Pacific Drive turned out to have a lot more mechanics and features than people were expecting. Some of these work better than others, and some were better received too, like the fact that you can’t save mid-run, which seems to be the main gripe of the player base. Another arguably questionable decision is the Quirks and Tinker Station mechanics.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the fact that your car develops quirks from being in contact with the anomalies of The Zone is a grand idea and adds to the eerie-ness of it all. The implementation, however, feels a bit hap-hazard. It turns into a charming little mechanic after you’ve realized what it is and how it works, but it can certainly be a frustrating part of the game, depending on the specific quirks your car develops.
The way you deal with the quirks, however, that’s another story. It definitely has its charm once you figure it out, but they can feel like they come too often while also being under-explained, all at once. We’re going to explain briefly how the game expects you to deal with quirks and what alternatives you have to dealing with them.
Check out some more of our Pacific Drive content at KeenGamer:
- Pacific Drive Review: A Supernatural Road-Like (PS5)
- Pacific Drive | Beginner Tips & Tricks (Best Early Researches)
What is a Quirk
As you drive around The Zone, you’ll become better at avoiding the different anomalies that can present themselves in there and damage or mess with your car and yourself. However, it is impossible to avoid them all, and eventually, if you have enough contact with the anomalies, your car will develop these quirks.
Has your car been misbehaving?
They can take a lot of different forms, like a hood that opens itself every time you go in reverse, or windshield wipers that will stop working when you turn right, or doors that open or simply fall off once your battery or fuel are under or over a certain threshold, etc.
These are designed to be annoying and complicate your life, and the way to get rid of them is first to diagnose them using the Tinker Station in the Garage.
What is the Tinker Station
I wouldn’t blame you for missing the Tinker Station all together and not even knowing where it is, as I discovered it by chance one of the times I circled back to the Garage after a run. Granted, I was playing an early build that was constantly being patched so chances are I missed the prompt to it. However, the way Ironwood does a lot of the tutorializing in the game takes the form of info dumping into the logbook.
The Tinker Station
The Tinker Station is the small computer station you can see right next to the battery array you used to charge your car’s battery before each run. In between the array and the Status Board and in between the workshop and your car, that is precisely where the Tinker Station is. It has a tools icon, and once you’ve spotted it you won’t believe you ever missed it. It won’t become available for you to interact with until after you’ve completed the “Take One More Drive” mission right after visiting Colossal Cappy.
Once you are back from that mission, and with the car in the correct spot (the status board needs to read “Connected” so you can make sure), Oppy will apologize for nearly getting you killed, and you can access the Tinker Station, and doing so the first time is a bit daunting and confusing.
How to Use the Tinker Station
Once located and unlocked, you can start using the Tinker Station to try and diagnose and fix the quirks in your Station Wagon. To do this, you have to exercise a bit of attention to detail and guessing work. The station is a computer screen with 4 sections, numbered in order: 1,2,3,4.
Numbers 1 and 3 list the car and the different parts of it, and columns 2 and 4 are different things each of these parts can do. What the game expects you to do is to form a 4-part sentence with the following format: “Part does X (which causes) Part to do Y”
Looking at this screen can be confusing at first
Say, for instance, you notice that your headlights are dimming while driving. You also stopped and left the headlights on to see if they kept doing it while idling, but they didn’t. So, you know something you’re doing while driving is what’s causing the dimming. So you could try the following:
“Car Moves Fast Headlights Dims” or “Car Moves Slow Headlights Dims”
Now, the Tinker Station will initially tell you how many out of the 4 columns you got right, but it won’t tell you which ones. You’ll only get a signal indicating “1/4 correct” or “2/4” correct or however many you got correct. In this example, the headlights dimming are pretty noticeable, so you’ll know that you have that second half correct, and you just need to adjust what is causing them to misbehave.
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- A good guess message
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- A bad guess message
Be mindful, though, as you only have 8 guesses each time you come back to the Garage. Each correct guess will “reimburse” you that attempt, or, effectively, not spend it. You can and will have more than one quirk going on at a time, and you can use those 8 attempts to guess multiple quirks at a time.
How to fix Identified Quirks
Once you’ve gotten a correct guess, you can press the prompt on the upper-right corner of the screen of the Station and that takes you to the list of quirks, both the ones you have already guessed, the ones you are yet to guess, and even those that you have guessed partially. Select one of the correctly guessed ones and it will tell you if you need either a Mechanical Kit, an Electrician’s Kit, or a Light Replacement kit, and how many of them.
Resolved quirk
You don’t have to fix the quirks if you don’t care about them, and some of them don’t even hinder you that much. Maybe your headlights get brighter when driving in reverse? Well, that may be draining your battery a tiny bit faster for those few seconds, sure, but is it worth fixing? maybe not.
Do remember that you need all of your doors and panels to stay put and closed in order for the car to protect you from radiation and other elements, so don’t disregard opening or falling doors.
Upgrading the Tinker Station With Modules
If you find yourself having a hard time figuring out the quirks or you simply don’t like the mechanic, there are ways to minimize it in the game itself by disabling or minimizing quirks in the gameplay menu. However, you can also unlock the Investigator Module and the Analysis Module from the Fabristation, which will greatly help you.
The Investigator module shows on the top-left
Once you have installed the Investigator Module, the Tinkering Station will improve its hints. It will no longer try to make you guess which of the 4 selected options you have correct with a cryptic “X/4 Correct” legend, but instead will show a happy face on the ones you have correct, which makes it easier to guess.
What is more, if you simply don’t want to guess, the Investigator Module will allow you to spend Stable Energy to tell you which of the options are valid ones, leaving you with the task of putting them together in the correct order. It won’t do absolutely everything for you, but it certainly helps to have those hints. The expenditure of Stable Energy can be significant, but considering you will run out of upgrades that use Stable Energy, using it in the Diagnostic Tool is a good way to make the Stable Anchors still worth collecting.
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- Getting the Module
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- Installing the Module
The Analysis Module brings an extra layer to the Tinker Station. With it, you can go directly to the Fixes screen and run an Analysis on the unknown or partially unknown quirks and it will reveal one of the 4 words in the correct location. If you have enough Stable Energy to spare, you can even discover the entire 4 sections of a quirk or even more than that if you have multiple quirks you may not have even noticed.
Tinker Station and Quirks Tips
- Test your car at the Garage. There is enough space and terrain variations around the Garage to help you drive around and determine what is causing the different quirks.
- Avoid anomalies as much as you can to minimize quirk incidences.
- Always use all of your guesses when trying to identify quirks.
- Keep notes of the guesses you’ve failed already.
- Farm all of the Stable Anchors you come across whenever possible, so you can use their energy to help you diagnose the quirks once you get the Upgrade Modules.
This was a hopefully helpful guide on the Tinker Station and Quirk removal in Pacific Drive!
