Pacific Drive ThermoSap Crystals: How to get them

A large red crystal — (Image credit: Ironwood Studios)

Finding ThermoSap Crystals in Pacific Drive is necessary if you want to turn your station wagon into a tank. Crafting armored doors, armored panels, and armored bumpers, plus puncture-proof tires, will greatly improve your car's durability in the exclusion zone. If you've already done some driving you already know just how hazardous it is and how quickly the anomalies can damage your trusty vehicle.

But crafting armored parts and unpoppable tires for your wagon can't be done without ThermoSap Crystals, and they can be tricky to find, especially in the early game. As you drive deeper into the zone you'll eventually find them in greater numbers, but at first you'll be lucky to find one or two in the same place. Here's where to look.

Pacific Drive: How to get ThermoSap Crystals

At the start of the game, your best bet for finding ThermoSap Crystals is in the armored doors and panels on the wrecks of old police cars. These cars are called Abandoned Squires and you'll find them along the roadside and sometimes in the woods in almost every junction you visit. It can be a little hard to tell the difference between Abandoned Squires and regular rusted cars, so look for the metal brackets that used to hold rooftop police lights.

Use your scrapper to cut up any doors, panels, and hoods remaining on the Squires, and among the steel scrap you'll almost always find a thermosap crystal or two. You'll be able to spot the crystals because they glow red. If you have a liberator tool, you can use it to remove the armored doors and panels intact, and then shred them at your garage using the matter deconstructor to obtain the crystals.

Later in the game when you've entered the mid-zone, you'll occasionally come across a large glowing red gem sitting on an item called a Sap Compressor. This gem is a bundle of ThermoSap Crystals, and you can shatter it with your impact hammer and pick up the individual crystals.

In addition to armor plating, ThermoSap Crystals are a component of tools and items such as:

The liberator tool
Thermal vacuum
Puncture-proof tire
LIM shield
Turbolight Engine

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.