Gizmo perks: how materials, ranks and Invention level decide what you get

A gizmo is a weapon gizmo shell, armour shell or tool shell filled with up to five materials. When you make it, the game rolls a value for every perk those materials can give, turns each value into a rank, and then spends an invent budget on at most two of the ranked perks. The same five materials can therefore give different perks each time, and the chance of each result can be worked out exactly.

What each material adds

Every material lists the perks it gives in each kind of shell, with a fixed base and a random roll. Connector parts in a weapon shell give Scavenging with a base of 9 and a roll from 0 to 32, Mobile, and a little Precise. When two slots share a perk, their bases and rolls add up. The total is the perk's value for this gizmo.

A perk's rank is the highest rank whose threshold the value reaches. Scavenging needs 55 for rank 1, 115 for rank 2 and 220 for rank 3. A value under the first threshold gives no rank at all.

Why the gizmo screen can promise too much

Put two connector parts, two smooth parts and a precious component in a weapon shell. The gizmo screen offers Scavenging 1 to 3. Each roll stops one short of its top number, so the five materials reach at most 215, five short of rank 3. Counting each roll to its top gives exactly 220, which is the figure the screen seems to use. Open this gizmo in the perk calculator: Scavenging 3 never appears in its results.

The invent budget picks the perks

The game rolls an invent budget from your Invention level: five rolls, each from 0 up to half your level plus 19, and never less than your level. It sorts the ranked perks by their cost and walks down from the most expensive. A perk is taken when the remaining budget is larger than its cost, and the cost is spent. After two perks it stops. Enhanced Efficient and Enhanced Devoted take both slots, so a gizmo that rolls one keeps only that perk.

If no ranked perk fits the budget, the gizmo does not form, and you keep the shell and the materials.

A higher level is not always better

For the gizmo above, the calculator gives:

• At level 80 the gizmo fails to form 3.35% of the time. Scavenging 2 alone comes out of 51.30% of the gizmos that do form.
• At level 99 it always forms, and Scavenging 2 alone is 51.26%.
• At level 120 Scavenging 2 alone drops to 48.79%, while Scavenging 2 with Energising 1 rises to 14.83%.

A larger budget can afford a second perk more often, so a single perk on its own becomes rarer. If you want one perk by itself, a lower level can serve you better than a higher one. If you want a pair, the higher level helps.

Where the materials come from

Each material comes from taking items apart. The disassembly tool shows what an item gives at your junk reduction research and ranks the items that give a chosen material by coins per material. A gizmo goes into an item that an augmentor has made able to hold gizmos.