So, you've bought one of the biggest multiplayer shooter releases of the year, and you're now signed up for a major grind-a-thon. You could bash your head into a wall repeatedly, making yourself a target as you intentionally run around with a pistol or do bizarre setups for achievements or challenges, or you could make life a bit easier for yourself using a bit of smarts and Battlefield's Portal feature.

"Farming", as I define it here, is setting up a private experience where you can fight against AI bots (who do fight back, but have a predictable skill level and often play in ways that are convenient for quickly racking up kills) in a way that's optimized to allow you to quickly get XP on your guns, your account and even ticks into challenges.

But as you may have noticed if you played the Open Beta, the versus Bots gamemode is now gone. But no matter, this is modern Battlefield, so we will make it ourselves and even improve on it slightly!

For those wondering about the ethics of this, or why do this instead of playing the real game, just know this is completely optional. We will all unlock attachments eventually, but it feels nice to be able to turn your brain off and grind them out in what is functionally a live shooting gallery, maybe listening to a podcast on the side, instead of overly sweating it out

And yes, Gun Mastery goes up to 50, so you can imagine the amount of kills to max out even a single gun.

And my apologies for the scrunched images, Steam no likey big images.

So, where do we begin with our fun farming simulator ?

First of all, we will need to use the Battlefield Portal experience builder. This is an official Battlefield site, you are not going to some weird risky website to do this. You can find it by navigating through the Battlefield site, or via this link: https://portal.battlefield.com/bf6/experiences

You will need to log in to your EA account (again, please exercise basic caution and navigate there yourself). Once that's done, click on the "Create New" button. You do not need to install the SDK, this will only take a few minutes.


The first page will ask you to pick a base template. You can create various experiences, but for our need Breakthrough is obviously the best option, as it has enemies spawning in one specific location and funneling into fixed objectives, maximizing our efficiency.


You will now enter the Portal experience designer. In the first window that opens, we immediately want to set our Breakthrough mode to last as long as possible so we minimize downtime. Make the following tweaks in Modeusing the sliders:

• Reinforcement Multiplier: 1000 %
  
• Sector Time: 1h

Resist the urge to modify too many things. Excessive modifications will lower or even turn off XP progression.

You can ignore Map Rotation as it's already set to what we want (Siege of Cairo), but feel free to modify it if you're tired of it or want to test out another map for farming.

Next, we will tab to Teams and enable the Bots so we can actually shoot something. While we are there, we will also set ourselves on the Defender team to make farming a bit easier (but you can be on attack if you'd prefer)

• Bot Spawn Type: Backfill
  
• Faction: NATO (hell yeah)

We are almost done already! Immediately ignore the other tabs and click on Publish on the left. Write a non-offensive name (I don't care if you hurt my feelings, but the AI moderator will), preferably something that'll make it easier to locate your epic AI farming gamemode that's totally a legitimate experience.

If you're already exhausted of this top-tier hacking, you can just click ahead.


Pick an image if you please, and then click to the last step.

Verify that your experience is labelled as "Verified game mode: Normal XP progression". Unless EA/DICE intervened, the settings in this guide should work just fine (I mean it's literally a 10x tickets AI server, if they disable XP for that, what would get XP ?)

If you've modified other settings and it shows something different, you may need to reset things to default. Once you're ready, mash that tasty Create New button, then Publish a few times for good measure (it didn't work on first click, go figure)


Congratulations, your abomination is out here in the world, ready to be played! And play we will. Now, boot up Battlefield 6 (you can also do this with the game open if you please)

Open the game and skip the twenty hour long opening cutscene. You'll arrive at the (horrible) Netlix menu interface. Don't worry, we're almost there.

On the little tab on the bottom left, click on "Community", then scroll down one further section to "Community Experiences" and click on "My Experiences"


You will see the newly created experience as an option. It may take a little bit to appear, or require you to mash that "Publish" button a little harder. This is why a good title and image helps a little, and why not putting slurs in the title helps too.


Click it.

You will now see a hosting server option. Since we're doing this as a private game, all we want to do is scroll down a little and input a password. Locate your hand and slam it down on your keyboard repeatedly (if you want friends to join you for stuff, maybe use a more legible password)

I recommend leaving Persistent Server off, as we obviously don't need the server to keep running once we're done, and EA is a small indie company that needs their server space for other important stuff.

Once you're done, click "Host"


Note that if you're unlucky, there may already be too many farming servers online, and you will see this funny little tidbit on the bottom right:



If this happens, you haven't been banned, your server simply wasn't set online. So how do we fix it ?

Keep your finger on the trigger, and pop, pop, pop. It will work eventually, I promise. You may want to do this at a time where all the school children are in school or asleep.

If you're finally allowed to host a server (or DICE finally adds local server hosting), you will now enter your match against AI.

There's nothing left to be said except enjoy your grind! Get to killing those bots, check annoying challenges you can crank out, and maybe consider padding your socially critical achievements!


(This was me previously testing with normal tickets, you should be seeing "2000 tickets". But the Portal server is getting slammed)

And if you're worried about your precious attachments, don't worry, they will come. Maybe consider not leaving your server too fast if you don't want to queue for a server loicense.

Happy shooting!