Red Algorithm – Guide for Habit Mechanic and How it Works

What is a Weapon Habit?

Habit is Red Algorithm is a pretty simple mechanic that gives you benefits if you stick to a particular weapon (or weapon cla*s) longer.

It’s this purple (or pink?) line (bar?) right under the weapon image:

It can have a value from 0 to 10. It’s 2.5 (25%) on the picture above.

You gain +1 habit every time you gain a new hero level.

1 level of habit improves a number of stats by 2.5% (up to +25% for habit 10):

• Damage
• Range
• Accuracy (dispersion)
• Reload speed

You can think of habit as it is a kind of your weapon level or weapon use experience.

So, it’s a pretty good thing to run around with a high habit, but it’s not that easy.

Every time you switch your weapon(pick a new weapon)you lose it all. In some cases, however, you lose only half of it, but we’ll talk about it a little bit later.

Why This Mechanic Was Introduced?

If you read the previous guide on Steam about weapon penalty:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2531679132
You may quickly understand that basically habit is the exact opposite thing of the weapon penalty. Weapon penalty reduces your stats when you use a weapon that you shouldn’t yet use, while habit increasing the same stats each level you manage to survive with this weapon.

The only difference in effects between habit and weapon penalty is that habit doesn’t improve your experience gain speed. Otherwise, habit serves a function of compensation for the weapon penalty, with level 10 being almost 100% all penalties covered and stats restored to net 0.

There are 3 fundamental reasons why habit mechanic was implemented.

The 1st reason to add habit to the game was to give people who want to use a high-level weapon early a way to do so by covering the negative effects of the penalty.

The 2nd reason is quite obvious, it’s just more realistic that as you use a weapon, you get better at it, you know pretty well how to handle it and how it works.

There was a 3rd reason why I wanted to add habit to the game, I wanted to create a path for the player to use certain obscure, weird, old and weird weapons and have more fun with them. A good example is British machine gun, which is pretty horrible on its own, but there is an achievement a*sociated with it, so I wanted to give weapons like that a boost. Mafioso, Veteran, and all such weapons with a good habit are more useful.

To be frank, I stole this idea of habit from an old game called “Silent Storm” (a great game btw!). It was not implemented there in the exact same way as it’s done in Red Algorithm, but the idea that you get better with the particular weapon as you use it more was there.

How to Gain Habit Faster?

The only way to gain habit faster in the game is to get Specialist perk, the one Lucy starts with. It will speed up the habit gain speed by a factor of 2, so at each level you will get +2 (20%) habit instead of +1 without this perk.

Since there are almost 100 perks in the game, the chances of getting this one are pretty low (and honestly, it’s not the most powerful perk out there…), it’s better not to gain habit faster, but to learn how to switch your weapons in a smart way to keep most of the habit.

Weapon Switch Types: Clear and Dirty

As was mentioned earlier, when you switch your weapon you lose either 100% (all) or 50% of your accumulated habit depending on the weapon switch type.

There are 2 weapon switch types:

• Clean (you keep 50% of the habit) – is when you switch to a weapon from the same cla*s (a pistol to a pistol, a rifle to a rifle, etc.)
• Dirty (you keep 0% of the habit) – is when you switch to a weapon from a different cla*s (a pistol to an a*sault rifle, a rifle to a machine gun, etc.)

Thus, if you want to keep half of your habit, you have to get the next weapon from the same cla*s as your current weapon.

Mixed Cla*s Weapons

The switching part may get much more complicated because there are many weapons that belong to more than one cla*s. For example, Kepler is a plasma (primary cla*s) weapon and a shotgun (secondary cla*s) as well. If you have 6 habit with Kepler right now, you are free to switch to any plasma weapon or to any shotgun as well to keep half of the habit (you will be left with habit 3, 30%). A weapon switch like that would a clean one.

That is why certain weapons offer you more flexibility to jump between cla*ses. Another example is Siberia, level 6 SMG and Pistol. If you gained 10 levels with it and have 10 habit, you are free to pick .50 (level 11 pistol, Desert Eagle) or Horangi (level 10 SMG). In both cases, it will be a clean switch and you going to keep 50% of the habit.

Not only switching from mixed cla*s weapons is good, but switching to them works as well. For example, you played with various a*sault rifles until level 18 and have 10 habit right now. You see Sheol in the weapon box, a mixed cla*s weapon (SMG + AR) level 20. You can take it with your a*sault rifle and keep 50% of the habit, but you also could have picked it in the a scenario when you had an SMG instead of an AR.

Most mixed cla*s weapons are either plasma (plasma rifle, plasma pistol, etc.), or gauss, but not all of them, so you will often have this nice switch option.

Lastly, there are a few uncla*sified weapons in this game (Tesla, Fuego, Diablo, etc.) which don’t belong to any cla*s at all (technically speaking, they belong to cla*s 0). The way switching works with them is even more complicated and a little bit broken at the moment. It’s intended that those weapons will be treated as if they kind of belong to all cla*ses, thus any switch to and from them will be a clean one, but at the moment in the game such a switch might end up being a dirty one. It should be fixed in one of the next game updates.

Now you hopefully learned everything there is about weapon habit in Red Algorithm and ready to use this knowledge in the game. Good luck!

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