Patch 0.6 Upgrading Your Frame and Crafting

I've seen this question come up a lot in zone chat, and also on the forum. I think it mostly stems from how different the new system is compared to the old tech tree, so I'll break it down for you.

There are 2 different ways to upgrade your frames. First you have the trait lines on the frames themselves. These can give you increases in movement speed and damage for both weapons and abilities, think of these as leveling your class. They take experience to increase, and give you stat increases across the board.

Second you can build better equipment for your frames. This will allow you to customize the frame for your play style. The twist in Firefall is that your gear has stat requirements. A new gun you build may have better damage, but it will also weigh more, so if you haven't leveled up your mass trait line, you'll end up moving slower with the new gun until you increase your frame's mass trait. Or you might build new jumpjets, but they have such a large power requirement that it reduces your overall damage until you increase your power trait line.

Traits:

Each frame has 3 trait lines that increase the stats for that specific frame. These are what you can upgrade in your garage. They are: Mass, Power, and Cores (or CPU). In each trait there is a current value (the yellow bar) a current maximum (the grey part of the bar) and the absolute maximum (the remaining black portion of the bar). By unlocking points along the trait line you increase your current maximum, and thus, the percentage of your current value compared to your current maximum.

Mass:

This is the maximum weight of equipment your frame can carry. You want to try and be on the left half of this bar. If you're to the left of the middle, you'll get a permanent increase to movement speed, as your used potion of the bar moves towards the right your base speed is decreased. The maximum value is 50% increase, and the minimum is a 50% decrease.

Power:

This is the maximum power your frame has available. The bonuses for power are on an exponential scale, with nearly 2/3 of your bar giving you a 25% bonus to attack damage. This damage bonus applies to weapons and skills. The maximum value is a 25% bonus, and the minimum is a 25% decrease.

Cores:

Cores (sometimes referred to as CPU) are currently what power your special abilities and your ultimate. Everyone starts off with 4 abilities that each require 2 cores. There is currently no bonus to using less than your maximum amount of cores, and you're unable to use more cores than are available. Higher level special abilities use additional cores. So until you've built better abilities, upgrading this trait will have no affect.

Battleframes:

There are a total of 10 points in each trait line, and the experience requirement is roughly exponential. Once you get past level 5 in a trait you will also need materials in addition to experience. Each frame has a single specific material required:

Frame	Material	Stat
Dreadnaught	Electroactive Carbon	CPU
Rhino	Energized Carbon	Power
Mammoth	Carbon Composites	Mass
Assault	Ceramic Dielectrics	Power
Tigerclaw	Ceramic Composites	Mass
Firecat	Ceramic Insulators	CPU
Biotech	Bio-organic Smartgels	CPU
Recluse	Bioactive Compounds	Power
Dragonfly	Bio-organic Sintergel	Mass
Engineer	Conductive Polymers	Power
Bastion	Hi-Strength Polymers	Mass
Electron	Electroactive Polymers	CPU
Recon	Hi-Tensile Metals	Mass
Nighthawk	Conductive Metals	Power
Raptor	Computational Metals	CPU

In order to fully upgrade a single trait line you need 2,420,500 experience, 325,000 of that frame's material, and 1 progression token. And to fully upgrade all 3 trait lines on a frame you would need a total of 7,261,500 experience, 975,000 of the frame material, and 3 progression tokens (Each progression token takes 10,000 Accord Merit Points and 278 hours of crafting).

Materials:

The first step in crafting is determining what type of material you want to use. If you look at the above chart you'll see that there are 5 families of materials, Carbon, Ceramic, Bio Materials, Polymers, and Metals. Each family has 3 members, with each member specializing in either Mass, Power, or CPU. So if you're going to build something that requires a high power stat metal, you would want to use Conductive Metals.

Once you've determined the material you need, you'll need to actually acquire some. Start using your scan hammer, and just like before, you'll find various types of materials around the game world. Also, just like before, each time you find a material there will be 2 additional stats, quality, and quantity. Quality affects how high the materials primary stat will be. So a quality 500 Computational Metal will have a CPU stat of 500.

In addition to the above 15 materials, there are 6 secondary materials. These are: Red, Yellow, Purple, Blue, and Green Crystite Hybrids, and Seed Crystite. Each of the colored hybrids corresponds to a material family. Red is Metal, Yellow is Bio, Purple is Polymer, Blue is Carbon, and Green is Ceramic. For every 1 raw material you refine you have a 1/1000 chance of also refining a Crystite Hybrid and a Seed Crystite. So refining 1000 quality 500 Raw Conductive Polymers will give you around 500 quality 500 Conductive Polymer, 250 Crystite, 1 quality 500 Purple Crystite Hybrid, and 1 quality 500 Seed Crystite.

Equipment:

Crafting equipment is similar to how it was pre-patch, but slightly more complicated and with different material names. Currently the first 2 tiers of equipment are unlocked for everyone to try, generally speaking T1 equipment will have lower requirements, fewer steps, but have lower stats. T2 equipment will have higher stats and more requirements, but takes more steps and more materials to craft.

One of the big benefits of the new crafting system is that you now have total control over the stats of the item you're trying to create. Instead of choosing between 5 or 6 different types of materials with different qualities, you only have to choose a single stat to worry about.

For example, a Firecat's T2 Thermal Cannon's clip size is based entirely on the Power stat of the Carbon material you build the Thermal Core sub-component out of. So, when you're building that sub-component you can only choose between different types of Carbon that you have, and they will all be listed showing you each one's Power stat. So if you want a large clip size, you would choose the Carbon that has the highest Power stat. But keep in mind, that by increasing clip size you'll increase the requirements of the final gun, so a larger clip size may increase the mass, the power, or both of the final gun. So if you aren't concerned with clip size you would want to choose the smallest Power value carbon you have, this will reduce the clip size, and also reduce the requirements of the final gun.

One more thing to keep in mind is that T2 equipment generally has an additional requirement to be used. For example, the Firecat's T2 gun requires you to unlock the Firecat's 6th Power trait upgrade, Zero Point Energy Inductor. If you don't have that trait unlocked, you won't be able to equip the new gun you built.

Conclusion:

Earn lots of experience, harvest tons of materials for the frame you want, unlock trait upgrades in the garage, then build equipment at the molecular printer to use.