I met Rubik the cyborg at the Exodii base around early Summer. From the information that I scavenged, I have to constantly visit Rubik and trade items with him in order to increase faction trust values, which will in turn allow him to sell me more advanced gear and install higher tier CBMs.
I’ve completed his initial quest, asking me to fetch him the “anus feticks” for my thinking-meat and their stock. I’ve also progressed a bit further with the trust, allowing me to purchase the recipes for “nomad” gear set. However, I returned to him around day 43 of Summer hoping that he could help me install this new Metabolic interchanger CBM which I found in a lab, but the game tells me that Rubik does not trust me well enough.
I tried to sell him manuals and lab notes of all kinds, but there is a 600-credit limit, and I really do not want to waste any resources. The “hints” that I found on the internet told me to visit Rubik and trade with Rubik often to increase his trust in me. I also dug into the json file for Exodii_merchant trying to figure out how his shop would restock. From what I could understand, the logic used by game is to measure the amount of time that has passed since I first saw Rubik, which is measured in the unit of weeks. The highest tier CBMs should appear roughly at least 4 weeks after I meet with Rubik.
What I did not understand from the json files was that the file mentioned about completing missions for Rubik to have even higher tiers of CBMs and CBM-interacting equipment appear in the stock. I checked with almost all of the dialogue options available with Rubik, yet there does not seem to be more missions beyond the initial “anus fetick” one.
So, my question is: Am I missing something? Could there be some kind of hidden conversation path that actually leads to Rubik giving me more missions for more trust? Or should I just be patient and wait for the time to pass by? Or maybe there is a hidden trust threshold that requires a specific action to be carried out in order to surpass? Thank you.
I am not sure if there are any missions for Rubik other than the Anesthesia one - at least I do not see the dialogue to get them.
Increasing trust with Rubik is just by trading and installing CBMs. Every 7 days (?), Rubik’s inventory refreshes. You will get new CBMs to install and new things to buy, and “trust” slowly grows as you do so.
Thank you for the info. It’s good to note that his restock cycle is on a weekly basis.
What I understood from your last sentence is that “trust” grows by spending (installing CBMs and buying) at Rubik’s. Since I have more than enough manuals and lab notes for my own good, I guess I could shove as many CBMs into my PC’s body as possible to see how things go. My guess is that probably sometime by winter I should have gained total trust from Rubik. I’ll come back with more updates if anything interesting happens.
If you start on Day 60 spring as is default, by the end of Summer, Rubik will most likely be offering you the highest tier of stuff. (I think?)
One thing to note is that when you move to another overmap chunk (the game “generates” the map in large chunks, one at a time, and they are giant squares too), there is always a chance that another exodii base spawns. I am not entirely sure (maybe someone else more versed with the code can confirm this) but I believe that the affinity with that Rubik you’re interacting with will not carry over to the “other Rubik” that may or may not spawn elsewhere in the world.
So if you travel really far from that Exodii base and you happen to find another one, keep that in mind.
I’d recommend avoiding interaction with more than one instance of the “unique” locations. At least in the past, they’ve been partially entangled. It can also be noted that the reason they’re not actually unique is to ensure there is one you can interact with (instead of having locations destroyed one otherwise becoming inaccessible), so interacting with more than one is really taking advantage of the game’s attempt to make sure you can get the content.
It’s a single player game, though, so “cheating” isn’t really an issue, but I’d still be cautious due to the risk of running into bugs.
Wouldn’t it be better for there to be a toggle in Debug Menu to tell the game it can place another “unique” location instead of just having no limit to how many it can generate?
We could place it ourselves of course, but I imagine not everybody can resist the urge to place it near their base.
A “spawn another X because I’ve given up on the one present” option is an interesting suggestion. The main problem is that it would likely only be found by people in the know, so it wouldn’t be friendly to beginners.
A way for the game to periodically check for progress and somehow detect if there’s a problem and then suggest to the player that a new one is spawned (yes/no) might be a possible approach, but figuring out how to perform such a check might not be trivial.
I would wish for the game to be able to detect that a unique location is compromised, but I can’t even imagine how long it would take to enumerate every probability for a code to look out for.
For now I only wish it wouldn’t spawn multiple types of it practically near each other, its a problem I especially noticed with smaller unique location, especially one-tile uniques in some mods I’m running. Is there a check in these locations I can enable to have them spawn strictly once?
If there’s none, is there a possibility that I can lock their spawning behind missions?