Tips & Tricks

Teleglitch is a difficult game. It is not meant to be easily defeated. Enemies do a lot of damage, ammo is scarce, and the player has limited inventory space. While trial and error is the best teacher, it is also the slowest. this page is dedicated to detailing some tricks and tips that may increase the probability of survival during the escape of the Medusa 1-C Facility.

General Tips & Tricks

Teleglitch plays, in many respects as a Roguelike and a survival horror game. Resources and inventory space are limited.

Levels

• Multiple secret rooms always spawn on each level, and contain useful gear; as such one should explore each level fully. Secret rooms may contain gear not otherwise found until later levels, giving the player an advantage early in the game.
• Using the TAB key will bring up the Map, which fills in as you explore. Enemies within line of sight can be viewed on the map. Also, destructible walls hiding secrets are visible as thinner-than-normal walls on the map, which aids in locating the secret rooms.
• Walls to secret rooms can be shot with any projectile weapon, and not just explosives; you can save explosives for other useful things.
• Many levels have a terminal that shows the teleporter location or storage crate locations. The latter are useful for making sure you have cleaned out a level of all useful gear. Although it's preferable to fully explore every level, taking the fastest route to the teleporter can save needless expenses of ammo, health, and armor.
• Large open areas often mean lots of enemies.
• Open pipes in walls occasionally mean a Zombie or a Swarm Bot horde is lying in ambush, triggering when you get too close to the opening. Building a detector early on is wise and save you from more than several hordes, as the detector shows the trigger radius as a dotted circle around ambush pipes, but the detection radius isn't much larger than the trigger radius. Good practice is to slow to a walk (using your aim button) when near wall pipes, lest you accidentally trigger the ambush by running into the trigger radius.
• Level 3 can sometimes spawn an optional boss fight with 3 war walkers; this occurs in a large industrial room that always spawns behind a secret wall in the room with several large industrial machines that look like tanks with large robotic arms. Have some Panzerfausts, canguns, or other heavy weapons ready for this fight.
• Levels 4, 6 and 8 have boss rooms. These trap you in the room with the level boss. Identifying them is easy - keep an eye out for a green light on the wall adjacent to the entrance doorway. The door closes and locks behind you, and the light will turn red. Retreat through the door prior to it closing to allow yourself time to prepare. If you die whilst facing a boss, and are carrying a teleporter, you will respawn in an anteroom to the boss fight, rather than at the beginning of the level. 

Inventory

• Keep your inventory organized so you can quickly select your most used items.
• Carrying multiple weapons of the same type can be beneficial, since in battle you can switch weapons without having to wait to reload.

Health

• Canned meat can increase your hitpoints past the normal limit of 100, up to a max of 150. This can save you inventory space, and the extra Empty Tin Cans have multiple crafting uses, such as making plates for armor.
• Don't waste medkits topping up your health if you won't gain the full effect; e.g. only use a Medkit25 if you have 75 HP or less.
• Keeping the above rule in mind, keep your health as high as possible, as some enemies do very heavy damage and can kill even a full-health player in seconds. Also note that Canguns do ten damage to you when fired, and poorly placed explosives (and cannon shots) also hurt you.

Combat Tips & Tricks

• Dropping a weapon unloads it; you retain the ammo. Pick up and then drop weapons you don't want to keep to get the ammo to feed your other weapons.
• The aiming line is extended the further away the cursor is from the avatar. This is quite useful for long range sniping with weapons like the Heavy Rifle and Lasgun.
• Shotguns are most effective in close combat. This might seem obvious, but having all the pellets hit the same target will take down most low tier enemies, and saves ammo.
• Learning to meleeing easy enemies during the early parts of the game can help you save more ammunition for the latter parts of the game.
• Stop and listen for movement sounds, warning you of approaching enemies. Similarly, squids make a sound reminiscent of a prog-rock album; this can be used to identify them before you see them.
• Pause the game by checking your map. Even though enemies might be in the fog-of-war so you can't see them, you can sometimes locate approaching enemies by looking for open or partially open doors on the map.
• Use a diverse weapon loadout so you don't rely on one type of ammo. That way you always have a back up weapon in a pinch.
• Always be moving, as a moving target is harder to hit.  
• Don't back up into a corner, as enemies can easily swarm you.
• Don't rely on just your firearms; explosives are also extremely effective when used correctly.
• The Pzfaust AP only damages one enemy, but can kill even giant zombies in one hit, and greatly damage stronger enemies.
• Prefer rapid-fire guns for hordes, and heavy-hitting guns for stronger individual enemies. Firing a whole clip of machinegun ammo at one giant and then getting overrun by zombies since you have only heavy rifle ammo left is a bad way to end a run.
• The AGL-1 is less intuitive than the other weapons, but the sticky grenades can be useful. Against hordes of low level enemies, watching 3-4 of them dance around while stuck together until they gib is quite entertaining. Against a higher level enemy, the sticky grenade will cause it to veer away for a moment, giving you more time to line up a shot while it is confused. [not sure if this works on bosses or not, but it does work on the big monsters and squidwards]
• Bullets hurt a lot. When you start encountering enemies with guns (e.g. guards in levels 3 and 4), immediately open fire and retreat to cover. Don't stand and take their fire - you aren't a tank, and even pistol fire can kill you quickly.  If you are unarmored, a 9mm pistol can drop you in 2-3 shots.
• Periodically check ammo for all of your weapons, and reload any that aren't full. Whilst you're there, reorganise your inventory to put weapons that are completely out of ammo out of reach. It sucks reaching for an empty gun in the middle of a firefight.
• Luring monsters into the void can be a good ammo saver. Combining this tactic with judicious use of explosives can be a potent way of handling a large horde in earlier levels. It may take several passes to get right, but certain types of enemy have difficulty turning and are easy to lure into the void. You can tell which can be void-killed easily when you are in normal combat - if they pass you when you dodge and take a significant loop to come back at you, they will do the same near the void. However, this tactic can lead to instant death; the red war walkers have a dash attack that knocks you back, which means YOU die in the void instead.
• Advance slowly in new areas. Keeping your weapon aimed slows your movement speed (reducing your change to accidentally trigger ambush pipes or running into large groups of enemies), and you can pre-aim at suspect corners or nooks. Also, your em-detector detects enemies at a certain radius around your mouse cursor (not you), making it easier to detect distant enemies while you are aiming.
• Spread out how you consume ammo.  This maximizes the odds of you having the preferred type of ammo for a particular enemy, and you will be better suited for more situations.
• Your character stabs with his right hand, meaning he has better melee reach when enemies are on his right. Circle mutants since their speed is constant and predictable.  When trying to stab zombies, try to "joust with them," as in running up and down vertically, making an attempt at a stab on each pass, to compensate for their fast-slow-fast movement. As you are retreating from them, moving diagonally will slow your movement speed slightly and let them catch up at a slow enough pace for you to get the knife in just right.
• Opposite to melee combat, your character holds his gun in the left hand, so while aiming with ranged weapons, the actual bullet path will be a line shifted slightly left from the aim line.
• A good way to deal with mobs of melee enemies is to lure them into a thin hallway and fight them there; that way they can't dodge your shots or go around you. The grenade launcher also works a lot better in small places and will actually make hit enemies block the hall.