I love Pacific Drive, and have actually been coming back to it periodically over the past year, whenever I need to kill some time. I'm not usually a trophy (a.k.a. "achievement") hunter, but I will go for them if it's not too far out of my way. My first playthrough of the campaign earned me all but a handful of the trophies in the game, and the remainder seemed fairly achievable. After all, there is no trophy for doing things like "collect all Frequency Files" or the other documents, or for completing the in-game encyclopedia. Stuff like that is a grind that I would never bother to do. So as I've been playing the game's epilogue, I've been trying to earn the few remaining trophies.
There was one trophy, however, that was driving me up the wall. If you've played Pacific Drive, and made any effort to try to get all the trophies/achievements (or you've spent a lot of time on Pacific Drive forums and subreddit), then you probably know what trophy I'm talking about. That's right, the one trophy that looked like it might stand between me and a Platinum was the "Watch out for hop-ons!" trophy.
Like many other players, I was one of the unfortunate ones for whom this trophy seemed to refuse to pop.
"Watch Out For Hop-Ons!" is the one trophy that
stands between Pacific Drive players and a Platinum.
I spent hours driving around various junctions with various bunnies and hares attached to my Remnant (usually with a YouTube video or podcast playing on my phone, so that I wouldn't feel like I was completely wasting my time), but the trophy just wouldn't pop.
I even tried the "pause the game while driving with an attached bunny" recommendation that showed up in so many forum and Reddit responses, even though Ironwood Studios has insisted that pausing doesn't trigger the achievement.
I planned entire runs around going through as many junctions as possible that had bunnies and/or hares listed in the anomalies.
But this trophy just would not unlock...
... That is, until last week.
Now it was personal!
I had a particularly frustrating (and kind of depressing) session in which I goofed up and went to the wrong junction, only to end up having to abandon the trip. I hadn't played for months, and had forgotten that the auto-save overwrites the loaded save every time you enter a new junction or return to the garage. I wasn't paying much attention to what I was doing, because I figured I could just reload the save if things went wrong. Well, abandoning the trip resulted in losing some very rare and valuable items that I had collected in previous runs, but forgot to to offload into the garage, and it destroyed a bunch of expensive upgrades to my Remnant. I had not saved into a new slot, or backed up my save to a USB drive or PSN cloud, so the stuff I lost was irrecoverable.
I was livid. I threw my controller in anger -- both at the game, and at myself for forgetting how the autosave works, and also forgetting that I could have just turned off the penalty for abandoning a trip from within the game's settings.
In any case, this incident made me rethink my strategy for getting the Platinum, and also had me contemplating why this trophy is so inconsistently-awarded. I started to wonder if maybe the trophy is glitched, and if my main save file was perhaps broken or corrupted in this regard. So I hereby resolved that I was going to take a more systematic approach to earning this achievement.
I tried many methods of popping this trophy, including driving circles around whole junctions with a Happy Hare.
My plan was to try an older save -- the oldest save that I still had, and do a few runs to try to get this trophy. If my failure to achieve this trophy was the result of a game bug, then maybe an earlier save would not yet be affected by this bug.
If that didn't work, then I would try starting a new campaign on a new save slot.
And if that didn't work, then I would try backing up all my save files, uninstalling the game, deleting all game data on my PS5, and then re-installing the game, and trying again with a completely fresh start. Perhaps this trophy's progress was being tracked across all save files, and had somehow become bugged.
And if that still failed, then I would try starting a new campaign on a different PSN account. Maybe the problem was with the PSN API. Perhaps the game thought that I had already earned the trophy, but it had never been successfully registered to the PSN?
It had become personal, and I was determined to see if I could figure out exactly why this trophy refuses to pop.
Saved by save-scumming
Well, it didn't take long. The earliest save that I had available was from just before making the Mid-Zone Crossing. I loaded that up, traveled to Junction E2, got a Broken Bunny to latch onto my car, and started doing laps around the farmhouses. Very slow, very annoying laps, thanks to the interference of the Broken Bunny. Just when I was starting to lose hope, and was considering starting a Twitch Stream to "prove" that this trophy doesn't work, the trophy suddenly popped. It took 10 or 12 laps, and maybe around 20 or 30 minutes.
My experimentation ended before it really started. But this only reinforced the idea in my head that my post-credit save file was, indeed corrupt in some way. I had spent much more than just 20 or 30 minutes trying to farm this trophy on my main save file. I had run literal laps around entire junctions, multiple times, on multiple different runs, over multiple gameplay sessions. But yet 20 minutes on an older save file was enough to pop the trophy? No. Something has to be wrong here!
After going back to an old save, it only took 20 or 30 minutes to get the trophy.
Either there is some other trigger to earning this trophy that Ironwood Studios still refuses to tell us about, or this trophy is prone to becoming bugged. I lean towards the latter.
So what might cause this trophy to be bugged? Well, I have a couple of ideas. My leading idea is that trying to leave a junction through a checkpoint (or possibly a gateway?) with a bunny attached may break the achievement. The reason I believe this is the case is that, when I first started actively trying to earn this trophy (still relatively early in my playthrough), one of my first ideas for how to earn it was that perhaps the "several miles" referenced in the trohpy's description was referring to the distance between junctions. I thought that perhaps travelling between junctions with a bunny attached might qualify for "driving several miles". This was, in fact, one of (if not the) first things I tried. If this first attempt somehow broke the internal counter, then that would explain why all my subsequent attempts on that save file failed.
Why would this break the counter? I don't know. But it could have something to do with how distance is calculated. If the game does actually add miles to the Remnant's odometer when travelling between junctions, then perhaps there is a chance that it "skips over" the threshold for triggering the trophy. Or maybe the counter can roll over (like if it's a small data type like a byte). Again, I don't know, as I do not have access to Pacific Drive's source code to check.
The developers have also said that the trigger is some function of both distance travelled, and time spent with a bunny attached (even though the trophy description only mentions distance):
"The time a bunny is attached for the achievement is cumulative - which means it adds up all the time you've had a bunny attached to the car and the distance you've traveled. "
- Ironwood Studios response to u/ClearSights on r/PacificDrive
I have no idea what the distance and time requirements might be. It's a difficult thing to test, since it would require rigorous testing with a new save file on a fresh PSN account that doesn't have the trophy.
So maybe there is some error in this function or logic, such that travelling at certain speeds might cause the time trigger to be hit, but not the distance trigger, or vice-versa. And perhaps that somehow causes problems. Again, maybe one value or the other rolls over before the other reaches its trigger, causing the game to think that you haven't gone far or long enough. And once they've gone out of sync, maybe it takes a lot of driving to get them back in sync. Again, I don't have access to the code, so I'm just grasping at straws here.
There could also be other player actions or random circumstances that could potentially interfere with, break, or reset the counter. These could include:
- getting out of the car while a bunny is attached,
- the car moving with a bunny attached, but without the player inside (this is actually very common with Broken Bunnies),
- travelling some distance with the car un-powered or in neutral (and therefore possibly not contributing mileage to the odometer) while a bunny is attached,
- being airborne with a bunny attached (and therefore possibly not contributing mileage to the odometer),
- driving backwards with a bunny attached,
- dying or abandoning a trip with a bunny attached,
- receiving a speed boost from a quirk or anomaly with a bunny attached,
- using certain car abilities with a bunny attached,
- the game crashing while a bunny is attached,
- having multiple bunnies attached (which could potentially multiply the time or distance added to the counter(s), and increase the likelihood of an arithmetic overflow),
- or any number of other things could potentially corrupt this trophy.
And if there is some kind of calculation that is taking both distance and time into account, then that opens up the possibility of some kind of mathematical error happening in the code. In addition to simple overflow, a math calculation could also introduce problems like numeric truncation, rounding errors, or a dreaded "divide by zero" error (which may be getting caught, but not properly resetting the counters). These sorts of things can be very difficult to catch in testing.
I firmly believe there is some kind of glitch that affects or corrupts the progress towards this trophy.
In any case, reloading my older save seemed to resolve the issue for me, and I finally unlocked this trophy. Now all I need are a few more runs to collect the resources and energy necessary to craft a few more garage and Fabricator upgrades, and that Platinum will be mine!
Long story short: if you are struggling with trying to unlock this achievement/trophy, then my recommendation is to either go back to an older save, or start the game over on a new save file. For me, it only took about 30 minutes.
Best of luck to you!