Scan Chip icon

Initially a 'search and destroy' virus protection device, its software development team could not keep up in the virtual space cold war. It still makes for a useful diagnostic tool.

A Scan Chip is an item which can be used to identify the daemon installed on a mainframe device on an adjacent tile. A Scan Chip has a cooldown of 2 turns, and can only be used by an agent with at least Speed skill level 2.

Scan Chips can be bought from Nanofabricators for 100 credits.

Identifying daemons is a useful ability, since most daemons can be mitigated or made completely harmless by triggering them at the right time, and others (like Validate) should normally be avoided where possible.

However, the problems with Scan Chips are that you have to move adjacent to the device, and they take up a space in your inventory. By the time there are daemons on more devices, inventory space becomes more expensive, and its cost should be factored into the decision to buy a Scan Chip, so they are usually not as cheap as their price suggests.

Hacking the facility's Daemon Database is usually a better option; Decker's Neural Networking ability also functions similarly to a Scan Chip but has no cooldown.