【2008 Archives】

Preyis great.

No008 Archives seriously. If you're not playing it, go do that. If you areplaying it, you're probably reading this and thinking "gahhhhhhh I want to go play more Prey." I get it. I'm right there with you.

Resources are a big deal in a game like Prey, where your ammo, your health, even your ability to unlock upgrades depends, in large part, on scavenging for crap. Unfortunately -- or maybe not, if you have an easy relationship with cheating -- Prey1.0 is a little bit broken in this regard.

How it's supposed to work

Here's the deal. The Talos-1 space station you're trapped inside of is littered with all manner of trash and useful items, any of which can be dumped into a machine called the Recycler. Once you've dumped them in, you simply press a button and the Recycler works its magic, turning everything into basic organic, mineral, synthetic, or exotic resources.

Here's an important bit about the Recycler: once you dump whatever you want to break down into the bin, look at the button before you press it. At the bottom of the image you'll see a readout listing the types and amount of each material you'll get if you break down everything in the bin.

The four types of crafting materials are used with another machine -- a Fabricator -- that assembles them back together into new and useful items. Weapons and ammo packs. Medkits. NeuroMods, the item you need to unlock new abilities.

As you push through the game, then, it behooves you to spend time scavenging up trash that you can transform into treasure. You'll find ammo and other helpful stuff scattered around, but Fabricators are the best source for getting exactly what you need.

The exploit

There are two ways to approach the exploit. Both work basically the same way.

For the lesser cheat you need a stack of any recyclable item. Let's just use banana peels as an example. They're a fairly abundant form of debris aboard Talos-1, yielding the always-valuable organic materials.

Preyuses a grid-based inventory system, where each item takes up one or more squares. If you're carrying more than one of the same item, it stacks. So instead of having five banana peels spread across five squares, you get one banana peel with a "x5" on it.

Simple, right?

If you dump that stack of banana peels into the bin, you'll get a certain amount of resources in return. Butif you split the stack into five separate squares in the bin, the Recycler spits out even morecrafting materials than it would have for the stack of five.

For the amped up version of this cheat, you do the same thing but with one of the four types of crafting materials instead. Normally, if you drop, say, a stack of organic materials into the Recycler and process it, you'll get the same amount of organic materials back.

In other words, once you have some base materials in each category you technically don't have to go out scavenging anymore. You can just recycle what you have and create something out of, essentially, nothing.

The most important bit

Using either of these exploits is cheating. Hard stop. You couldargue that stacked items aren't yielding as much as they should, but I think the fact that this exploit also works with base materials makes it clear: stacks are, in fact, working as intended.

Personally, I would stronglyrecommend against succumbing to the temptation of this exploit in either of its forms. Preyis great precisely because of the way it ratchets up tension around forcing you to weigh the value of different resources against one another.

Do you craft more shotgun shells or more gloo gun canisters? More medkits or more NeuroMods? And how many of each? These are important decisions to weigh at each stage of the game, even as you climb higher on the power scale.

As soon as you eliminate the need to scavenge for trash around Talos-1, you step away from many of the things that make Preysuch a winner. Everyone finds their own fun and anyone who judges you for cheating is doing it wrong.

But.If you're looking to experience this game the way Arkane Studios intended, skip the exploit and hope it's patched away soon.