Marathon: Best Faction Upgrades to Prioritize

Runners compete in the city of Marathon, battling each other, searching for essential supplies, and building relationships with six different groups.

As you finish contracts and gain experience, the different groups in the game will give you rewards like weapons and items. They also have special upgrades that can significantly improve your gameplay, but these take time to unlock.

To get these improvements, you’ll need to gather a lot of resources and money. It’s best to start by prioritizing upgrades that will significantly boost how quickly and effectively you operate.

This guide will help you choose the best upgrades to stay alive longer, by improving your equipment and stats.

Best Faction Upgrades to Get First

Now, let’s take a look at the CyberAcme faction. The image above shows the upgrades we recommend for them:

Expansion: Gain additional rows of vault capacity.
Informant: Increases data card credit rewards by 50%.
Carrier: Unlocks enhanced backpacks for purchase in the Armory.
Scavenger: Increased loot speed.
Firm Stance: Increased fall resistance.
Loot Siphon: Opening unlooted containers reduces tactical ability cooldown.

These upgrades are essential for faster progress, much like oil is for an engine. The ‘Informant’ upgrade, which boosts your credit rewards by 50%, is one of the first things every player in Marathon should unlock – it significantly speeds up how quickly you advance.

Heat Reduction

We still have more to discuss regarding CyAc. As you can see in the image, three key upgrades focus on reducing heat. Here’s a look at those upgrades:

Heat Sink: Increases the number of movement actions you can perform before overheating.
Quick Vent: Increased heat recovery speed.
Active Cool: Inreased heat recovery rate.

When you’re battling lots of UESC enemies, quickly moving between cover, or rushing to help your team, your armor will start to overheat. That’s why a better cooling system is essential in every situation.

Crafting Keys

Keys can be rare on Tau Ceti, but you can craft them yourself with the keymaker upgrade. This upgrade needs a reputation level of 16 with the CyAc faction, but it unlocks access to some of the game’s best items, making it a worthwhile investment to pursue early on.

Nu Caloric Essentials

You’ll go through a lot of healing items like patch kits and shield charges, so we recommend unlocking these upgrades from the Nu Caloric faction (as shown above).

Safeguard: Unlocks daily free shield charges in the armory.
Restore: Unlocks daily free patch kits in the armory.

To do well, especially in player-versus-player (PvP) battles, you’ll need to upgrade your shield implant. Nu Caloric has released an upgrade that lets you buy better shield implants in the armory.

Getting these Nu Caloric supplies will make your daily tasks easier and more efficient. You’ll get free medicine and a stronger shield, all at a great price – see details below.

Sekiguchi Cores

Once I’ve picked the shells that really fit how I like to play, I’ve learned it’s super important to keep a good supply of cores designed specifically for those shells. They’re what really boost my character’s skills and strengths!

As you level up Sekiguchi to level three, you’ll unlock a set of upgrades. These upgrades provide improved cores for each of your shells.

The Arachne Arsenal

The Arachne faction’s ‘Hard Strike’ upgrade boosts your damage with melee weapons and knives by 20%. This simple improvement will be very helpful when fighting UESC soldiers and other players up close.

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If you love the assassin shell, this upgrade should be one of your first purchases.

One of the best parts of Arachne is the awesome gear you can get! I’ve been grinding to unlock some seriously powerful weapons, and it’s totally worth it. You can snag the Retaliator LMG, a crazy railgun, and honestly, my go-to weapon? The combat shotgun – you can see it pictured above. It’s a game-changer!

Now that you’ve unlocked these improvements, building the perfect gear setup is easier than ever. You’ll have quick access to everything you need – health items, shields, weapons, special cores for each shell type, and keys to unlock rooms with the best loot.

2026-03-13 17:43