CheeseNoodle

Continuing my recent playthrough of deliberately letting myself get distracted by every vaguely interesting piece of scenery here are 4 interesting spots around night city that never come up in scripted gigs.

Fairly easy to find, a random security gate near the Kiroshi Optics HQ leads to a surprisingly detailed little loading bay.

Beneath an unassuming overpass lies a whole little village of tyger claws. This area even includes a tyger claw dragon who's appears to be particularly tough, akin to the minibosses often found in criminal activity scanner hustles.

Just a hop, skip and jump from Dantes Den (literally) how many of us have ever looked down to realise there's a whole housing block sealed in by a wire mesh, based on a light in a bottom floor window it appears to still be inhabited to. (The media outer chest piece can be found on the balcony to the right of the image)

Just down the hill from the monestary we can find a whole abandoned housing development, as well as a gas pipeline running underneath the highway. Alas the alluring skywalk of mystery has an invisible wall that prevents the player from following it past the black electronic billboards.

So equipping a glowing clan emblem in either front/back sigil slot will cause the ephemera to be completely overridden by the sigils colour, mostly annoying but could also be interesting if its what you want.

On this playthrough I've decided to just wander around Watson a bit before the heist and keep finding streets I've never seen before, even on previous playthroughs where I walked everywhere. This particular street is practically subteranian and its a shame most of the content takes place at surface level or in the main streets when there are great environments like this hidden around the place where most players will never see them.

So for a lot of people Patch 2.13 has been a great performance boost; though I personally have a 40 series GPU and intend to keep using DLSS since it looks better (FSR 3.1 when CDPR?) FSR does actually gain me significantly more frames at the cost of some visuals.

However some of you (like me) will have initially had a significant FPS drop compared to pre-patch, along with weirdly low GPU utilization and loss of access to frame gen for 40 series cards. The fix is simple, go into windows graphics settings and enable hardware accelerated GPU scheduling. For me at least that solved all the above issues and I hope it can for some other people too.

Small update:
I was just trying some things to get latency down and while I was in Nvidia control pannel decided to give:
"Texture filtering - Anisotropic sample optimization"
A try. I can confirm that I saw almost no shimmering and it dropped my GPU/CPU useages from about 70% to 50%. I'm playing at 1080p with DLSS on balanced and settings maxed. My system is a 32GB of ddr4, an AMD 3700x cpu and an RTX4070 GPU for reference.

Thought I'd add it to this post because it seems to be a fairly substantial performance boost with no downside, at least on my setup.

Tiny update:
Changing multi-threaded optimization from 'auto' to 'on' in the nvidia control pannel or your GPUs equivelent appears to result in a small but noticable boost to performance on some setups. This is due to windows often having auto default to off, though you should do this on a cyberpunk specific profile as it can break older applications.

I'm on a new save and haven't re-unlocked everything yet but I'm really enjoying the projectile velocity buff on the plasma rifle. Its one of the most powerful/shot non-stancing weapons and has been making S ranking missions a breeze. As I'm trying to S rank each mission before moving on.

So with his new fashion (love that lopsided scarf) and more importantly his newish augments he's really become a frame that I love a lot more than I thought I would. After looking at some youtuber builds the option seemed to be distinctly nuke or ghost but honestly he works great doing both (even with some mods missing)

Overall he ended up being a frame I can play however I want.

• Tanky enough to just melee or shoot when I want too.
• Nukey enough to handle base steel path even without subsuming roar
• Able to transition to shadow form pretty much whenever I want since the nuke instantly charges death well.
• Able to nuke well in shadow form too.

Its also just awesome to be able to have swarms of killer ghosts to summon on a whim in both normal and shadow form.

I'm sure we've all seen the old 5D dungeon post on reddit, this isn't quite that and its use of 4D space is rather simplistic being a basic translation through 3 slices of an un-rotated 4D cube, however its already set up and ready to go.

I hope some DMs out there get some use out of it wether that be for a confusingly long dungeon crawl or just a one session gimmick.

For more context, I'm thinking of playing a centaur barbarian which means with the practiced brawn ancestry feat I can get +1 to athletic checks to shove and any succesful shove is a critical success.

Despite the potential for cool Trip just seems better though? it targets a save which most monsters are worse at than fortitude, also steals a movement action and puts the enemy off-guard until their turn. Is there something I'm missing or is trip just a better option every time that doesn't involve a convenient cliff or river of lava?

It seems much more grippy than before, even in singleplayer a few times I've managed to zipline away only to somehow be pulled back inside the crystal after its already closed.

I'm sure we all remember when Topaz shards were utterly overpowered only to be nerfed so hard as to be all but abandoned outside secondary crit chance. Since then DE have said they follow the same rules Calibans lethal progeny ability, this howerver is incorrect and Topaz shards appear to be even more limited. They in fact seem to obey the following 2 rules.

• Overshields cannot be generated.
• Shields cannot be generated during ANY kind of recharge delay.

The second point is important because any recharge delay includes the brief one every time you'r hit, even if you still have shields and haven't shield gated. The result is that Topaz shards cannot generate any shields while under fire.

This in my opinion is likely an oversight as it renders them utterly useless since their only potential utility is when you're not in combat yet still able to kill enemies with a blast, a situation not only incredibly rare but also one where shields regenerate on their own anyway.