System Shock 2 Melee-Only Walkthrough

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

Walkthrough

Hydroponics

1. Finding Toxin A
2. Snowland
3. Exploration
4. Hydroponics Sector A
5. Hydronics Sector B/C
6. Hydroponics Sector D
7. Hydroponics Sector B/C Continued

Finding Toxin A / Top

When you try to go to Deck 4, you'll find out the elevator shaft's jammed, so go to Deck 3 instead. You'll get an e-mail from Polito, listen to it and leave the elevator. The first time I played the game, I made a bee-line for the security station I could see. That was back in the good old days, when I was a whimpering baby who took down the security even when every camera and turret in the deck was destroyed. Even though I've toughened up slightly, I still go down there first. If you go down the hall past the security station, 2 shotgun hybrids will come out of the two doors. It's possible to kill them both before they can even get a shot off, especially if they foolishly stop in the doorways.

In the far room, there's a log and 6 shotgun shells in the desk. In the other room, you find the first vial of Toxin-A. When you approach it, Polito will e-mail you, and a few seconds later you'll hear a midwife in the hall. Run to the door, and wait for her, crouching, then kill her once she's close enough. Pick up the vial of Toxin A, then research it. Since you probably won't have a research skill higher than 1 or 2, you'll probably be waiting a while for it to finish. If you want, you can go back to Deck 2 to avoid giving the game time to spawn more friends for you to play with on Deck 3. But, by the time you get to the first regulator it should be almost fully researched, so you don't have to.

On a slightly unrelated note, I always liked the subtle touch of Polito's comment about accessing the primary data loop. If you remember one of her e-mails back on Engineering, she was unable to access the primary data loop then, but is able to now. We'll learn later Shodan wants us to power up more systems so Xerxes is weakened just enough for her to take over, she was already crippling him this early in the game. She just hasn't mentioned it yet, an alert newbie might've noticed something was a bit odd about it.

Ahem, anyways. Once you've got the Toxin A, head back to the security station, and up the ramp. There's a camera up by the glass windows, run up there and give it a good hearty smack. You've probably heard hybrids and a midwife nearby, they're behind the glass windows and will become particularly upset when you destroy the camera. You don't have to worry about them coming after you, as they can't open doors that you need a keycard for, you can search the computer areas nearby in relative safety. You'll find a bottle of juice and a can of pop in the garbage can by the female corpse, who has a PsiBoost implant and 10 nanites on her. By the other computer, near the door to sector A, you'll find a desk with a mug and magazine on it.

Now, it's time to deal with the hybrids and the midwife. Break the glass and jump down. The best spot to try this is by the door to sector A, they probably won't be able to see you there and you'll have a chance to run over and kill them. You'll only find a pipe hybrid and a shotgun hybrid, the other hybrid and the midwife are down the ladder. If you want to learn on how to cope with the eggs, read Interlude 3.

Snowland / Top

Search the dark room you found the hybrids in. There's a ladder leading down, and there'll be a lot of eggs down there.

Keep in mind that while you're down here, you'll have to worry about the shotgun hybrid and the midwife, who both have ranged attacks. Know where the nearest wall to hide behind is. When you destroy the first egg, the midwife will likely come running to defend the other eggs. Just wait for her, kill her when she arrives, then kill the shotgun hybrid when the opportunity arises. He should come to investigate the midwife's death, so just be patient, and wait.

When you search the area down here, put on the hazard suit, and run past all the eggs, triggering every single one of them. Once they've released all their goodies, use an anti-toxin hypo, then search and destroy all the eggs. Also, there's 4 bodies down here. In no particular order, heres what you'll find on each of them. On the female corpse, you'll find an ice-pick, 18 nanites, and the Hydro A card. You need it to get to one of the regulators, so make sure you get it before you leave. On one of the male corpses, you'll find 38 nanites, 6 armor piercing bullets, and 3 cyber modules next to him. In the hallway with the regulator in it, you find 2 corpses. On the one farthest from the regulator, you find 9 nanites. On the one closest to the regulator, you find a speed hypo, 6 standard bullets, 36 nanites, and a log.

By now toxin A should be researched. Stick it into the regulator for a nice helping of cyber modules. Climb back up the ladder, and go back to the room with the windows in it. On the highest box farthest from the windows, there are 3 cyber modules. Mantle the lower boxes, and pick them up.

Exploration / Top

Head down the hallway from the dark room, the one that has a keep clear sign in front of it. You'll probably hear some monkeys. A lot of monkeys. Head through the big door, then hang a left, to the doors which slide open sideways. The monkeys are back here. You need to get the doors open, get the monkeys to see you, then run like hell and dive behind a wall, and wait for them to come to you. I ran into 4, there may be more. Once the monkeys are all finding out what the afterlife has in store for them, its time to explore.

There are 2 sets of stairs leading down to watery areas. Down the first one there's a log, and 3 cyber modules. Down the next one there's a camera. Be ready to run down there and destroy it.

There's a body with lots of blood around him up here, steal his 6 rifled slugs, and Hydroponics sector B card. There are 2 more monkeys down the hallway he's facing. There's also a shotgun, a bit hard to see in the dark.

Pick it up, and throw it into the hallway. If you're lucky, a monkey will be nearby and come to see what the noise was. If you weren't, pick it up again, go to the corner just down the hall, and throw the shotgun around it. That should upset both monkeys *down the left hallway,* kill them.

Go past the doorway leading to the chemical store room and watch the rather disturbing ghost scene, with Dr. Miller and nurse Bloome. There are some supplies in here. There's 2 med hypos on one of the surgical units, and a rad hypo between the two of them. There's a corpse, who has 24 standard bullets, a laser rapier, and 16 nanites on him.

Head down the hall and go into the sliding doors on your left, then hang a left before the crates and go into the chemical store room. You can probably hear a cyborg midwife in the connecting room. Run in and kill her, judging by the log you find on her, she's nurse Bloome. She's guarding a vial of toxin A, and the chemicals V and Sb, but you don't need the chemicals anymore. In the chemical room, on the top shelf just to the right of the sink, you'll find a med kit. There's also 3 cyber modules in the trash can.

Leave the room, and go left. Be careful, there's a camera in the room you're about to enter. Swipe 13 nanites from the corpse in the doorway, then run behind the central column, out of sight of the camera, and get 2 med hypos from the locker. *There's also a toxin hypo in the water in view of the camera, you'll need to disable security to get to it.*

Leave, and head back towards where you entered. You can go down the hallway and destroy a series of eggs, but save before you do. You may very well end up searching all the eggs, finding nothing, then get torn apart by the midwife who spawns in the hallway you entered from.

Head back the way you came, towards Snowland, but when you see the door leading there, which has 'cold storage' written beside it, head left instead of right. There's 6 grenades lying on the floor, and 1 inside the grenade launcher. Open the door, and you'll hear a camera to your right. It's out of reach. No good. *There's a corpse here with 17 nanites and a maintenance tool.* Run under it, through the door and up the ramp, and you'll find the door to Hydroponics sector A. Now's as good a time as any to go there. When you open the door, you'll see a camera slowly scanning the room. Wait until it's slowly turning away from you, then charge it and destroy it.

Hydroponics sector A / Top

When you arrive here, you'll hear a camera to your right, and several eggs. Run around the corner, and take out the camera, then deal with the eggs. The one under the camera releases a worm for me, it may be different on different installations, but it's not too much of a danger. Go to the upgrade units, and look up. There's a hole in the ceiling, and there's 3 cyber modules up there. If you want to upgrade your endurance or strength stats, now is a very good time to do it.

On the female corpse, you'll find a vial of Toxin A, and on the male corpse you'll find a Swiftboost Implant, a pack of cigarettes, and 19 nanites. *There's also a mug on the floor in front of the replicator. (I thought the female corpse was Delacroix my first time through the game, since there's logs by her about how she was the one who made it.) Now, you should be ready to go.

Go through the door, and stay right. We'll save the doors to the left for a little later. There's a log on the floor, by Polito. Hang a right, and go into the room there. There's 19 nanites on the corpse right in front of the door. Around the boxes, there's 6 anti-personnel bullets in the security crate. Past the door, there's a male corpse, (*approaching him causes worms to spawn inside the female corpse*) then some crates. In the nearest crate, there's an anti-toxin hypo. Head out the door, *show the spawned hybrid the business end of your wrench,* and hang a right and search the crates to find a speed hypo, 6 rifled slugs, and in the locked crate, an auto-repair unit.

If you're hacking, (although the station is absent on Impossible) I recommend you take out the security now. You've probably heard 2 robots past the only 2 doors you haven't entered yet. The room's in an H shape, and there are two cameras, each on either side of the short hallway connecting the two longer ones, and two robots, each patrolling the long hallways. If you're not hacking, you need to be extremely careful. There are 2 ways to kill the robots, I'll list them both.

1. Listen to the footsteps of the robot, maybe save a few times and open the door to see where the robot is. You need him to be past the camera. When you run into the hallway, do a running jump to destroy the camera, and keep running, then attack the robot. The other robot will come to investigate what's going on, kill your first victim before he shows up. You need to stay out of the short hallway to avoid the other camera seeing you and setting off the alarm.
2. I found out this attack method by accident, I was trying to inch forward and get closer to the door to be able to hear better and the doors opened with the robot right on the other side. I leapt backwards, and beat the crap out of him, and destroyed him. Once he was dead, I waited for the other one, and backed up close to the door to the room with the crates in it. When he showed up, I ran in there, then waited for him. When he was far enough away from the door to the H hallway I attacked. Considering I took no damage, (the robots exploded wrong and I wasn't hurt by it) this may be the better of the two attacks.

Once the robots and the cameras in the H hallway gone, do a bit of searching. On the left long hallway, you'll find 17 nanites up by the plants on the right side of the hallway, *and a hard to see med hypo between two plants on trays in the water.* In the connecting hallway, you'll find a corpse on a trash can with 3 grenades, and on the corpse lying on the bench, you'll find 12 bullets and 13 nanites. There are guns beside both corpses, *there's 6 bullets in the gun by the female corpse, and 3 bullets in the one by the man. There's also a plant on the man's side of the hallway.*

On the right long hallway, there's a corpse with an assault rifle lying in front of him. I'll never understand why, but I almost never, ever, ever remember to search him. Maybe it's because he holds a card you need to get into Hydroponics section D and it's necessary? Who knows. In addition to having that card, he holds 15 nanites and 12 armor piercing bullets. *On the opposite end of the hallway as the corpse, there's 12 standard bullets between 2 plants on trays in the water.*

Go out the door in front of the cadaver, and go down the hallway and swipe a psi hypo off the female corpse. Go through the big door, and greet the shotgun hybrid the only way you know how. Polito sends you an e-mail, telling you to get your ass in gear, but it sounds ... different. There's some kind of background noise. Weird.

There's rooms with eggs on either side of the hallway you'll be going down, it's up to you whether you want to use a toxin hypo and try to get organs out of the eggs. (If you do decide to, I recommend saving it to last. Put on the hazard suit, trigger all the eggs all at once, then use one hypo, and start looting.) There are also supplies in some of the rooms. In this section, there is nothing in the room on the right side of the hallway, but in the room on the left, there's 6 rifled slugs lying on the floor between the eggs, and up the ladder and beside the plants on the catwalk, there's 6 anti-personnel bullets.

You may have heard yet another robot further down the hallway. Run through the door and kill him. In the rooms on the right side of the hallway, you'll find 3 cyber modules past the eggs, and on the catwalks up the ladder, there's a crate with a rad hypo and 14 nanites in it, *and if you jump over the crates, you'll find a rad hypo on the ledge.* In the room on the left side of the hallway, there's a maintenance tool and 16 nanites, *and in the water on the floor, a rad hypo and a psi booster.*

In the next room, there's the environmental regulator, a cyborg midwife, and a camera. Go down the hallway as far as you can without being spotted, and watch the camera. Just before it starts scanning back towards you, charge the midwife and kill her, then run back to the hallway before the alarm sounds. There's a robot in the room behind the regulator, sometimes he comes out to say hello, sometimes he doesn't. If he comes out, kill him or run, otherwise leave him be. When the camera makes the two sounds that mean it's decided there's really nothing there, go back into the room, stand directly under it, and hop up to destroy it. Place the vial of Toxin A in the regulator, and head back to the bulkhead.

When you get there, a shotgun hybrid will have spawned. Kill him, and search him. There's a log, and you'll find out this particular hybrid was actually a woman. She was originally Turnbull, the one who was pissed off with Bronson about changing the code to the Deck 2 armory. It's one of my favorite logs, I love everything about it, especially the ending. "Dont have any regrets about punching my clock - I was already gone."

Hydroponics Sector B/C / Top

Once you're back, it's time to return to the elevator. There was a door to your right that you could've gone through at the beginning of the level, head through there now. In the room with the elevator in it, there's a log on the floor, pick it up. It's the first time I found it, and I'm feeling rather stupid right now. How many times have I played this game again? I've organized all the logs twice even, and listened to them all in order, and I never once noticed that there was a log I'd never found before in there. Damn. I'm really a sharp knife now arent I?

Anyways, once you go through the door, and through the next door, you'll see an OS upgrade unit ahead of you. You'll probably also hear a camera and some eggs. There's turrets in the room with them, too, and there's breakable windows between you and them. Despite trying to abstain from hacking when writing the walkthrough, I took down the security systems and took the turrets and cameras out, then got some organs from the eggs. *There's also a med kit in the far left hand corner of the room.

In the now very safe room that you walked into, you'll find 3 crates with bullets in them, there's 6 standard bullets, 6 armor piercing bullets, and 12 anti-personnel bullets. On the desk on your right, there's a pack of cigarettes, on the counter past it there's 3 magazines, a mug, *and a log.* On the next desk, there's a bag of chips, and on the floor beside it, there's a pistol with 12 bullets in it. There's a recharge station here, and a tech upgrade unit. If you want to upgrade anything, go for it. At the OS upgrade unit, I'd recommend getting Smasher, the overhand swing upgrade.

Now that you're done in the room, go out of it, then down the hall. When you go around the corner, be careful. There's a hybrid here who has The Power. He's able to walk through the doors like they're not there. He may be in a room, but he can walk through the jammed door, unlike you. He can't shoot through it though, thankfully, so wait for him to come out and kill him. Once he's dead, go into the door down the hall from the one he walked through. There's a log by Delacroix on the desk explaining the rather unhappy looking replicator. Mantle the desk, smash the window, and search the desks, and nab 2 vials of Toxin A, a LabAssistant implant, *and a small beaker.*

When you leave the room, go into the door across the hall. In the desk, there's 3 cyber modules, on the female corpse, 19 nanites and a med hypo, in the far desk, a log, and under the desk, a surgical unit key. Head out of the room, going right. You can probably hear the cyborg midwife. Go up the ramp, and down the hall to your left is where she is. In front of your face when you went up the ramp was a door to Hydroponics sector D. Well, let's get that over with, shall we? There's 3 grenades on the floor on your way to the bulkhead.

Hydroponics Sector D / Top

When you arrive here, you'll see this isn't the tidiest of places. There's blood all over the walls, and gouge marks in the wall. There's a log just in front of the bulkhead, and a corpse just past it. He holds an EnduraBoost implant, (second most important implant in game) 3 grenades, and 20 nanites. Destroy the egg, and kill the midwife. Destroy 2 more eggs, and get a psi hypo, log, and a large beaker from the desk there. Go up the ramp and get a maintenance tool from the crate, and 3 cyber modules hidden behind one of them. Don't bother hacking the security crate, there's only a French-Epstein device in there. Get the Korenchkin log off the computer nearby, then go down the ramp, and into the room with the really funky sound in it.

The corpse in the room has a little special something with her. I don't mean the 65 nanites, med hypo, and speed hypo. I mean the powered armor. It's a wonderful little device, but it sucks up power like an alcoholic drinking a flask of whiskey during a coffee break when the boss isn't looking. As it protects you much, much better than standard armor, it's handy to keep around. Personally, I threw away the hazard suit to use this one instead, (and haven't done it since) just keep a good suit of combat armor with you in case the power runs out.

Do you enjoy jumping puzzles? I don't. I hate them as a matter of fact.

But, if you go through the one in this room, you'll get 3 cyber modules, a maintenance tool, a bottle of bubbly, a magazine, and 6 anti-personnel shotgun shells. I just noticed it this time through. There's 3 breakable windows, shatter the one farthest to the right. Get up in the window frame, and walk out of it onto the narrow catwalk.

Follow it around, and you'll find a ladder. Climb up the ladder, then jump on the pipes. Follow the pipes around the room, and you'll get to the little stash. Get out of there the way you came, I was able to get through the window again on my first try.

Leave the room, and go through the first door on your right. Guess what, it's time to circle strafe spiders! Yippee! Actually, they should die within one hit, but still. You can hear a cyborg midwife down there, too. Now wouldn't be a bad time to try on that new suit of powered armor. Go down, and kill the midwife, and the 3 spiders. Crouching really wouldn't be a bad idea here, either, since the spiders here are just itty bitty ones, and midwives can't hit you if you're crouching.

Once the hostility in the area has been eliminated, let's do a bit of searching, shall we? Go back to the ramp, and head to its right. The corpse has 20 nanites and 12 anti-personnel shotgun shells. Go down the narrow hall, in the dip there's 3 cyber modules. Head back to the ramp, and go left, back the way you went when you took out the spiders and the midwife. Take all the eggs out, and place the vial of Toxin A in the environmental regulator. *There could very well be a shotgun hybrid here, so keep sharp.*

To the right of the regulator are two corpses. Once has 6 armor piercing bullets, a toxin hypo, and 20 nanites on him, the other has 12 bullets on him. Past his outstretched hand, theres a gun, with 7 bullets in it. As you've searched every inch of this sector, it's time to leave via the bulkhead.

Hydroponics Sector B/C Continued / Top

Once you're out, head back to the hallway the midwife came out of. There's a mug on the bench, and chips on the floor beside it. Go down the ramp, and swipe 6 rifled slugs off the floor, a bottle of vodka, and get 18 nanites which are jammed into the bottom of the bench. Go through the door, get 10 nanites off the corpse, and get the log off the floor to his right. Head through the door to your left, and get a toxin hypo off the corpse to your left, *and a log past him.*

Go up the ladder, and, even though there's not really any point in it this far into the level, activate the resurrection station. Go through the door. *If you hear a monkey, don't worry. He's under the room with the windows in the floor, you're safe from him where you are.* There's a log *and can of pop* on the desk to the right of the wall, but be warned there's an unreachable camera watching it. There's also 3 cyber modules on the floor. Head down the ramp, and take out the midwife and the eggs. In the corner of the room, in the dark, there's an auto-repair kit.

On the corpse there's 12 nanites. And, in the middle of the room, there's the final environmental regulator.

When you go to leave the room, go out the window on your right, *swiping the plant and mug on the window sill,* and you can walk over the glass ceiling here. (If you heard a monkey before, you'll probably see him below you at some point.) Just watch out, before the corpse with 20 nanites and a Swiftboost implant one of the unbreakable windows isn't so sturdy, and you'll fall through. Past the corpse, over the pipes, is another little crawlspace leading to more ceilings, and 39 nanites, and a maintenance tool. There's no glass in these ceilings, you might as well jump down and run for the elevator. That's what I did.

Once at the elevator, you should probably take a swing by Interlude 5, as you can choose which deck you complete next, you should probably think a moment about where you want to head off to. Depending on which way you feel like heading, you can either get ready for Ops deck, then head there, or you can get ready for Rec deck, then head there, after forcing Shodan to endure your deranged prescence, of course.

During the game where I noted what stats I upgraded when, after this deck I took my research skills to level 3, and exotic weapon skills to level 1.