RetroSpace Cloning Errors: Death, Helo Domes and Your Body
Death is part of the loop in RetroSpace. The store page puts it this way: “Clone yourself, recover your lost gear, and deal with the consequences of repeated resurrection.”
Helo Dome chambers
Helo Domes are the cloning chambers spread around Aurora 5. Activating one saves your game and makes it your respawn point; an in-game line calls them “like beacons on a stormy sea”. The chamber menu also sells three treatments for credits:
- heal surface injuries,
- treat serious injuries,
- gene reconstruction, which repairs cloning errors.
The developers’ deep-dive video: “The Helo Dome chambers will clone us for free. Unfortunately, cloning is never perfect, so be prepared for various cloning errors.”
Cloning errors
Each clone can come back with a flaw. Two are named in the patch notes:
- Alcoholism: your character needs a drink regularly or starts vomiting. Demo players hated it; the June patch made it trigger much less often, and a developer promised vomiting would be switched off during cutscenes.
- Bad manners: also toned down in the June patch.
The July patch reworked the whole cloning error system. Errors can stack; the achievement Evolutionary dead-end asks for three at the same time.
Getting rid of an error
- The corpse run (free). Go back to where you died and use the gene extractor on your old body. Charl’s demo video describes the debuffs vanishing the moment he recovered his genes.
- Gene reconstruction (paid). Buy it at any Helo Dome. Charl notes you also lose some money when you die, so this gets expensive.
If you die again before reaching your body, the errors can stack, so clear the route first. Demo bugs where bodies vanished or landed out of reach were mostly fixed in the June patch.
How difficulty changes death
- Classic Horror: you keep your inventory; you only need your body to extract the genes.
- Harder difficulties: a developer confirmed you lose some items on death and have to fetch them from your body, and loot is scarcer.
- Hardest difficulty: “you’ll have a certain amount of respawn chance, and then it’s game over, you’ll need to restart the whole game from the beginning.”
Full details are in difficulty and saves. Mutamod side effects are a different system; see Mutamods.
Thanks, janitor. Logged for the next shift.