R.E.P.O. Upgrades Guide: Best Stats to Prioritize Early and Late
How to spend your cash on R.E.P.O. upgrades, which stats to stack first, and what matters once the late game gets nasty.
Cash burns fast in R.E.P.O. You scrape a level for everything it's got, roll up to the Service Station, and stare at a wall of boxes trying to figure out what's worth the money. Pick well and the next few levels basically play themselves. Pick badly and you're broke, slow, and getting folded by a Clown. Below is how the upgrade economy actually works, which stats earn their price early, and what to chase once the moon phases start making life ugly.
How the Shop and Energy Crystals Work Between Levels
The Service Station sits between every level, and it sells two very different kinds of things. Treating them the same is how squads go broke.
The first kind is stat upgrades. Health, Stamina, Strength, Range, Sprint Speed, Tumble Launch, Extra Jump, all of them come as boxes you use once. The effect sticks with you for the rest of the run. Next run, everything resets and you start over from scratch. They're personal too, which matters more than you'd think. More on that in a bit.
The second kind is consumables. Health packs, grenades, drones, energy crystals. Used once, gone.
Stock is random each visit, so you can't count on the box you want showing up. When a good one appears at a decent price, grab it. The shop also tends to only keep a couple of each upgrade type on the shelf per visit, so you can't clean out six stamina boxes in one stop even if you wanted to.
Pricing is the part people miss. Prices climb as your level number climbs, and buying the same upgrade again costs more than the first one did. That $2K stamina box early in the run might cost close to double by level 6. Cheap early buys are the best buys, pretty much every time.
Energy Crystals
Energy crystals are the yellow ones, and they confuse everyone at first. They're not loot and they don't count toward your quota. Buy one and it loads itself into the truck's charging station. Drop a drained weapon or tool into the slot back there, and the station refills it. It takes a few crystals to fill the whole bank from empty, and one is usually enough to top off a single weapon between levels.
Early on, skip them. They run about $7K to $9K, and if nobody owns anything with a charge bar, there's nothing for a crystal to fill. Once the team owns a bat, a tranq gun, or anything shock-based, a crystal is way cheaper than replacing the weapon it recharges. Crystal prices climb hard as the run goes on, which is why experienced players snap them up when they're cheap.
One odd little detail worth knowing. There's a tucked-away second shop up near the health packs, behind a loose ceiling panel. It stocks strange stuff like duct taped grenades and human grenades for surprisingly little. Pop the panel with a grenade or a thrown item when you have a spare minute and some cash to burn.
Health, Stamina, and Speed Upgrade Breakpoints
Every Semibot starts a run with 100 health and 50 stamina. That's the whole kit, and those two numbers are exactly where the early game tries to kill you.
The 100 damage line
Here's the big one. Several of the scariest entities deal 100 damage on a clean hit. The Huntsman's shotgun is the famous example, and the Loom, Clown, and Robe all sit in the same club. Base health is 100. A clean hit from any of them deletes you on the spot.
One Health upgrade adds 20 max HP. At 120, that same hit leaves you wrecked but alive, and alive means your team can drag you out. That single box is arguably the most important purchase of the first few levels. It usually runs somewhere between $3K and $8K depending on when you buy it, which makes it one of the pricier early picks. Worth it anyway.
A second stack gives you headroom for everything that piles on top. Headman and Mentalist hit for around 50, and the small stuff gnaws at you all level long. Two stacks is a comfortable place to stop for a while, since past that you're better off spending on ways to not get hit at all.
Healing has its own little economy too. Returning to the ship after a round restores 50 HP, and the neck interaction lets you hand a teammate 20 of your own. Hand it off before extraction, collect your 50 back on the ship, and the whole squad ends the round healthier than they started. Free healing, once you build the habit.
Stamina
Each Stamina box adds 10 max stamina. It's the cheapest upgrade in the shop, usually sitting between $2K and $5K, and all it does is let you run longer. That's more valuable than it sounds. Sprinting away is your only real defense against most entities, and hauling heavy loot drains the bar too. Running dry mid-chase with a pricey vase in tow is a classic run-ender. Three to five stacks is a comfortable baseline by mid-run.
Speed, and its catch
Sprint Speed adds about 20 percent per stack. It sounds free, but it isn't. Each stack also burns an extra point of stamina per second while you sprint, going by the wiki numbers, so speed quietly eats the stamina you just bought. The two pair well, but only if you buy both.
There's a stranger problem at high stacks. Past around four speed upgrades, your bot starts hopping on its own while sprinting. It's fun for movement and awful for cargo, since one involuntary hop into a doorframe can gut a fragile item's value. One or two speed stacks is plenty for most players.
Crouch Rest is the quiet cousin of the group. It speeds up your stamina regen while crouched, which matters a lot on maps with good hiding spots since you can recover safely behind cover. Buy it after you already have a stamina pool worth recovering, not before.
Grab Strength vs Range Tradeoffs for Hauling
Your grabber is the whole game, and two upgrades fight over it. Strength decides what you can lift. Range decides how far away you can lift it from.
What Strength does
Each Strength stack pumps your grabber power by about 25 percent, going by the fan wiki figures. In practice that means heavier valuables without a teammate's help, less wobble on fragile items, and less of a movement penalty while you're loaded up. The chunky loot tends to be where the money is, so strength is partly an income upgrade wearing a muscle costume.
It also decides which entities you can pick up and slam. Community strength charts put your base strength at 5 with zero upgrades, and the top monster breakpoint at 13. The rough tiers break down like this:
| Tier | Entities | What it takes | |---|---|---| | Freebies | Gnome, Banger | Grab them from the start | | Light | Rugrat, Upscream, Birthday Boy, Animal | A few Strength stacks | | Heavy | Clown, Headman, Robe, Trudge | Top of the chart, stacked-carrier territory | | Never | Peeper, Elsa, Tick | Can't be grabbed, don't try |
Two tricks soften those numbers a lot. Stunned monsters mostly drop to a lift requirement near zero, so whacking one with a heavy object first makes picking it up trivial. And a second player on the same grab adds their strength to yours, which works out to roughly five solo stacks since that's everyone's base.
What Range does
Each Range stack extends your reach by about 30 percent. That sounds boring, and it really isn't. Reach lets you pull loot down from shelves, over railings, and through doorways without actually stepping into the room where the nasty thing patrols. It also improves the scroll wheel, letting you push and pull held items further, which is how you thread something fragile through a tight doorway without dinging the walls.
So which one do you buy?
Strength makes money. Range keeps you alive to spend it. Solo, go strength first, because nobody is coming to help you lift the big ticket items, and slow solo income kills runs dead. In a full squad, let one person be the dedicated carrier while everyone else leans range and speed. Four bots each buying one strength stack is usually worse than one bot buying four and the rest covering each other's gaps.
Team Upgrade Sharing and Cost Scaling
This is the part new squads get wrong constantly. The wallet is shared. The upgrades are not.
Every dollar anyone extracts goes into one team pot, and anyone can spend it at the station. But each box only affects the bot that uses it. Buy health, and you're the only one walking around with the extra health. If three people all assume someone else grabbed it, nobody has it.
How the costs scale
Two things push prices up. The level number, and repeat purchases of the same upgrade type. Your third health box costs more than the second did, and every box costs more at level 8 than the same box at level 2. Stack that on top of the limited shelf stock and the lesson gets simple. Buy your cheap core stats early, while they're actually cheap.
The shared pot turns this into a coordination game. Thirty seconds of talking before anyone touches the counter prevents most of the classic disasters. Three duplicate grenades while nobody has a single health stack. Two people saving for the same big box. One well-upgraded carrier babysitting three bots made of paper.
Splitting the work
A setup that works well looks something like this:
- One carrier: Strength stacks first, then Extra Jump for the awkward hauls
- One runner: Stamina and Sprint Speed, ferries small loot fast
- One support: Health early, Crouch Rest later, holds health packs for emergencies
- One flex: whatever the team is missing, plus Map Player Count in bigger lobbies
Map Player Count deserves a quick mention. It adds a living-teammate counter to your map, and putting more points into it shows where everyone actually is, downed bots included. It's useless solo. In a four to six player lobby on the huge late maps, it saves a lot of wandering around trying to find whose head rolled off where.
Bigger lobbies have one more quirk worth knowing. Difficulty doesn't scale with player count, so a six person squad faces the same spawns a duo would. Same threats, more hands. Your upgrade money just spreads thinner across more bots, so the coordination tax is real.
Late Game Upgrade Priorities for Higher Difficulty Levels
The late game changes shape on you. Quotas sit around 70 percent of everything the level generated, bent by a difficulty curve that rises with the level number. The number of extraction points climbs too, from one on level 1 up to four from level 7 onward, so your routes get longer just as the maps get bigger. Monster tiers climb along with it, and by the back half of a run you're regularly seeing multiple top-tier spawns in the same level.
Then the moon gets involved. Every five levels a new phase starts, and you can check it in the escape menu or just look at the sky. Crescent from level 5, Half from 10, Full from 15, Super from 20. Each step gives entities more health, more speed, and more stun resistance, and energy tools start building overcharge that bursts if you don't vent them. The payoff is that orb values climb with the risk, so a scary late run is also the most profitable one.
What to actually buy
Health, still first. Late game damage comes from everywhere and the chip hits stack up fast. You want enough max HP that a Huntsman shot plus one careless moment doesn't end you on the spot.
Strength, second, if your squad fights at all. Monster orbs run roughly $3K to $10K depending on the entity, and high moon phases multiply that. A carrier stacked toward the top of the strength chart turns the things chasing you into a second income stream, and stunned targets lift at a fraction of the normal requirement.
Stamina and Crouch Rest earn their keep on the big maps. Four extractors means four long walks, and walking is the safest thing you do all level.
Your energy plan matters way more than it did early. Crystals get genuinely expensive late, so stretch what you already own. The Frying Pan has the best hits per charge of the melee options and the Boltzap is the most efficient ranged stun tool, going by community testing. When crystal prices get silly, lean on melee and let the expensive guns sit in the truck.
The vertical kit is a late luxury that pays for itself on multi-floor maps. Extra Jump covers gaps and high shelves. Tumble Wings let you glide down and cancel fall damage. Tumble Climb lets you roll into a wall and scale it, though it eats stamina fast, so buy the stamina before you buy the climb.
One co-op only late pick: the Death Head Battery. It gives your detached head more charge after you go down, so you can keep talking and hopping around to guide teammates to your body. Cheap insurance for a squad that's deep into a long run.
And keep the old rule in mind when the shop waves health packs at you. A large pack runs $9K to $12K for a one-time 100 HP restore, while a Health upgrade is a permanent +20 for less at base price. The upgrade wins on paper nine times out of ten. The pack wins when you're sitting at 40 HP about to walk into the worst room on the map.
Spend the cheap boxes early, save the big ones for when the pot can take the hit, and always leave room for a crystal or two once the team owns something with a charge bar.