DC Mutagens

[nerdz]

DC SPOILERS AHEAD

I might have missed something, but I've gotten all mutagens except Exitus-2 and I'm completely at a loss about what to do with them. I've read the text logs that explain what they are and their addictive/subtractive properties, and that terminal that says exitus mutagens are lethal to mutants, but when using the combinator I have no idea what I should be doing here. I imagine I need to recreate Exitus-1/2 from the other mutagens, am I right? But I can't use exitus itself, and haven't found any clear clues of what I should be doing there.

Is there another place I should look that has the recipes(even though the guy said he deleted all instances of the sequence)? Do I actually need Exitus-2 to progress here?

[saporotis]

i have the same problem!, the thing is i try to make a melee character, but then i realized the only melee weapon are hammer and dagger, hammer need too much strenght so i went dagger, but,dagger sucks in this game, so i changed to unarmed, but it was too late because i had too many feats in throwing and dagger, both a bit useless for the end game, i even have dodge, i read somewhere that dodge and evade are capped at 50% so my build is a bit useless right now and i am capped in lvl 25, so in resumen my build is the worst, i am short in supplies in the deep caverns facing this boss thing i cant even get close to,i was hoping to solve this puzzle but my english, as you can read, is not so good, i am at the mercy of this puzzle i cant even understand, please help!

[Fenix]

Lol - knifes sucks?
Throwing build is one of the most powerful builds in this game.
With in you can have 110 AP in one turn.

[nerdz]

Has anyone even figured this puzzle out yet? It really feels pretty badly designed as far as puzzles go. Too few information, the dialog interface is too cumbersome to test variations, you don't even know how many mutagens you have to add, you don't know what is the sequence you should be replicating. And supposedly it does not even kill tchort outright, only makes it easier.

Please, if you guys ever do a sequel, please do not do anything like the Deep Caverns ever again. Maybe as an optional endgame dungeon, but it really goes against everything that makes this game great. Whenever I'm doing my second playthrough I'll consider the game as "done" as soon as I finish the tchort institute quests. It's plainly unfun, even with the good game mechanics.

[Coaxl]

I'd love to know something about this too. I found a big supply of reagents including Exitus-1, which the combinator doesn't accept. As for the rest, I understand the principle of how combining reagents would lead to different sequences, I just don't know the end result. If there were a hidden scrap of paper somewhere that described the combination of Exitus-1 and/or Exitus-2, the puzzle would be quite logical indeed - as it is, though, since I don't know what the end result must be, technically all I could do is to try out different combinations and see if it affects Tchort in any way (a big no-no). Does anyone know if there is, perhaps, a location where the sequence of the Exitus compounds can be discovered?

[Coaxl]

Well then, I don't see how you are supposed to solve the puzzle. It's actually a pretty good question, has anyone ever solved it? If so, could they comment on what you have to do?

[nerdz]

Really, for how hard this puzzle is, it should definitely be a non combat solution to killing tchort outright. All other oldschool RPGs had non combat solutions so I was really expecting the puzzle to do just that. I'm pretty sure it's a simple adjustment and it would make the endgame less frustrating than it already is, since not all builds are viable to fighting it (especially for builds that avoid combat as much as possible.)

And it's not frustrating because of the difficulty, it's the sudden change of tone, lack of direction and ridiculous backtracking. This might be the "system shock" influences that's mentioned on the game description, but it sincerely doesn't work. It's a testament for how good the game is pre deep caverns that I kept going this far even though I simply wanted to give up before I soured on the whole game. What makes it even worse is that you get zero warning that you're about to be thrown into a point of no return. I don't even know how worse it would get if I didn't have 200+stealth. The power plant dungeon was really amazing, but having to come back to the power plant to reassign power was simply bad. Even more since you didn't know the order of things, so you would end up going back there multiple times needlessly.

[minsc]

Has anyone found a list of mutagen combos for tchort?

[Waladil]

I'm at the same point. The Tchort battle is looking really tough, I've done a few exploratory attempts on him, it seems like I might be able to do it but it's gonna be a slog. (I did manage to bumrush the big guy and use Thermionic Destabilization followed by Proxy'd Implosion and Punch on a tentacle to put even mighty Tchort down to like 1/2 health, but I couldn't sustainably deal 200 damage/turn to keep that run going.) I'd like to try to figure out how to run the mutagens, but I'm at a loss.

My mutagens:
Echo 1-4, Helicon 1-3, Io 1-3, Ovid 1-3, Solis 1-2, and Exitus-1. I've quite thoroughly searched the DC, so I don't think I missed any mutagens, unless they're behind very difficult hacking or lockpicking challenges (>120 lock, >130 hack).

I haven't read a good description of the various mutagens, all I recall is a conversation in the housing area where mutagen compounds only include positive atoms, and one positive at most, and reagents have negative atoms that cancel out positive atoms. I guess I could start recording each mutagen's actions and interactions, but that seems like it's gonna be a really long project.

[Coaxl]

Okay, basically, there is one particular mutagen compound that has a deadly effect on Tchort. In fact, a scientist has already discovered this long ago and has taken steps to ensure this mutagen compound cannot be used. Your job is to find another way to recreate this compound.

There is a mutagen scanner in the same building where you crafted the biocide grenades. Scan the mutagen reagents there, one by one, and write down their combinations. You will see entries like "G7" and "-CD". The former are the positive atoms, the latter are the negatives.

Hint 1:

The compounds that the scientist has tried to forbid are Exitus-1 and Exitus-2. You can find Exitus-1, but it is forbidden to place it into the combinator. So how else are you going to create it?

Hint 2:

By combining other reagents, of course! Ensure that you get the same sequence as in Exitus-1 by adding reagents into the combinator one after the other, using the negative atoms to remove excess positive atoms. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if you have to get the exact order right, or you've just got to have the same atoms as in Exitus-1. I'm also not sure how to tell whether your compound is working in the final battle or not. So yeah, it's still a bit of a mess.

[chimaera]

This is a complete guess, as I am currently slogging through DC and probably won't bother with the mutagen puzzle at all; there is enough traveling around for various quest items as it is, but: it could be that you need to recreate the sequence you get from scanning Exitus-1 by combining the other mutagens. Obviously two letters will cancel each other out, if one is predated by a minus, e.g. QO and -QO.

EDIT: oops! coaxl was faster
(still not going to bother, too much traveling in circles)

[Waladil]

Ahh, thanks. I didn't figure out how to use that scanner at first. It's never obvious when you have to put items into other containers to make them interact with the world.