Summary
- Prioritize skills like Sprinting, Strength, and Fortitude in Abiotic Factor for a well-rounded survival experience solo or with friends.
- Level up your Crafting and First Aid skills to create essential items for survival and healing, gaining useful buffs along the way.
- Develop skills like Accuracy, Reloading, Sneaking, Cooking, and Construction for better combat, resource management, and base building in GATE.
When you find yourself stranded in the facilities within Abiotic Factor, it’s truly about the survival of the fittest. Many perils and challenges await, so you’ll need to equip yourself with the right abilities if you want to survive, and even though different roles have varied strengths and unique attributes, all skill trees are accessible to every player.
Regardless of what build you are going for, there are quite a few skills you’ll want to prioritize off the bat. You don’t necessarily need to max up every single skill (as that will depend on your preferences) but level these up to at least the fifth tier if you want a more well-rounded experience whether you’re solo or with friends.
10 Sprinting
Run, Forrest, Run!
Category: Fitness
GATE is a huge facility, and you’d be surprised how many twists and turns you encounter in these labs, and that doesn’t even take into account the portals that bring you to other realms. If you want to make it through with all your limbs intact, you’ll need to have the speed and stamina necessary to cover such lengths.
If you think you’ll be doing most of the exploring for your squad, you may want to get the Lab Assistant or Trans-Kinematic Researcher role to get immediate points in this skill.
The world is deceptively large but easy to traverse once you unlock shortcuts, which shouldn’t be too difficult to level up as you naturally gain XP from sprinting long distances. The fifth level of Sprinting nets you the Athletic trait, which gives you a chance to keep your stamina despite taking an action that would otherwise consume it.
9 Strength
Sworn To Carry So Many Burdens
Category: Fitness
Listen, it’s not hoarding if you’re going to put it all to use! Strength is the skill you want if you’re planning to haul heavy items and tons of loot around, which you will inevitably need while building your base. Packaged furniture can be extremely heavy, and the game has an encumbrance mechanic that prevents you from just carrying three refrigerators and a couch from one end of the lab to another.
The beautiful trick here is to always remain slightly encumbered, as this builds up your Strength skill efficiently, and you also get XP from hitting enemies with heavy weapons. The stronger you are, the more you can carry, so once you reach Strength 5, you can stomp those annoying Carbuncles in one hit and shake Vending Machines for free snacks, and further leveling also makes it easier to use heavy melee weapons.
8 Fortitude
Stand Your Ground
Category: Combat
Dangerous anomalies, trigger-happy radicalized military personnel, electricity, fall damage, you name it. So many things in this world seem bent to harm you so, how can a squishy little scientist outlive these terrors?
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Fortitude keeps you on your feet by giving you more health points and decreasing the damage you receive, and the more fortified you are, the tougher your skin. At Fortitude 5, your health regeneration happens more frequently thanks to Habituation; unfortunately, the primary way to gain XP for this skill is to get hit by enemies.
7 Crafting
You Can Fix It
Category: Crafting
This is the absolute bread and butter for any scientist trying to emerge victorious in GATE, and you can make all manner of items built to aid in your survival. Food, tools, furniture, armor, components, quest-related needs, and even a variety of weapons are at your disposal as long as you have the skill to craft them.
The higher your Crafting skill, the more recipes you unlock across every category, and you will gain access to bench upgrades. These will allow you to reinforce the bench (yes, it can break), add a suppression field to prevent Portal Storms, have an integrated heater, automatically access items from nearby containers while crafting, and install a Dioxohealer that passively heals you and other players.
6 First Aid
Healing For Dummies
Category: Crafting
There are so many possibilities for disease in this game, you could get radiation, and other forms of poisoning, start bleeding out, starve, become dehydrated, develop a lung condition, and break your bones. That’s just the starter pack of painful things that require immediate aid, so it’s worth building the First Aid skill even if you don’t take on the medic role in the team; the higher the level of this skill, the more health you regain from healing items.
If you want to level this skill up fast, craft tons of First Aid gear as often as you can. This counts towards XP without having to wait around to get injured. Bandages are the easiest to craft, but you can also keep a good stock of anti-radiation and injections.
From levels three to five, you gain some very useful buffs in the First Aid tree, and Refreshing Touch lets you provide extra hydration to any other player you heal. Rad Remover gives you the recipe for the Pentetic Acid Syringe, which is a real lifesaver when you are spilling all your guts and ticking off the Geiger counter, and finally, Bedside Manner lets you see player debuffs just by standing near them.
5 Accuracy
You Shoot, You Live
Category: Combat
Every ranged weapon in the game has weapon sway, meaning you can’t simply aim straight with a steady reticle to rely on, which can get very troublesome when you have multiple enemies attacking you. It’s especially difficult in the earlier game stages when you likely only have access to a crossbow that needs to be reloaded after every shot.
Because you spend most of the game having a limited health pool, you’ll want to get your accuracy up so you don’t have to engage in melee combat unless it's absolutely necessary. The higher you level up this skill, the less recoil your weapons have and the more accurate your shots are, and you also get access to a semi-ADS function by level five that zooms in as you aim.
4 Reloading
More Bullets Per Minute
Category: Combat
As you level up your Accuracy, you will inevitably start leveling this up as well; you get more XP every time you reload, and you will be doing a lot of that. Most early-game ranged weapons don’t have huge magazines, so progressing this skill shouldn’t be too hard.
As this skill improves, the less clumsy you are at reloading, so it doesn’t take you painstakingly long just to get a new mag or bolt in. You also unlock Ammo Crafter at the fifth level, which doubles the speed of your ammo crafting.
3 Sneaking
Safety In The Shadows
Category: Fitness
Whether you like to face your enemies head-on or prefer to make your way around the facility unnoticed, Sneaking is a very useful skill to develop. When leveled up, enemies take a longer time to notice your presence, which is useful if you want a headstart in combat or just want to get some loot before a speedy escape.
At Sneaking 2, you gain access to a Sneak Attack that can potentially deal double damage on your first blow, and at Sneaking 5, you learn Biotic Shadow. This nifty skill increases your movement speed while crouching and gives you the ability to roll.
2 Cooking
Food Science
Category: Crafting
There is a chef job available to players, but the Cooking skill should not be relegated to that role alone. You will require constant sustenance in this game if you want to survive and have an easier time getting things done and Cooking 3 comes with a wonderful new ability - Soupsmith.
This opens the world of soups to you, which is super useful because every kind of soup comes with buffs; you can access soup recipes through your Journal, and unlike other dishes, soups won’t give you radiation either. Even if you end up making Bad Soup, it will still fill up both your Hunger and Thirst meters, so learn all the soups and you can get buffs to your stamina, hunger, and thirst management, agriculture, accuracy, reloading, and more.
1 Construction
Building Home In A Hopeless Place
Category: Crafting
As you might have guessed, Construction has to do with building and packaging furniture, and the most useful structures to get are couches and chairs for rest (and crafting beds), and cabinets for storage. There are plenty of filing cabinets around the facility, and they can hold tons of items safely. Bigger ones have even more inventory space than the storage crates you can craft.
You will also want to package a refrigerator or two to store your perishable food items; these also provide some radiation lining, so you can put items with high radiation in a dedicated Rads fridge to lessen the negative effects on nearby players. Aside from improving the speed at which you build and package things, increasing this Skill also makes it less likely for furniture to break in the packaging process.
