Eridian Weapons



 are the alien guns found throughout Pandora, and were developed by the Eridian race. There are Eridian equivalents to all conventional types of guns, but don't use conventional ammo and have their own proficiency class.

Eridian weapons look more organic and tend to deal damage. They are all made of the same heavy material, which will reduce a user's running and walking speed when wielded.

They can be found either in high-level oval chests or looted off of high level Crimson Lance. These guns are typically hard to find, though their rarity color is only. This suggests that they are quite common, but with the vast amount of other green-colored guns, Eridian weapons are actually quite rare.

Archetypes
There are Eridian weapons of seemingly every conventional class of weapon, though they have their own weapon proficiency. Most of them deal damage, though the manner in which they do so is unique to each archetype. For example, the Thunder Storm shoots a spread of bouncing lightning balls and sounds like thunder when fired.

Weapons of the same archetype will always have the same function, description, and general organic appearance, but many other things can be different, even among guns with the exact same name. The most commonly found archetypes include the Eridian equivalents to the sniper rifle, shotgun, and rocket launcher.

Gun variations


Eridian weapons are composed of 7 different parts, each of which affects the gun's unlisted stats, like the effective magazine size and the recharge rate. Except for the barrel, the same base sets of parts are used across all archetypes. However, certain archetypes don't have stocks, and haven't yet been encountered with all possible types of each part.
 * Barrel: Each archetype uses its own unique barrel. Blasters all use the same looking barrel, suggesting they're  all variations of a single Blaster archetype.
 * Stock: Determines half of the model number. Doesn't appear for the Thunder Storm, which has a body type of none.  Also affects the reload speed stat, whatever that means for Eridian guns.
 * Body: Determines damage. Guns with body type 1 deal 92.5% the damage of guns with the other body types.
 * Magazine: Determines the number of shots a gun can fire and how fast it recharges. Also used to determine the model number.
 * Sight: Determines whether the gun can zoom and how well. Sight 1 provides no zoom, sights 2 and 4 seem to have the same zoom capability, and sight 3 provides an iron sight.
 * Grip: Nothing obvious.
 * Accessory: Nothing obvious. Can also have an ID of none, observed on Eridian Lightnings.

Getting the actual values for the stats currently requires using the debugging console until more data is gathered. Available data is on various Eridian archetypes' Talk pages.

Gun names
Each gun's name is composed of two parts: the binary model number, then the archetype. One example is the 1110 Eridian Lightning in the upper-right. However, the true model number is actually 6 bits long; anything shorter than this can be padded with 0s at the beginning (so the 1110 Eridian Lightning has a true model number of 001110). The first three numbers correspond to the binary representation of the stock number, while the last three numbers correspond to the binary representation of the magazine number. This can be verified by looking at the raw data on the Talk page. Note that the Thunder Storm model numbers will always be less than 4 characters long since none of them carry stocks, which is represented by the string 000.

The number of available model numbers is only 42 (7 stock possibilities x 6 magazine possibilities). From the data gathered, none of the archetypes share model numbers, but how they are allocated is unknown.

Manufacturer Tier and Level Requirements
There are 5 known manufacturer tiers, each corresponding to a single sale value and base level requirement. Any variations on the level requirements are due to the user's Eridian weapon proficiency, which lowers them when guns are equipped. The manufacturer tier will appear briefly when the gun is picked up from the ground, or visible in the debug console.

Eridian Magazines
Eridian weapons don't use regular ammunition, and instead use an energy source that recharges (even when the gun isn't being held). Although the magazine size is marked as infinite, each shot of the gun uses a certain amount of energy. The energy source will not recharge immediately after firing, and will delay even further if it is completely depleted (the gun overheats).

Eridian weapon instances vary in the number of shots that can be fired before the energy meter is empty and how fast the meter recharges. More specifically, the magazine type directly affects the effective clip size, overheat delay, and recharge rate. The effects seem to be constant across all archetypes. Not all guns seem to appear with all magazine types.

The cooldown bonus you get for proficiency affects the regeneration rate, or how fast the gun can replenish its energy source.

The clip size and regeneration rate seem to always be negatively correlated: guns that have a lower capacity recharge faster, and vice versa. Note that it isn't a direct correlation as one might expect; for example, an Eridian lightning with a 6-shot capacity will take about 34 seconds to fully recharge, while one with a 4-shot capacity will only take about 15 seconds. In other words, a gun with double the capacity has more than double the recharge time.

When compared to conventional weapons, the relatively slow recharge rate doesn't lend itself to run-and-gun type gameplay.

Weapon Proficiency
Raising proficiency levels increases damage and accuracy, and also decreases the cooldown time and level requirement. See the weapon proficiencies page for more info.