System Shock 2 Melee-Only Walkthrough

God save the UNN . . . their weapons sure won't.

Walkthrough

Command

1. Arrival
2. Finding Ops Card
3. Backtracking
4. The Shuttle Bays
5. Shuttle Bay 2
6. Shuttle Bay 1
7. Korenchkin's Execution

Arrival / Top

We get off to a nice start here. There's a cyborg assassin in this room, and a camera, which will set off the alarm if you're not careful. You could very well be a walking tank right now, worry more about setting off the alarm than about how many hitpoints you're losing, unless you're on Impossible. Once it's dead, swipe a maintenance tool off the floor by the door to shuttle control, which won't open yet. *There's a magazine, bottle of vodka on the bench, and cigarettes next to the bench.* There's a corpse to the right of the door, which has a medical kit and 49 nanites, *and around the corner from it there's a soda on the floor.* There's a body almost directly under the unreachable camera, if you stand by the bench out of sight of it, you should still be able to swipe it's speed hypo and 12 armor-piercing bullets. Head through the door before the camera sees you.

A Many speech will start, there's a spider around the corner down the hall past the recharge station, and another one in the room to your left. Take them out. In the room with the upgrade units theres a log on the floor past the corpse, it's dated today, in fact it was recorded since you woke up by the sound of it. There's 12 standard bullets on the corpse, and 3 bullets in the gun. There's also 7 cyber modules in the trash can. As you've found all there is to find here, head out of the room and go left. In the room with the 2 replicators there's several corpses, they have 3 grenades and 20 nanites on them. One of the replicators is broken, it dispensed some items so you might as well take them all. In the trash can, there's 3 cyber modules, and a bag of chips.

Hop into the tram car, and head to the first stop, which will trigger a speech by the Many. Be ready to move when the car stops, two turrets await you. Book it out of the car and to the right wall before the turrets have a chance to lock onto you. If you pin yourself against the wall, you should be shielded from the explosions, so long as you don't get too close to the turrets when you destroy them. Head up the elevator in the corner of the room to the second level. Destroy the eggs and evade the swarms. Don't bother with the security crate, there's only a laser pistol in there. On the corpse, you'll find 4 cyber modules. Get back in the tram car, and *when you're facing the turrets from the tram, there's a log from Delacroix on top of the right hand partition that the right hand bench is sitting against.*

After you get it, head to the next stop. *There's going to be either an assassin, a spider, or a protocol droid* waiting for you, kill whichever it is. Head for the door, and you'll get an e-mail from Delacroix. I did a double take when I got her message, I thought she'd died back on Hydroponics deck. But, I'm proud to say, I didn't search the cargo bays on Engineering for her. Least if I did I can't remember it. There's some stuff lying on the floor to your right on the way to the bulkhead, behind it there's 6 cyber modules.

Now, where's that card needed on Ops deck... / Top

When you arrive here, you'll be behind a red door. Head forward, and you'll see Rebecca and Tommy running for it, being chased by a rumbler.

The rumbler vanishes into thin air, don't worry about it. If you fix the replicator here, you can get a recycler, so if you're not hacking I'd get the recycler now. There's a corpse behind the counter here with 20 nanites, on the counter there's 5 cyber modules. There's a corpse lying face down in the water, snatch his 12 standard bullets, 6 armor-piercing bullets, and unload his assault rifle to get 2 more bullets. You can probably hear a camera in the room nearby, run in and smash it. There's 20 nanites and a can of pop in the trash can, and there's an incomplete surgery unit here. As you probably won't be using the resurrection stations here, you might think about completing it. *You may run into a spawned protocol droid when you leave the room. Also, you'll probably hear a rather upset spider around here, but he's on the level above you, and he won't be able to get to you.*

Head to the elevator, and you'll hear a cyborg assassin somewhere. Not on this level. Go up using the elevators in the corners of the room, and you'll find him. Kill him swiftly. If he runs into the hallway with the camera, go back down to the first floor, and listen to the sound it's making, and the door. When you hear the door close, and the SFX of the assassin are still fairly loud, go back up.

Once he's dead, go through the door with the log lying in front of it, and take out the camera. This will upset the turret at the end of the hall. When you feel lucky, and hear it go into stand-by mode, book it down there and take it out. The door here leads to a missing section of bridge. But hey, don't let that stop you, hop across. There's a cyborg assassin and a spider here, take them both out. On the corpse in front of the door you came in through, you'll find 31 nanites. Down the ramp to the lounge type area for the escape pod, you'll find 7 cyber modules behind a displaced bench, and 6 anti-personnel shotgun shells by the overturned bench. Go to the noisiest escape pod at the end of the hallway, and wave bye-bye to Tommy and Rebecca.

They left some goodies here, a maintenance tool, pack of cigarettes, bottle of vodka, and bag of chips. Oh, right, and the bridge access card...

Leave via the first door you come to, with the intact bridge. The corpse on the floor has 25 nanites. You'll be able to sneak up behind the robot here, a nice thing to do considering he's the kind that fires fusion cannon blasts at you. There's a cyborg assassin who will quickly come to join the party. Keep the robot between the two of you, then charge and kill him. Don't chase him towards the sound of the camera, hide behind the wall and wait for him to come back. And make sure you have more than 12 hitpoints before going in here, or powered armor on, I found out this isn't smart the hard way...

You'll see the resurrection station down a ladder here. After looking at the layout I decided there had to be a way to take the camera out, and after trying for 15 bloody minutes I finally nailed it. I'd recommend taking security down before you try for it, although once you get the hang of it, you should only need one try to get it. Stand beside the ladder, right on the edge, then run forward and jump, going as straight at it as you can, then swing. If you're lucky, you'll hit it. If you're not hacking, you'll need many reloads to nail this prick before it sets off the alarm. When you go down there, here's what you'll find. At the bottom level, there's 4 eggs, a tech upgrade unit, and a corpse with 3 grenades, and 37 nanites. On the middle floor, the corpse has 2 maintenance tools. *There's also 6 cyber modules in here that you can get to. Go down the ladder next to the ressurrection station, walk on the crates, mantle the lower pipe, then walk across it to the other side. There, you can mantle a couple ledges, and be rewarded with a nice little treat.*

Now, go down the hall with the worms in it. There's a cyborg assassin here, kill him swiftly. *Marecki mentioned that he's only spawned when you approach from this direction, however, I came through this area from the opposite direction, and he still showed up. I realize now what he meant was that you can avoid crossing the tripwire which spawns the cyborg assassin. Worth backtracking to avoid dealing with one of those bastards, far as I'm concerned.*

In the hallway with the hole in the wall, there's a corpse with 3 grenades on him. Go down the hall, and welcome to hell. There's a robot here who is standing right under a camera, pretty much. You need to pop out, let the robot see you, then run for it before he can hurt you, or the alarm goes off. Back into the hallway with the hole in the wall couldn't be a bad place to go. Kill the robot there. A protocol droid will show up at some point, but I didn't see from where. Once the robot's dead, take out the camera by mantling the crate nearby and smashing it. A spider will appear from the hallway you didn't go down, kill it too.

Now, it's time to do some searching. Get the vodka bottle off the floor by the hallway you entered from. The corpse by the pool table has 3 grenades which she obviously can't use anymore. Past her, there's a log. Go to the bathroom, and get the log by the plant. Let's start with the little girl's room, you'll find 8 cyber modules on a male corpse in the shower by some worms. In the little boy's room, you'll find a maintenance tool in the shower. (I really do spend too much time in the forums. I think one of the toilets here is the unbreakable one Shevers ran into when he was trying to destroy all of them. Enchantermon confirmed it.)

Leave the bathroom, and crack the security crate open to get 6 grenades and 47 nanites. Go to the crate by the now destroyed camera, it has 20 nanites, and there's a bottle of vodka lying beside it. Go up the ladder, and dodge the 2 exploding protocol droids you've probably heard plenty of by now. From the ladder, go into the first room on your right. You'll find in the lockers 1 med hypo, a log which will earn you 20 cyber modules from Shodan, several bodies stuck to the ceiling who'll spawn worms, 10 grenades, a toxin hypo, and 32 nanites. Keep the wall on your right and go to the next room. In here, you'll find a psi booster, and 10 prisms on the corpse. *Also, there's 2 prisms in the broken statis field generator, and 2 eggs in the room.*

Head down the walkway to get to the next crew room. Go into the room on your right, and you'll find 34 nanites, 3 grenades, 6 cyber modules, *and 3 eggs.* Leave this room and head right to get to the last room. You'll find a surgical unit activation key, a med kit, 41 nanites, *a worm beaker,* and lots of worms ready to greet you on your way out. **If you cross the trip-wire, that is. If you walk in front of the bunks directly opposite the door, the worms will appear. However, you can get to all the lockers containing goodies without triggering all those worms. Try it, you might like it.**

Head to the room locked with the keypad, and punch the code in to open it, 83273. In here, you'll find a shuttle bay card, 23 nanites, 3 grenades, and, in the super-duper high security crate, 41 nanites, 6 grenades, a med kit, *and 2 large beakers.* Across the hall is a chemical store room, if you need any chemicals pop in here to see if it's here, and take Ra with you. Head to the 2 other rooms which you need to hit buttons to open. In one, you'll find 20 prisms and 3 grenades, in the other 3 more grenades.

As you've finished here, head down the ladder, and head down the hallway which has a sign on the floor saying 'officers area' pointing to where you came from. Pick up 20 prisms out of the corner, and go down the hallway. You'll find a log and 26 nanites on the first corpse you find. You can probably hear a camera now, run to it and take it out. Search the room. On the corpse by the laser rapier you'll find 6 grenades and 21 nanites, and there's a log, a drink, and cigarettes just lying about on the floor. Head out via the hallway. You'll be back in the room with the elevator shaft. Head to one of the little elevators which goes up a level.

Be ready to take out the turret. Shatter the one intact glass window here, *(or go to the already broken one if destruction isn't your thing)* and hop through to do some more searching. The corpse you may have landed beside has 6 anti-personnel shotgun shells. *There's a magazine by the bench, and a bottle of vodka in the middle of the room.* Go right, you can probably hear the assassin here, take him out. Get the various junk you'll find in here, making sure to get the log and med hypo, of course. Head out, and go through the door to your right, then into the room in front of your face. *As well as a magazine on a ledge,* there's one of the Korenchkin logs after he's changed here, they freak me out worse than all the other logs combined. When you leave this room, go into the other, get 57 nanites from the locker, *a bottle of juice and a bag of chips on the ledge above the bed, and a large beaker in the locker.* Since you're done here, it's time to go to the elevator; once inside, Shodan gives you a treat in the form of 20 cyber modules. You have a little heavy fighting to do up on the bridge, so you may want to take a trip to the surgery machine first.

When you arrive at the top of the elevator, be ready to jump behind the wall, there's a robot up here. Wait for him, then destroy him. There's an assassin up here, but don't follow him into the high tech area. If he goes there, go behind the wall back towards the elevator to make him come back. Once he's dead, you're relatively safe. Go into the high tech area, and go down the ramp to your right and check under one of the computers, and lift an auto-repair kit.

If you're a hacker, you will appreciate it soon. There's a missile turret up the ramp, hack it, and a later section will be much easier to handle. If you're not hacking, you can still use it to your advantage later, Marecki told me how, I'll note it at the appropriate time. There's 8 cyber modules on the ledge nearby it, and 12 armor-piercing bullets under the hologram. When you go down the ramp, you'll see grav shafts to your right. Run to the one leading up, and hopefully you'll get to the top before the camera sets off the alarm. When you get to the top, the assassin is normally in the room on your right, but he was kind this time through and was right between me and the missile turret. Once you kill the assassin, take out the turret. Hide in the room with the table first if you need to, and get the various goodies around here. Make sure to get the ice-pick off the table, *and the 20 nanites from the desk.*

Just before the turret is a body with a toxin hypo, and a med kit just past his hand. You'll find 6 armor piercing bullets on the corpse by the high-security crate, which has a rad hypo, 82 nanites, and a WormMind implant. There's a key card just beside some glass up here, shatter it, and you'll be ready to return to Ops.

Backtracking / Top

Head back to the central elevator, then go through the crew quarters to get back to the deck 1-5 elevator. Go to Deck 4, and go through bulkhead 43.

Once here, leave the bulkhead, hang a right and go down the ramp to the turret, then go right, *left at the crew quarters,* and head straight from here on. You'll reach a door which requires the card you just picked up on the Von Braun's bridge. Go in here, and use the computer. Now, run like a madman (or madwoman) to get out of here. Go through bulkhead 43, and head to Engineering. Don't stop to play, you won't ever have to come here again, and do you really want to deal with cyborg assassins if it can be avoided?

Once in Engineering, go through the coolant tubes to get to the engine core. Once there, take the elevator with the glass shaft back up to the computer you used to get the main power back online. You can probably see the keypad you need to use through the windows. When you head through the door, be ready to run for the door. If you run right up to the door with the keypad, stand right against the door, then crouch, the camera won't be able to see you. Marecki mentioned it, and it works like a charm. When it's not alerted anymore, punch in the destruct code, 94834. Run in, and frob the computer. As you're done here, let's go back to the Command deck, shall we?

Shuttle Bays / Top

When you get here, Shodan will send you an e-mail. Seems as though the Many are trying to save some of their children; you need to deal with this poste haste, of course. The doors you couldn't go through before will open now. As you go up the ramp, you'll likely hear a sound you know from earlier. Rumbler! You can have a bit of fun with him, as there's also a missile turret up here who will fire at you, whether or not the rumbler's in it's way. Use this to your advantage as much as you want. Just be careful, there is no resurrection station anywhere in this sector.

When the rumbler's dead, you'll have to deal with the egg. If you want to try to search it, *or destroy it to get the log behind it, by the grate,* you'll almost certainly trigger the annelid swarm. If you don't want to get hurt, Marecki told me of a trick you can use to destroy the egg:

Wait for the turret to retract, position yourself between it and the egg (the closer to the egg the better, but take care not to trigger it), dodge the missile (splat! scratch one pesky egg) and run into hiding, either back where you rushed out from or behind one of the wall supports on your left. Wait for it to go retract and do the usual. People feeling lucky might skip the hiding part and charge the turret immediately (hint: don't run straight at it!).

When you're relatively safe, head back towards the shuttle bays. There's a corpse near the door to the shuttle bay with the operable door who has *6* standard bullets. Beware the unreachable camera, though. When you feel lucky, charge down the hallway to the grav shaft, and the robot. Take him out, or just run right by him if you'd rather. Marecki pointed out a much safer way to leave this area, and it doesn't involve using these grav shafts again...

The replicator you run into here you'll need to hack later. If you hack it now, you may screw things up. According to what I've heard, if you hack it now, when you need to hack it later, you won't be able to, and you can't get an item you need to finish the game without cheating. However, Enchantermon told me he'd hacked it and was able to hack it again when he needed to. I checked it out, and lo and behold, he was right. I'm guessing the patch fixed the problem. But, there's absolutely nothing worth hacking replicator for, so unless you want to waste some nanites on the hacks, I'd recommend not bothering with it.*

Go through the door to your left, the one with the midwife in it. Take her out. The computer's broken, thats no good. Go through the other door, and you'll find an operable shield computer. Use it. You can probably hear a cyborg assassin down the ladder. If you don't want to search Shuttle Bay 2, you can use him to your advantage. I'll let Enchantermon do the talking here.

If you want to search Shuttle Bay 2, or like to do things manually, then just heal up, climb down the ladder, and kill him, then take out the egg at the bottom of the ladder. Bang on the shuttle to destroy it, then listen to the e-mail from Shodan.

Shuttle Bay 2 / Top

If you want, you can search this shuttle bay. If you do, you'll find an egg, a midwife who informs you that you have a BO problem, and 3 missile turrets. Be careful. Marecki gave me advice on how to deal with all the turrets, I'll let him do the talking...

First, the one the closest to the grav shafts: right after going up go forward and crouch next to the larger of the two crates, then stand up and quickly crouch again. The turret will try to shoot you but will hit the smaller crate instead, damaging itself with the blast. Repeat until it's exploded.

Then there's the one in the middle of the upper level of the bay. There are large crates on both sides of it, not close enough however to use your wrench safely; what is worse, the turret itself is in the field of fire of the third one... Have you just thought the same thing? Repeatedly run from behind one large crate to behind the other, trying to get the third turret to shoot its fellow; the latter should be unable to get a lock on you because you're covering quite a large angle during these runs. Time your runs right and you'll be rewarded with another pile of smoking scrap metal.

Finally, taking out the third turret is extremely straightforward: go back down, approach the large crate beneath your adversary from the side of the door, mantle it, look up and strike.

As long as you are in the melee range the turret will be unable to fire at you, furthermore if you position yourself close enough to the crate's edge, the floor of the upper level will shield you from the final explosion. Now you can mantle up from where you're standing to you can collect the med hypo or reach the blood splatter regardless of whether the egg is destroyed or not.

Now, it's time to do some searching! In the security crate to the right of the main door, you'll find research software. Not worth the effort, in my opinion. Run around to the crates to the grav shafts. While you're up here, search around and you'll find a log by Korenchkin, (due to how much he creeps me out I think all the effort of getting here is worth it) then crack the security crate to get a rad hypo, 6 rifled slugs, and 42 nanites. Check behind some boxes near the destroyed turrets to find a med hypo. If you can squeeze past the turret to the blood splatter, you'll get 6 rifled slugs and 6 standard bullets off the corpse.

There's a female corpse in the center of the room, she has nothing, but theres a crate near her which holds a speed hypo and a toxin hypo. To the left of the door you entered from is a crate with a repair kit in it, swipe it. You're finished in here, for now.

Shuttle Bay 1 / Top

Or, you can just skip searching the shuttle bay, and head straight back up the ladder and to the replicator. Hack it, or use one of your ice-picks on it, and buy the sympathetic resonator. Return to the shielded shuttle, and climb down the ladder. Deal with the egg. *If you want, walk through the shield and smack the indestructable shuttle.* Then, when you're ready, attach the resonator, and hit the road. Unlike with the decompression situation, you're in actual danger if you stick around. Get up the ladder and you should be okay. If you go back down the ladder, you'll notice the door into the shuttle bay was destroyed. Why not explore?

When you enter the hallway, you'll trigger a warning e-mail from Shodan. Why not piss her off? Directly to your left is a cyborg midwife hiding in the shadows, when you round the corner she'll be right there. Head for the grav shafts, go up, and kill the other midwife. Destroy the egg which likely exploded as you went by. The only things on the second floor are eggs, so search and destroy them. As you come down in the grav shaft, search the crate ahead of you and to your right to get a rad hypo. In the female corpse closest to the door you'll find 14 bullets. Search the final female body to find a log by Delacroix, 10 cyber modules, and a psi hypo. When you leave the room, Shodan swipes the modules from you as a slap on the wrist. (If you're low on cyber modules, IE have less than 10, don't get the modules until after Shodan's scolding e-mail.)

You could leave the shuttle bags via the grav shaft, but this would mean having to deal with 6 shotgun hybrids. If you leave via the first shuttle bay, whether or not you cleared it out beforehand, they won't show up to party. I'll agree with Marecki, this is a better route to take.

As Shodan said, the umbilical to the Rickenbacker is opened at the central tram stop, go there now. I ran into 4 spawned spiders and 2 spawned protocol droids along the way.

Bad Goggles! Korenchkin wants to have a word with you now... / Top

When you get to the umbilical, kill the spider, and get the e-mail from Korenchkin. There's a body to the left of the entranceway which has 12 armor-piercing bullets, a med kit, and a toxin hypo. As there's no other way to deal with the situation, go to the bridge of the Von Braun to "discuss your future" with Korenchkin. I ran into a spawned cyborg at the final tram stop.

When you get up to the bridge, as you'll see Korenchkin isn't in the mood for discussing anything. Now, you have 3 choices about how to deal with him, the first 2 are my ideas, Option C is Marecki's idea.

Option A—run up to Korenchkin, and beat the bejesus out of him, until he disappears. Then, get the hell out of there before he reappears. You only need to destroy him once to get to the umbilical. However, you won't get the psi reaver organ to research. Killing him for good will cause a pretty good explosion, which will hurt you. Which downside would you rather have?

Option B—to destroy him for good, you need to destroy the brain, which is by the missile turret near where the Ops card was. Head up there, and give it a hearty thwack. A log will fall out, listen to it. If you did some hacking, the missile turret down there will take care of Korenchkin for you. (I'm ashamed to admit, I do this often. It's funny watching Korenchkin say 'die, puny human' while shooting at the missile turret.) However, this isn't what people who're hacking only via ice-picks do.

Go down the grav shaft, and run like hell out of sight of the camera, and back into the hallway with the elevator in it. Wait for Korenchkin, he's slow, but he'll turn up. I had him follow me torwards the grav shaft, and I wasn't able to kill him where he was without the camera spotting me. When you do get the chance, swing like mad, he's not in a good place to take him out via circle strafing, he was right against the wall for me, but a couple overhand swings should deal with him. I threw away my armor and got right under him when I killed him, and lost 15 hitpoints. Grab the organ, and do some backtracking.

Option C—here's Marecki's method for killing Korenchkin for good, using the turret as an ally, but without hacking it.

Destroy the brain, go down and run out of both camera's and Korenchkin's range—but don't go too far. Crouch and quietly go up the ramp leading to the narrow platform opposite to where the turret is.

If you did everything fast enough before, the psi reaver should still be in approximately the same place it was to begin with, i.e. right in the field of view of the blast turret. If it is further to the right you have a chance of directing it back by going down and running right up to it—the creature should then hastily float away to get far enough to be able to use its attack; instead of waiting for this to happen head back to the platform.

Now, this part can be tricky if you're not careful: either jump up or mantle the computer console and immediately go back down, having the turret happily blow a dent in the back of Korenchkin's bloated head. Haste is important because by going higher you have likely gone into the latter's field of fire. Repeat as many times as needed, go down, collect the organ and get out of there.

However you killed him, head down the elevator and back to the central tram stop. Once in there, Shodan will give you, the dog who's been running around fetching things for her for hours, a nice treat in the form of 30 cyber modules. There's a log on the floor, and a complete surgical unit. And, thus concludes our stay on the Von Braun, head up the jumbo grav shaft and you'll be in the Rickenbacker. Although, before heading there, you might want to pop over to the section on preparing for the journey.

During my game where I noted what stats I upgraded when, prior to the shuttle bays, I took my maintenance skills up to level 5.