The Change from Avionics into Mods for Railjack

With the last Railjack update, something dramatic happened with modding. Originally, Railjacks had their own sets of mods, called Avionics. These worked very similar to normal mods, but were arranged in a special grid. You could upgrade both the grid and the mods themselves, and combining both gave better boosts.

But this was all changed in the Railjack Retrofit update. The grid went away completely and all the Avionics were turned into normal mods. We were given a very standard modding screen, almost identical to normal modding screens for Warframes and weapons. The whole Avionics modding system was completely removed. Everything changed, and now we modded the Plexus, to alter our Railjacks.

The good news

On the plus side, the Plexus is a lot easier to mod. You can clearly see your capacity. More importantly though, the modding screen is very familiar. If you’ve modded a gun before, then you have a good idea what to do with your Railjack. Simply throw on a bunch of damage mods and you’re mostly done. There’s a 2×8 grid, an Aura slot and two 1×3 screens for battle mods and tactical mods.

What’s odd though is that health and shields are still tied to the ship. All you are modding here on the Plexus are damage mods mostly. On the plus side though, there’s a ton more space, since the Battle and Tactical mod areas don’t have a maximum capacity. So you can easily fit in a full build, or at last a mostly filled build. Even with the best reactors available, with the old Railjack system, it was very hard to have a fully modded Railjack.

We also had all our scrap turned into Endo. Originally, Railjacks required a resource called Dirac to rank up mods, but, for ease, it was all turned into Endo. One less resource to worry about.

The bad news

There is some bad news to be had though. The costs of a lot of mods became more expensive. The base mod Hyperstrike has a capacity of 15! FIFTEEN! That’s more than Serration for normal guns, and the same amount as multishot for shotguns and rifles. The majority of Railjack mods are actually incredibly expensive. Which means, unless you’re like me and have multiples of the same mod, you’re going to need Forma for a full build. Which means leveling up your Railjack over and over.

And that whole thing about one less resource to worry about? We now have a new crafting material, used to make hull plating for our ships. This plating is now what determines your ship’s health and armour. Luckily, once you have the new hull armour, you can ignore the new resource entirely. But it kinda defeats the point of having less resources to worry about.

Are they better?

This is something I can’t answer. Are Railjack mods better than Railjack Avionics? I’m not entirely sure. While yes, the modding does seem more flexible and you can fit more mods on, there are caveats. You need a lot more endo to level these mods up. And if you want a full build, you need more forma.

But, frankly, I just think it’s a shame. The old Avionics menu looked really cool, and I thought it was pretty unique. But now, modding your Plexus is no different from modding an Archwing or K-Drive. The only difference are the battle and tactical mods. Aside from those? It’s just another thing to level up and forma. Okay, sure, the concept is identical. But a change of flavour is nice once in a while, and that’s what I liked about Avionics. That flavour is gone with the new modding system.