Supercharged slots

How do you place modules for the most damage? Put a weapon's three upgrade modules on the supercharged slots, and the weapon on the one adjacent to the fewest of them. The rule is the same for every weapon, on a multitool and on a starship, and a square of four supercharged slots is the best figure for any of them.

The numbers on this page are the Boltcaster's, because it is the weapon we measured: that does not make it the best weapon. Another weapon can hit harder, or hit an area rather than one target, and its Damage Potential does not compare with the Boltcaster's single shots. Read each number against the same weapon placed another way.

The ceiling

A Boltcaster with three Illegal modules on a square, every one at its best roll, its Barrel Ioniser and Ricochet Module beside them, reaches 15535.7 Damage Potential on a Sentinel multitool or a staff. That is the Boltcaster's highest number, and nothing goes above it. With three of the best S-Class modules instead it is 13451.0. Every core technology takes three upgrade modules, as the game itself says (a fourth switches all of them off), and no multitool has more than four supercharged slots, so a weapon and its three modules on a square is the most one weapon can have. The Boltcaster's own Barrel Ioniser and Ricochet Module add no damage, but the game counts each as a neighbour of the modules, so placed against them they lift the ceiling by 8%: without them it is 12464.5. What is left is the tool's own damage and how well each module rolled.

The Illegal ceiling needs luck: an Illegal module raises two to four of its stats, and each roll has to land at the top end, which is rare. Class S modules always raise four, so their ceiling is the one most players can reach. The three modules can be mixed, two S and one Illegal for one, but not four: a fourth module of any class switches all of them off. The Royal multitool measured further down, with its own good but not perfect modules and no Ioniser beside them, reached 90% of what its square gives with the best modules.

Technology that helps its neighbours

Some technology adds nothing to the number it stands beside and still matters, because the game counts it as a neighbour. The Boltcaster has two such, and the hyperdrive four:

So the best Boltcaster takes six slots, not four. Here it is cell by cell, the square on the right:

	Left	Middle	Right
Top			Ricochet Module
Middle		Module, supercharged	Module, supercharged
Bottom	Barrel Ioniser	Module, supercharged	Boltcaster, supercharged

Each of the two helpers is adjacent to one of the modules beside the Boltcaster, and the third module, on the far corner, already has two.

How to place them

Four supercharged slots make one of five figures. Here is each, with the weapon on its best cell in the other colour and three Illegal modules at their best, on every kind of multitool, against the same weapon and modules with no supercharged slot at all:

Any figure more than triples the damage, and the square adds only 3% more than the others. Where the weapon stands matters more than the figure: on a line, a corner, or a zigzag put it at an end, on a T at the foot, and on a square anywhere. In the middle of a T it loses 13% against the square, the worst place there is. Whichever figure you have, the modules keep the supercharged slots: the next section says why.

Why the modules want the slots

The weapon gains only from the slot under it. A module gains from its slot and from every neighbour, and more from another module than from the weapon. So a supercharged slot under a module raises everything that module adds, and the modules should be adjacent to each other more than to the weapon. That is why the weapon goes where it has the fewest neighbours.

The proof

One class S Royal multitool, the Boltcaster, and the same three S-Class Boltcaster modules, moved from layout to layout. The number is the tool's Damage Potential, on the right of the inventory screen, and the rule above gives every one of them to the printed digit.

The steps are plain. Modules with no supercharged slot stay under two times the Boltcaster alone: three apart give 1.47, an adjacent 2×2 block 1.82. A supercharged slot under the Boltcaster alone gives 1.57. The big step comes only when the modules take the supercharged slots, and the square, with all four on them, gives 5.6 times. How often a multitool has a square is on the square.

On a starship

A starship follows the same rule, so place its modules the same way: a weapon and its three modules, the modules on the supercharged slots, the weapon where it is adjacent to the fewest of them. A square is the best figure here too: ship figures shows which figures a ship's slots form, and the square on a ship how rare one is. On a class S Interceptor, Photon Cannon modules raise its Sentinel Cannon, and a supercharged slot raises each card by the same 1.25:

A fire rate of +3% becomes +28% because the card prints how far the stat moves from its base, and the supercharge acts on the whole stat.

The hyperdrive is where the most technology stands adjacent: the Hyperdrive itself, the four colour drives, and three modules, and the inventory frames them as one group. Keep the supercharged slots for the three modules and the Hyperdrive, and set the colour drives around them, as the table of helpers above says: a colour drive adds no range of its own, and on a supercharged slot it gains nothing you can see.

The starship's own Damage Potential works differently. Each of its seven weapons adds up to 50 and stops once its damage per second reaches a cap, so the screen can never show more than 709.5: a class S Fighter at its best damage with all seven weapons at their caps. A Sentinel Cannon with its three modules, or alone on a supercharged slot, already reached its cap in the measurement, so the starship screen cannot rank layouts the way the multitool screen does; the placement that wins on the multitool still wins in a fight. The modules themselves, class by class, are on multitool modules and starship modules.

On the exosuit, the exocraft, and a freighter

The exosuit and each exocraft have three supercharged slots, none adjacent to another, so there is no figure to make: put one module of a kind on each and set the rest of that kind around it, as exosuit modules says. A freighter's slots belong to the freighter, as freighters shows. Its technology gains from adjacent technology of its kind by the same rule as a weapon's modules: the freighter's hyperdrive range grows when its hyperdrive upgrades sit adjacent to each other and to the hyperdrive itself, and the hyperdrive itself gains nothing from them.

The ceiling above needs a tool with 50% damage, and a staff is one you build yourself: staffs says how.