Low-shield pack

The low-shield pack is a single-use accessory added by Royalty DLC. It allows the user to deploy a circular shield that stops incoming projectiles but does not affect outgoing projectiles, or prevent pawns from moving through it.

Acquisition

As a complicated piece of technology, low-shield packs can only be made at the Machining table and requires Shields to be researched in order to be constructed. Crafting the shield pack requires 1 Shield core, 1 Component and takes 14,000 ticks (3.89 mins) to craft. Shield cores are only available from mechanoid clusters and trading.

Alternatively, this item can be received as a quest reward, bought or found on Raiders.

Summary

Radius of the shield with unshielded area denoted in red, partially shielded areas in gold (see Note right).
Note that despite the shield visually extending beyond the tiles, it does not protect them.

The low-shield pack is a single-use item that deploys a temporary structure called a burnout low-shield. This, in turn, projects a shield with a radius of 4.9 tiles for a duration of 1,800 ticks (30 secs), after which it burns out and is destroyed. There is no delay between the use of the item and the deployment of the shield, it will even project the shield if used while paused. The burnout low-shield has 250hp, and can be manually targeted and destroyed.

During that time, the shield stops all incoming ground-level fire from passing into the bubble but does not prevent pawns inside from firing out. This is in contrast to the otherwise similar Skipshield psycast, which prevents all incoming and outgoing projectiles. Also note that this only applies to ground-level fire, i.e. fire from ranged weapons carried by all types of pawn and turrets, including grenades that cross the boundary of the shield. Fire from mortars, orbital bombardment, or aerodrone strikes or salvos will not be blocked by the shield, nor will explosions crossing the boundary.

Note: Pawns on the tiles shown in gold in the image to the left are shielded from attacks directly targeted at them however, due to a bug, they can still be hit by attacks aimed at other nearby pawns that miss.

A pawn does not need to be inside the shield to benefit from the effect, assuming the enemy is not inside the shield and that the shield is between them and their attacker the incoming rounds will be stopped. However, it does not prevent pawns from moving inside the shield and attacking. Projectiles from EMP grenades and launchers from outside hitting the shield or EMP damage from any source done to the burnout low-shield object itself, will disable the shield for 600 ticks (10 secs), during which time the burnout timer will still count down. Furthermore, unlike Mechanoids, the shield projector will not adapt to the EMP effect. Its therefore possible to continuously disable the shield until the projector burns out. Note that an EMP area of effect overlapping with the projected shield will not disable it - a projectile must hit the shield or the EMP damage must be dealt to the structure itself

NPCs equipped with the shield pack will deploy them when an enemy-fired projectile travels past them. Friendly ranged fire will not trigger the pack. Note also that NPCs will occasionally end up walking outside of the effect of the shield.

Analysis

The low-shield pack is incredibly powerful in the right circumstances. Pawns equipped with shield packs can stand toe-to-toe against entire centipede raids on open ground. Their use can be also be integrated with other tactics, such as chokepoints with melee blockers to prevent being overrun with melee while the shield protects colonists from ranged attacks. Additionally, their instantaneous deployment means they can be used to intercept projectiles like doomsday rockets already in the air and completely destroy them, potentially protecting even those outside of their radius.

It is often much easier to acquire completed packs from NPCs than to farm mechanoid clusters for shield cores. Therefore, the ideal way to get them without deploying is to use melee pawns and either not used ranged or micromanage your ranged pawns to ensure that they don't target anyone near or behind the pawn with the shield pack. Bionic or archotech legs and/or a jump pack or locust armor paired with a strong melee weapon are recommended if the pawn is to be rushed, however use of the Skip psycast allows the wearer to be teleported into the middle of as many as 8 melee pawns and quickly downed.

Gallery

The deployed shield projector

Version history

1.2.2719 - Added.
1.2.2753 - Renamed from Broadshield pack to Low-shield pack. Broadshield Projector renamed to burnout low-shield. Gave the broadshield pack a smaller drawsize, so that its icon/map-icon is more congruent with its appearance on a pawn. AI will now only deploy an NPC's Broadshield pack if the offending attacker is hostile to prevents friendly-fire causing activation.

Low-shield pack

Contents

Acquisition

Summary

Analysis

Gallery

Version history

See Also

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