Is your car behaving funny? In Pacific Drive, the only autoshop you can take it to is your own, so you’d better know how to fix it. Here’s how.
This doesn’t really come up in the tutorial, and even when your vehicle eventually develops a “quirk,” it doesn’t do a great job of explaining it (as per the game when this was written). You get an objective to use the Tinker Machine, but what you do with it is buried. And the UI is not great, but I’m not trying to get critical here. The Tinker mechanic is actually quite fun.
There are two steps to fixing a quirk. Well, one step is two steps, but bear with me.
Finding your quirk
A quirk is a weird behavior that your car will pick up. This typically happens when it’s exposed to certain types of anomalies for too long. Quirks range from barely noticeable to “Screw you, game, I can’t work with this.”
For example, your hood might pop open at what seems like random moments. That’s annoying but pretty innocuous. Other times, in the heat of the moment, you might not have time to figure out the cause and effect of a quirk. If you’re bolting towards the gateway, there’s no time to recognize that activating your headlights reverses your steering.
So, when you get back to the shop, and you know that there was some strange behavior on your last journey, you need to diagnose. In order to fix the issue, you need to know what it is. Specifically, you have to know what you’re doing and what is happening.
If you only know that your wipers come on at weird moments, then it’s time to just do a check around your car. There is a huge host of variables that cause problems. Sometimes, honking your horn will cause weird behavior. Other times, it’s descending a steep slope. If you need some ideas for what to test, you can check the tinker machine since the first option will list all the variables. Once you have some ideas, it’s time to do some testing.
Start opening all the doors in your car. Turn it off and on. Put it into drive and park. Activate a skill. Turn on the radio. Honk the horn. Or take it out onto the test track behind the garage and drive it around a bit. Keep going until you have some idea of what you’re doing and what it’s causing to happen.
Diagnosing a Quirk in Pacific Drive
Then, take your findings (stored in your brain or notebook) to the tinker machine and plug them in. The first two rows are what’s happening. In my example, I have “Car” and “Moves Backwards.” This means that the issue happens whenever I reverse. Next is what it’s causing to happen. Here, I have “Hood” and “Opens.” So, when I reverse the car, the hood opens. Once these are inputted, hit the button to submit the guess, and you’ll be told how accurate you are.
You have a certain number of guesses, and if you get part of your diagnosis wrong, it will tell you how many you got right, but it won’t tell you which were the correct portions. Keep tweaking your diagnosis until it tells you that you have the correct diagnosis.
Fixing the Quirk
Now that the correct diagnosis is accepted, we can fix the quirk. This is where the “sorta bad” UI causes complications. From the main screen on the tinker machine, you can see the “Fixes Label” in the top right. You need to hit the corresponding button.
This will take you to a menu that will tell you what quirks you’ve diagnoses, and what are still undiagnosed. Highlight one and select it. It will tell you what item you need to remove the quirk, unless you already have it in your inventory, at which point you can just fix it.
Once you have that item, you just need to select the quirk from the fixes menu, and the quirk will be removed. Note that I still have a “Diagnostic Required” option in my quirk menu. I don’t know what it’s talking about. Maybe that’s a good thing. If a quirk isn’t causing any problems, or it’s bound to an action I don’t often do, then removing it isn’t a priority. Until it’s too late.
Upgrade the Tinker Machine
If this is too much, there is a way you can get an advantage. There are two upgrades available for the Tinker Machine. Both require you to spend LIM, but if you can’t figure out what’s wrong with your car, it’s your best bet.
The first is the Investigator Module, and it will reveal what is causing problems in the diagnostic screen. It will show you, one column at a time, what functions or parts have problems. Each column you want to reveal will be progressively more expensive. However, if you use it and find that, for example, the gearshift has an issue. You can go into your car and keep toggling it to see if you can notice something happening.
The second upgrade is very similar, but it is used on the fixes screen. When you spend LIM there, it will fill in the blanks on one of the quirks displayed. This will tell you exactly which quirk the problem occurs on, so there’s an advantage there. I wouldn’t recommend spending all your LIM entirely on diagnostics since it gets expensive, but getting a single hint can help immensely in diagnosing. Once you have the two modules, you can use both in tandem to get a better picture of what’s happening.
