYWHERE so hoarding them is silly.
• Also during the early game when my car is still built out of crap parts, I usually just let those parts deteriorate fully, scrap them and replace with another freshly crafted crap panel/door/whatever instead of using repair putty. Putty needs chemicals which are significantly rarer than the duct tape and scrap metal used to create new crap parts. Duct tape and scrap metal can be found in abundance by scrapping car wreck parts.
• You can use lit flares to explode tourists. flare guns have limited use, so I usually just light it from a safe distance and toss the flare gently at the tourist in front of me. If I do it right, I can get a chain reaction for easy thermo crystals.
• The bunnies that chase your car and electrocute it can be destroyed with a scrapper. Sometimes they drop deco parts. If you wan them to stay still, pick it up and toss it at the ground, it will be stuck there for a bit so you can scrap it.
• Liberators have a limited use, and you can’t make them on the craft mat, so when you have them unlocked, bring extra to liberate those sweet armored doors and panels.
• Box trucks carry more stuff than regular trunks, but you have to get pretty close to the back of the truck for the highlight and indicator to open it appears. Don’t be like me and just leave the first box truck you see behind thinking it’s just a model and only useful for the doors and tires.