Vault

Vault mission preview

This facility warehouses credit hashes. We could siphon off a portion without triggering a hash recall.
—Central

Vaults are a type of mission which can occur in both Campaign modes and Endless modes. The primary objective of a Vault mission is to loot the Deposit Boxes for credits, and loot the Secure Cases for Research Experiments.

The Vault room is protected either by an Emitter connected to a Power Supply also in the Vault room, or a Captain and two Sound Bugs. Some of the loot in a Vault is locked behind a Vault Door, requiring a Vault Access Card to access, but it is not necessary to have a Vault Access Card to get the rest of the loot.

There are three prefab Vault layouts:

The Vault mission objective is optional; if you find the exit room and try to leave before looting the vault, you will be warned by a dialog box, but this only asks you to confirm that you want to leave.

A Vault Terminal.

There's the vault terminal. You'll need to hack that to release the secondary locks.
—Central

The Vault Terminal is a mainframe device found in the Vault room. If hacked and accessed by an agent on an adjacent tile, it unlocks the Deposit Boxes, allowing them to be looted. However, hacking the Vault Terminal also triggers the corporation's security response.

The Vault Terminal provides soft cover, allowing agents to hide on adjacent tiles. The Vault Terminal cannot be accessed while it is rebooting, or by an agency-controlled drone.

A chest of Deposit Boxes.

Deposit Boxes are found in Vaults, and can be looted for credits after first being unlocked using the Vault Terminal. Each chest of Deposit Boxes contains 200–275 credits; the amount is random.

Deposit Boxes provide soft cover, allowing agents to hide on adjacent tiles. Deposit Boxes are not mainframe devices, as they do not have firewalls that can be hacked, but they can be rebooted by EMP Packs. Unlike Corporate Safes and other lootable devices, Deposit Boxes cannot be looted while they are rebooting, unless they have already been unlocked using the Vault Terminal.

Vault rooms can contain some decor objects which are visually similar to chests of Deposit Boxes; they are purely decorative and should not be confused for Deposit Boxes.

Research Experiment icon

An ongoing science project. The black market will pay well for its secrets. Bring it with you when you exit the level.

Research Experiments are items which can be looted from Secure Cases in the Vault room. There is a reward of 500 credits for each Research Experiment carried out of the mission; to receive the reward, it must be carried by an agent, not left on the floor in the exit teleporter. Research Experiments have no other use, and cannot be sold at a Nanofabricator during a mission.

Each Secure Case in a Vault contains one Research Experiment. When one of the Secure Cases is hacked, the corporation's security response is triggered.

You've got the goods, now don't dally. They're sending someone to investigate the security breach.
—Central

In response to the agency hacking either the Vault Terminal or a Secure Case, the corporation usually brings in reinforcements — an Enforcer spawns at a random guard entrance, and is sent towards the hacked device. The security response happens at most once in the mission; once it has been triggered, hacking more devices does not bring more Enforcers.

The response is not always triggered by hacking one of these devices. Specifically, the Enforcer spawns when you hack the Vault Terminal or a Secure Case using a breaker program which targets a specific device, breaks its firewalls immediately, and breaks the exact number of firewalls the device has when the program is used. This means the Enforcer does not spawn if you:

• Use an EMP Pack, Dr. Xu's Subdermal Tools, or the program Fool to disable the Secure Cases.
• Hack using Buster Chips or the Prototype Chip.
• Hack using a program which breaks more firewalls than the devices have when the program is used.
• Hack using Data Blast, which does not target one specific device, even if only one device is in its area of effect.
• Hack using Parasite or Parasite 2.0, which do not immediately break firewalls.

The security response is never triggered by hacking the Power Supply or Sound Bugs protecting the Vault room.