Learning goals
- Understand revive and recovery behavior.
- Understand incapacitation.
- Understand why uptime matters.
- Build a companion plan.
- Avoid changing too many systems at once.
Explanation
Companions can be downed, incapacitated, disabled, or recover depending on companion type, mods, and current systems. Exact recovery rules should be checked in-game for the companion type you are using. The key concept is uptime: a companion is valuable when its important effects remain available during the mission. Uptime depends on survivability, Link mods, recovery behavior, companion type, precepts, danger exposure, weapon or claw use, pickup utility, priming, damage, and whether key effects work while incapacitated or recover after delay.
What should I do?
Build a companion plan by choosing a role, adding core precepts, adding Fetch or Vacuum when useful, adding survivability, adding weapon or claw support if relevant, adding Bond mods only when conditions are met, adding arcanes only when triggers are reliable, testing uptime, and improving one weakness at a time.
Common mistakes
Avoid these companion mechanics mistakes before spending mods, Forma, arcanes, or farming time.
- Ignoring recovery behavior.
- Assuming all companions recover the same way.
- Not checking whether utility works while incapacitated.
- Building damage on a companion that spends most of the mission down.
- Changing every mod at once and not knowing what helped.
- Ignoring companion role after copying a build.
Key Takeaways
- The best companion build is the one that does its job consistently.
Practical task
A companion plan should make useful effects consistent, not just add more mods.
- Pick one companion.
- Identify its role.
- Identify its main survival issue.
- Add or improve one survivability tool.
- Check whether pickup utility is active.
- Check whether key precepts are working.
- Run one mission and observe uptime.
- Write the next improvement.
You have a companion plan based on role, survival, and uptime.