The Jetpack costs 700 credits, roughly the price of 1.75 Zap Guns or about twenty-three shovels.
It is also the item that ends runs in the most avoidable way: someone flies up, and comes down badly.
What it does
The Jetpack lets you fly. That is the whole function, and it is genuinely useful for two things:
Reaching scrap on ledges. Some layouts put valuable items somewhere you cannot walk to. A Jetpack turns those into normal pickups.
Crossing gaps. Drops and broken routes stop being obstacles.
Both are conveniences rather than survival tools.
Why it kills people
Falling is fatal in this game, and the Jetpack makes height trivially available.
The failure is almost always the same shape. You go up to grab something, the fuel runs low or the angle is wrong, and you come down somewhere you did not plan to land. The distance that looked small from above was not small.
A crew that loses one person this way has also lost the scrap that person was carrying, which is usually more than whatever was on the ledge.
Flying without dying
Three habits remove most of the risk.
Pick the landing spot before you leave the ground. Not while you are up there. If you cannot point at where you are coming down, do not go up.
Do not fly indoors. Ceilings, doorframes and corridors turn a short hop into a collision, and a collision at height is a fall.
Go up for a reason, not for the view. Every second airborne is a second not spent looting or walking back, and the scrap is the point of the run.
A note on stormy weather
The Jetpack is a bad idea in a storm for a reason worth stating: being airborne and metallic during lightning is not a plan.
If the forecast says stormy, leave it on the ship.
When it earns its price
Only when the quota is comfortably handled and the crew is farming a moon it already knows well.
At that point the remaining problem is efficiency, not survival, and a Jetpack on a known layout does improve efficiency. It is the last purchase a crew makes, not one of the first.
When to skip it
Skip it while the quota is tight. Skip it with a crew that has not flown one. Skip it if anyone in the group treats it as a toy — the person who does is the person who dies with it.
Buy it with credits that would otherwise sit unused. If buying it means not buying something the crew needs, it is the wrong time.
Related guides
- Best equipment tier list — the buying order, with the Jetpack at the end.
- Best weapons — what 30 credits buys instead.
- Weather guide — why stormy moons and flight do not mix.