The following are extracts from The Scavenger's Guide To Archaeotech, a popular and frequently copied beginner's guide to finding and using forgotten technology from out in the Wasteland.
So, right, the first and most basic thing everyone knows about Archaeotech is that it's really old advanced technology from the days before. But do you know how to go about finding it? Figure out what it does? Make it work? That's what we're here to talk about.
The first and most pressing obstacle to anyone who wants to get their hands dirty messing with ancient tech that might have helped destroy the world is that no-one really knows how any of it works any more. We've managed to figure out a few basic things, but most of the time these artefacts work in unexpected ways, or worse are straight up broken and don't work at all until you figure out what's wrong.
If you're lucky you'll come across a piece of junk that's glowing or has lights flashing on it. They're rare these days but if you get one you are golden, because right there you know you have something that at least partially works. Then it's just a matter of whether it'll do anything useful.
It sounds trite, but usually the best places to find Archaeotech are places no-one has looked before. That usually means places that are far out of the way, really dangerous, or just really well hidden. There've been a lot of scavengers over the years and the obvious stuff has been picked clean.
After you've found a likely spot, you probably need to filter through a whole load of junk that doesn't do anything. A good way of spotting useful tech is that it has an obvious purpose. This one kind of depends on context, so use your best judgement - with time and experience you'll learn which things might be useful and which not.
You'll quickly learn about screens, buttons, and dials. These are pretty common on Archaeotech devices. A screen is a shiny flat panel that shows you information when the device is activated. Sometimes if you're lucky you can touch the screen to get it to do things. Buttons and dials are controls that you can press or turn to get the device to function - these are a good sign since they're usually hardier than screens, which are easily broken.
Most Archaeotech requires a thing called Power. We're not really sure how it works, only that it gets used up as you use a device more. Luckily Power seems to be stored in a way that sometimes makes it possible to fill back up again. Presumably the people who built these devices originally were taking this limitation into account - we've managed to find a few devices that can do this, usually by turning some sort of crank, and those are available in Bastion and even in the Arena itself if you know the right people, or are willing to pay.
Obviously the only way to find out whether tech that has run out of Power can be filled back up again is to try it and see, but since you can't take the crank devices with you this can make it a bit of a gamble to lug something big and heavy around in the hope you can make it work later. On the other hand, something that does something useful a few times is still better than nothing at all.
So as a general rule even if we don't know precisely what purpose something was made for, any device we can get to reliably do a thing can usually be repurposed for something useful. Sometimes you can add stuff to a device or combine them if you have the mechanical know how. Be careful though - some Archaeotech is really easy to break if you start fiddling with it, particularly if you don't know what you're doing.
Also as a general rule of thumb, most Archaeotech is too complicated to take apart and recombine, or use any of the bits that make it work. You can sometimes get components out of a device but since we don't know how they were built in the first place it's nigh impossible to put them back in any other configuration, or swap them for other bits.
Ultimate Monster Battle Arena is not a game about researching or inventing new technology. Instead, the scope of the game encompasses discovering devices, learning how they work and what they can do, and figuring out how to either strap them to monsters or put them to some more nefarious use. Expect your character to use Archaeotechnology to augment themselves and their Monster, rather than changing the world.