How to...

So, you've just started Starborne Frontiers, you've chosen your first Rare unit, gotten through the Campaign, picked up a few things and learnt a little about how to play.

If you're now wondering "What do I do next?", or "Which units should I use?", don't worry, this section will provide some helpful hints and tips for beginners, that will help you on your track to commanding an entire fleet of high powered units.

What do I do next?

• Use all of the available promo codes (found on this page) to give you a head start with free XP, Credits, Beacons, and more...
• Ensure you have levelled: 1 Defender (typically Shepherd), 1 Supporter (typically Shelter), 1 Attacker (I prefer Valiant, but you may have chosen differently), and 2 other units from your pulled beacons.
• If you get a Legendary Attacker, this will likely become your main attacker to go alongside your chosen Rare. You can also take APEX from the promo code if you haven't found anything else.
• If you hit and wall and can't progress, don't worry. You probably just haven't skilled your units. Head on over to the Anomalies, and kill them until you have enough Neurons to get your main squads skilled to maximum level. Focus on your Attacker(s) first. Skills can almost double your units damage output.
• If you have duplicate copies of your Rare or Epic units, you can refit your existing units using those copies. All units gain an additional bonus to their passive when you have refit them twice - often referred to as R2 (★★★★★★).
• Equip Sensors that have Crit Rate, Crit Power, HP %, Defense %, or Attack % as main stat.
• Equip Software that has HP %, Defense %, or Attack % as their main stat - for Debuffers you may optionally use Hacking; for Supporters/Defenders you may optionally use Security, this is unlikely to be warranted in early game though.
• Equip Thrusters that have Speed, HP %, Defense %, or Attack % as their main stat.
• Upgrade your most used units to 50 first. Upgrade all of your Epic units to 50 when you can do easily (using mainframes and Uncommon fodder units).
• Level your best/strongest Attacker to 60 when you have levelled all of your units skills to maximum, and all of your Epic units are 50. Eventually you'll be able to level a unit to 60 every couple of weeks, there is no rush to get 1 in the first month, it will likely hurt your account more than help it.

What should I NOT do?

• Do NOT sacrifice units for Fusing - Just pretend that this system does not exist. Nothing here is necessary until you're at least working on the Seasonal Abyss and/or Nightmare campaign, and by that time you'll likely have the units you would get from Fusing anyway. This is a VERY expensive system, and using it could have a huge negative impact on your ability to progress.
• When using the "Quick Rank" or "Rank" system, only use Common and Uncommon units as Fodder. You will need your Rare unit copies for other things, such as refit levels, Squad Level ranks, and Fusing later on when you have enough spare units to Fuse a Legendary unit.
• When you unlock multi-battle, you are given the option to filter things. This is not the most user-friendly filter, and you can automatically sell things that could actually be good for you.
• When upgrading equipment, Weapon, Hull, and Generator units always have Attack, HP, and Defense respectively. Try to avoid equipping Sensors, Software, or Thrusters that also have these stats, they're a credit blackhole, you will not get those credits back, and those items are not good.
• When you get your first, second, third, ..., tenth Legendary refit etc... don't just put it on whatever your current best unit is. Legendary refits (and to some degree Epic refits) are very rare and should only be used if you are going to use that unit long-term, and can get them to R2.
• Do NOT use a Legendary refit on the free units, such as APEX, Oleander (from Achievements), Lionheart, Asphodel, and any others that you cannot naturally pull from Beacons. These are generally not good units to refit until you have excess refits, as you cannot upgrade them with duplicate copies.

A general rule of thumb is do not spend any kind of currency (platinum, credits, xp bits, implant essence, blood tokens, duplicate units, epic & legendary refits) unless you're 100% certain that you want to do it and that it's the right thing for your account.

Nothing that you spend or do can be "undone" and you may regret your decision (for instance if you sacrifice all of your rare units to Fuse a unit that doesn't help you, or upgrade a unit to 60 when you don't have enough 50s).

Be aware that a lot of people give advice that can lead you down a dark path, because it works for them in their current hangar, but if may not for you where you're at in the game.

Which units should I use?

This is something that we see a lot for new players, and there's really no correct answer for this.

It all depends on what you pulled, as every hangar starts differently. If you got really lucky you might have some definite focus units, or you may just have some not so great units.

However, there are abilities that you likely will want in your battles that a few units can provide, that will make a big difference to your clear speed and progress.

Below is a list of those skills and on which units they can be found.

Currently you can claim one free copy of APEX by entering the code APEXLEGEND in to your game.

To access the code entry for the game follow these steps:

• click on the hamburger menu in the top right corner of the game.
• select settings
• go to the game tab
• select the input box for Claim promo code
• enter the code APEXLEGEND
• click on the "confirm" button

You will receive your unit in the mail.

In Abyss story mode you will find story driven battles that unlock over the course of the activity.

1 of the fights on each level of the abyss is a fragment battle, which rewards you with fragments towards Yazid in the first 10 levels of the Abyss.

The fights can be recognized by the enemy head icon.

Once you have a rare (blue) unit in your hangar (not to be confused with an Electric unit), open the unit by clicking on it.

On the left hand side there are several tabs, the skills tab is where you go to level up the skills.

You will need to fight Anomalies in order to gather Neurons for the upgrade process.

Once there are no more skill levels to add, the skill will be at maximum level, and the unit will get a new border in the hangar.

If you need to farm Anomalies for Neurons you can find out how many you need on the Anomalies page.

Ships in your hangar have a ranking that relates to their level.

All ships are rank 1 when recruited, you can level them up level-by-level from the rank tab for that unit.

Once a unit is at the maximum level for the rank they're at, you can rank them up to the next rank.

Getting a unit to rank 5 requires levelling them to level 40, then ranking them up 1 more time.

This can be done more easily in the new quick rank feature, which lets you rank up a unit 1 rank at a time without having to level them up (the levelling up is done automatically for you).

You will still require the necessary resources to perform the upgrades using this method.

For more information on levelling up see the Level Up Calculator page.

Critical gear set items come from either the Fenri Khaliriz Bounty or stage 7 of the campaign (any difficulty).

Protection gear set items come from the Mamma Maglienza Bounty.

You can see a full list of all the available sets, their names, icons, and descriptions on the Equipment Farm page.

For more information on equipment upgrades see the Upgrades page.

Conclave is a community event held in discord by the community manager and/or developers (sometimes).

You can find information about this in the announcements channels prior to the event.

Typically there is a conclave on the 1st, 3rd, and 5th Friday (UTC) of the month.

For US customers the Conclave will be on Thursday evenings, there are 2 conclaves during the event about 18 hours apart.

After each conclave concludes a code will be shared in the event-chat channel in discord, which you can use to claim some free resources.

Every 10 pull of Specialist beacons that results in 10 rare units will add 50 Platinum to the code.

Every 10 pull of Expert beacons will add 10 Energy Cells to the code.

The first event of the month is typically for new units, here you have a chance to get the new unit when pulling a Legendary from a Specialist beacon.

The second event of the month is typically for existing units, here you are guaranteed to get a specific legendary after a certain number of pulls.

For Antimatter unit this is likely to be 150 beacons, whereas other affinities are typically on your 100th beacon. This is subject to change of course.

The following codes are currently known to be valid (this may change at any point):

• Apexlegend
• Frontierscommunity
• thelawyeriswatching

The best way to farm XP bits is to do the highest campaign stage that you can complete level 6 for, on the hardest difficulty.

For example, Nightmare 10-6.

However, this depends a lot on your setup as well. If you take 3 minutes to clear 10-6, but only 20 seconds to clear 9-6, then you should farm 9-6 for optimum XP per hour.

Optimum XP per Energy spent will be the highest N-6 that you can do though.

The best way to farm Credits is to do the highest level of any Bounty Boss that you can kill with a 100% win ratio, the fastest.

Fenri Khaliriz is the go to for most players because most of the gear dropped can be used on any unit (Critical for instance).

There's steps to progression, but for a new account there's a few things you want to do.

New Players

Firstly you'll want to make sure that you do all of your daily/weekly/monthly missions to ensure that you're capping out on your rewards, with as little effort as possible.

This involves: 10 Anomaly kills, 5 ship levels, 10 bounty boss kills, 10 campaign battle wins, recruit 4 ships, and play 4 arena battles, daily.

You will usually need to win an additional 10 campaign and bounty battles every 5 days to cap the weekly challenge.

The monthly mission requires a little more effort.

Naturally if you do all of the dailies/weeklies you will by the end of the 20th day claim:

• 0/20 Equipment pieces to Level 12
• 4/4 Weekly Challenges
• 240/250 Campaign Battles
• 0/4 Unit upgrades to Rank 5

You can do the daily equipment upgrade, levelling any piece(s) of equipment 4 separate times for the daily, but this will not apply to the monthly unless you go from 11 to 12.

You can see the cost of equipment upgrades on the Upgrades page.

An Epic ★★★★★ piece for example will cost 127,916 credits to go from Level 11 to Level 12 for a total cost of 2,558,320 credits every 20 days for the Epic Beacon.

Besides the dailies, you want to use up all of your gained energy (not energy cells) on running the highest level Bounty that you can achieve, or the highest level Anomaly that you need neurons for.

You should have all of your Attackers and Debuffers (at the very least) max skilled, as you lose over half of your outgoing damage and debuff capability without those ranks.

Bounties are the best way to farm credits too, so if you can run an additional 20-30 bounties per day, this will help you with your equipment upgrade mission at least.

Finally, there's the main mission. This should in theory be done naturally, however, it can make sense to focus on it until it's complete. You will earn beacons, XP, credits, boosts and more from this mission track.

Veterans

Don't forget to:

• Do your dispatches
• Use your Faction Ops keys
• Farm your Abyss Anomaly boss (for Ultimate implants)
• Progress your Abyss to avoid capping your Jump Keys
• Get your highest score in the Alliance Raid that you can
• Farm, Farm, and Farm some more...

You can get specialist beacons from all of these possible locations:

Area of the Frontier	Beacons per Day	Beacons per Week	Beacons per Month
Playtime rewards	1	7	28-31
Platinum Market	0	2	8-10
Arena Market	0	0	5
Credit Market	0	2	8-10
Events	0	4-12	40-44
FREE Battle pass (10/20/30/40/50)	0	1	5
Alliance Raid (p2/p3/p4 + double reward)	0-6	0-42	0-186
Arena Archon placement (#1)	0	0	16-32
Abyss Seasonal	0-3	0-21	0-60
Daily login	0	1	4
Missions	0	3	12-15
Dispatch	0	1	4-5
Total	1-10	21-92	130-437