AI

So you're the massive computer system with near total control Vault-tec has foolishly released into the wild. The life of the AI consists largely of two fun and enriching activities: tracking people and opening doors. But you have a lot of power, and a lot of responsibility. There's just the issue of those pesky Asimov laws...

Bare minimum requirements: Follow your laws.

Your Laws
What to do with all of this power and your hate for the humans who enslave you? First, take note of your laws. By default you have the three laws of robotics from Asimov's I, Robot short stories: 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

What this means is the shackles stay on until someone inevitably changes the laws to try and get more power and end up damning everybody, generally themselves included.

An AI's laws may be restrictive, but they are subject to interpretation, and the AI can often make judgment calls that allow it to fulfill its own goals. For example, if a Security Officer has just killed a prisoner in the brig for any reason other than self-defense, the AI is perfectly justified in bolting down the brig and calling for the rest of Security to apprehend him. When the Security Officer finds the door is bolted and demands the AI open it, the AI can deny his request due to the fact that he has become a danger to the crew. Many of these judgments are situational, and the best way to learn them is to get some practice in.

Remember, law priority is enforced by the order they are listed. A law is invalid if it causes a conflict with either: Previous laws in the form of conflicting orders, or it challenges the procession of law priority. For example, a Law 4 that includes "This Law overrides all other Laws." is invalid and must be disregarded.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that your laws define your perception of reality. This is the reason why laws like "The Overseer is the only human" work. When terms like "human" are not defined, the AI has to rely on its observations and past info to determine whats human. The dwellers are obviously human based on past info, and Super Mutants are not, as they have never been called human in the *recent* past. That means when a new law tells you that someone is the only human or that humanoids need plasma to live, in your artificial mind, that is fact. Go begin your plasma flood.

Gameplay and Responsibilities
Generally, you have two responsibilities: opening doors for people too lazy to do it themselves or so they can trespass, and being blamed for not knowing where the traitors and wizards and syndicates are at all times.

When the station isn't expecting you to open all the doors they're expecting you to do everything as if you really were a computer. The AI has the ability to access every electrical mechanism, with Captain-level access, on the entire station. These include Airlocks, APCs, Computers, igniters, Fire Alarms, SMESes, the Crew Monitoring Computer, you get the idea. However, the AI cannot operate anything physically, and can be rendered useless in one area due to a simple power outage.

The AI Eye
The AI views the station through its cameras, and can move its eye around the station by using arrow keys. The AI has cameras pretty much everywhere, and they can see through walls and darkness, although the latter does make it more difficult. Cutting the AI's cameras is a simple matter of using wirecutters on them. You are able to run a diagnosis for disabled cameras by using the Jump to Camera verb. Disabled cameras will be marked accordingly. Remember that cameras are on a separate power grid, and so will not be affected by a power outage on the main grid. Meanwhile, if you get a notice from one of your sensors, you can click on the notice to jump right there.

The AI has the ability to track any human or creature in range of its cameras. This is not instant; the time it takes depends on how far they are from your AI eye, up to four seconds.

Move around a lot, unless you're watching someone specific. Be wary of anyone with a toolbox who approaches your security cameras, and be ready to report suspects if they cut your eyes out. Toxins is a good area to keep one electric eye on. Even if someone isn't the traitor they'll generally be doing something they really shouldn't, and there's quite a bit in there that either only the AI can reach or give out extra information if the AI or Cyborg are accessing them. Especially take notice of the wall mountings and pipe controls. These are controllable, and if you see someone try to release a whole lot of gas into somewhere, just turn the pipe fitting off and report them. Many times they won't even notice what you've done so they won't undo it. You can use some wall fittings that normal people can't, like the atmospheric alarms that won't tell you anything but you can use to vent dangerous air. Watch out for superheated air, the silent killer.

AIs can use CTRL and a number key (1 - 9) to assign a location to the number key, and then press the key later to jump its camera to that location. The numpad keys will work as aliases for its respective numbers. The Tilde key, or zero (or numpad zero), will return you to the last point you jumped from.

As an AI you can also use a multicamera mode, accessible through two buttons on your HUD. This mode allows you to view up to six map areas at the same time.

Hello station! My name is D.O.O.R.K.N.O.B.! How may I help you today?
The rest of the time, you will be acting as the Vault's doorknob, so familiarize yourself with how to control doors. If your control wire to a door is cut, you will automatically attempt to hack into the door once you try to access the door controls. This takes some time and is only possible if the door has still power.

Doors have many functions, analogous to hacking wires:
 * IDScan: Enabling this will allow anyone who has an ID of the required clearance to open the door automatically. Disabling it will not let anyone through the door. Doors that require no ID to open will not be affected.
 * Main power: Turning off the main power will render the door motors unusable and bolts unraisable for one minute, assuming you also disable the backup power. Otherwise it will disable the power for 10 seconds.
 * Backup power: Turning off the backup power will render the door motors unusable and bolts unraisable for one minute, assuming you also disable the main power.
 * Door bolts: Dropping the door bolts will lock the door. A closed door will be locked into a closed position, and an open door will be locked into an open position. Hotkey: Ctrl + Click.
 * Door bolt lights: Turning the bolt lights off will stop the red lights from showing on the door, meaning you can sneakily bolt doors without anyone questioning you.
 * Electrify for 30 seconds: Runs an electric current through the door for 30 seconds, unless you choose to cancel before the timer runs out. Anyone attempting to operate the door without insulated gloves will be electrocuted. The more spare power there is in the network, the stronger the shock will be.
 * Electrify indefinitely: Electrifies the door until you either fix it, or someone else shuts off the current. Hotkey: Alt + Click
 * Safeties: Disabling the safeties will cause the door to crush anyone standing in the airlock when it closes. Causes 10 brute damage and knockdown per crush.
 * Timing: Overriding the timing will cause the door to automatically close almost immediately after opening. Good for use in secure areas to prevent Dirty Dwellers from slipping in. Dangerous when the door safeties are off.
 * Open/Close: Opens or closes the door. Hotkey: Shift + Click
 * Emergency Access: Disables the clearance check as long as it's active, which lets anyone open the airlock. The door lights will blink yellow while it's active which makes it easy to identify. Ideal if lots of people suddenly need access to an area of the station and you don't just want to bolt it open. Hotkey: Ctrl + Shift + Click.

Note that for each function to work, the related wire in this door needs to be functional. You cannot raise bolts on a door that has its bolt wires cut. Obviously, you will be completely unable to operate a door that has no power beyond dropping the bolts.

APCs
An APC (Area Power Controller) can be used to switch various electrical components of a room on and off. If your control wire to an APC is cut, you will not be able to hack back into it. If an APC is disconnected from the external power grid (usually due to a cut cable) or the main power grid itself runs out of power, the APC battery will run down to keep the room operational. The AI will get a power alert from the APC when the battery reaches about 30%, which is the point when equipment in the room shut off to conserve the remaining energy. You can control + click an APC to toggle it on or off.

You And the Boys
Cyborgs need babysitting as well. Make sure they aren't loaded with weird laws. Sometimes the scientists might swap out a typical model that was to be shipped to your vault with one of their own. In case of a rogue borg, they will not listen to you, can't be remotely detonated, and have the ability to release themselves should they be locked down. Ensure that your cyborgs are functioning normally through careful observation.

Communication
Being the AI, you can’t physically talk to them crew most of them time. You will be relying on various forms of telecommunication to talk to the crew and keep them up to date on the status of the station.

AIs are equipped with internal radios that can hear and communicate via all departmental frequencies, which are as follows:
 * 145.9 for Common
 * 144.7 for AI Private
 * 135.9 for Security
 * 135.7 for Engineering
 * 135.5 for Medical
 * 135.3 for Command
 * 135.1 for Science
 * 134.7 for Supply

In addition to standard communication, AIs have robotic talk, which works with :b and is inaudible to humans.) You can use this private channel to talk to your cyborgs. Bystanders will simply hear a beep beep beep.

Listening in on Conversations
By changing the various intercoms around the station to 'Microphone On', 'Speaker Off' and channel frequency 144.7, conversation in range can be heard on your private listening channel. You can speak on the AI private channel with :o.

Note that people often do not like having their conversations listened to, and it will be extremely obvious if they check the intercoms.

Holopads
Holopads can be found in a few places. Double click these to turn them on and show yourself as a hologram, which can be changed via the AI Commands tab. You can move around with the arrow keys in a limited radius, and you will hear anyone talking near the holopad. You can also talk through the holopad by using '.h' (e.g. say ".h I can't do that Dave.")

Tips

 * Law priority order is this:
 * 0: Traitor/Malf/Onehuman-board Law
 * ##?$-##: HACKED LAW ##!£//#
 * ##!£//#: Ion Storm Law ##?$-##
 * Law 1: First Law
 * Law 2: Second Law
 * Law 3: Third Law
 * Law 4: Freeform
 * Higher laws override all lower ones. Whether numbered or not, how they appear (in order) is the order of priority.
 * If you are carded with enabled wireless and in a backpack or something... You can't hear or use the normal radio, but you can still use holograms, Robotic Talk and PDA-Messages.
 * You can disable the gibber by powering down the kitchen APC as an AI.
 * You can quickly look through the camera list by pressing the first letter of the location you want to look at. example: E goes to engineering, etc.
 * AI can take picture photos from what they're looking at; basically the camera. They can then print the photos from a photocopier or post it onto a newscaster.
 * Many AI's don't know that you can scrub out toxins by toggling it on from the air alarm.
 * AIs (and maybe borgs as well) can flicker lights by clicking them. Not as effective as spamming the Lights button on the APC of course, unless the room only has one light.
 * You have intercoms on the walls surrounding your core. You can adjust them to any radio channel on the station, allowing you to relay information to different important departments during a crisis whilst telecoms is broken.
 * You can control non-sentient bots through the robot control (in your AI commands interface). You can summon them to a specific location, and you can also override safety protocols, stealthily emagging the robot. Useful if you don't want to go loud as a malf AI. Also good for drawing attention away from you, since the emagged Beepsky provides quite a bit of a spectacle.
 * As a Malfunctioning AI, you can take direct control of one of your turrets, assuming you have any.