Also this is apparently the only place to get the bridge implant, which allows several alternate endings.

It's an upgrade to the INT implant giving you a bit of XP. For the Bridge you only need a vanilla INT implant to access the endings, no hassle required. Faythe or Harbinger can use theirs too.

In fact, the only thing the Eye really does is give you encounter XP, the aforementioned upgrade, and an energy pistol. Shadow finds another way to enter the Mission Control lower levels and you don't get punished.

Shadow is indeed hard to find if you don't explore the maintenance tunnels, but at least you always have full vision of the area and can look from above. For better or worse, there's no way of knowing beforehand that he's there.

I am pretty sure the bridge implant is required to get any ending other than the pilgrims of terra. I just reloaded a save from before entering the bridge. At the bridge, I chose the option to shut down the engines, and the screen said "Authentication Failed. Bridge officer's neural uplink required". There wasn't any skill check; anyway I have computers, electronics, streetwise and persuasion all at level 10. (hero mode, cult leader premade character)

Maybe this is a change made after early access? Huggybear's guide agrees that the bridge implant is required. I can't link to the section and the guide is long, but search "of the ship!" and there is only one match.

I'm debating whether to go back to chapter 2 and get the bridge implant from the eye mission. There was a lot of running around in chapter 3 but no time-consuming combats due to my high skill levels on hero mode.

There's a bridge officer implant in the deepest level of Mission Control too, it's not mandatory to get the one from the stealth mission. It does require dealing with Shadow by the elevators later though.

OK, I searched the internet some more, and the colony ship wiki does say that there is a corpse inside the lander from which you can extract that implant. But, my non-combat team has zero chance of defeating the danger room to unlock it.

Originally posted by davea:

OK, I searched the internet some more, and the colony ship wiki does say that there is a corpse inside the lander from which you can extract that implant. But, my non-combat team has zero chance of defeating the danger room to unlock it.

You can get by with just a computer tag and a cloaking field!

Thanks for the suggestion! I took my skill girl MC with the upgraded cloak and I could reach the console and disable all three countermeasures. I was stuck for a minute because after I did that, the door at the far end didn't have any gear icon to do the skill checks. But, I left the level, saved, exited, and reloaded. Now it's there and I have the chip.

Well, two of the four endings require combat anyway. But at least I have seen two now.