Clearing a room is worth nothing
SteamWorld Heist has two reward systems, and both of them punish the obvious behaviour.
Experience comes only from completing objectives. Not one point comes from killing enemies. There are 47 achievements in the game and none of them ask you to clear a room.
And killing an enemy destroys your chance at its hat. You can only gain a hat an opponent is wearing if you shoot it off their head first. Merely killing them will not make their hat obtainable — and this is especially true for bosses, whose hats are the good ones.
So on a level you want the hat from, the correct order is: shoot the hat off, then kill them. Doing it the other way round loses you the loot.
Two things that follow:
- Pick the hat up and finish the level. Collecting the hat but failing the mission awards you nothing — you have to win for it to count.
- Hats you do not own yet pulse with light where they lie on the ground, the same as uncollected loot bags. That is how you spot one across the room.
If your own bot gets their hat shot off, do not panic — the hat is not removed from your equipment list, and you can go back and put it on again, or take any other hat lying on the floor.
The three bosses
| Boss | Mission | Region |
|---|---|---|
| The Scrapper boss | Chop’s Shop | The Outskirts |
| The Red Queen | An Audience With The Queen | The Core |
| The final boss | The Far Side of the Moon | — |
Worth knowing the shape of the story before you get there: the Red Queen is a decoy. She is the main villain for the first two acts, and once she is dealt with, Vectron turns up.
The Red Queen
Bring Sally to kill things and Ivanski to tank. Those two are the point of the mission.
The fight has two hard summon thresholds:
| Her health | What happens |
|---|---|
| 2/3 | She calls for help → Copperback, the ape-looking boss. He always appears from the left of the room. |
| 1/3 | She calls again → Buck, the boss sniper with the ricocheting shots. He always appears at the top right. |
The useful trick: you can finish the mission without killing Buck. He disappears the moment the Queen dies. At the 1/3 mark she is low enough that killing her first is easier than dealing with him, so do not feel obliged to clear the room.
Note that she also uses a smoke-bomb-style teleport, so she will not stay where you last saw her.
The final boss
The Far Side of the Moon is the point of no return. Before you go in on Elite, make sure you have gained maximum reputation in every earlier mission, because you cannot go back for it.
The fight is an orb-breaking puzzle:
- The boss spawns protective orbs. You need Sally and her Mad Dog ability to destroy them.
- Rounds 1 and 2 spawn 4 orbs, with some Crystal Golems.
- Round 3 spawns 8 orbs — so keep one use of Mad Dog in reserve for the last wave.
When you finish, a Black Hole appears next to the mission. Do not use it. It restarts your progression and drops you into NG+.
Ricochet is the signature, and it beats shields
The whole game is built on aiming, and the trick shots are the point. But there are two places where ricochet is not just stylish, it is mechanically required.
Forcefield emitters. The last area has crystal orbs that project force fields around any voltbots in range. Some larger voltbots carry a shield orb on their back, and it must be destroyed before the bearer or any nearby ally takes damage. Chop Sue also activates one after taking a certain amount of damage.
The way through, when you cannot get a clean line: you can knock out a forcefield emitter by ricocheting a shot off the field it generates. And a piercing shot that knocks out an emitter can still reach and damage whatever the field was protecting.
There is an achievement for it too — Bullet Bouncer, 20 kills by bouncing bullets, counting one per attack. Roughly a third of players get it.
The progression gates you will hit
Fame gates. Some portions of each of the three world maps are cordoned off behind a node that requires a number of stars in that region. On a smaller scale, some vendors will only sell you their best stock once you have enough stars. The best weapons in the game are shop-only.
Reinforcements. If too many turns pass, enemies arrive. This is why the exploration-versus-speed tension exists — you have to spend turns walking to loot, and spending too many makes the fight worse.
Failing costs you twice. Fail a mission and you lose half your money, on top of the objective XP you did not get.
What to buy
Spend on weapons first. The best weapons are only available in shops — they are expensive but not ruinous — and those shops also sell backpack slots, which are the other thing worth saving for.
Where the saves are
If you want to back up or move a run, the save files sit at:
| Platform | Path |
|---|---|
| Windows | %USERPROFILE%/My Documents/My Games/SteamWorld Heist/ |
| macOS / Linux | ~/Library/Application Support/SteamWorld Heist/ |
A practical habit for anyone going for the hardest difficulty: do a cloud save before each zone, and abuse the Quit function rather than accepting a bad result. The game also punishes aborting, so never click Abort Mission in the pause menu if you care about your records.