Shellshocked is the ultimate test of your skills and wits when it comes to Amnesia The Bunker. It can feel daunting at first glance so I am here to give you a few tips and a general strategy that can help you.
Know your basics
Eerst en vooral, you need to know the basics very well to have a chance at this difficulty. Playing a few saves on normal or custom difficulty is a good idea to get a feel for the random generation and monster behaviors. There are small nuances that are hard to pick up consciously, but you will get a feel for if you play the game naturally.
Second is the gameplan. While in other difficulties, you can generally play in a more casual way, just exploring around the bunker, picking stuff up, Shellshocked requires a solid plan to complete. This can be different depending on RNG but generally you want to gain access to the fuel storage in Maintenance -> open pillbox, get code for wrench (since you are probably already there) -> get wrench -> access the arsenal code -> get wire cutter -> get dynamite -> get the detonator.
The order in which you do any of these can be swapped around. In feite, you will probably HAVE to change your plan on the fly based on RNG. In general you will want to explore the part of the Bunker that has an active fuse box at the start for more fuses and fuel when starting out.
In case you need it, here is a full map of the Bunker.
Fuse boxes and dark areas of the bunker
The main RNG that affects your plan is which fuse box is active at the start of the game. Ideally you want Maintenance or Soldier Quarters. If you get any of those two, you can find other fuses easily and open up the map. If you get either Arsenal or Prison, your job will be a lot harder.
Both Arsenal and Prison have few places to loot and will require a ton of luck or venturing out into parts of the Bunker that aren’t lit. You can deal with the RNG you are dealt or restart until you get a good RNG.
The fuse boxes are in a pre determined location in all 4 of the levels.
- Soldier Quarters: The fuse box is down the stairs to the right in front of the Clerk’s Office.
- Prison: The fuse box is in the main hallway before Processing down the stairs.
- Onderhoud: The fuse box is in the Clerk’s Office.
- Arsenaal: The fuse box is after the long hallway to the right, next to the Clerk’s Office in the small enclave with the boxes.
Use the map included above (of lager) to help locate these fuse boxes.
If you have a fuse item, you need to open the box, place the item into the empty circular hole, and pull the lever inside the box. It should activate the fuse and enable power in that part of the Bunker.
If a part of the Bunker has no active fuse box, the game treats that part of the map as if your generator ran out of fuel there. You have a small grace period when entering, but once you enter deeper, the monster will start roaming regularly as if the generator wasn’t active. If you plan to go into one of those areas, it can be a good idea to shut off the generator to conserve fuel since it won’t help you there anyways.
If you decide to venture out into a dark area, you can use the emergency lights to your advantage. Even if there is no active fuse boxes in the area, the emergency lights will be on. These will behave the same way normal lights do. They will flicker if the monster is around. Thread carefully, try to use your ears and the flickering lights to locate the monster and avoid it at all costs. Hiding is not an option when the area is dark. The monster will destroy any and all hiding spots before leaving an area. The only way to evade it is by putting walls and other line of sight blockers between you and it. Ook, you are going to have to crouch mostly and not use the flashlight.
The smallest amount of noise can cause the monster to camp your location. Use distractions with caution. Meestal, whenever I threw something away to lure it away, it just found me instead because throwing the item made me be in an exposed location with not enough time to slowly worm my way to cover.
Oh and watch out for traps when stumbling around in the dark.
Fuel storage
In hard mode and shellshocked, a full tank of the generator is good for 10 minuten, which is a pitiful amount of time but can be manageable if you gain access to the fuel storage before you run out of fuel everywhere else. This is why it can be a good idea to check if you can get an easy access to the fuel storage early on, because your whole run can depend on it (especially since you use fuel to save).
To gain access to the Fuel Storage you need to find the dogtag of Sdt. Millard. Unfortunately for you, his location is entirely random. The better outcome is that it’s somewhere in Maintenance, but worse RNG happened to me. There were times when he was literally laying next to the Fuel Storage, one time his dogtag was on the table of the Chapel, other times it was one of the many random corpses.
The two main things you want to look out for, is whether you can even get to the Fuel Storage in the first place and whether you have Sdt. Millard’s code or not.
If you manage to get the code, taking damage from the rats can be a manageable risk to take for infinite fuel. On the way back you can burn the corpses with the help of a flare (which you will most likely find somewhere and you literally have no other use for it) and bottles filled with fuel giving you safe passage backwards.
alternatief, you can also bait out the monster, which will make the rats run away, but it’s a lot riskier since the monster is a lot more unpredictable in Shellshocked.
If there are no rats on the way to the Fuel Storage, it can be a good idea to, even if you don’t have the code, look around for supplies and take the free pillbox key. Be mindful that the monster is hard coded to come out and search the Chapel the first time you enter it on your save (this can be bypassed if the generator is not online). Be prepared to repeal it (with fire or gas, since both bullets and grenades will only stun him) or hide in the only viable hiding place, the confession booth. The monster is hard coded to check pretty much everywhere and even smash a few benches, so hiding behind the big table at the back is not viable, Helaas.
Wat je ook doet, be mindful that you can’t unlock the alternate, shorter path to the Fuel storage (down the stairs) without a revolver or a brick, so you will have to go around.
Saving
The main reason I recommend starting with opening up the Fuel Storage is because saving costs one fuel. My advice is to not bother saving before gaining access to it because you already have scarce resources and very limited time with the generator. Saving can easily use fuel that could be 3-6 minutes of generator time and it’s easy to save in a situation where you soft lock yourself because of lack of fuel.
It is entirely possible to evade the monster once the generator is out, heck I even brought back one save from a soft lock by using save scumming to find Sdt. Millard’s dogtag and opening the Fuel Storage, but it can be more time consuming than restarting and does not guarantee success.
Soldier quarters
The main thing you gain here is the arsenal code. Try not to linger too much in the side rooms, looking for supplies. It can take more time than the reward you gain (unless it’s your only level with an active fuse box). Als dat mogelijk is, try to go around and open the doors if they aren’t trapped, otherwise ignore them. You also don’t need to open the door to the key room because the key is never there. It’s always under the pillow of one of the soldiers.
Over het algemeen, if your first fuse box is in here, you might want to look around for fuses and take whatever supplies you can with you, otherwise you will want to beeline towards the back of the Quarters and restore power to the Communications. Try to look for a brick to open the room to it.
Do be mindful that, in order to get the Arsenal code from Communications, you need an active fuse box in the area and you need to have all the power nodes activated because they are Daisy Chained. While you can manage without an active fuse box in the other areas, you are literally required to have one here.
Bricks
These things can be the most useful tools in your entire run. They can open doors, break locks and probably cure cancer. Be mindful that if you break a lock with it, the brick breaks with it, so if you have your eyes on a locked door, open that first, then go for the lock. Also be aware that once you break something, the monster is guaranteed to come out, so always have a plan to hide or defend yourself from it.
While carrying a brick, you are lot slower than normal but you can carry bricks trough loading zones. Unfortunately in shellshocked, it can be a huge waste of time, so only carry bricks a long distance if you really have no other choice.
Arsenal and Prison
I have good news and bad news. You can easily tell if your first fuse box is active in either of these two places (open the lockdown and look at the entrances, the one that’s not in pitch black is the one with the active fuse box, if you don’t see either of the 3 from where you lift the lockdown, then the active fuse box is in Maintenance). The bad news is that if they are in Prison or Arsenal, (and there is a 50% chance to be in either of these places) you are in trouble. Arsenal’s large storage is locked away behind the Arsenal code and Prison is small compared to the other areas and most of its loot is locked behind locked doors.
If you manage to get the arsenal code, you can speedrun getting the dynamite.
Once you open the door with the code, you can immediately obtain the dynamite by getting very close to the bars to your left and looking at the dynamite. You can actually pick it up, and skip going trough the entire storage part.
The one saving grace of the Arsenal is that the monster can not follow your trough the Tunnel entrance, so feel free to use it as a hidey hole (bijvoorbeeld, if you want to open the room with the map with a grenade, the room is called the clerk’s office by the way).
The Prison tough, is a tough nut to crack. It’s a very small area, with a few rooms that are always locked. The only door that is always open here is the Interrogation room and there is a high chance that it’s trapped. The way to the storage always has to be broken to gain access and even then it’s usually very subpar when it comes to supplies. One room has to be cut open with the wire cutters, and one door is usually trapped. So you have effectively 2 doors that you can open without any hassle. Check the boxes in end of the corner tough, usually there are grenades.
The cells contain some amount of loot but on higher difficulties I have never seen any of them open by default. I have seen only 1 being open on normal difficulty. I usually don’t bother with them but you might be lucky and get a pog fuel from one of the cells or something.
If you have the wrench, you can get the wire cutter. On shellshocked I would advise against saving the prisoner. He is very loud and always attracts the monster even if his cell isn’t open. You can’t get the monster to retreat with bullets on this difficulty so unless you have a gas mask, it’s more hassle to get it to retreat. The monster is also hard coded to come out and kill the prisoner when his cell is opened, unless the monster is in his retreat cooldown.
Loot and the shuffled lockers
Gonna include the map here as well because it’s important. In normal progression, every single locker you need a code for can be found in the Mission Storage not far from the Generator Room in the Central Bunker. In randomized lockers mode, there are a lot of lockers that are empty in mission storage and are scattered around the rest of the levels. As far as I can tell these are predetermined and not completely random.
Alongside Mission Storage lockers are in:
- Soldier Quarters: Mess Hall (usually Gas Mask)
- Arsenaal: Storage Area B at the entrance to Supply Closet (usually generic loot, het niet waard)
- Onderhoud: Fuel Storage (another reason to go for that early)
- Prison: Processing (usually Shotgun)
When I say usually, I mean that out of the 2 saves I played with randomized lockers, the given items were always in a locker at the given location. I always had a Shotgun before a Revolver simply because I found the code for that locker and opened Processing. I also struggle to find the code for the Lighter in my saves, despite the Lighter usually being in Mission Storage.
I don’t recommend going for an item specifically because it most likely involves having to get rid of rats one way or another and there are only so many meat items in the game, so you will probably have to burn a lot of corpses to obtain locker codes. I recommend never burning corpses if possible. Leave that to lower difficulties. You unfortunately have to make do with what the game throws at you.
Dealing with rats
Unfortunately your main way of dealing with rats is going to be meat. Fuel is very limited, even if you have enough to fill the generator and spare, it’s better used as a quick way to refuel the generator later since it eats trough fuel on this difficulty. The only time I advise burning corpses is if there is absolutely no way to get around rats and you will need to use that route multiple times on your save (like the way to the fuel storage in Maintenance, hieronder afgebeeld).
If you manage to get the lighter, then you can unlock the best item in the entire game, the torch. Not only can it deal with rats easily, but it’s also a completely silent light source and it can light fires from a safe distance. You also don’t need to keep it in your hands at all times once lit. You can put it back into your pockets and it will not lose from its duration.
Stalker
In shellshocked, the monster, called The Stalker, is not only set to its highest difficulty, meaning that it has low noise tolerance (a single rat hissing can trigger it to come out), but also bullets don’t make it retreat, only stagger it and random behavior is on as well. This turns your weapons into utility tools more than defensive ones (shotgun -> door opening and crate destruction, revolver -> breaking locks, shooting explosive or gas barrels and rats). The monster is not immune to bullets mind you. 3 revolver or 2 shotgun shots will stun it for a short time, giving you time to run away in desperate situations.
I recommend reading up on the guide below. It contains the basic workings of the monster, what counts as low noise and high noise and other information.
The main thing I will focus on is the unpredictability. This option makes the monster’s behavior more random (shocker I know) so it’s hard to pinpoint its exact inner workings without actively testing it, but my observations are the following:
- The monster has a habit of faking its return to the tunnels to lure you out. Sometimes it will return to a tunnel (doing its signature noise with it) and then immediately come back out to surprise you. Try to make sure that the monster is really gone before running again.
- Most of the time the monster will linger in the tunnel it moves into after finishing his patrol, so try not to make much noise around that tunnel entrance.
- The monster seems to hang around for a random ammount of time. After coming out to patrol, it will sometimes return quickly to the tunnels, other times it will take ages for it to return. Waiting it out can be a gamble sometimes because of the heavily nerfed generator time.
- The monster will also look around in common hiding spots, breaking tables you can hide under (and sometimes scaring itself by making barrels explode). Only hide around the monster if there is no other option because you risk being found randomly by it otherwise.
Jachtschutter
I wanted to mention the shotgunner for a short section. The shotgunner is the guy singing in the roman tunnels with the shotgun (duh). In shellshocked, his damage is set to very high, meaning he will one shot you, so you need to be very careful when dealing with him. dankbaar, not only is he blind, but incredibly stupid. In two of my saves he randomly shot an explosive barrel and killed himself while I was lurking around. You can also easily lure him into convenient spots by throwing stuff around for an easy kill. You will need to shoot him twice with your revolver to kill him (even if it’s a headshot). alternatief, the room to the detonator is sometimes open, so you can try to sneak to it and open it without killing him. Because of the reshuffled/randomised lockers, you will most likely already have access to the shotgun so you can’t pick it up again anyways.
Make sure to get the bunny plush if you are there, because it’s the single best way to make the monster retreat.
Proloog
That’s about it. I hope any of these tips helped you overcome Shellshocked. Unfortunately I can’t provide exact steps to do in order to beat it because of the random nature of the game. Also a large part of this difficulty is based around making you brave the darkness and risk bumping into the monster, so you must be brave.
Also I haven’t seen everything in the game yet, as I have only ~30 hours in the game, so I will update the guide as I keep playing the game.
