Mycopunk Upgrade Guide: What to Unlock First, and What to Ignore Until 13

The single most expensive mistake in Mycopunk is spending your first hour's currency on an Exotic that fights your employee's kit. The second is refusing to spend anything until you understand the grid, which leaves you under-armed at threat 3 for no reason.

This guide is the spending order — what to buy, what to bank, and what to leave on the shelf until the board can support it.

The four phases of an account

Everything below is about not skipping a phase.

Levels 1–6: buy weapons, not stats

Two weapons unlock at level 3 that carry an account further than any early Epic: Gunship Cannon and FR.15833 Plate Launcher. Gunship's shells handle groups and its Prism cell scales with pattern size, so it keeps improving as your board fills. Plate Launcher is a one-shot-per-magazine skill weapon that teaches you to place damage rather than spray it.

Take Gunship Cannon first if you play solo. Take Plate Launcher first if you already have a friend holding a doorway — it deletes whatever is standing in it.

Do not buy a second primary yet. You cannot fill two grids at level 6, and an empty grid is worse than a small focused one.

Early cells that are always safe: Reinforced Plating, Repair Siphon, Polished Chassis (all 1-cell Standards). They cost almost nothing in footprint and they stop the deaths that come from being caught in the open during a modifier wave.

Levels 7–12: build one cluster and fix your uptime

By now you should know your employee's damage engine. Spend on cells that feed that engine and on nothing else.

The two uptime cells people skip and then complain about:

• Ammo Processor — without it, every fast weapon (Cycler, Trident S2, Street Sweeper) runs dry in the last third of a mission. This is not a luxury pick.
• Liquid Cooling / Thermal Paste — the cooldown pair for ability builds. Bruiser, Scrapper and Glider all live or die on ability uptime, and cooldown reduction stacks.

Skip anything that only helps at full health, and skip resistance cells until elemental modifiers start showing up in your rotation. On threat 1–3 nothing applies enough status to matter.

Level 13: the infusion window

This is the pivot point of the whole account. Pattern infusion unlocks at player level 13, and after the 2.0.2 rescale it is a genuine damage multiplier: infusing with a larger pattern increases stats more than it used to, and infusing with a smaller one no longer ruins the cell.

Three rules for the window:

1. Bank duplicates from level 10. Every duplicate of your main damage cell is an infusion waiting to happen.
2. Infuse one cell, deeply. Do not spread three shallow infusions across the board. The multiplier compounds on the cell you actually shoot with.
3. Refuse the temptation to infuse a filler. A 4-cell Standard is still a Standard.

If you have been hoarding patterns, level 13 is where your damage jumps a full threat tier without a single new drop.

Levels 14–20: the second identity

Now you can afford a second Epic, and this is where builds diverge:

• Bruiser: Modular Construction is the purchase that changes the character. Six cubes with five extra charges is both defence and mobility.
• Scrapper: Parallel Wiring and Spare Cable are the flight-enabler pair. Buy both before any damage.
• Glider: Star Fuel plus a duration cell. Since 2.0.2 the larger-pattern infusion extends flight instead of cutting it.
• Wrangler: a second damage Epic next to Eyes Up Here. Nothing structural needed.
• Mycologist: Engineered Infection. Without it the infection ramp plateaus.

Levels 20–30: buy the floor, not the ceiling

The last ten levels are about surviving threat 6 and 7, not about topping the damage chart. What actually keeps a build alive up there:

• Two resistance cells matching whatever elemental modifiers are in rotation this week.
• One movement cell you did not have — a second dash/slide beats a third damage cell at this point.
• An Oddity only if it expands the grid (Boundary Incursion) or changes a mechanic (Modular Construction). A four-cell stat Oddity is a trap.

Resist buying Exotics on sight. Four cells is a quarter of a 5×5 board, and if the cell does not interact with your engine it is a downgrade dressed as an upgrade.

What to ignore entirely

• Cosmetic-adjacent economy cells early (Frantic Greed) — the payoff arrives too late to matter in a 10-minute mission.
• Any upgrade that requires you to be at full health to function, unless you are running a dedicated healer.
• Resistance cells before elemental modifiers appear in your rotation.
• Second and third primaries before level 20. One grid, filled, beats three grids, empty.

The upgrade patterns page covers how to place what you buy; the leveling guide covers which missions get you to 13 fastest.

FAQ

What should I buy first in Mycopunk? Gunship Cannon at level 3, then 1-cell Standards that keep you alive. Stats before spectacle.

Is infusion worth it before level 20? Yes — at 13 it is the largest single damage increase available to a mid-game account, provided you infuse your main damage cell rather than a filler.

Should I save for an Exotic or buy two Epics? Two Epics, unless the Exotic changes a mechanic you rely on. Footprint is the scarcest resource on the board.

Do weapon unlocks compete with upgrade purchases? They share the same economy, which is exactly why the order matters: weapons first at levels 3–6, upgrades from 7 onward.