Beginner Guide

This guide assumes that you have read the New Player Guide and looking for how to progress beyond the beginning of the game. This guide will focus on when to upgrade, how to upgrade, how much to upgrade, which quest lines to rush (and when to rush), leveling strategy, along with a long term planning ideas. It's followed by Intermediate Guide, Advanced Guide and eventually by the End-game Guide.

At the start of the game, getting combat and mining exp masteries are very important for progressing faster by unlocking higher tier items or more mining lasers. Getting these early on, when the global boosts are especially more powerful for you multiply their value. For the global boosts to be more effective, we want the % exp masteries. Therefore, we need these masteries:

1. Skilled Weaponry (4)
2. Knowledge Weaponry (3)
3. Skilled Extraction (4)
4. Knowledge Extraction (3)

After exp, action efficiency is key. You don't have any buffer actions and thus will go into negative actions (aka fatigue) quite often every time you sleep. There are multiple ways to solve this: Buying stasis injections from market before sleeping (temporary) Buying actions with credits (permanent) Getting action masteries and eventually getting buffer mastery (permanent)

The action masteries get better with every following one on the chain. These are:

1. Limitless (4)
2. Prevail (4) (takes very long) (needs combat level 100)
3. Buffer Efficiency (Ideally 5, in practice at least 4)

As you hit negative actions, both your combat and mining rate will drop. So, if you wanted to focus on mining, you should get the mining exp masteries first, then get the action efficiency masteries so you don't lose out on mining because of hitting negative actions. As these masteries will take time, more mastery specialization will be covered in the next guides; specifically the late-game guide where you are expected to be above combat level 100.

Keep in mind that early game, selling data chips on market gets you an incredible amount of income. As the price fluctuates around 3-4M, that means, by selling every data chip you get (one per hour), you can get around 80M income if you sell them all.

Your equipment doesn't need to be the best that you can buy that is allowed by your level: it must depend on your current objective. For example:

• If you want to level combat as fast as possible, you don't need to switch to T4 when it becomes available, as you can max kill the last Wastelands enemy with all T3 + T4 earrings setup easily. Nothing else needs to be converted to T4.
• When you acquire your T6 augments, as they provide enough power to max kill Unseen Horrors; you don't need to swap to T6 gear then; just get the new T6 shoulder as a new equipment.

The starter T1 items are recommended because the upgrade resources are actually cheaper than of T0 items, and they provide much better benefits: enough for our purposes for some levels.

When upgrading, as T1 reinforcements are cheap, take the 100% chance upgrade option. Due to the abundance of upgrade materials from Prospector's Antiquing ability, you should do this for every tier except the final one. Decide by looking at the market price of these upgrade materials: if they're above 10k gold a piece, go for the 10% upgrade option as that's statistically cheaper.

There is a very simple principle about empowerments: DON'T. Not until you reach T5 or T6 gear, it's just not worth it. It's very expensive (at least 1M in gold/ore, increases with every tier) and you will either need the money for quests or the small stat increase it will bring won't be enough to make a difference unless you invest a lot of money for mass empowering and do it all the way to 9 stars which gives +10 speed.

You can get your 1st mining laser at lvl 20, 2nd at lvl 60, 3rd at lvl 90 and so on. At the start of the game, where you don't have many bonuses from Prospector levels, mining lasers will be especially weak. By only having 1 mining laser to use, you won't be getting much mining income from any of these lasers. As you don't have much gold in hand, it won't make too much of a difference to have 20% more ore when you were only mining 16. The mining lasers only really start to matter when you have 2 of them: base ore and percentage together. Before having 2 lasers, getting only 1 of them isn't justified against the cost. Your gold can be better invested in other areas like data chips, injections, mastery unlocks or even Rbot upgrades.

Your first goal should be to have all your T1 gear fully upgraded, you should have no trouble clearing the questline until the end of “Maintaining Supply Routes”. Your next goal should be focused on getting to combat level 50 for the T3 equipment power spike. Until then, you may not max kill the required monster all the time. To compensate, you can buy lvl 1 brutality injections from the market. All the other injections provide you with % bonuses while brutality provides flat amount bonuses; this makes it much more useful than any other injection early on in the game. With a higher brutality injection, you can easily max kill all Wasteland monsters with ease. Use these to breeze past “The Gishin Excavation” questline, as it provides Combat exp, permanent actions and -most importantly- the T2 augments which will fill the empty slots in the right side of your Gear. These augments are important as they will be with you until level 100.

To help your purposes of clearing the required monsters easier, complete the 2nd quest in the Sidearm Instructor questline to get the T1 sidearm. Only continue this questline until you reach level 30 for the T2 sidearm and likewise for level 50. There are some quests that grant some combat exp that will push you to level 50 for tier 3, so you can rush those quests.

You can slow play getting the Brain (aka not rush through the questline with brutality injections) as it's at the end of the questline, while the other 3 are much easier to get. If you decide not to rush, wait until combat lvl 50, then get all tier 3 equipment and demolish the questline.

The last quest of Enter the Abyss questline is the first big limiter on your progression: pay 1M gold. At this point, your goal should be selling everything you own to afford this cost ASAP because it unlocks the first dungeon and the Abyssal Riches daily questline, which you can only complete one quest in it that rewards the dungeon runs (Extracting Wealth quest). The quickest way to get this funds would be converting all your monster drops to points to form a platinum and sell it on the market. Since the restructuring of the plat scaling, you can craft up to 8 plat safely and profit by selling it on market. Unsorted Valuables are the easiest thing to buy to make this. There may be cheaper options on the market, but that requires quite an effort to comb through all of the market to determine the best value on a spreadsheet. Just buy unsorted valuables for ease: they will be the meta for quite a long while.

It's recommended to buy a level 6 experience injector from the market and use it after saving 8 runs (4 days worth). Dungeons will give a great deal of exp, and you fight the monsters one on one, so you will easily calculate if you can win by looking at the dungeon monster's stats.

By this point, you should be really close or arrived at level 50 and thus can switch out to T3 items (after the 1M quest). Remember to follow the equipment guideline I've wrote here. However, T1 items are definitely not enough for the next phase.

As always, gather the money for the equipment by selling plat.

The jump from killing monsters in Wastelands and in Abyss is extremely high: you might not even kill a single Mammoth Bat when you were able to kill 5 Warped Tormenters (the last monster in Wasteland). They are that hard to kill. The solution is T3 gear. At this point, your goal should be to get T3 equipment and upgrade them until you can kill 2 bats. 4 fully upgraded T3 equipment will be enough. The reason for this goal is another goal: Unlocking the Death of Darkness dungeon, the 2nd dungeon. The daily mission that gives 1 run of this dungeon is also unlocked with the same The Finished Map quest.

Now to the hard part: you will grind, very slowly, through the Taming the Abyss questline. It will slow your progression, since you won't be leveling as quickly and killing only 2 monsters at most means you won't be getting that much gold and loot from the monsters. Using brutality and juggernaut injections when you are against the harder enemies in the last few quests is recommended.

Following this rush strategy, I've achieved finishing the map in 8 days of playtime.

Dungeons give great exp rewards, and should always be completed with experience injectors. The fact that you can save attempts is why we rushed all the quests to unlock the dungeons in the first place. Save your runs and do them all under a lvl3 or higher experience injection for maximum benefit. They are relatively cheap in the market.

The 1st dungeon is relatively easy and doesn't require item prep.

The 2nd dungeon is hard: I recommend waiting until level 70 and crafting an earring before trying out the dungeon. If stuck, the 2nd dungeon can be completed with brutality and juggernaut injections. 4 fully upgraded T3 or T4 pieces, brutality and juggernaut injections will be enough to clear the monsters.

With the restructuring of the plat production, producing plat and selling it for profit is much more viable. By selling up to 8 plat, we can basically get some plat for free on the side and thus can invest them. As plat will take a great part of the game after the early game is finished, I recommend using part of your income for Recyclobot (called Rbot after this point), for it's an essential part of increasing your income later on.

We definitely don't have the funds to go after the companion abilities; they are also very weak for now, as their max level can only be the current level of your companions. This is the reason we will increase the level cap of the companions: we can upgrade the abilities later, but our companions weren't gaining exp to level up while staying at their capped starting level of 5, it's time to fix that fast. The passive fortitude and savagery gained by Drone and Drake are very powerful early on.

Once you have slowly leveled the companions' max levels to 20, you will need to prepare for the almighty lvl 20 → 25 companion level jump, which features a staggering 10 plat cost per companion. As a new player, it's just impossible to get all 52 plat required to get them to level 25 (where it starts requiring 2 plat for 5 levels until level 50). Therefore, you will have to prioritize. As this guide is focused on progressing through gear and mainline quests for gear: I recommend you level up Drone, then Drake. These 2 companions give Fortitude and Savagery and they give great amounts of it when we've just started the game.

Until you have leveled all your companions past level 25, don't spend plat on any ability whatsoever, no matter how tempting it is. The levels on companions are more valuable.

The previous questline was the last important quest to rush, as the next main questline gives abyssal T6 (level 100) augments. Since the strategy was to rush unlocking the 2nd dungeon, we will need to wait quite a while to arrive to that level. For now, your goal should be switching back to killing Warped Tormenters, the last enemy in Wastelands, or Karth Drakes for compendium, to farm experience to level up until level 80. This is the point where we can transition into T5 equipment and skip T4. T4 and T5 share the same upgrade materials, so waiting until level 80 would save us resources.

You can switch into shiny T5 gear to make a push for killing the max amount of monsters against Abyss monsters, or just keep killing Wasteland monsters to casually level up until level 100, where the mainline quests will finally be relevant. Killing the slightly lower reward Wasteland monsters isn't detrimental to your progression, as Compendium rewards will start to be completed on your way to level 100 and beyond. This will be mentioned in the next Intermediate Guide.

Thank you for reading, all feedback is appreciated (just write about it on discord).