Holy Resource Costs, Batman! – The Insane Upgrades and Resource Costs for Railjacks

So you’ve been playing with your Railjack for a bit and the first two things you will notice are that the base ship has basically no health and that the starter guns are fucking awful once you’ve completed the first or second missions. That’s alright! Because there’s two great ways in which you can get better gear!

The first way is simple. Get your clan to fund all the new Sigma MK gear in the clan dojo! You can get this gear in order, starting with crappy starter stuff, then MK1 versions of that stuff, then MK2, then finally MK3 versions. The MK3 versions though, if your clan has been working hard, would have only unlocked about a week ago, so not every clan will have the MK3 Sigma Series stuff yet. Once everything has been researched, you can replicate and repair Sigma Series items as you please.

The alternative way is to pick up wreckage during your missions. But this is risky business for two reasons – firstly you need a good ship to start with to be able to do the missions that drop good loot (mostly Saturn and Veil Proxima) and secondly… turns out these new parts… are both somewhat rare and have random stats on them.

See, the thing I left out is that you need resources to repair and build these parts. You need a lot of them. Sure, the quantities have been increased so we get more of them since Railjack’s release but you still need a lot of resources, many of which are only found in Railjack AND are often used in the repairing of your ship and making missiles for it and things like that as well. That would be fine, after all, ships are expensive to build and make. But it’s insanely easy to build something and then immediately get something better.

Let’s go back to that Signa class gear. You COULD build the MK1 stuff as soon as it’s available, but if you wait three days for the MK2 stuff to finish researching, you can build the MK2 stuff straight away. But you could also wait for the MK3 stuff to be finished researching and build that. OR you could head out, do missions and find Zekti, Lavan or Vadar ship parts and build those. Or rather, find ones with good stats, because these all have random stats on them.

My point is, it’s really easy to waste resources on ship parts and get new parts not long afterwards. It’s one thing to have high building costs and long building times on better gear, but when you have random stats tied to long build times and expensive resources, even if you get half the resources back when scrapping materials. It feels disheartening, like your efforts were wasted building your first weapons.

Worse, there’s a fucking limit. You can only pick up 30 pieces of wrecked parts at once and it is very easy to accidentally go over that limit if you do several missions in a row. Go over that limit and your extra parts will automatically get turned into Dirac. You don’t even get a choice, the same way you do with Riven mods.

Even Avionics stuff isn’t immune to this sort of shenanigans. There are in fact multiple copies of each Avionics mod (from the three different schools) and those Avionics mods are kinda like normal mods in that you can upgrade them but some mods upgrade more. It’s basically the difference between a Flawed (formerly Damaged) Flow mod, a normal Flow mod and a Primed Flow mod, except the most basic Bulkhead Avionics (for ship health) only has one node to upgrade and the most advanced one has 10 nodes to upgrade. And that’s on top of leveling up your Grid, which also costs Dirac.

I’ll be honest though, one of my bigger disappointments is that they didn’t call it Exo or Starto, the opposite of Endo.

Seriously though, it’s a genuine struggle. You either get your gear early and have to build better stuff later, wasting resources, or you struggle on with shitty ship gear until you get better weapons. Or you do what a lot of people do and join other people’s ships, helping with Archwing, engineering and gunning until you have all the resources you need.