Quasimorph drops you into a solar system full of numbers, factions, and systems that do not explain themselves. Underneath all of it sits one repeating loop. You take a contract from a faction, drop into a facility, clear floors, loot, fight, and extract, then bring materials back to your ship to upgrade your gear, your body, and your ship itself. Master that loop and everything else falls into place.
Quick answer: Start on Mars, Phobos, or Deimos (no Quasimorphosis pressure), rush the Monitoring and Scanner ship upgrades first, run Percy or Kensei Yukio with dodge-heavy clone points and a reliable rifle, and never spend your last action point stepping into an unexplored doorway.
The core loop, from ship to extraction
You live on a ship and control a PMC operator. From the ship you browse available contracts, pick one, and load your clone with ammo, food, medicine, and weapons before launching. This prep step never changes, so learn it early.
Each facility has multiple floors. The map stays dark until you explore it. You move room by room, open doors, fight enemies, loot containers, and push toward the elevator to the next floor or the extraction point. Enemies patrol or wait in rooms, and the moment one spots you it alerts the rest. They tend to bunch into long single-file lines and rush whatever door you are standing at.
When the mission ends, whether you extract or die, you return to the ship with whatever you managed to carry out. If you die, you lose everything you brought in and everything you looted on that run. There are no second chances on a lost clone.
Start on Mars and its moons
Mars is the best early area. It has many stations and no Quasimorphosis, which means space demons do not burst out of enemies and no horror counter climbs as you move. Phobos and Deimos share that safety, so treat all three as your farming grounds. The Moon, by contrast, has Quasimorphosis active, so avoid it as a starter zone.
Return to Earth only when you need to buy things. Planetary positions change travel time, so watch the alignment before you commit to a long trip. Time keeps moving while you fly and while missions run, and factions grow stronger in the background, so wasted travel is wasted progress.
Building a clone that survives
Percy Fawcett is the strongest early body for most players. He has high health, a high pain threshold, a large calorie capacity, and an armor perk that makes small-arms fire far less dangerous. His trait raises all resistances, and even a modest amount of armor gives a big return because resistances scale logarithmically. Pair him with Scout of Hades or Tunnel Rat, and swap perks so he keeps the armor while gaining dodge from Tunnel Rat.
Kensei Yukio is the strong alternative, with better base accuracy and dodge. Keep him as a second body or move his useful perks onto Percy. On the clone screen, pour almost everything into dodge. Bring your combined shooting accuracy (clone plus weapon) to around 50 percent and stop there. That is enough to hit what you need without over-investing.
Note: Scouts of Hades is the easiest starter class on normal difficulty. If you prefer melee, Eclipse Blades works well early because strong melee and throwing weapons are common on the first planets. Even a melee build should still carry a ranged weapon for threats like flamethrowers and cutters.
Weapons, ranges, and staying alive in a fight
Weapon range is strict. If an enemy sits outside your gun’s listed range, you deal only a fraction of the normal damage. Carry both a short-range and a long-range weapon and skip anything in the middle, because mid-range guns end up weaker at both distances. Multi-shot guns burn durability fast, while single-shot high-damage rifles last longer and stay reliable early on.
Heavily armored enemies shrug off small-arms fire unless you bring the right damage type or enough pierce. Right-click enemies before engaging to see their weaknesses and stats. Fight from a distance whenever you can, since the best way to avoid damage is to avoid being hit at all.
A few practical tricks make floors much safer:
- Open doors from a distance with explosives to save weapon durability.
- Throw plastic and rags to create temporary cover.
- Watch for red armor, which hides bleeding, so you may not notice a wound until it is serious.
- Never spend your final action point stepping into an unexplored area or through a door.
Inventory, weight, and food management
Your inventory is limited, and weight directly cuts your dodge. Armor protects you but adds weight, so a full backpack can drive your dodge negative. Watch durability on your vest and backpack, because once either hits zero it starts dropping items with no clear warning. You often only notice after the loot is already gone. Buffalo backpacks hold a lot, and losing one packed with good loot hurts.
Food and water matter as much as ammo. Exploring a full floor without a plan can burn several stacks of food, and you can starve to death as easily as you can be shot. Some floors have vending machines stocked with food, others are empty, so plan supplies around mission length. Isabella Capet is a strong first clone here because her immunity to infection lets you eat raw meat and flesh from corpses as a free food source, which makes farming Mars maps nearly risk-free.
Set up your inventory tabs so items sort themselves when you receive and distribute loot. A practical layout looks like this:
| Tab | Contents |
|---|---|
| Tab 1 | Ammo, food, drinks, alcohol, pills, injectables, medical kits, dressings, repair kits, mines, access keys |
| Tab 2 | Helmets, armor, everything you can equip |
| Tab 3 | Parts, quasimorphic and human organs, crafting materials |
| Tab 4 | Goods, turrets, portable covers, high-value trade items |
How contracts and credit really work
Contracts are your main way to affect the solar system. Every contract has two sides, the attacker (beneficiary) and the station owner (victim), and you can switch sides using the button at the top right of the briefing screen. Working for the station owner brings friendly NPCs who fight the attackers and drop their gear when they die, though friendly fire is on, so mind your shots.
The big reward number on a contract is not straight cash. You receive the listed items first, and whatever value is left becomes credit with that one faction only. Low-reward contracts can pay entirely in items with zero credit, while high-reward ones usually leave more credit behind. You spend that credit at the faction’s stations on the items they produce and anything on their tech list.
Warning: If your reputation with a faction drops below zero while you still hold credit with them, the trade break deletes all of that credit. Do not attack factions you are stockpiling credit with.
Reading difficulty past the red skulls
Red skulls are misleading. They only change power concentration, which is the budget used to spawn enemies on each floor. Real difficulty is a mix of the faction, their current tech level, that power concentration number, and whether Quasimorphosis is active. A one-skull mission against a high-tech faction can still kill you, and power concentration numbers that look very different can produce almost the same enemy count per floor.
Quasimorphosis generally makes higher-power missions harder unless you already know how to manage it. On the flip side, missions without it against high-tech factions can feel harder because you get no extra help against their special forces. If you need specific upgrade materials, take contracts at the matching facility types, and when something still will not appear, open the commodities market to see who currently owns the stations that produce it.
Which factions to back
If you leave the big corporations (Hexarchy) alone, they take over the solar system. Minor factions never reach the higher tech tiers, their trade goods disappear, and the game turns repetitive. Keeping the smaller factions alive keeps their chips and trade stock available, so it pays to support them.
Reliable factions to work for include Civil Resistance, Franche-Comte, Unchained Belt, PlanetBridge, Coreward MG, Church of Revelation, and Grasshopper. Help Daydream Chems when it fits, and push back against Sunlight Coven if it grows too strong. Church of Revelation stations become useful once you build good reputation with them.
Reputation also drives prices. Good relations give large discounts, bad relations make everything expensive, and a negative reputation blocks you from landing at that faction’s stations entirely. Buy the clone and class chips you want as early as possible, then shift your spending toward ship-upgrade materials and resources.
Ship upgrades to prioritize first
Ship upgrades are the backbone of long-term progress, but only a few change the game early. Get these online before anything else.
| Upgrade | What it does |
|---|---|
| Monitoring | Generates new missions when you arrive at a location, up to five at full rank. Natural mission spawns take one to two weeks of game time, so this is the top priority. Rush it fully. |
| Scanner | Reveals floor layouts, starting with the first floor and later up to three. You see elevators, medical rooms, loot rooms, and danger zones before walking in, saving food and time. |
| Item quantity and level | Raises how many items and what item level you find on missions. The “fewer enemies” option helps during the first ten hours when the power spike hits. |
| Hangar (capsule) | Extraction slots start low. Push toward five, six, then eight slots, and use them to protect chips and rare items you refuse to lose on death. |
| Scavengers | Automatically bring resources after a mission. Once upgraded, they remove the need to loot common consumables. Pair with recycling for steady parts and gunpowder. |
Hold off on heavy engineering upgrades until the project-cost reductions appear, since early ones waste expensive chips. Rank upgrades on the clone, like an extra rank or fewer kills needed, give real health, better healing, and lower calorie use, so they are worth the investment.
What to loot and what to leave
Space is tight, so prioritize by value. Grab these in roughly this order:
- Containers and packages, especially gun and armor crates.
- Welding machines, hydraulic pumps, drillers, and other large industrial items.
- Thermal containers, drug packages, medical components, and bio-waste tanks.
- Turrets and robots, for defense missions and for recycling.
- Every chip.
- Every data pad or tablet.
- Augments when you can extract them.
- Neo-ceramic plates and other rare armor materials.
Sell excess goods back to factions for more credit. On armor, fix the missing resistance first, since weight reduction is often more valuable than raw numbers. On weapons, damage and range matter most, and passive class skills tend to be more reliable than active ones.
Chips and crafting decisions that pay off
Collect every chip you find. Class and clone chips unlock and upgrade your operators, basic item chips unlock recipes you can afford to improve early, and high-end or faction chips open stronger but pricier gear. Extract materials from body parts and gear to speed up mission completion and give yourself more to trade.
Once the loop is running, the pieces reinforce each other. Monitoring and Scanner hand you better, faster missions. Scavengers and recycling turn those missions into a steady flow of parts and consumables. The capsule and shuttle let you keep the rare pieces, while credit and reputation convert your excess into the exact chips and materials you still need. Get Monitoring and Scanner online first, protect the minor factions, keep Percy or Kensei alive with proper dodge and a reliable rifle, and the systems that felt random start working in your favor.
