G12 for Dummies Part 3: Building and Upgrading

Grid12 for Dummies

Part 3: Building stuff and upgrading your tank

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OK, so you've killed a few enemies, gotten a bit of loot, and now you're wondering what to do with it all. Time to build something!

Gridshards

The first kind of stuff we'll talk about are gridshards. This is the most common kind of loot, dropping from almost all enemies and many minions. For every 100 shards you pick up, you'll get an XP point for the tank you're driving that levels you up. At the moment, though, levels don't do anything yet.

Let's use them to build up a city! First, find one that you can deposit loot in. Cities are must a) have a clear path to Origin and b) have their surroundings clear of enemies before we can build them. Cities that meet these conditions are indicated by a light blue outline around them. Cities that don't have a purplish-pink outline.

Here's an ineligible town:

And here's the same town after it's been made eligible by clearing the area around it of enemies:

So find a blue city (or clear the area around a purple one) and you can deposit shards into it to make it bigger.

Roll your mouse over the icon to see its stats. You can see the town name, its level, and its wealth.

Wealth refers to how many gridshards people have invested into a particular town. The number following the slash is the wealth that will cause the town to level up (become bigger, and give us more facility sockets).

Park on the white pentagonal socket at the center of the town to start dumping shards in.

If you've deposited enough gridshards, the town will level up!

Leveling up will make the town bigger, and that may mean that the area around it will be filled with enemies again. That means that you'll need to clear the town again before dumping more shards into the town.

Facilities in cities offer us a way to nerf the enemies in an entire region (that's the area denoted by one of those big translucent rounded squares when you zoom out, in case you were wondering). Roll your mouse over a facility (one of the H-like things) inside a town to find out what they do.

Facilities are arranged in a tree, with higher level facilities being further from the socket. For each facility you want to build, you'll need to make sure that there is one fully constructed facility of the same color next to the facility you're about to build in the direction of the city center. If there isn't you won't be able to build your facility!

You can build where there's a green arrow pointing, but not at the crossed-out sockets.

Other than the tree thing, building a facility is much like building a city. Find a facility you want to build, park on the colored pentagonal socket, and if you have enough shards, a facility should appear.

There are lots of different kinds of facilities; a full listing can be found here on the wiki. Most of the time, the "best" facilities are the loot drop boosting facilities that occur at the 40k level. Build lots of these - they'll let you collect even more shards!

The inventory system

The other significant loot type you can get off enemies are inventory items, which I'll refer to simply as items. These items can be accessed by clicking on the white disk-platter like icon on the left side of the screen, above the chat window.

When you click on that you'll see two windows pop up. The yellow one on the left is your short-term storage, and the blue one on the right is your long-term storage.

Stuff you pick up appears in your short-term inventory. STI can hold an infinite number of items, but there's a catch: all items have an expiration time, set to 24 hours after pickup. When twenty-four hours have passed in real-world time, the items will disappear from your inventory. Each time you die, twelve hours will be taken off the expiration time of all items in storage, so if you die twice, you lose everything there!

You can move items to long term storage, which has none of these pitfalls; items placed there persist until they are used, sold, or deleted. However, you only get a limited number of them, and items that you place in long-term storage cannot be sent back to short-term storage, so use it wisely!

Click on an item to bring up a menu of possible actions.

Here are the options:

There are currently four kinds of items:

Tank unlocks allow you to unlock different kinds of tanks. The level of the augment determines the type of tank unlocked; you can look at the order tanks occur in the tank menu to see what level unlocks which tank. Level 1 is corsair, 2 is mustang, 3 is avenger, and so forth.

Storage space items give you more long-term storage space. When used, a storage space will increment the number of LTI slots by one. Storage slots can only be used if the current number of slots you have is less than or equal to the level of the storage item, so don't waste higher-level storage items when you don't have a lot of storage already!

Augments will increment the augment level of the selected tank by 1, provided that that tank's current augment level is less than the level of the augment item. These items allow you to augment your tank far in excess of what you would be able to with VP alone.

Protomodules don't do anything except make a pretty explosion when you use them; they were originally added as placeholders to test the inventory system. Since they don't drop anymore, they've become collectibles and are therefore highly priced despite their uselessness.

Prisms

Indicated by the orange box on the right (which reveals a full inventory of prisms when you hover over it), prisms are automatically equipped up items that apply a stat boost to your tank. Prisms apply to all tanks and provide a big boost (up to 40%!), but each time you die, all your prisms will be downgraded by a level.

The best prisms in the game are those with three stars, which give a 20% bonus (or a 5% bonus in the case of cooldown); they're referred to as pulchs and people will often say n/12 to refer to the fact that n of their 12 prisms are pulchs.

Splinters

There are six different kinds of crystal splinters (lightning-bolt shaped loot), which can be used to create HP regenerating crystals. Go to a city, click on an empty diamond-shaped slot in the bottom right, and you'll see this window come up:

Click on the crystal you want to craft, and it'll go in that slot. HP crystals can be used by clicking on them, or with the X, Y, and Z keys.

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