Intermediate Guide

This guide assumes that you have read the previous New Player Guide and Beginner Guide, are at level 100, have a T6 set with 1 T6 augment at E9. In other words, you're able to max kill Unseen Horrors. This is the first breakpoint of the game where you decide if you want to stay farming a certain monster even after getting its R3 compendium.

This guide will be followed by Advanced Guide and then by the End-game Guide.

These monsters are all the trigger points for the guide, and are as follows:

1. Unseen Horror (requires T6)
2. Filchers (requires decently empowered T8/T9)
3. Dreadghouls (requires max empowered T9)
4. Nassul Reaper (requires max empowered T10, only better due to t10 antiquing rewards, won't be able to max kill)

All of these are marked with a diamond sign, and are collectively called the Plat monsters, even though the first one is just a normal monster with very good drop rates. The latter monsters are different because their drops aren't used in empowering; every other drop in the game is used in empowering certain tiers in certain empower levels. Their difference from all other monsters is their plat points gain per action being way higher than normal and those drops are only used for Rbot and nothing else (unseen horrors are the exception to this). Therefore, when you're thinking about income, they are the best in their respective brackets. They have great drop rates and great point values, therefore everyone trades their drops to convert to plat points.

When people are choosing which monster to fight, they're choosing with 4 factors in mind:

• Total gold+drop gain
• Total exp gain
• Do I inject?
• Compendium

Since compendium is temporary as it's completed after 1M kills, late/end game players really only look the first 3 factors. However, we are not there yet, so compendium will be in our calculations.

The question from the previous guide comes after you've gotten the 1M compendium from UH: what do you want to do now? Now, let's analyze the different options. These options cover different fields of the game, but in effect mean only what you'll buy with your gold, where you'll spend your gold/ore/etc and what monsters you'll fight. After getting to max filchers, this question will repeat again but with the added caveat of how much you want to empower. Before we start on the details, you should know that people generally don't market trade UH drop 'Black ink' as most people have moved on from it; you won't be able to sell your drops for profit in the market unlike the other plat monsters. The income from UH solely comes from converting the black ink drops to points efficiently.

The reasoning on staying on UH after 1M kills is simple: it's the most direct income you'll get from combat. You won't be able to max kill filchers without greatly empowered T8 (1 month later) or decently empowered T9 (2 months later). There is a world of difference in power requirements and therefore the investment into gear. Investment that could be spend otherwise.

Since you can snowball just a bit better if you invest earlier and more in any field, staying on UH gives the best income returns until T8, where we'll ask the same question with Filchers (but this time 50% of players will stay there).

Finally, it's more relaxing to not worry too much about combat and trying to sell/buy drops from market.

The reasoning on switch from UH after 1M kills is even simpler: eventual income and power.

Even though there is a significant increase of income by staying on UH, when compared to other drops, it's not much. Gape gives only 15% less points in drops than UH while Burrowbone is 26% less. However, UH pales in comparison to the first true plat monster:Filchers. Filchers gives 158% more points in drops than UH. This is why many people go after staying on Filchers indefinitely during the game: good income, greatest exp, relatively easy to achieve. Basically, there are many abyss monsters, mostly on the lower end of Abyss (the higher end of Abyss monsters have really low drop rates) that have 3/4 to 2/3 of the income potential of the UH. When you finish 1M kills on UH, you can move onto other abyss monsters and not suffer a huge setback in income.

By switching away from UH to other monsters; be it Abyss or Wastelands, we gain Compendium. The way of the Compendium and where to switch is very nuanced. There are basically 3 ways to progress after UH and vary in terms of how much you invest in equipment.

1. You don't invest in equipment at all, and choose to do all the lower compendium. Basically the entire Wastelands. Slowly. Even with the absolute lowest exp and drop gains in the game, you'll arrive at lvl 130 (T8) before you finish the Wastelands compendium and be in a great position to breeze through Abyss compendium.
2. You invest in getting all t6 augments to E9 and get full t7 equipment and empower some of them to E9. You'll switch monsters as you gradually become more powerful due to companions leveling and giving you raw stats.
3. You invest even more in equipment, get most T6 equipment to E9, go for the highest exp monster (that you can max kill), invest into T7 equipment similarly to force your way through the main questline until you finish “Pit of Greed” and get your final non-craftable sidearm (T7). You'll arrive at T8 and beyond the fastest while having best exp and good drop gains.

A thing of note is that completing a questline grants 100 permanent actions (10 minutes of combat), so if you progress through questlines more, you'll have an easier time to be at positive actions.

As you see, progressing through Compendium isn't as simple as it is. Even while doing abyss Compendium immediately, it may be better to get 1 rank (200k kills) in all monsters before going for the rank 3 (1M kills) for them. We need to delve into the topic of Compendium more.

Compendium is simple: you kill a certain amount of any monster and get their listed bonuses. There are 3 bonuses that are granted at 200k, 500k and 1M kills. The 500k bonus replaces the 200k bonus and so on. At 1M kills, you get another bonus: multikill bonus. This is explained more in the Multikill page. A summary of it is that it reduces the speed monsters become more powerful, so for killing a lot of monsters, it's quite useful, especially towards endgame where we'll be killing 50+ monsters. This is why people go back and grind wastelands compendium: the multikill bonus. Additionally, for every 10 Compendium ranks you gain 3% damage bonus (base 2%, multiplied by 1.5 from Corp skill).

After Wastelands, the 200k reward gives a great amount of stat while the 500k and 1M rewards barely increase the total amount of Compendium stat gained. Coupled with the 10 TR = 3% damage bonus, going for rank 1 for all Abyss compendium bonuses are optimal in terms of gaining combat stats fast.

My personal preference on the stats to focus on are speed > armor > pierce. Therefore, my recommendation to focus on which monsters are, in order:

1. Excavator - 4 speed at 1M kills (hardest one, you can switch this to when you can max kill and do others first)
2. Karth Drake - 3 speed at 1M kills
3. Warped Tormenter - 7 armor at 1M kills (you probably farmed this at your lvl 80 grind)
4. Shadow Giant - 7 armor at 1M kills
5. Flamebreather - 7 pierce at 1M kills

At 15 base kills, it takes 4,6 days to get 1M compendium for a monster from 0. However, this can be fastened up with Slayer mastery: a must when entering middle game and will be discussed a bit below.

Keep in mind that if you want to progress a lot faster and want to support the game, buy a VIP pack and you'll get 10 more max kills from VIP alone. Since currently credit prices are insanely high, I don't recommend buying VIP until you at least reach lvl 130 combat and unlock T8. You'll definitely need VIP when you arrive at t9 and start getting your t9 augments.

Slayer mastery is the ultimate max kill increase method, designed to increase your max kill over time as you progress through the game. Just about every player above 3 months of playtime is rushing this mastery. However, since we have been playing for close to 2 months of playtime, our total kill count should be around 7-8M kills. This complicates things:

• With no negative actions and no slayer/frenzy, we can kill 15*14460=216,900 monsters a day —> 1M kills in 4.62 days.
• The slayer mastery has terrible starting max kill bonus: +1 max kill 9M/8M/7M kills at rank 1/2/3.
• We wouldn't profit from the mastery at all until we get to rank 4, where it would give us +1 max kill. Our total kill count wouldn't be enough for getting +2 max kill from this rank when we hit rank 4. It may give us +2 max kill somewhere close to the end of getting rank 5 of Slayer.
• We would only start to profit decently from the mastery at rank 5, where it would give us at least +3 max kill.

When should you go for Slayer V? My recommendation is when you get 12M kills. Getting +2 kills isn't that significant, +3 kills is barely worth speeding up the snowballing of max kill limit while +4 kills is worth it enough to go for it. You can see how many monsters you've killed on the Compendium page, under “Total kills”.

If you want to go all the way towards the endgame and be a top player, you'll need to eventually do all Wastelands Compendium. The only question is when? You can immediately start working on Wastelands compendium after UH compendium, or at any time really. Due to it's simplicity, you can mix and match with Wastelands compendium at any moment, insert it into your grand plans whenever there's a roadblock.

The tradeoff for switching into Wastelands is getting the worst exp, drops and compendium stat gain. This is why I recommend getting income investments first (Rbot ranks, mining lasers, Cache ability) and then starting the grind when you have much more multikill (so it'll be shorter).

If you're immediately switching into the Wastelands compendium after UH, since you don't need to invest in equipment, you'll be very weak against Spire and incursions. However, Spire really isn't that great until you can get more than 60k points (at the end of the month) and get the 10 bonus actions. Incursions can be compensated by joining a team where a member can easily wipe the incursion and you're just an extra on the side. You can get some degreee of power by simply getting your T6 augments by slowly cruising through the questline and empowering them to E9 when needed.

Assuming we max Slayer mastery sometime during the Wastelands grind, we'll average 1M kills in 4 days, it will take 17 monsters * 4 days = 68 days. So, around 2 months of grind time. Abyss has 21 monsters, so it'll take a similar amount of time, especially if done after Wastelands and you have more max kills.

If you wait until you have all of the Wastelands compendium done, it'll take long enough that you'll be combat level 145, enough to get t9. This'll be covered in the advanced guide. For comparison, doing at most 5 R3 compendium for abyss monsters and getting most of them to R1 compendium will be enough to get to level 145.

Check the market. Generally after corporation donation event runs out, the prices drop by quite a lot. 2-3 days after the event end is the best time to buy the ores. Make buy orders for it and be patient. However, you have until level 100 to hoard all your ores. After all, we want to switch to better abyss monsters and be able to actually contribute on corporation incursions (level 4 is the best for now). Remember that this investment will stay until the game gets updated and T8 or higher augments are in place. For now, it's a permanent upgrade that will stay there forever: think about that when you are shaking your head at the colossal amount of gold you have spent. It will be worth it!

As t10 is the highest current tier, buying equipment from other players for t8 and below (2 tiers below max and below) needs only 1 redeeming coin. Therefore, buying a max empowered t8 equipment from other players is currently quite economical. And to buy equipment from others, you need to complete the quest that opens trading: Reclamation.

Even though it's early to ask the question of “Do I stay on Filchers?” again, it's important to determine if you need just the combat power and compendium progress to max kill Filchers. You can do it several ways, but the most used and recommended way is Abyss 200k compendiums, waiting for t9 and buying several pieces of max empowered t9 from other players.

T7 gear is the gateholder equipment for the end-game gear. They are much more abundant than any gear in the game as they are the most commonly used gear, even by the late game players. The reason is simple: T8 equipment is, comparatively to T7, hideously expensive. A single T8 piece requires around 500-600 Mechanoid Reinforcement to fully reinforce, and the empower items are also expensive. The lowest T8 piece can cost around 200M gold to fully upgrade. Some pieces, such as mainhand weapons, require 8.5 reactor cores which are just ridiculous to craft, costing over 600M gold to craft it. However, this opens up a neat opportunity for us that wasn't very profitable to do before: trading gear via redeeming coins. The T8 helm and T8 boots require the lowest reactor cores of 8.1, which means people will substitute that gear the quickest, meaning they will get rid of their T7 ones and try to make a profit off of them by selling them.

Here are the T8 gear requirement rankings, entirely determined by their reactor core models, from most valuable to least valuable:

1. Rifle (8.5 core) (most valuable)
2. Sidearm (8.5 core)
3. Chestpiece (8.4 core)
4. Leggings (8.4 core)
5. Boots (8.3 core)
6. Earring (8.3 core)
7. Shoulder (8.2 core)
8. Gloves (8.2 core)
9. Belt (8.1 core)
10. Helm (8.1 core) (least valuable)

Therefore, when you are looking at the trade channel for T7 gear, you should look at that order, as we will be crafting the T8 by ourselves. Since T9 came out, everyone is quickly swapping out their T8 equipment, so buying T8 from the market in the future is a very profitable endeavor. I would recommend crafting T7 and buying T8 items from other players at this moment, as they are in high supply at the moment, making their prices low.

When looking for gear, prioritize these things, in order:

• The rifle must have puncture 4.
• The T7 item should be at least E13. The coin cost, now that credit prices are rising, is high. Therefore, you should always look for E13 and above when buying an item to be worth it.
• If you are buying leggings or boots, they must all have 15% speed energizement. You might spend a couple million on rerolling the energizements otherwise.
• The chestpiece should have +4 armor per 10 levels in all cases, even if you're not doing a full armor build.
• The sidearm and rifle should have either IDR or damage% energizements.
• The speed stat of the item should be average or above average.
• If your IDR is below 60%, bolster it with IDR energizements on glove until it's above 60%.

Keep at acquiring the T7 gear as much as you can (preferably E11 or above for the future), focus on acquiring the T7 sidearm and get it to E9 empower, and keep at it.

The general goal is to have decent T7 gear (with speed being average or above average on the equipment, the most important) all around, with maybe the exception of a T6 shoulder if you invested to E10 it.

The next guide covers the road to the ultimate T8 gear combat level of 130, and the one after that covers the push for daily 4th dungeon unlock: Advanced Guide and End-game Guide.

Thank you for reading my guides,

Determinor