Equipper



"At each station, the available weapons will be displayed atop the orange. orange are required to take each test. We'll grant you S2 Icon CQ Points.pnge to start with. The orange indicates the number of CQ points needed to take the test. The orange is how many CQ points you will earn for passing the test. Now go ahead and press to select a weapon."

- C.Q. Cumber (on Fake Plastic Station)

Equippers are a mechanic in the Octo Expansion and Return of the Mammalians. They primarily appear at the starts of tests in the Deepsea Metro in the former and at the starts of missions in Alterna in the latter; however, one also appears in Abandoned Station, another appears in the Diaphragm Phase, and two appear in Alterna Space Center: Entrance.

Description
Equippers are metallic pads with shoe prints printed on top. Stepping into an equipper and activating it raises a glass cylinder with rotating metal plates around the player, while a menu is shown with one to three weapon loadouts. These loadouts can be either sets of main and/or sub weapons, permanently-usable special weapons, or an unarmed option. In Return of the Mammalians, Agent 3's Hero Gear can sometimes be one of the options, consisting of the Hero Shot, Smallfry (as well as potentially Splat Bombs, Curling Bombs, and/or Burst Bombs depending on the Hero Gear's upgrades), and the ability to charge a Splashdown. Choosing a loadout selects it for the next mission or section. The loadouts are ordered based on difficulty level, with the furthest left as the easiest and right as the hardest; additionally, if there are multiple options, one of the loadouts will be marked with a recommendation. Equippers never provide variants of main weapons, since their sub weapons (or lack thereof) are determined separately. Uniquely, the equipper in Abandoned Station can take away the player's weapon loadout that it already gave them without requiring they select a new loadout.

When entering a level that starts with an equipper, the player automatically walks into and activates it. After selecting their weapon, they can reactivate the equipper to change their choice by stepping back onto it and pressing. There are three equippers that function differently to this: the equipper in the Diaphragm Phase and the second equipper in Alterna Space Center: Entrance can be manually activated by pressing while standing on them, and the equipper in Abandoned Station automatically activates whenever the player walks over it, such that they will always have a weapon within the storage room section and never outside of it.

The animation for completing a test in the Octo Expansion shows Agent 8 returning to the equipper at the start and being scanned inside it while receiving the mem cake for that station.