How to solve oddities with the tinker station in Pacific Drive

By James On Feb 23, 2024

While your car sustains damage Pacific driveit could start to develop odditiesthat you need to repair at a craft station. Oddities can include things like popping the hood when you’re reversing, or changing the radio when you turn left.

Us Pacific drive guide walks you through diagnosing and troubleshooting your car’s quirks, and tells you everything you need to know about using the key fob.

How to use the tinker station in Pacific Drive

Arrived very early Pacific driveyou’re given a purpose for using the key station to diagnose your car’s quirks, but you’re not given any explanation of how that process works.

Image: Ironwood Studios/Kepler interactive via Polygon

Right next to where you park in the auto shop you will find the craft station — it’s located just to the right of the charging station. It is a computer with a crossed wrench and a screwdriver on the screen. Communicating with it will help you diagnose your car’s quirks.

The tinker station has a fairly simple interface, but the game doesn’t really explain how it works. You have four columns: lists of car parts, actions, another car part, and another action. You can think of these columns as a way to explain the cause and effect of a quirk, with the cause on the left and the effect on the right.

Basically, you fill in the blanks of a sentence that reads: “If the (car part) does (action), then the (other car part) does (quirky action).”

Using that structure, we’ve seen oddities like: “when the switch do shifts to parkThen the left front door do opens‘ and ‘when the headlights do turns onThen the radio do switches.”

Diagnosing oddities takes some experimentation

The problem is that the line between cause and effect isn’t always clear, especially when you’re dodging dangers and fleeing the storm in the Zone. It can be difficult to decide whether the cause of an oddity is the headlights, the speed of the car, going up or down a hill, or a lack of gas, when all of these things are (constantly) happening at the same time.

If you have a quiet moment in a stable part of the Zone, experiment a bit. Better yet, if it’s a simple cause and effect, you can try it out in the car workshop between trips.

If you are confused, use the options in the columns on the crafting station to guide you. It’s a long list, but the first two columns contain all possible causes.

When you correctly figure out the cause and effect of an oddity, you can repair and remove it. This is usually accompanied by a mechanics or electrician kit.

If you do something wrong, you lose a gamble. Speaking of guesses…

How guesses work at the tinker station

Every time you visit the auto shop between trips to the Zone, you have that eight guesses to diagnose an oddity. If you get any of the columns wrong, you lose a gamble. If you correctly guess the cause and effect of a quirk, you get that guess back.

Once you run out of guesses, you’re not stuck with that whim forever, just your next run. This time you’ll be out of the guessing game, but your count will be reset the next time you open a Gateway and return to the auto shop.

Some quirks are subtle

Not every quirk your car develops is easily noticeable. The more dramatic ones will jump out at you, like when the hood pops open or the headlights go out. But others affect components you don’t often look at. For example, I currently have six quirks with my car, and I really can’t tell you what they are. I think it has something to do with the skylight?

There’s no real penalty for having a quirk, so it’s okay to leave the subtle ones for a while. You’ll get the occasional sarcastic comment from Oppy over the radio, but if it doesn’t affect your survival, it’s fine to ignore it.

For those hard-to-diagnose oddities, you may need to upgrade the tinker station.

Build the investigator module to diagnose oddities

Pacific Drive researcher module in the manufacturing station interface

At the manufacturing station, look for the research module on the first tab: it’s in the fourth column from the left and one row down. This adds a number of features to the tinker station.

First it will tell you which columns of your guess are correct. When you submit a diagnosis, you will see a small smiley emoticon below the columns you correct.

If you’re still struggling, you can spend some money stable energy (which you earn by collecting that glowing yellow one stable anchors) Unpleasant to research the peculiarities of your car. If you do that, you’ll get an exclamation point next to the car parts that (may) have quirks. You can even examine it multiple times to help you narrow down the quirk.

For more Pacific drive manuals, here’s how to get chemicals, how to get copper wire, and how to expand your inventory.