Legion is the main game, featuring a PvE roguelite adventure for up to two players. Arena is a PvE standalone expansion akin to a wave survival game. You could call it a demo to try out the mechanics of the main game. Purchasing Legion also unlocks the full version of Arena, and progress in one does carry over to the other.

See this thread on the Steam Community discussion forums for details about the differences between the Arena Premium Upgrade, Synthetik Supporter Pack, and Arena Supporter Pack:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/app/528230/discussions/0/1699416432413896945/
Note that if you have the game on Gog instead of Steam, not all the different DLCs are available.

Yes. You can hide it by mousing over the chat feed and clicking on the red X that appears.

Yes. The cog icon in the bottom left corner of both the menu screen and the pause screen opens the settings menu. From there, you can click the (A) and (B) keyboard key icons that appear in order to change your keybinds.

No. Like most roguelites, a run in Synthetik is meant to be played all at once with no chance to save your game and try something again. Upgrades and so on also don't carry over between runs, although class levels that you unlock with XP as you progress do.

No. There is no time constraint or pressure to finish levels quickly like in some other roguelites, and the game will not get harder with the clock. You should always try to clear each floor as thoroughly as possible to collect the most credits that you can. Always be sure to double-check the map by pressing Tab before leaving each floor to make sure you didn't miss anything.

That said, there is a mechanic in place to prevent you from going AFK while your passives recover (such as HP regeneration): if it takes you an excessively long time to move on to the next stage (longer that it would ever take to actually clear a floor while playing normally), you will get a 1-minute warning to reach the exit. If you don't reach it in time, a mid-game enemy called the executioner spawns to fight you. The executioner does not drop any kind of special loot, and only one will ever spawn in a room in this way.

Shockingly, all eight classes are actually pretty good, despite what some diehard players might tell you. The best/worst class is simply the one you are best/worst at.

While every class is good, some are indeed easier to pick up than others. While your mileage may vary, the most accessible classes, in my opinion, are:

• Riot Guard – Tanky fellow with many hitpoints and stun rounds on his starter gun. His starter SMG/shield is the only starting weapon that is intended to scale well to endgame; just be sure to get items and upgrades that mitigate its high heat buildup once you start upgrading it. Dash and shieldbash with upgraded Battlecry is a potent combo, especially once you get the prestige bonus.
  
• Breacher – Dash in, shoot shotgun, blow things up with bombs. I recommend stun grenades and methadone. Throw your bombs sideways relative to your dash to avoid self damage.
  
• Heavy Gunner – Shoot many bullets. Special ammo supply and overdose are basically essential when you're getting started; aside from supplying the starting gun, a side-effect of his level 25 talent lets the ammo supply reset heat on use in combat. The Routine memory module is pretty helpful to compensate for his slow speed. Try to replace the LG2 with basically any other automatic weapon as soon as you can.

That said, give all of them a try—your play style may be more acclimated to something different.

Whatever you settle into, though, as a new player you should endeavor to complete Riot Guard's class challenge as soon as possible to unlock its passive HP regen (see below).

Every class has a basic class challenge that unlocks a small global buff for all classes, which you can see by mousing over the last item on your class levels list called "Challenge". You can unlock this challenge by beating the standard Legion game at at least 140% difficulty. You should seek to unlock the Riot Guard's class challenge as soon as possible, as the passive HP regen it gives all classes is invaluable.

What pistol is best comes down to player preference as much as it comes down to the strengths and weaknesses of a given class.

Accurate weapons good for methodical headshots:

• Desert Eagle .50 (Commando only, hard to use)
  
• G17 Undercover (Rogue only, and a popular recommendation)
  
• Kaida Model H (Commando only, and a popular recommendation for Raider)
  
• Last Breath (has its fans because of jam immunity but IMO there are better picks)
  
• Master Chief (Guardian only, reasonably easy to use as far as heavy-type pistols go)
  
• PXS Covert Ops (Rogue only)
  
• PPQ-H Laser Pistol (Specialist only, and a popular recommendation for Engineer)
  
• Titanium Eagle (hard to use)

Easy-to-use pistols, or pistols for run and gun:

• Auto 9/45 (accurate burst fire but low damage per bullet; fairly general-purpose)
  
• Coil Pistol (Guardian only shotgun-type pistol, synergizes with Breacher's abilities)
  
• Kaida Laser Pistol (Specialist only, honestly not as good as PPQ-H)
  
• P25 Overdrive (runs hot, and a popular alternative for Engineer)
  
• P33 Compact (starter gun, average in most ways)
  
• TEC-9 (a decent backup weapon for stripping plating)
  
• 57 Fusion Classic (weak with shield bonus; an alternative for Gunner and Riot Guard who rely less on pistols)

Consider trying a sidearm that has a contrasting role to your starter weapon, if you have one—e.g., use the TEC-9 or Auto 9/45 on Sniper to strip armor plating, or try the Kaida Model H or Auto 9/45 on Heavy Gunner to have something accurate.

You can type the code /CYBERPOLICE945 in the in-game global chat to unlock the Auto 9/45 pistol for free to get you started.

There is a wiki for that. It's not fully up to date, but most of the items are on there.
https://synthetik.gamepedia.com/Items

Also check out the fan-made strategy guide, which is also not fully up to date but still useful:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QPwldzfs4m3pF9e-QJqKs4ulIFO54paVLuE8y9933oI/edit

Lastly, this guide contains screenshots of all the in-game item descriptions:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2003902578

Mouse over the floppy disk that appears at the top of the weapon stats.

Yes, actually, there is! If you research Supply Hack, you can manipulate the drop tables to give Demolisher more explosives, Breacher more shotguns, Sniper more machine guns sniper rifles, and everybody fewer Pressurized Impalers. Go to the Weapon and Item menus and left/right click the arrows to uptick/downtick a particular weapon/item as more/less likely to appear.

Using the right mouse button, click and drag an item from your inventory bar into the world to drop the item next to you.

To recycle the item, use the same technique to move the item to the red recycle bin that appears when you start to drag it.



Recycling items gives you credits to spend, and some give other benefits. After you buy the Recycling Info research in the game menu, you can see what the extra benefit is labeled as "R:" in the in-game item description.

Press the L key on your keyboard to drop a weapon.

You can't recycle weapons, however. Being able to recycle weapons would fundamentally upend the game's economy and require all of the shops, upgrade stations, and money boosts to be re-balanced.

When you collect a set of 6 bolts, you get a random item. When you collect a set of 4 cores, you get a unique heart core item which you can use to raise your maximum hitpoints. If you complete a set of bolts or cores while your inventory is full of 8 items, the item appears on the ground, and you must make room in your inventory by dropping or recycling a different item to pick it up.

Additionally, you can collect 4 cursed weapon parts to get a Cursed variant weapon, and 3 artifact pieces to get an artifact. You can see your progress assembling each set of collectibles on the bottom right corner of the screen after pressing Escape.

Weapon mastery does nothing beyond tracking how much you use a particular weapon. There used to be an in-game tooltip that said it reduces jam chance, even though that function had been removed while the tooltip accidentally remained for some time. If you see somebody say that weapon mastery reduces jam chance, they were likely led to error by this old tooltip.

In a word, the Luck stat is overpowered, and you should endeavor to raise it. Luck affects just about everything that meaningfully involves random chance, including but not limited to:

• Critical hit chance
  
• Odds of finding high-tier weapons and items
  
• Abilities that have a percent chance to trigger

A higher luck stat makes all of these things better, and can dramatically affect a given Legion run.

Scavenging increases the amount of random pickups that enemies drop when they die, such as ammo boxes or health pickups. To a lesser extent, it also theoretically makes crates and shops appear more often, but I've never been able to find an empirical difference.

In my humble opinion, scavenging doesn't offer enough to be worth investing into, especially as compared to boosting luck or movement speed or shields, whose benefits are plainly evident.

The various stores, upgrade stations, and other kiosks you can find around the world, collectively called shrines, are set up to work like oldschool computer terminals. Use the arrow keys to navigate left and right on the pop-up interface when you stand near the shrine, and press Y (for Yes) to accept.

Increased terror level corresponds to more dangerous enemies and increased boss health. Terror level can rise from picking up red and divine weapons, using weapons of dark purple tier and higher, gaining artifacts, opening cursed chests, traveling to high threat zones through teleporters, player death in co-op, and just generally progressing through the game. Escalated terror level persists for the rest of the run. There's no particular benefit to deliberately raising the terror level other than for the challenge.

When terror level rises, a squad of headhunter enemies also spawns on the map. These enemies are fast and do a lot of damage but aren't particularly difficult to kill, especially because they move in a tight formation that is easily gunned down all at once.

The term "curse" appears in a variety of contexts, including:

• Cursed weapon/item chests
  
• Cursed variants of weapons/items
  
• Curses directly affecting the player character

Cursed chests generally have high-tier loot inside, but opening them comes with risk. An opened cursed chest can inflict multiple dangerous effects, such as setting the player character's health to 5%, raising the terror level (and sending the accompanying headhunter squad), and inflicting the player with the Cursed Flesh curse, rendering them overall more vulnerable to injury. This curse can also stack up to two times, so carefully weigh your situation and the risk versus reward when considering opening a cursed chest.


Cursed weapons are one of many different types of weapon variants, and have no particular correlation to cursed weapon crates. Cursed variant weapons include a massive bonus to damage at the cost of rate of fire and magazine size. More importantly, they can injure the player character as they pull the trigger.

Some cursed weapons are actually very strong and have a manageable amount of self-damage, especially if you have good passive HP regeneration. Generally speaking, slow-shooting high-power weapons like sniper rifles fare better with this variant than rapid-fire automatic weapons like machine guns, as they proc the self damage less often than machine guns do.


When it comes to items, "cursed" is for most purposes simply one of many potential tiers that an item can come in that affects their power rating out of the box. Supposedly, they are effectively Ultra variants but with a longer cooldown, but my investigations do not support this and I've been unable to find anything unique about them. Either way, there is no danger or risk to using a cursed item.


When a player dies in multiplayer or opens a cursed chest, they incur the Cursed Flesh curse, which makes them more vulnerable to damage. The specific effects of the curse can be seen by mousing over the pentagrams that appear in the upper right corner of the screen when under the curse's effect. Cursed Flesh can stack up to two times, and makes aggressive play significantly more dangerous.

At shrines to the machine god Zir, players can voluntarily incur a curse of their choosing, which offer some kind of tradeoff involving a boon and a cost. Most of these curses are dangerous to use, but one particularly useful one to pick up at the end of a run before the final boss if possible is Curse of the Ignorant, which reduces money gain in exchange for granting damage resistance.

The game wiki has more details about shrine curses:
https://synthetik.gamepedia.com/Curses
(To my knowledge, the information about Cursed Chest on this page is outdated and can be ignored.)


After defeating the final boss, the player enters Loop, which is an after-game zone designed to be unwinnably difficult. Part of this involves inflicting increasing stacks of the Loop curse, which significantly reduce the player character's health and healing abilities. Each time you defeat the final boss, you gain a new stack of the Loop curse.

A player suffering from the Cursed Flesh curse has a variety of options for clearing their ailments. The most straightforward is by defeating a boss—Cursed Flesh is always removed once a boss stage is completed. Less reliable is making a prayer at a shrine to Zir: if the prayer is accepted, the player gains a temporary boon, and rarely might be cleared of their curses. The third way to clear curses is by using the rare Devil's Dice item, the details of which are described in the item description itself.

The Loop curse and curses deliberately accepted from a shrine to Zir cannot be cleared.

Click on an enemy's head to headshot them. More accurately, click such that the line of the bullet's travel will impact on the upper part of the head to land headshots most reliably. Even then, headshots are finicky; sometimes what you might reasonably expect to be a headshot may not register as one. Non-humanoid enemies that don't have heads cannot be headshot, and shields also protect from headshots.

There's a handful of things that affect whether your bullets go where you want them.

Deviation is the random spread of shots away from the aiming reticule. Lower deviation results in more shots landing where the player is aiming.

Recoil increases deviation under sustained fire. Higher recoil results in fewer bullets landing where the player is aiming when firing uninterrupted.

Recoil control counteracts the effects of recoil. Recoil control added to a weapon that has poor recoil results in more bullets landing where the player is aiming when firing uninterrupted.

It's a minigun.[synthetik.gamepedia.com] You have to hold down the button.



Also, if you got the Printing weapon variant of the Gladiator (not to be confused with the Gladiator's innate ammo printing), be careful not to expend all of your ammunition. The ammo gain penalty on Printing can combine with the enormous penalty built into the Gladiator itself to make it impossible to pick up more ammo.

Nope. You should always do this. You can even drop your RMB class item (e.g., Breacher's bombs or Raider's knife), as long as it's not the only item in your inventory.

As a related side note, consider turning off automatic item sorting in the game settings so that you can manually arrange your items to the inventory slots you want.

High-threat zones contain more enemies. Since defeating enemies is your primary source of income, high threat zones offer more credits than normal or low-threat zones. Additionally, high-threat zones have an increased chance to contain rare special events that can be completed for rewards.

After researching the prestige shop, a diamond icon will appear next to the game logo at the top of the screen. Click this to open the prestige shop.

To prestige a class and unlock its level 1 prestige bonus, you must first reach level 25 in that class. Once you have reached level 25 and also accumulated 1,000 data, you can buy the class prestige in the prestige shop. This resets the class to its baseline level, so you will have to level the class up again, but it's worth the effort to maximize the strength of your favorite classes.

No. Only the first level of prestige has any mechanical benefits.

You unlocked the Daily Modules upgrade in Research.

You can get the code for the TEC-9 pistol by subscribing to the official newsletter at https://www.synthetikgame.com/. Once you have the code, simply type it into global chat, and the TEC-9 will unlock in a few minutes. You may need to restart your game to access it.

That's not a question, but it's not an uncommon problem. First, check the spam folder in your email account; it may have been filtered out there. If you have waited 24 hours still didn't receive the email, come to the official Discord server for some help:
https://discord.gg/JyTVtKM

There are some one-time-use codes you can type in for a fun gimmick solo run. Others unlock starter equipment. Some known codes have been assembled in this guide here:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1995448736

No, that was the final boss. Everything after the doomsday device is Loop, which is essentially hardmode game+. Don't worry—you aren't intended to beat Loop; just see how far you can get.

Like, physically stuck in the world? Okay, don't panic; there is a solution, albeit a well-hidden one. Hit Esc. and click on the cog in the bottom left corner, then hit the second cog that appears. On the right side of the screen should be an option simply called "UNSTUCK". Click on this and you should be good to go. If it doesn't work the first time, try clicking it many times repeatedly.

Maybe. The game population exploded[steamcharts.com] in the wake of a certain YouTube video review, so sometimes the servers need to be restarted. If you seem to be having connectivity problems, just wait a couple minutes to log out and back in and try again, or try a different server region if available. It's also possible that the servers have simply gone down in the middle of the night Western Europe time, and the developers who would fix the problem are asleep. In this case, unfortunately you'll likely just have to wait until morning.

If you don't think either of these is the case and you're still having problems, come to the official Discord server for some help:
https://discord.gg/JyTVtKM