New to game, already lost

[Kaidalen]

I am in my first drive, collected a bunch of stuff but now I need to return to put some arc thing in the garage, Where do i find that garage again, I cant point to it on the map. Its confusing

[Macmanius]

Originally posted by Kaidalen:

I am in my first drive, collected a bunch of stuff but now I need to return to put some arc thing in the garage, Where do i find that garage again, I cant point to it on the map. Its confusing

If you're at the point I think you're at, then you should have a number of yellow circles on your in-car map. (Note that the game does not pause when you're looking at this map.) Each of these has a yellow orb in the middle that you need to physically pick up and put into the device in the right front seat. (That's the aforementioned ARC device. You need to open the right-side door to put the orbs into it.) You don't need to collect all of them, and the game will tell you when you have enough. I recommend collecting all of them anyway, as they're needed to craft base (garage) upgrades, but it's definitely optional.
Once you do that, the game should direct you, through a VO by the character "Oppy", to open a "gateway" using the map in your car. Drive through the giant pillar of light that appears, (I recommend dropping a waypoint if this is your first game,) and you'll be automatically transported back to the garage.

[Saint]

Yep, it's actually a neat design decision to not have you drive back to your garage at the end of every trip while your storage is filled to the brim, unable to pick anything up anymore. So the loop is: scavenge and explore, collect LIM once you're getting ready to leave an area (because collecting it also destabilises the area), select an exit on the map once you have enough charge (yellow metre on your passenger seat), drive to the exit as fast as possible before the region collapses, and get warped back to the garage.

[Nikas Zekeval]

Originally posted by Saint:

Yep, it's actually a neat design decision to not have you drive back to your garage at the end of every trip while your storage is filled to the brim, unable to pick anything up anymore. So the loop is: scavenge and explore, collect LIM once you're getting ready to leave an area (because collecting it also destabilises the area), select an exit on the map once you have enough charge (yellow metre on your passenger seat), drive to the exit as fast as possible before the region collapses, and get warped back to the garage.

Later in the game the zones you visit will have the access to the next one unlocked, allowing you to explore, and plunder, multiple zones before triggering the return.

[pcdeltalink]

Originally posted by Saint:

(because collecting it also destabilises the area),

As far as I can tell this is not the case. Unless you have the Barely Plugged modifier the destabilization seems to be solely determined based on time (the gauge that you can see before you even enter an area). I have had plenty of places where I've taken every core and the area still doesn't destabilize for 10 - 15 min past that and others where it is already destabilized long before that.

[Saint]

Originally posted by pcdeltalink:

As far as I can tell this is not the case. […]

It fits with the theme of the game that there's so much about the Zone we don't know for sure, I love that. I definitely had the experience where taking two stabilisers in a zone made it collapse almost immediately, could've been coincidence, of course.

[HeliosDrive]

Originally posted by pcdeltalink:

Originally posted by Saint:

(because collecting it also destabilises the area),

As far as I can tell this is not the case. Unless you have the Barely Plugged modifier the destabilization seems to be solely determined based on time (the gauge that you can see before you even enter an area). I have had plenty of places where I've taken every core and the area still doesn't destabilize for 10 - 15 min past that and others where it is already destabilized long before that.

AFAIK Barely Plugged only spawns a Squall right on top of you when unplugging an anchor.