Pacific Drive beginner’s tips and tricks before starting

Pacific Drive drops you into its Olympic Exclusion Zone, where things like physics don’t really work right anymore. The first objective or two will help you get acclimated, but you’re left to figure out a lot of it on your own.

Our Pacific Drive beginner’s guide will help you get started exploring the Exclusion Zone with tips and tricks from our roughly 20 hours with the game, including advice about how to treat your car, deal with its quirks, getting it unstuck, and a great upgrade to unlock early.

Your car has personality in Pacific Drive

Your car in Pacific Drive is more than just a means of transportation (it’s technically not even really a car). It’s your Family Truckster, your mobile base, your protection from the Zone, and your constant companion. It keeps you alive (or tries to, anyway). If you’ve ever owned a car that you had to pat on the dashboard reassuringly after you hit a particularly nasty pothole, you know how your relationship with your car in Pacific Drive works.

Image: Ironwood Studios/Kepler Interactive via Polygon

Sure, the car might come back to the auto shop with fewer wheels than it left with, but it’ll always get you back. Treat it with some respect. Keep up on the repairs, outfit it with new and better gear when you can, put on that new sticker you found.

And most of all, be forgiving when it develops its quirks.

Your car develops quirks

As your car takes enough damage, it’ll start to develop quirks: things like a door popping open periodically, the radio turning on and off, or the horn honking seemingly at random.

These quirks are part of a (charming) mechanic, and there’s always a simple cause and effect to them. Right next to where you park in the auto shop, you’ll find the tinker station. It’s a computer with a crossed wrench and screwdriver displayed on the screen. Interacting with it lets you diagnose your car’s quirks.

It’s not really a straightforward process, though.

Diagnosing quirks takes experimentation in Pacific Drive

Pacific Drive doesn’t explain diagnosing quirks, so it’s a bit of a guessing game. On the computer, you’ll enter information to fill in blanks in a sentence. That sentence is, effectively, “if the [car part] does [action], then the [different car part] does [quirky action].”

Using that structure, we’ve had quirks like, “if the shifter does shifts to park, then the front left door does opens” and “if the car does moves backwards, then the radio does changes channel.”

Image: Ironwood Studios/Kepler Interactive via Polygon

The problem is, the line between cause and effect isn’t always clear — especially when you’re dodging hazards and driving for your life out in the Zone. When you get a quiet moment in a stable part of the Zone, do some experimenting. Use the options listed in the columns on the tinker station to guide you.

When you guess the quirk correctly, you’ll be able to fix and remove it. Usually, this involves a mechanic’s or electrician’s kit.

Sometimes replacing parts is better than repairing them

Outside of developing quirks, your car is just going to take damage while you’re out driving around. If you happened to find chemicals while you were in the Zone, you can make repair putty (2 scrap metal, 2 plastic, 2 glass shards, 2 chemicals) that’ll patch up almost anything.

Over time, though, some of your car’s parts will become fragile. This just means they’re old and worn. And, sometimes, you just don’t have the resources on hand to make enough repair putty to fix the whole car. In both those cases, remember you can always just make a new part and replace it instead of using up all of your precious repair putty.

Teleport your car when it gets stuck in Pacific Drive

Exploring the Zone is rarely as simple as just driving along a road from point A to point B. There’s inevitably swerving, fleeing, and offroading, no matter how careful you are. And that means that your car is going to get stuck eventually.

You’ve got two options when that happens. You can kick it with the square button or by hitting F on your keyboard. That usually works, but it damages your car a little (see above). In more dire situations, you have another option.

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Image: Ironwood Studios/Kepler Interactive via Polygon

Hitting both the left and right thumbstick at the same time (L3 + R3) or T on the keyboard will attempt to summon your car to you with the ARC warp ability. You have to be outside of the car and a little ways — but not too far — away. If your car can find an open area to teleport to, it will. Just remember that it will be in the same state as it was when it got stuck, so if you teleport onto a hill while it’s in drive, you’ll be chasing your car down that hill.

Triggering the teleport uses a huge amount of your battery, though, so make sure you’ve got a battery jumper on hand.

And to make battery jumpers, you’ll need electronics.

Scrap electronic at the auto shop

Battery jumpers are incredibly useful during your exploration of the Zone. Using electronics like your lights, windshield wipers, and radio drain the battery (and apparently alternators aren’t a thing in Pacific Drive). To recharge your battery out in the Zone, you’ll need a battery jumper (4 9v batteries, 2 copper wire, 1 electronics).

Image: Ironwood Studios/Kepler Interactive via Polygon

Those resources are a little harder to find than most everything else you’ll need early in the game. Luckily, there’s a (small) supply of them at the auto shop. Head over by the wrecked car out front and look to the right. There’s a shelf next to it with a couple pieces of electronics — usually a computer and a radio — that will drop the parts you need for a battery jumper when you scrap them.

There are a ton of tech trees at the fabricator

Aside from repairing your car for the next journey into the Zone, the other thing you’ll do in the auto shop is research new gear at the fabrication station. This is your tech tree for Pacific Drive.

At the fabrication station, you’ll spend resources and stable energy (more on this in a second) to unlock things like new workstations at the auto shop, better tools, and new and better parts for your car.

Image: Ironwood Studios/Kepler Interactive via Polygon

There are 12 different trees across the top of the screen. When you’re looking to unlock something, make sure you check them all. Don’t focus on building up the auto shop when you could be unlocking puncture-proof tires.

Unlocking new tech in at the fabrication station requires a lot of stable energy, though. And you get that from collecting anchors.

Anchors earn you stable energy

The first couple times you pick up a stable anchor — those glowing yellow orbs you use to trigger the Gateways that bring you back to the shop — that’s all you’ll use them for. You’ll grab the anchor, open the glowing pillar, and start over.

Image: Ironwood Studios/Kepler Interactive via Polygon

You’ll need some of the stable energy from the anchor to open the Gateway back to the auto shop. Whatever’s left over goes toward unlocking new tech at the fabrication station. As your trips get longer, start looking for ways to gather multiple anchors each trip — you can even gather anchors from multiple junctions per trip. More stable anchors fed into Oppy’s ARC device means more stable energy for the fabricator and new stuff to unlock.

New stuff like…

Unlock the anchor radar early in Pacific Drive

Not long into your explorations of the Outer Zone in Pacific Drive, you’ll start to encounter junctions with the anchor obfuscation condition. In these junctions, the anchors won’t appear on your map as the little yellow dots you’ve relied on. Instead, they’ll be large, vague dots that move and blink in and out of existence. This is a problem for when you’re just looking for an anchor so you can escape the Zone.

Luckily, there’s a tool for that. At the fabrication station, tab over to the third tree, survival tools. Two down from the scrapper is the anchor radar that costs 1 fabric and 0.8 stable energy to unlock. That’s a handheld tool that will let you find anchors even when they’re obfuscated.

The anchor radar doesn’t have any prerequisites to unlock it. Other tech, though, needs you to find something out in the Zone first. Which is why you need to…

Scan everything in the Zone in Pacific Drive

Once you’ve picked up the mechanic’s eye headset as soon as you get to the auto shop, you’ll be able to scan things in Pacific Drive with L1 on a controller or C on your keyboard. This enters the information into your logbook menu.

Image: Ironwood Studios/Kepler Interactive via Polygon

More importantly, though, certain things in the fabrication station tech tree require you to have scanned something out in the Zone. Make it a point to scan everything you come across — especially anomalies. Scanning a wriggling wreck anomaly, for example, unlocks the lightning rod that charges your battery. Scanning a spike puddle anomaly unlocks puncture-proof tires.