How to Increase Radiation Resistance in Pacific Drive

Ironwood Studios’ Pacific Drive is proving to be one of the most atmospheric and exhilarating survival games released so far this year. One important method of protection is Radiation Resistance, which you’ll need to even be able to enter certain areas. If you’re wondering how to use it, here’s our handy guide for how to increase Radiation Resistance in Pacific Drive.

Since the region is completely unstable and rife with environmental hazards, you have to know how to protect yourself and your closest companion – the car.

How Does Radiation Work in Pacific Drive?

It’s pretty much a universal understanding that radiation is something you want to avoid at all costs. It’s relentlessly harmful to living things and machinery alike, so this is a particularly dangerous hazard to deal with in Pacific Drive. Protecting both yourself and your car from it is incredibly important.

As you unlock more Junctions on the game’s map via the Route Planner, you’ll notice that the deeper into the Exclusion Zone you go, the presence of hazardous Junction Conditions will increase. This is especially the case with radiation, which you’ll find plaguing many locations inside those Junctions. Sometimes it’s in open areas, other times it surrounds buildings that you need to explore.

On top of making travel treacherous, exposure to radiation will not only increase the gauge below your health bar, but it’ll eat away at your health as well. The longer you linger in an irradiated area, or when you’re hauling ARC Anchors back to your car’s ARC device, the more your HP will decrease, so soldiering through it all without sufficient protection isn’t an option. Burning through First Aid kits isn’t necessarily worth it either.

Exposing your car to high levels of radiation will cause gradual damage to it as well, so it needs protection just as much as you do. If you don’t, you may very well find yourself stranded and at serious risk of death, which in turn will cause you to lose everything you have.

How to Increase Radiation Resistance in Pacific Drive

Since you will eventually need to venture into irradiated zones to find important items and other needs, crafting radiation protection for yourself and your car is absolutely important. It’s the first layer of true protection that we recommend before anything else, honestly.

In order to craft protective items for yourself and your car, you need to have two machines unlocked in Oppy’s Garage – the Outfitting Station and the Fabricator, respectively. Note that you will need to unlock the Fabricator first, in order to then unlock the Outfitting Station.

Radiation Resistance Upgrades For the Car

First, go to the Fabricator, and look under the ‘Car Body’ tab, where you’ll see all available upgrades for your car. If you’ve unlocked the Steel Door/Panel/Bumper options, you should also see the three lead-based upgrades that all provide radiation resistance. We’ve listed them below, along with their prerequisites and the buffs they provide.

Radiation Resistance Upgrades For Your Character

To craft gear with radiation resistance for yourself, you’ll need access to the Outfitting Station (unlockable after the Fabricator). Like the car, there are three options for equipping yourself against the irradiated elements. They’re listed below, again with their given buffs and the materials needed to craft them.

Once you have at least some of these upgrades crafted and equipped, you should be well-suited for the radioactive elements of the Olympic Exclusion Zone.

That concludes our guide for how to increase radiation resistance in Pacific Drive. We hope you found this helpful, and let us know how you’ve been enjoying the game so far, and how you feel the hazard elements impact the gameplay.

Be sure to check out all of our other guides for Pacific Drive, such as how the Friendly Dumpster works.