While running Anarchy Online, type ctrl-1 or click the left-most icon on the menu bar in the upper right corner of your screen, to open your equipment view. There are 3 tabs: Weap[ons], Cloth[es], and Imp[lants]. If it's not selected, click on Imp.
This window shows you the 13 spots on your character's body where there are places for cybernetic implants: Eye, Head, Ear, Chest, Waist, both Arms, both Wrists, both Hands, Legs, and Feet. These work with your NCU to enhance your natural abilities or skills.
Like everything else in Anarchy Online, implants come in every Quality Level, or QL, from 1 to 200 (and very rarely, slightly above). And as with everything else, you need to keep your implants updated to at least roughly the same QL as your character level, or you're falling behind. The higher, the better.
Every implant consists of at least 2 parts, and no more than 4: one Basic Implant, plus up to 3 Nanoclusters. An empty basic implant has 3 slots into which you can insert one cluster each. These slots are called the Faded slot, the Bright slight, and the Shining slot.
For every skill, attribute, or armor class in the game, there is a Faded, a Bright, and a Shining cluster available. At the same QL, the Bright gives more points than the Faded, and the Shining the most of all. Consequently, Bright clusters are more expensive, and Shining clusters the most expensive of all.
Every assembled implant has 2 requirements before you can have it installed. One of your attributes will have to be (at least temporarily) up to a certain number. That number is dependent on the QL of the implant and which sockets are in use. Which attribute is semi-arbitrary, and hard to predict (more on this later, under "Nano Nanny"). The other requirement is the Treatment skill, which must also be (at least temporarily) up to a certain number to install the implant, and is also based entirely on the QL of the implant.
To install an implant or to take one out, you need a Surgery Clinic. There are Portable Surgery Clinics available in-game, either as loot or for sale from any Pharmacist or from any Medical Supplies sales terminal. Portable Surgery Clinics come in a variety of QLs. They say in their description that they temporarily transfer some Surgery skill from the operator to the target. Supposedly, the higher the QL, the more points transferred. Don't believe it. There was an exploit that took advantage of this, so Funcom shut off that function. Portable Surgery Clinics no longer raise the target's Treatment skill - which renders them useless, pretty quickly.
More importantly, then, there are permanent Surgery Clinics mounted into the wall in every Ordinary Supermarket and every Implant Shop. These cost 300 credits each time to use, but they also "buff" your Treatment skill by 100 points. And trust me, you will need that 100 point buff (and more) soon enough.
Making Implants
If you have an implant with an empty socket, and a cluster that matches both the socket and the implant type, you combine them much the same way you build anything in Anarchy Online. If you have them both in your Inventory, then with the Inventory window open:
1) Left-click the cluster to pick it up, then ...
2) Shift-right-click with it on the implant.
If everything goes right, you will get a message saying that the 2 have been combined, making a new implant. You will also receive a small XP award for doing so.
Here are the requirements for combining an implant and a cluster:
1) They must match location. A foot cluster can't go into a head implant, and so on. Shift-left-click on any cluster to find out where it goes.
2) The implant must have a matching empty socket. Faded clusters can only go into empty Faded sockets, and so on.
3) The cluster must be at least 85% of the same QL as the implant, rounded up. If they don't match exactly, but can be used together, the QL of the cluster changes to match the implant. For example, if you put a QL47 cluster into a QL50 implant, you get a QL50 implant. If you put a QL47 cluster into a QL10 implant, you get a QL10 implant.
4) You must have a high enough skill in Nano Programming (hereafter abbeviated "NP"), or find someone to do it for you. When you try to assemble it, it will either work, or it will tell you what skill in NP is needed to make it work.
Once a cluster has been installed in an implant, it is stuck, and it is not coming out. If you want to replace it, you have to rebuild the entire implant from scratch.
Every Ordinary Supermarket has a Trade Department. You can buy empty implants at the Implant terminal in the main store, and clusters at the Faded, Bright, and Shining cluster Terminals in the Trade Dept. Omni Ordinary Supermarkets have 2 of each cluster sales terminal in every store, one on the floor and one on the second balcony. In most cases, you should be able to find the cluster you need in 2 or 3 trips.
Nano Nanny
Thanks to third-party software called Nano Nanny, you can take almost all of the guesswork out of implant design. You can find it on the web at http://www.timezulu.com.au/NanoNanny/.
Nano Nanny starts with a spreadsheet of 13 rows (implant locations) and 3 columns (cluster type). Each slot is a popup menu, offering only the clusters that can go into that slot. You can show clusters by cluster name or by the name of the skill or attribute they raise, and switch quickly between the 2. You can also change the layout so that it shows skills down the left instead of locations, which may occasionally save you some searching.
Nano Nanny will also auto-allocate clusters for you. You can use the right hand side of the screen to build a list of the skills you want raised, from most important to least important. When you click Auto-Allocate, it will pick the clusters for you. You can then fine-tune the results on the spreadsheet, if you disagree with its choices.
Then, when you click the Build tab, fill in a few choices, and hit Build button, it will do the rest of the calculations for you. The first 2 reports are the most important: they show you what skill increases you'll get, what NP skill you'll need for each step in the construction, and what attribute and Treatment skill levels you'll need to install it when it's done. All of these reports can be printed out.
Another nice trick that Nano Nanny can do for you: it can help you "tweak" your implant designs to suit your breed and profession. After about character level 10, you should probably have stopped raising all six attributes every level. You're probably only raising 3. This means that if an implant requires a high value of one of those other attributes, you're out of luck. Here's how Nano Nanny can help.
If an implant ends up requiring an attribute you haven't maxed, go back to the implant design spreadsheet tab. If you filled in all 3 slots in that implant, take out at least one cluster from that implant that you don't absolutely need. Then switch to the Build tab. Check the boxes for the attributes that you've raised the most. Having done so, click the Build button on that screen, again. Now, when you go to the Suggestions tab, you'll see which clusters you could put into the empty slots to switch the implant over to the attribute you want!
Number Crunching
If you don't want to use Nano Nanny, or Nano Nanny isn't enough for you to get a mental "grip" on what implants do for you and how to build them, you can use the following rules of thumb.
To install an implant of Quality Level "n", you need a little bit more than twice "n" in whatever attribute it requires. You also need (after buffs, including the +100 for the surgery clinic) to have a Treatment skill of just short of five times "n". Or in other words, a QL 200 implant will require 404 in some attribute, and 945 in Treatment (as if such a thing were possible for most professions).
The NP skill needed to build the implant, and the bonus you get from that nano cluster, depends on what that cluster raises: an attribute, a skill, an armor class, or a stat (health or nano pool). The following numbers are estimates, not precise numbers. If you need to know the exact numbers, use Nano Nanny. But in general, an implant will give you about this much increase per QL:
Code:
Shining Bright Faded
Attribute: 0.27 0.16 0.11
Skill: 0.52 0.30 0.21
Health/Nano: 2.20 1.30 0.85
Armor Class: 2.75 1.60 1.15
And will require this much NP skill per QL to combine it with an implant:
Code:
Shining Bright Faded
Attribute: 4.50 3.38 2.25
Skill: 4.00 3.00 1.80
Health/Nano: 5.00 3.75 2.50
Armor Class: 4.00 3.38 2.00
Warning
Using these numbers and Nano Nanny, it is possible to design an implant that you can just, just barely squeeze into. You then run around to all of the stores and buy the parts. You then find the best, highest level Engineer or Meta-Physicist you can, and hand them the parts. They hand you back the completed implants ...
And only then do you find out that your implants are one to 3 QLs higher than you thought they'd be, and you can't use them yet.
What went wrong? If the NP skill of the person who assembles the implants is much, much higher than it needs to be, they end up making better implants.
On the other hand, you may not have much choice, because at this point on Rubi-Ka, most of the people who are hanging around waiting to assemble implants are very high level characters.
So what to do? Look for people who advertise on the For Sale channels with an "NP" skill not much higher than what you need. Leave yourself some "wiggle room" when you design your implants. Be prepared to have to wait another character level to install them if you've cut things close.
Finding Helpers
The best and most polite way to find help is wait outdoors in any major city, listening to the For Sale chat channels. If someone is looking for customers, this is where they'll advertise their services.
The other alternative is to go where they are and ask. If not handled delicately, this can get you a reputation for being rude, and you'll find that you're paying much more, if you can find someone to do it at all.
High level characters looking for employment typically hang out in 3 places at the moment. Clanners hang out in the plaza near the Tir grid terminal on the north end of town, up by the Happy Rebel tavern. OT employees wait by the Bronto Burger in Omni Entertainment District.
The riskier place to use is by the Newland City mission terminals. They're popular with high level characters, many of whom are waiting for someone in their team to pick a mission. While they're waiting, they may be willing to help you, especially with the more expensive buffs. But they aren't there waiting to help you, they're there to do something else; remember that when you phrase your request.
The potentially rudest and riskiest way is to use the new "/list" command. Let's say you know you need the +80 treatment buff from a doctor. You need to find someone who can cast a QL119 nano on you, which means they're going to be at least 100th level. Type "/list 100 200 doctor" and press enter. That will show you every 100th to 200th level doctor in the same city as you who hasn't used the "/anon" command to hide from "/list". You can use the same command to find other professions in the level range you need, as well.
If you do this, go beyond polite all the way to groveling. You are asking a total stranger to interrupt what they're doing to do you a favor, even if you offer to pay them for it. Remember this when you phrase your "/tell".
Implant Strategy
Once you can spare the 300 credits to install it, almost any implant is better than none. Even pre-assembled low-QL faded implants are worth it, especially if you can install several at once.
By the time you reach character level 6 or so, you should be thinking about custom building your own implants. Faded clusters and empty QL5 implants are dirt cheap. At the very least, pick the five or six most important skills for your character class, build a QL5 bright and/or a QL10 faded implant of each, and install them. 2000 or so credits is enough to get started. The difference will blow you away.
At medium to high levels, strongly consider always including Treatment (Surgery), because at high levels, you will be scratching for every point of Treatment you can get if you want to raise your implant levels.
Every character has at least one, probably 2 or more skills that they very much need to raise and can't afford to, because they're dark blue skills. When you're giving Nano Nanny priorities, move those to the top. Even if they're not the most important skills overall, they are the most important ones to raise via implants, since implants cost no IP.
It is almost never worth it to use implants to raise armor class. By the time you deal with conflicting, overlapping armor classes, the absolute best you can do is around 3 to 5 AC per QL. To stay competitive, you need more like about 15 to 20 AC per character level, minimum. So if you sacrifice quite a few skills that you could have otherwise raised, you can build implants that raise your AC by maybe 20%.
You will often find that you need to raise 2 nano skills to the same level -- and then find out that they conflict with each other. To give just one example, one that affects all puppeteers, Matter Creation (Creation) and Time & Space (E=MC^2) use the same slots. Here's a useful rule of thumb: at the same QL, one faded plus one bright equals one shining. Put one skill in the shining slot and the other in both the bright and faded slots.
If your character is Omni or Neutral, you can buy an Omni-Med uniform from any OT Ordinary Supermarket. Sometimes clan characters can buy them (at high markup), or earn them as mission rewards. Together, the six pieces give a combined bonus of 78 to your Treatment skill. Also, Doctors and Adventurers have buffs that can raise Treatment skill, and those stack with Treatment Expertise.
Can you use an Attribute-raising implant to meet the Attribute requirement for another implant? Yes. Can you use it to meet the implant for a replacement implant in the same slot? This used to be called "stair stepping," and it doesn't work any more, not since version 14.0.
Finally, don't forget to update your implants often, about every 5-10 character levels through 30 and every 20 levels thereafter. If your character feels helpless, this is one of the most common reasons. It is at least as important as spending IP carefully, upgrading your nanoformulas, and using the right equipment.