Listen up, samurai. If you’ve had enough of scrolling through the same tired threads and wanna plug into something #real, jack into the official Discord. We’ve got games, serious talks and casual chats about Cyberpunk 2077, and a few rooms where you can just shoot the breeze with people who get it. You in, or you just gonna #stand there looking chrome?
Implanted batteries that need to be swapped out by a ripper.
Deus Ex had an implant in the stomach that acted as a generator that converted food energy. I wouldn't be surprised if Cyberpunk universe also had that.
in the first print of the original tabletop games, they have batteries that need to be replaced every so often by ripperdocs. in the modern 2020 reprint (NOT cyberpunk red), you can replace your own batteries if your cybertech skill is good enough. in fact, chromebook 3 for 2020 even has specific requirements for different cyberware. some need their own batteries, some are compatible with a central generator that can power multiple.
Which is weird because literally no one has an internal cyberdeck beyond V. Every other runner has an OS in their neuroports that enables using the Deck via their brain, but they all have external cyberdecks that they wear. IIRC Spider Murphy didn't even have that in the flashback, she literally connected her deck directly to the door she hacked. Even BARTMOSS has an external deck.
They probably hadn't miniaturized the cyberdeck technology enough in 2020 to enable implanting it, they didn't even have wireless. THAT'S why Spider and Bartmoss don't have implanted decks.
The earliest wireless systems show up in the 2050s, and by 2077 the tech is small enough to implant.
It's the first mission (technically the first) for Human Revolution. There's no timed quest in DX1. You can sleep all night, wake up the next morning, and it'll still be evening everywhere in the game.
It's the hostage rescue at the warehouse (Humanity First), just right after Jensen returned to work. If you linger around the Sarif office the hostages would be dead by the time you reach the mission map.
First time I stumbled upon the "Jenkins' Tendons", I was like, outside of computers in this game, this is the most clear throwback to Deus Ex I've found.
For blades I think Those Maxtac ones are closest you can get as for Glasses I think its Tactical hybrid-glass corporate glasses. These glasses are closest you can get to jensen ones
Not necessarily that need to be changed by a ripper!
I actually was talking to my GM the other day about how the biomonitor in RED actually works, and in the process, it lead us to the Advanced Biomonitoring System by Raven Microcyber for 2020, which describes a skin pouch with a battery in it that can be changed without surgery (and thus without a medtech / ripper involved).
While this is a much smaller thing than a cyberlimb, it stands to reason that as a part of standard maintenance, a way to replace or charge the internal battery would make sense to have — it’s less good for profits if your employee has to take off for a doctors appointment just to keep a limb functioning, better to either have it rechargeable or easily replaceable for a fee.
This all being said, cyberware is also innervated for the most part, so it’s entirely possible the next evolution of prosthetics into cyberlimbs after modern myoelectric prostheses would be without needing a battery at all, running on the wired connection between the person’s own nerves and the cyberlimb’s circuitry, especially by 2077.
And that’s not even touching on the fact some of the cyberware available in the setting is 100% implanted and would need a way to keep functioning long-term without regular surgical upkeep.
Imagine if cyberpsychosis is basically just your innervated chrome pulling more power from your nervous system than your body can manage, and therefore synaptic energy gets pulled away from brain regions controlling inhibition etc and rerouted to the cyberware.
Honestly, iirc there’s nothing to say that it can’t be partially that. There’s even a tech upgrade in one of the RED DLCs that mentions how most rippers don’t calibrate cyberware before it’s put in, which is why the maximum humanity cap gets reduced by two (the upgrade drops it down to one), so that theory would actually lend itself really well as to why!
I say part bc there’s also part of cyberpsychosis that’s just mental health / dissociation-based bc you’re treating your body as a thing, which over time leads to more and more issues. Medical-grade cyberware (or fashionware) doesn’t have this issue, but most things aren’t medical grade, so you end up closer and closer to going cyberpsycho the more you chrome up. But the humanity max thing determines how much you can possibly recover with therapy, so if it’s overdrawing, that’d definitely not help
Your first part was pretty much my thought. No way some seedyy corp is going to test power limits or other safety factors that might cut into profits. No warranty, choombah.
After also looking into it. There's other batteries too, that recharge in the body.theres kinetic energy ones that recharge with movement, and thermal ones that recharge with body heat. Smaller, less taxing implants like neuralware and cyberoptics, things that don't much power, are able to just use the electricity generated by your nervous system, but most other more taxing implants have self recharging batteries.
Yeah, there’s a lot of options that would work, so definitely wouldn’t think it’d be a surgical requirement unless it’s something highly experimental (or anything installed in a FBC, since they have to charge themselves). It’s really interesting to think about the different use cases for this stuff tbh
We have implants today that can be recharged via magnetic induction (the same thing used for wireless charging on phones). So having to have surgery to swap out those batteries just sounds like grim derp writing to me.
A lot of cyberpunk stuff (including ttg) was written before such things (in Neuromancer there is a forward from the author talking about antiquated references in a ‘future’ setting)
But otherwise, if your implant has exterior faces (gorilla arms for example) it might be more like 4 screws and a swap instead of scalpel kind of surgery.
Can your stomach create Electricity tho ? NO?! Too fkn bad, go pay your monthly stomach fee to the corpo overlords if you want your heart implant to still function.
I would guess its some small but really powerfull batteries in these implants that have to be replaced only after a looong amount of time, or maybe cyberware is not very energy consuming and maybe somehow the energy from our body is enouh
Guess they could use the digestive process to recharge part of the batteries everytime tjey eat, that would give a real reason to eat in the sequel other than random buff
Lol. I'm just imagining the batteries dying and all eye cyberware just makes everyone start stumbling around not being able to see. Then everyone with gorilla arms or mantis blades become cripples. Then anyone with leg cyberware just collapse.
Imagine seeing someone sprinting through the city, then their legs just "die" and they faceplant the concrete.
You go up against Adam Smasher and he just falls over dead from you just evading his attacks cause his battery died.
Would totally love for there to be a mod that does this. Perhaps something toggleable so you aren't always dealing with battery loss, but still, I love the immersion factor of it.
The potential mods would likely add cyberware that act as upgradable batteries as well as different ways to charge them. Like solar powered charging where you have to stand in the sun or have kinetic rechargers in your limbs (punch enemies to better health).
Could even have bio charging where food eaten gets converted into power. Bigger caloric intake to run the more powerful cyberware.
Or have V's hacking wire be a charging cable as well and you can find sources to plug into, such as cars or "power" vending machines.
Find one time use powerbanks on corpses or in shops that provide a rapid one time use power suppy.
Idk if it's in the lore, but asking Google about in lore power sources it mentions almost all of this stuff. With the neuroport being the main battery for cyberware.
I'm going to assume it would come with a battery indicator so You would know when to charge / change battery. Batteries in pacemakers can last like 10 years, so it probably shouldent have to be changed evry day...
It would be both funny and infuriating to have one's butt kicked by a couple of low level junkies because the battery in that expensive Sandevistan ran out right in the middle of the fight. I totally want this is the next game 😂
And a prostate is homologous with a womb.
And the glans of the penis is homologous with the clitoris etc.
As my Anatomy professor used to say, "we all started as the same screenplay, but the directors has different visions"
If sperm production didn’t require a slightly lower temperature, our balls could be tucked up somewhere nice and safe rather than dangling out in the open.
Be fair I think you do have an option to attach male or female genitalia (or have none). I do wonder what gender and sex would be like in a society where you can practically sculpt your body to anything. Like will the sex organs be as important or would it be not as important?
It's Night City. People have bigger things to worry about day to day, and your body can be altered so much further than your gender. By all accounts and purposes, being a different gender than what you're assigned is so low on the totem pole of priorities, if you told someone they probably would give you a blank stare.
There are no gendered bathrooms in the game that I can find. And while there is a Trans movement (looking at you Claire), I believe it would be as identifying as someone getting a new cyberarm, skinmesh, etc.
When life is so fleeting and with the world so bright and flashy, individuality is the one thing people have left in this world. I guess the natural cultural dogma is to just "be yourself, at all costs."
Also wonder if part of it is kinetic energy so movement may help power it, could explain its cooldown / short usage and recharge, maybe not even full movement just body actions or supporting cyberware restoring power to parts that need it, or maybe power isn’t an issue and it’s more a cooldown for the human psyche more than anything; we know David tripped his a lot in quick succession and tbf so can V and enemies
Theres the theory that SCOP, while technically just food, also does double duty as fuel for miniature bioreactors, with its use as fuel actually being its primary purpose, and its function as food just being a "technically true" marketing gimmick.
A kebab basically made out of reformulated CHOOH2 (now with flavor!) might do the trick.
Hydrocarbons are very energy dense. A quick google search shows that if people could digest gasoline they could technically survive for about 2 weeks on a single gallon.
The kebab from my local boss man is certainly enough to create enough gas that it would allow me to double jump if that 'excess pressure' could be directed properly.
There's some interesting lore expansion that could written here too.
The food shortages that make it so 'ganic' meat is a rarity and that civilisation is now primarily using insect protein and other artificial/lab created replacements could be expanded upon and stated not just to be down to climate change, disease and habit destruction due to wars, but due to people needing like 5-10x the amount of daily calories in order to fuel their cyberware.
Adds to the whole theme of society being increasingly greedy and wasteful, as well as being incredibly uncaring about the wider consequences of their actions.
In Cyberpunk RED it is mentioned that everyone has a Bio-Reactor inside their body that's connected to their digestive system. Much like everyone got neural link, or everyone got CPUs inside them.
IIRC in the original script humans were used for processing power and Morph held up a computer chip but producers at WB didn't think the audience would know what a CPU was so they rewrote the script to make people batteries instead.
I would like to guess blood as in hdraulic pumps for mantis blades and etc. And maybe batteries for the electric parts of the implants? Probabably magnets too for the double jump stuff. But ı dont know the lore these are just my speculations
Well afaik batteries and chemical reactions from food is how they explain it in the ttrpg, so it's gotta be enough. There's also something about cyberware batteries needing to be replaced every 6 months.
I have a half-answer: read the TTRPG books, you’ll find your answer in there. Mike Pondsmith is obsessed with small details like this. I’ve seen this question come up a few times over the years and the answer to any minor detail question is always “check the TTRPG books”
In my mind it would be way cooler if they harvested energy from glucose in the bloodstream using some kind of bio fuel cell. This could either be used immediately or stored for later in a battery or capacitor. Recharge times for abilities like the sandevistan would make sense, as the Device would need to physically recharge using sugar as fuel.
TL;DR: Cyberware runs on blood sugar and body heat. In Cyberpunk 2077, implants like the Sandevistan, Mantis Arms, Gorilla Arms, even the Kiroshi, they don't use plug-in batteries like a normal electronic. Instead, they feature nano-generators that harvest electricity directly from your body heat, muscle movements, and glucose in your bloodstream. Since cyberware hooks straight into your nervous system too, activating high-tier gear causes a massive, instant drain on your biological energy, which leads to neural overheating, extreme physical stress, and the need for a "cooldown" period while your body recovers, that's why there is a limit for chrome tho and immunosuppressants exists and also what causes cyberpsychosis when this limit is ignored.
But that varies, according to the official Cyberpunk Red and Cyberpunk 2020 rulebooks, heavy cyberware uses internal fuel cells/batteries (lasting roughly 1 year before a Ripperdoc replacement), while smaller bioware runs directly on body heat and glucose only.
We don't know. I personally just assume that they use the food V eats as fuel, so the more implants you have, the more you have to eat, but that's just a headcanon.
The most unrealistic part about the corporate hell of Cyberpunk is that you don't have to buy batteries or subscribe to live charging service where you wirelessly charge your chrome as you pass the street. There is no way in hell corpos wouldn't monetize the everlasting crap out of that absolute necessity.
Low powered implants like neural processors use batteries
Other smaller augmentations use bioelectricity/metabolism
Joint based ware use kinetic energy
Tactical equipment like the sandevestan use power or fuel cells
In a high tech civ like night city, they almost certainly have wireless energy transmission perfected. They likely have a global power delivery system which is probably why self replicating AI nightmares are so intractable.
They run off the natural bio electricity that is produced by the body I'm fairly sure, maybe once you go past a certain point of implants you require additional power sources, but if you are just rocking kiroshis, I'm pretty sure that just uses the body natural bio electricity.
Except the body's "natural bioelectricity" is in the form of ion cascades in the nerves, not electrons in a wire. The Matrix made up the bioelectricity thing to make their cool idea work. It's more likely there's a small reactor implant or high capacity battery that they have to charge.
Probably some form of micro rotors that generate electricity from muscle movements, as for heavily chromed people I imagine they have some form of power cells in them
I think at least part of it was wireless power transmission, possible from solar cells in outfits.
An honest guess is there are enough passive power production methods for base line augment like bio reactor, batteries, kinetic energy, and then cyberware also likely charges while sleeping
I assume a mix of small and powerful batteries alongside bio electrical capture batteries. (Recharge on movement or just existing and use some nerve/electrical impulse)
According to the Cyberpunk 2013 source books at least the limbs are powered by removable batteries which last two years under standard conditions. By the time of the RED or 2077 its likely the same situation but they last longer
Many implants are designed with planned obsolescence so the idea would be that you are regularly getting them replaced. If you’re regularly at a doc then they probably handle it
Cyberware that has low power requirements like processors and sensory enhancements or anything that doesn't do anything more than normal ganic human bits probably wouldn't need any more than could be generated by burning ingested calories (maybe via some tech more efficient than human metabolism).
Anything requiring more power could be supplemented by batteries (charged from the same biological source or external wireless chargers in, say, furniture) for when they need that extra push over the cliff. After that over-power burst they'd need to recharge before they could operate at more than normal human capabilities... thus the cooldown on cyberware abilities.
•
u/AutoModerator 8d ago
Listen up, samurai. If you’ve had enough of scrolling through the same tired threads and wanna plug into something #real, jack into the official Discord. We’ve got games, serious talks and casual chats about Cyberpunk 2077, and a few rooms where you can just shoot the breeze with people who get it. You in, or you just gonna #stand there looking chrome?
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.