The manual hacks mostly (maybe all?) come from talking to npc’s in the branch areas and the computers you find there. You can check how many you’ve found in the records/lore menu.

As for armor, I need to do the math, but I think even one small piece will have a large effect on capturing overflow damage and preventing critical hits.

Good luck!

So I don’t know where you’re at, so I’m just going to info dump a few things that have increased my scores recently:

Materials
The first few floors are all about giving you time to prep a starting build. Even if you intend to go flight, start with some storage and clear these floors completely to gather any good loot. You don’t have to kill everything, but check everywhere for any good items and get some hacks going. Fill up your storage with your entire flight build before switching to flight, and honestly, it’s good to try and keep the storage after transitioning so you can keep extra flight units and armor.

Hacks
Swarmers are a pain, but if you manual hack analyze(swarmer), then you get +5% accuracy towards them and they get -5% towards you. There are only 3 main models of swarmers, so any time you seen the next level of swarmer, hit this hack. Really, analyze(...) everything! It’s like having a free reaction control system and target analyzer on at all times. There are also some seriously useful trojan(...) hacks.

Armor
Always try to carry some armor to switch on if you’re getting shot at. It absorbs all overflow damage, protecting all your vital bits. I was massively undervaluing armor, assuming I was never supposed to get shot at as a stealth-flight build, but it’ll happen, and armor can let you get away clean.

Other than that there’s chopping through walls with melee weapons, standing inside doorways to minimize enemy fire, knowing when to hit side branches for good loot, scanning your equipment for little bonuses, checking enemies when you see them for damage resistances. The dev puts out videos of him playing (and streams), and watching him do the first few floors really showed what important factors I was missing.

CoQ is an example of a game that gives you so much when you invest time in it. If you’re into that, I would also recommend Cogmind. It’s similar in that the world has so much texture, both in lore and mechanics. We’re lucky have so many great roguelikes to choose from!

Caves of Qud is one of my favorite games of all time! The writing got a Hugo award last year. The story is developed algorithmically for each playthrough, with historical events that affect the towns and factions within the game. It’s tone is amazing, I can’t recommend it enough for people who enjoy roguelikes.