Jupiter Hell has a number of mechanics which are not immediately obvious. You really don't need to know about most of these to beat the game and are probably better off focusing on better positioning and inventory management if you are a new player. That said, knowing about everything in this guide will help a lot for attempts at Ultraviolence and beyond.

This is a work-in-progress - if there are any mechanics you're not sure about, feel free to leave a question in the comments.

Warning: this guide contains minor spoilers.

Yes, you can do this.


Just press your "Action" button while next to a door. By default, that's spacebar on keyboard and B on controller. If you're next to two doors, the game will ask which.

You can do this too: just manually target and attack the door.

Often provides better positioning. With a melee weapon and good awareness, you can break a door and move into a doorway to be adjacent to an enemy on the other side without giving them a turn to attack you first. With a ranged weapon, you can save yourself a turn of moving into cover.

This also works on locked vaults except on some special levels and during the "Secure Vault" level event. Not spending time finding or running to the terminal can save you a bunch of turns on Nightmare, limiting respawns.

Normally, you automatically miss if you try and fire at an enemy outside of your line of sight.

There are some exceptions, however:

1. Shotguns can't miss. This means you can hit things beyond the edge of vision with them if they have enough maximum range. This won't do much damage on its own unless you have a shotgun with huge optimal range, but it can allow you to apply status effects to helpless targets at the expense of ammo.

2. Splash damage also can't miss. This means you can shoot a rocket at a wall and damage whatever happens to be nearby, even if you can't see it.

3. You can't miss terrain. This includes explosive barrels.

4. While vision-blocking effects like smoke and toxic gas limit what you can see, you can still fire through them with manual targeting and hit things, assuming you know where the enemies are (and they'd be visible if the cloud wasn't in the way.

You can't move diagonally under normal conditions, but you can melee diagonally and will move into the tile if you kill its occupant (unless holding Shift or the equivalent controller button). Combined with manual targeting, you can move diagonally through destructible cover if you have a powerful enough melee weapon equipped.

These enemies (and more!) can track you by scent, and will roughly follow your path through the level once they pick up your trail. This is also why they can perfectly follow Scouts even in stealth.

Clouds of smoke and toxic gas will break your scent trail and confuse them, as will teleportation. Scent-tracking exalted enemies with the HUNTER trait can still follow you through gasses.

Smoke grenades block vision and confuse scent-tracking enemies as described above, but that's not all they do!


There's not enough oxygen within a cloud of smoke or toxic gas to allow a flame to burn. You can extinguish the Burning status effect by immersing yourself in a cloud. Gas will poison you unless you are immune, of course.


Newer clouds overwrite older ones. This can be very helpful on Toxic Contamination levels.

Most status effects are obvious. There are a few hidden interactions, however.

Bleeding: Since enemies are immune to Pain, bleeding inflicts a significant flat accuracy penalty on them as opposed to the occasional high pain inflicted on the player by its ticks.

Burning and Chilled / Frozen cancel each other out.

When used, the CRI phase device selects eight random points on the level, then moves you to the one with the fewest enemies nearby.

Most enemies can hear you and will start investigating if they do, but some - like Warlocks - are deaf.