All player characters are permanently equipped with a PDA that translates languages, mines minerals, and harvests DNA from your encounters in order to make then use clones of the creatures you defeat along the way.
Most characters are equipped with a personal force field which can protect you from incoming weapons fire. Some species have physiology that's incompatible with shield technology (Aakash, Lhithish, Ysara, and Robots).
Your primary inventory is displayed at the bottom of the screen represented by numbered slots corresponding to the keyboard. The availability of these slots is governed by your Weapons and PDA Skill Level.
Slots numbered 1 & 2 are you left and right hands. Until the player character attains Weapons Level 5, the right hand is permanently equipped with your PDA.
Your PDA also has its own capacities for storing the DNA, Stem Cells, Minerals, and Composite Metals. All of these capacities are governed by your PDA Skill. Each time your player returns to your spaceship with content within your PDA that content will be transferred to your ship's inventory. This helps to keep your PDA from getting too full and preventing you from acquiring new resources.
If your character should die on a level, the resources your PDA collected will remain with your corpse. Since a new character clone is created for you on your spaceship, it will be created without any of the inventory your last character had. Once you return to the level, you should go back to corpse to retrieve all of its contents. On the mini-map your clone corpse will be marked by a pulsing orange marker. If you do not go back to your corpse to retrieve your items and scanned contents within your PDA, all of that inventory will be lost.
Weapons Skill:
This skill governs the amount of slot inventory you have plus at the 5th level you gain the ability to place a weapon on item into your right hand.
PDA Skill:
In addition to governing your mineral and DNA capacities, this skill manages your crystal inventory.
