How do traps work?

Do you mean the disable device mini game? You're supposed to disable Machinery first, then Triggers. If you max out the red failure bar, you have no choice but to take your chances with the Core. It seems to work as it should from what I've seen, except that input sometimes lags and your mouse will continue to "click" things for a few seconds after you actually clicked... which can be a problem if you reveal a component you didn't actually want to click on.

You can trigger the trap from clicking anything if you fail your roll badly enough, even discovering components, though that seems rare. Disabling all the triggers disables the trap, which is easier if you disable machinery first. Or you can just disable the core directly, but it's much less likely to succeed. If you 'soft fail' too many attempts at disabling other components, the red bar maxes out and everything except the core becomes non-interactable. At that point you just have cross your fingers.

What makes you think they're bugged?

edit: to clarify, the way it works mechanically as I understand it is that there's a hidden roll every time you click something, and if you fail that roll then the component breaks or the trap goes off (if you fail it really badly). Doing it in the intended order of machinery -> triggers seems to work most of the time, but you'll still sometimes fail catastrophically. I'm sure it happens more with lower lockpicking.

Yes, I'm curious to the numbers on this, as well.  %success chance per particular device.


I did some really vague experiments (only 10 each sample group) where I compared success of trying to succeed on 3 tripwires vs 1 core and I couldn't see a noticeable difference in success rate.  In fact, with 3+ triggers, I waver on just going for the core directly.  I fully uncover all components, in case this gives a % boost...*shrug*

(but such a small sample group is probably meaningless, depending on the mechanics)