Characters

None of the three pages in this section is really a biography. Adam Smasher is a fight that rewrites its own rules twice while you are in it, his hideout is a room that refuses to open until that fight is finished, and Panam Palmer is a run of phone calls you have to answer inside a window. Treat the section as three timers rather than three profiles and the order you should tackle them in falls out on its own.

Here is the short version. Everything below it is what our individual pages say about getting each timer to run down in your favour.

Adam Smasher rewrites the rules twice

Nothing about him begins until you have accompanied Hanako, testified in her favour, shaken off the Arasaka soldiers who object to it and ridden two lifts up to the CEO floor at level 140. Walk towards Yorinobu's office from there and the Relic picks that exact moment to fail, so you reach the arena with every implant offline and nothing but guns and grenades to argue with.

The opening phase is the version of him with all his hardware running. He closes distance, works in melee combos that always end on a final potshot, so you dodge sideways through them, break line of sight behind concrete when the bullet storm starts, and step out of his landing circle before the jump attack puts a shockwave through it. The arm carrying the smart gun is the target worth committing to: strip it and half his kit goes with it.

Losing the arm flips him to range. He hangs back, throws missiles out of the ruined limb and calls in two waves of Arasaka muscle, which is exactly what your frag grenades are for, and a Ping quickhack marks those reinforcements through the walls before they are on top of you. He also backs away repeatedly across this stretch, and every retreat he makes is damage you get for free.

By the last phase most of his systems are gone and the fight is a formality with one decision attached. Mercy and a killing blow lead to the same ending, so take whichever suits your V and carry on to the staircase and to Yorinobu behind it.

What genuinely shortens the fight is the kit you walked in with. A cybernetic heart sits behind a plate on the right of his chest, and once that plate is off the heart takes disproportionate punishment. He shrugs off electrical damage and has no answer to chemical. Tech weapons punch straight through the plating, the Bladerunner engineering perk adds twenty percent against drones, mechs and robots, and inside Mikoshi a high enough Body attribute lets you rip a turret off its mount and turn it on him. The full Adam Smasher guide has the pattern-by-pattern breakdown including the stealth route, and our Netrunner build is where our quickhack and cyberware picks live.

The vault only opens once he is down

His secret room sits at the Ebunike Docks in northern Watson, and it is shut to anyone who wanders up early. You get in over the shipping containers stacked beside the main gate, follow the yard to its far end, turn right into what looks like a dead end and clear the fence with a double jump. The huge yellow ship berthed behind it is the destination: take the stairs aboard, turn left, and the secured door at the rear is the one you came for.

The key is Smasher himself. Beat him during Totalimmortal, search the body and you walk away with his Access Token, and the door stays sealed until you are carrying it. Waiting on the other side is the Ba Xing Chong, a shotgun that spits homing rounds and the reason most players make the trip at all, along with his own armour, a collection of other weapons and a few notes on the man that are worth stopping to read. Once the Ebunike dataterm is on your map you can fast travel straight back, which matters more on a second run than a first. The rest of the city's locked doors, from the Militech Aegis panel on Brick's rescue to the developer room buried under Arasaka Tower, are collected on our door codes page.

Panam is four waits and a short list of dialogue picks

The gate on Panam closes before you have left character creation, because she only responds to a V with a male body type and a male voice. Anyone else needs either the Panam Romance For Female V mod or a single debug line typed into Cyber Engine Tweaks, both of which the Panam Palmer guide spells out, with our console commands page covering the tool that runs it.

Two things break the chain outright rather than merely delaying it. Refusing the Saul rescue finishes the romance on the spot, and the rescue itself can be failed, so a manual save before you walk into that camp is cheap insurance. The quiet approach she asks for tends not to survive the number of bodies inside, which costs you nothing except her opinion of your methods.

The payout here is the biggest of the three. Seeing the questline through earns the Life of the Road trophy and puts the Aldecaldos behind you for the assault on Arasaka Tower, and it changes what is waiting after Mikoshi, where V can leave the city for good and live out the rest of it with the clan. She reappears afterwards at the Nomad Camp in the Rocky Ridge plains of the Badlands, and if she is missing, a long enough time skip and a night in the camp bed will produce her, with a run of texts arriving a few days after that.

Where these three sit in the rest of Night City

Panam is also one of only four people in Night City a V can build something lasting with, and the body type and voice that gate her gate the rest of them too, so our Cyberpunk 2077 romance guide is the page for deciding which half of that cast a given character can reach at all. Two of the three subjects here are endgame content and the last one runs across most of Act 2, which makes this the section you finish a playthrough on rather than the one you start it with. Levels arrive faster from the XP farming routes, the hardware for everything leading up to it comes off the cyberdeck rankings and the free Militech Apogee Sandevistan, and the rest of our Cyberpunk 2077 coverage arranges the whole thing in the order a first run actually wants it. Come back to this page when Hanako is already on the phone.