What do the sensors do?

Sensors go on sensor or spare mounts. Each part's hover panel and the Factory's reach total give the details.

Finding things

• SCN-1 ping scanner. It looks along a 30° arc at a bearing you set, and reports a bearing for each thing in the arc, up to 4, out to 30 m. It gives no distances, and it can't tell a bot from an obstacle or a friend from a foe. To look all the way round, sweep it over several ticks. It can also profile a bot it pings (read its shape), and it warns you when a heat-seeking missile is locked on your bot.
• RNG-1 rangefinder. It measures the distance along one bearing to the first wall, block or bot, out to 30 m. Point it at a scanner ping to tell a nearby bot from a wall behind it.

Knowing where you are

• GPS-1. Your bot's exact position in arena coordinates, every tick.
• RAD-1 radio. Everything GPS-1 gives, plus it shares your position with the team, hears a teammate's, and sends short messages (up to 4 numbers) to every teammate with a radio. Enemies can't hear it.
• RAD-2 radio. Everything RAD-1 does, plus it can ask your team's drone where the enemies it sees are.

Taking hits and watching the sky

• DMG-1 damage localizer. Panels all round the hull say which side was hit since you last cleared them, even by a bot you haven't seen. One per bot.
• ADR-1 air defence radar. Finds enemy drones and gunships above your bot, with their x, y and z. It also warns of incoming heat-seekers.
• IRC-1 infra-red camera. Finds anything hot, which means any flier in flight, from either team. It's what heat-seeking missiles lock onto.

Sensing from tools

Some tools sense too. The deployer (DPL-1) sets proximity sensors down on the ground that report what's near them, even through blocks. A GPS bugger (BUG-20, BUG-40 or BUG-70) fires bugs that stick to a bot and report where it is.

Built into every bot

Some sensors need no mount: the conch cage (for picking up and hearing conches), an incline sensor (the slope under the bot) and a traction sensor (how much grip the ground gives). Your program uses them with no channel to set up.

Choosing sensors

Every reading costs CPU cycles to fetch, and the I/O per loop total in the Factory goes up with each part you add. A good first pair is SCN-1 to find targets and RNG-1 to check what they are. Add a radio when your bots need to work together.