Plug-in chips

The loadout. Every passive ability the player has is a Plug-in Chip slotted into a fixed Storage budget. The chips that show your HP bar, EXP bar, and minimap are also Plug-in Chips. So is the chip that prevents the operating system from crashing.

Removing them does what they say.

The canonical chip configuration screen. Top-right: Storage Used: 68/72 — the loadout budget. Categories: System (the OS chip, mandatory), Attack, Defense, Support, Hacking. Each chip costs storage; the total can never exceed the budget. Source: Game UI Database.

What's in a chip

The chip catalogue splits into seven categories. The honest framing: everything that is a number, a HUD element, or a quality-of-life feature is in here.

Category	Examples	Notes
System	OS Chip	Mandatory. Removing it kills 2B/9S. Mentioned later.
Attack	Weapon Attack Up, Ranged Attack Up, Shock Wave, Last Stand, Critical Up	Combat damage modifiers. Cost scales with bonus tier.
Defense	Max HP Up, Anti Chain Damage, Reset, Damage Absorb	Survivability.
Support	Auto-Heal, Auto-Use Item, Item Scavenge, Drop Rate Up, EXP Gain Up	Quality of life + reward shaping.
Hacking (9S only)	Hijack Boost, Stun, RAM Defense	Active during the hack minigame.
HUD chips (cosmetic — actually System slot)	HP Gauge Display, EXP Display, Minimap Display, Damage Numbers, Enemy HP Bar, Sound Indicator, Score Display	These chips are how the game draws your HUD. Unequip them and that part of the screen disappears.
Auto- chips	Auto-Attack, Auto-Battle, Auto-Move, Auto-Aim, Auto-Use Item	Hand control of the game over to the AI to varying degrees. Used to enable Easy mode-style accessibility.

The HUD-chip line is the philosophical pivot. The HP bar in the corner of your screen is a chip you chose to install. So is the minimap. So is the operating system itself.

The Storage budget

Storage is the loadout's central number. Starting Storage is around 64; the maximum is 256, reached by paying ascending Funds (G) costs at the maintenance shop to expand it.

Storage	When
~64	Game start
~128	Mid-route B
256	Late game, fully upgraded

Most chips cost between 1 and 16 storage. The cost scales with both the chip's level (+1, +2, +3 — better effect, more storage) and its quality (random base cost — duplicates of the "same" chip can have very different storage costs).

So: a Lv 33 build with 72 storage and 68 used is almost full, mid-game, on a real player save.

The same chip type appears at multiple storage costs and tiers. Two "Ranged Attack Up +1" chips here cost 6 and 11 storage respectively — the cheaper one is more efficient but rare. Optimization is partly chip selection, partly chip-cost RNG. Source: Game UI Database.

Fusion — the chip economy's pressure valve

Two duplicate chips can be fused into a single chip one tier higher (+1 → +2 → +3) at a Maintenance Shop. Three chips of tier N produce one tier N+1.

This means a played-through inventory generates a slow currency of storage savings: you find a Weapon Attack Up +0 [11], you fuse three of them into a +1 [9 or 7 or 6], you fuse three of those into a +2 with even smaller storage cost. Better builds emerge from compressing your existing chips, not from finding new ones.

The Move / Remove popup is the fusion gateway — Move sends the chip to a different Set, Remove discards it (and frees storage). The Sort: Equipped header at top is itself relevant: with this many chip duplicates, sorting is a real ergonomic problem. Source: Game UI Database.

The OS Chip — the load-bearing joke

There is one chip you can equip and unequip that the game will not stop you from removing.

The OS Chip is mandatory for the android to function. The chip menu lets you select it and choose Remove. The game asks "Are you sure?" If you say yes, 2B (or 9S) instantly dies, the screen cuts to a Game Over, and your save is reverted to the last checkpoint.

This is the most quoted Yoko Taro flourish in the chip system. It is dismissable as a gag — but it makes one structural argument: the player's character is software. The OS is not a metaphor. The HUD is not a frame. They are systems running on the android, and what runs can be uninstalled.

The accidental version of this happens later — chips drop to the ground when you die, and if you die a second time before recovering them, they're permanently gone. Including your equipped HUD chips. Some players experience the un-rendered minimap as a glitch before they realise it's the consequence of a previous death.

Bonus-with-drawback through composition

Most individual chips are pure upgrades — there's no chip that says "+10% damage, but you take 20% more damage". The drawback layer is emergent from the storage budget:

• Equipping Auto-Heal (~16 storage) means foregoing a Critical Up.
• Showing the Minimap (~4 storage) means a smaller Auto-Use Item.
• Showing damage numbers means less Last Stand defence.

So bonus-with-drawback here is structural, not per-item. The drawback is what you couldn't fit. This is the same logic as Hollow Knight charms, or opportunity-cost-loadout generally — but Automata uniquely puts the UI into the same budget.

The closest analogue elsewhere in this knowledge base: Sparklite's patch-board grid forces you to fit Tetris-shaped patches in a limited grid (spatial budget); Hollow Knight's notches give you a pure integer budget; Automata is in between — integer budget like Hollow Knight, but with the UI itself as a participant.

Two chip sets, swappable on the fly

The chip menu has Set Type A / B / C — three saved loadouts you swap between mid-game from the menu. So a player typically configures:

• Set A: combat-focused. Heavy on Attack chips. HUD pared down.
• Set B: exploration. Item Scavenge + Auto-Use Item + Minimap + Damage Numbers (all the QoL).
• Set C: bossing or hacking-heavy missions.

Swap is instant. So there's no real cost to multiple builds if you've already paid the storage for the chips. The constraint is one budget per set, not three budgets total.

What this teaches

• The HUD is a system. Treat it as one. Most games hard-code the minimap and HP bar. Automata's choice to put them in the loadout creates: (a) accessibility — show only what you want to see, (b) incentive — players who don't need a minimap can spend that storage on combat, (c) commentary — perception itself is configurable.
• Diegetic UI lands harder when the game commits. Other games render the HUD diegetically (helmets, holograms) without making it interactive. Automata makes it removable, which is the difference between aesthetic and mechanic.
• Fusion economies create slow optimisation. A player who's barely paid attention to chip costs at hour 5 will notice in hour 25 that the same chip exists in their inventory at 6 storage and 17 storage, and they will spend an hour fusing duplicates. Free engagement. No new content shipped.
• Mandatory ≠ unequippable. The OS Chip is mandatory, but the menu doesn't hide the unequip option. Letting the player do the wrong thing — and immediately punishing it — is more interesting than greying out the choice.

Patterns this exemplifies

• loadout-as-budget — pure integer storage budget, items have variable costs.
• opportunity-cost-loadout — every chip equipped is a chip not equipped.
• bonus-with-drawback — emerges from the budget, not from per-chip drawbacks.
• diegetic-ui — HUD elements are themselves equippable. Uncurated; only Automata in this knowledge base does this fully. Adjacent-but-distinct from "diegetic interface" in Dead Space-style fiction.