Complete Beginner’s Guide to Marathon – Progression Guide

When playing Marathon, the biggest challenge comes from learning the basics, as you get bombarded with hundreds of things to understand right at the gates.

The learning curve is steep, and this guide will focus on getting you familiar with the basics as quickly as possible, including mostly what to prioritize for progression.

Critical Things You Should Know to Progress in Marathon – Beginner’s Guide

The progression in most extraction shooter games revolves around getting loot, unlocking cool stuff, and leveling up. In Marathon, almost everything about progression revolves around questing.

Faction Progression

The very first thing you should do after finishing the tutorial is to accept contracts from the factions and activate one. You can only have one active contract at a time. That will slow down your progression, but you’d want to keep finishing these contracts to increase your reputation, level up, get gear from quest rewards, and most importantly, unlock upgrades along with new armory items.

There are six factions available: Cyberacme, NuCaloric, Traxus, Mida, Arachne, and Sekiguchi. Each of these factions provides you with specific types of upgrades in the game. For example, progressing with the Cyberacme faction unlocks useful “general” upgrades like giving you more vault space, improving heat efficiency, unlocking good backpacks, and even helping you gain credits faster.

To unlock more of these upgrades, you must continue to increase your rep with the faction by continuously finishing their contracts or quests.

Here are the specializations of each faction:

• Cyberacme – Vault capacity upgrade, backpacks, locksmithing, credits, and other general functions for your runner.
• NuCaloric – Healing, Shields, and other consumables for heating, buffs, and cleansing.
• Traxus – Weapon mods/chips, SMGs, and Assault Rifles
• Mida – Traps, grenades, and other general functions for your runner.
• Arachne – LMG, Railgun, Shotgun, melee perks, and other general functions for your runner.
• Sekiguchi – Core upgrades, energy amps, class ability perks, and other general functions for your runner.

Cyberacme is the first faction unlocked, and you’ll gradually unlock other factions as you progress. However, you’ll unlock all of the factions while having other contracts available with the other factions, giving you the freedom of choosing which ones to progress first.

Cyberacme should be the #1 priority, with NuCaloric being the close second. Cyberacme unlocks a lot of useful progression upgrades, such as better backpacks, more credits, and more vault space. Unlocking the backpacks in the armory should give you more return on credits in each successful raid, speeding up your progression, as almost everything in the game requires credits, including buying these upgrades.

Keep finishing quests one at a time until you level up Cyberacme enough to unlock the backpack and credits upgrade. Next, prioritize getting the better healing and shielding kits from NuCaloric. The rest of the factions or upgrades depend on your preference afterwards.

Earning Credits and Extracting Successfully

While questing and earning reputation from factions unlocks all the cool upgrades and mandatory items for your loadouts, currency or credits still play a crucial role in progression. If you keep dying, you’ll lose your valuable equipment. You’ll spend your remaining credits on more loadouts, not leaving you with enough left to buy your upgrades.

While there are some “Sponsored Kits” acquired from the armory for free, these are the most basic kits, just so you can continue playing and hopefully earn credits.

The best tip for earning credits early is to understand the item types and just completely forget about maximizing your backpack slots for the “best” items you can pick up in a run.

Looting is very easy as each place is dense with loot. You can fill up your backpack with loot in less than a minute, just by looting a few containers and loose loot inside key areas like the North and South Relay in the Perimeter beginner map.

The goal is to extract these as fast as possible. Just understanding the item types and what they do should help you sort loot better during a run. Take note of the small icon on top of each item. These are their item type or category. Healing items have a cross in the icon, while ammo items have a rectangle with a symbol in the middle (pertaining to the ammo type).

When you loot, you’ll slowly understand these item types and start thinking of prioritizing which ones you would need. Healing and ammo items are always useful and valuable since you use them in every run. The items with a garbage symbol are loot that are automatically sold for credits when you successfully extract. These items are just “fillers” when you don’t have enough items to fill up your backpack.

Apart from items that have actual use, including weapons, their rarity also plays a factor. Obviously, you’d want to get the highest rarity items over the lower ones regardless of their item type. They should always give more credits when sold. In later maps, you’ll find rarer items more frequently, but not in the beginner maps.

Just focus on surviving and earning credits to buy all the upgrades you need. The only rule that bypasses loot priorities is items you actually need for upgrades. If you go to the Faction menu and hover over an upgrade, some of them may have item requirements like Unstable Diodes or Biolens Seeds.

You can go to these upgrades and track the item, so you are aware of items that you need for upgrades when you pick them up or encounter them in a run.