Beginner Guide: Classes, Upgrades & Survival

Choose an Employee and Unlock the Right First Weapon

A Mycopunk beginner guide should start where the game does: the employee screen. Four employees are available right now, and more are expected as early access continues. You can swap between them at any time in the hub by opening the pause menu and clicking on your character, so this is a preference rather than a permanent commitment. Every weapon works on every employee, which means no class gets locked out of a gun you enjoy.

All four are strong picks for new players, so choose whichever sounds fun and revisit later.

Read the mission board before you pull the lever

The drop pod outside your spawn room is where you select a mission. The board rotates roughly every ten minutes, and the biome and mission type that appear are randomized, while difficulty and swarm intensity are yours to set. Swarm intensity controls how often waves of enemies arrive, and both settings feed into the experience a run pays out — so keep them modest until you know the maps.

Before confirming, walk the hub. It is stuffed with silly interactables and easy achievements, including one for greeting Rochard, your handler, through the callout menu (hold X and select wave). There is an emote wheel on G as well.

Maps themselves are big and mostly static, split into several sub-biomes, but the objective locations shuffle on every drop, side objectives can appear mid-mission, and up to 29 different mission modifiers can stack on a single run. Expect chaos to escalate rather than repeat.

Pick your free weapon wisely

After the tutorial you choose one of two weapons to unlock at no cost.

The other weapon unlocks fairly quickly, so neither choice hurts you. There are no primary or secondary slots — you equip any two weapons you own, and dealing damage with one regenerates ammo for the other. That single rule is why you should swap constantly instead of holding one trigger.

Combat: Break the Parts, Not Just the Core

Combat is the section of a Mycopunk beginner guide that players skim, and it is the part that saves runs. Every enemy is assembled from parts, and each part can be destroyed individually: armor plating, shields, health chunks, weapons, even invulnerability generators. Killing the core ends the threat, but disarming it first is usually smarter, because destroyed parts stay on the ground and any surviving core — including a small one — can pick up a boss weapon and turn it on you.

Grenades are infinite and limited only by a cooldown, so use them on cooldown against clustered targets. Armor barely matters on grunts, but abominations and other large enemies carry multiple layers, and chewing through the same plate is far faster than chipping around the body.

Small cores sometimes drop small health chunks that heal but cannot overheal. Try not to vacuum every orb the moment it appears — fights run long, and leaving one for a teammate who is actually hurt is often the better call.

Movement, Revives, and Respawns

Staying alive comes down to never standing still. You can sprint, slide, mantle, and double jump, and even sprint backward, and every employee has at least one tool that doubles as mobility. Spam those abilities; they are not situational. Splitting away from your team is the fastest route to going down, and friendly fire is switched on, so mind your line of fire.

Death is not permanent. A downed teammate splits into two pieces that get flung across the map, and reviving means carrying both halves back together — no timer, no channel, just a scramble. If the body landed somewhere terrible, hold 4 to call spare parts down in front of you, and use the D19 Dart personal vehicle to cross the map quickly.

Respawn charges sit at the top center of your screen. Burn through them and the mission is over. Failing does not erase the upgrades or resources you collected during the run, but you lose the large completion bonuses and the end-of-mission loot rolls, which is the real penalty.

Two habits matter more than raw aim: use the terrain, including high ground and explosive plants that bait enemies into corrosive clouds, and respect the invisible clock. Enemies get nastier the longer a mission drags, so finish objectives before farming kills. You do not have to clear every spawn on the map.

If the menus give you a headache, turn UI distortion down to 10 and UI bloom to 50 in the graphics tab; lowering screen shake and enabling the reduced motion option in gameplay helps too.

Upgrades, Hex Grids, and Elemental Synergy

Upgrades are the heart of progression, and any Mycopunk beginner guide has to spend time here. Most arrive as glowing pyramids dropped by enemies — run over them to collect. If one despawns, it waits for you in the lost loot dispenser after the mission. Extra copies come from employee skill trees.

Collecting an upgrade unlocks it in your inventory for a small resource cost, then you slot it into a hex grid. Each upgrade has a shape, and stronger ones use bigger, more awkward patterns, so building a character is a puzzle as much as a choice. Grids grow separately for every employee and every weapon, so a maxed Glider does nothing for your Scrapper.

Decay is the standout for raw damage, since it debuffs a target so everything hits harder — it pairs with almost any build. Fire leans toward healing and shock toward move speed. Hollow-node upgrades are exclusive, so commit to an element early rather than splitting your grid.

Enemies use elements too. Getting electrocuted, set on fire, or caught in a gas cloud hurts badly in the first hours, before self-healing options come online.

Resources: Where Each One Spawns

Resource knowledge separates a smooth first week from a stalled one, and it deserves space in any Mycopunk beginner guide.

Yuko bombs have a small area of effect, so group grunts together before throwing. Hover over a region on the mission select screen to see which rare resources it offers before you commit to a drop.

Saxonite is the usual bottleneck, since only higher difficulties drop it reliably. Also, those element-colored barrels sitting on every map are explosives, not collectibles — punch with care.

Consumables are worth spending rather than hoarding: the bootleg replicator doubles all resources for the next mission, while the personal access token and premium loot license steer which employee or weapon your next upgrade belongs to. All three stack to five and can be activated mid-mission.

Levels, Skill Points, and Scrap

Leveling confuses plenty of new players, so this Mycopunk beginner guide splits the three tracks apart.

Levels never change your stats directly. Instead, your upgrade grid expands at employee and weapon levels 3, 6, and 10 — and separately for each one. Reaching player level 30 unlocks the ability to rotate upgrade nodes inside the grid, which is enormous for fitting awkward shapes. Progress slows noticeably after about level six, but there is no cap; beyond 30 you are collecting bragging rights.

Skill points spend one per node, adjacency does not matter, and "spend X points" requirements count points spent in any employee's tree. You still have to slot the node into a grid before it applies.

Crafting runs on scrap from broken-down duplicates: 4 scrap for a random upgrade, 6 for a weapon-specific one, 8 for the exact upgrade you want. Ten lower-tier scrap converts into one of the next tier — pricey, but worth doing as you approach the 100-per-type cap.

Cosmetics drop from the same pool. Skins roll with random properties, and scrapping one can yield an oyster; hand it to Rochard for a different cosmetic with a better chance of being a player skin.

FAQ

Can I change my employee after starting? Yes. Open the pause menu in the hub and click your character to switch. Weapons, upgrades, and grids stay tied to each employee and weapon individually, so switching is free but progress is not shared.

What should I unlock first in Mycopunk? Take the Swarm Launcher if you plan to jump into high hazard missions and want crowd control early, or the DMLR if you are sticking to gentler difficulties. The other unlock arrives quickly either way.

Do I lose progress if a mission fails? No. You keep the upgrades and resources you picked up during the run; you simply miss the completion bonuses and end-of-mission loot chances.

How do revives work? A downed teammate splits into two pieces. Carry both back together for an instant revive, or hold 4 to call spare parts down in front of you. As this Mycopunk beginner guide stresses, staying near your team makes the whole process a few seconds instead of a cross-map trek.