NieR: Automata – Tips and Tricks for Beginners

Don’t Worry About Side Missions

I’m not saying to ignore them completely, because the side missions in NieR: Automata are really well done for the most part, but don’t worry about doing them all in one shot. As a semi open world game, NieR: Automata comes packed with quite a few side missions for you to attempt, and these are a good source of experience points, money, and materials. If you have time for them, definitely give them a shot.

However, if you’re one of those players (like me) who constantly worries about being locked out of side missions and never being able to go back to them ever again after a certain point in the story, don’t. After beating the game and seeing its third ending, you’ll unlock a Chapter Select function that lets you jump straight back into the open world.

Not only that, starting a second run with your cleared save file will give you access to all the side missions you missed as well. Mission completion will carry over to subsequent playthroughs of NieR: Automata too, so you won’t have to redo the ones you’ve already completed.

Sell All Your Trash

Over the course of the game, you will pick up a lot of materials scattered across the world and dropped by enemies. Heck, you might even decide to take up fishing as a casual pastime and end up with lots of fish in your inventory. Most of these items can be sold for huge sums of money. If you’re unsure of what to sell, look at the item descriptions and sell the ones that specifically say “Can be exchanged for money.” Those are the items you won’t need for upgrading or anything like that.

That said, it is pretty easy to get maxed out on upgrade materials like Crystals and Copper Ore. You can only carry up to 99 of each item in NieR: Automata, so once your inventory is full, feel free to sell some of those for extra cash.

Look Into Upgrading Your Pod

Your Pod is the most handy companion you’ll come across in NieR: Automata. By holding down R1, the Pod will fire a steady stream of bullets at your locked on enemies. You can also hit L1 to use your Pod’s special skill. While the Pod’s damage output might seem a bit low at first, you can upgrade it to make it even stronger. Hit up the Terminal vendor in the Bunker to purchase new Pod programs and to upgrade its base stats.

The materials required for Pod upgrades are actually quite rare, but the upgrades themselves are usually quite substantial. If you can’t upgrade the Pod just yet, don’t worry.

The Pod programs available in the game are quite varied, and can be used for a lot of situations. For instance, your Pod starts off with a laser blast, but you can obtain other programs that deal AOE damage and suspend enemies in the air. The laser is really good, but you should look for something that might be better suited to your play style.

If you don’t want to travel to the Bunker, the Resistance Camp also has a vendor who specializes in Pod upgrades.

Organize Your Chips

Chips are extremely overpowered in NieR: Automata, at least on Normal difficulty. When you first start out in the game, you might not think that chips make much of a difference, but you’ll soon see how wrong you are as you get more powerful ones. First things first, you’re going to want to increase your chip storage capacity. You can do this by talking to the upgrades vendor at either the Bunker Terminal or the Resistance Camp. Storage upgrades start at 8,000 G, but that price will go up as you buy some more.

Some really handy chips that will help you out during the game’s early hours include EXP Gain Up, Auto-Use, Auto-Heal, and Item Drop Rate Up. The EXP chip is useful for obvious reasons: the more levels you gain, the more powerful you’ll become. Auto-Use is a handy chip that automatically uses one of your recovery items whenever you hit critical health. The healing potency from Auto-Use is also higher than just using an item normally. The Item Drop Rate chip is another one that I like to keep on at all times because of the sheer amount of loot you can get from enemies. Larger machines will drop Machine Cores, which can be sold for a large sum of money. You’ll also get tons of materials to help with weapon upgrading. And if you don’t need these materials, just sell them off.

Chips can be bought from the supply vendor at the Resistance Camp, and I recommend buying a few when you gain access to those. Chips that increase your damage, defense, and HP are nice, but I found that my limited storage was better used on items that would help me in the long term. One other thing to note: once Devola and Popola are available in the Resistance Camp, be sure to check out their stock too. They sell some of the most useful chips in the game, including Overclock and Auto-Collect. The twins also sell chips that enhance your dodge, and let you chain combos even while evading. Emil is another great chips vendor, though his prices are a little bit on the steep side.

You definitely want Auto-Collect, which is basically a quality of life improvement chip that lets you pick up surrounding items without having to press any buttons. What a time saver. Overclock is a fantastic chip to have as it slows down time whenever you evade an attack. During the few seconds when time is slowed, you’ll have the opportunity to get in tons of hits, which is great for boss fights.

Lastly, you can also fuse chips together to increase their effectiveness. This can be done at the upgrades vendor, but be warned that increasing a chip’s potency will usually increase the amount of storage required too.

That said, if you see chips with a black diamond next to their name, save those. The diamond symbol means that the chip is at its optimal level, and will offer you the best potency with the least possible amount of storage required. If you happen to have two of the same chips with the diamond symbol, you can fuse those two together to create a higher level chip with that optimal cost.

Use the Map

NieR: Automata’s map isn’t the easiest thing to read, but once you figure out how it works, it becomes an incredibly useful tool to have around. The cool thing about the map is that it’s basically a 3D model of the in-game world, which means that you can pinpoint locations quite easily.

Before you can use the map efficiently, however, you need to activate access points around the world to unlock the satellite feed. Access points look kind of like vending machines, and you’ll need them in order to fast travel and save your game. Once you activate an access point, you’ll unlock new area info on your map.

Now for the map, you can use the right stick to rotate it, and even check the elevation of your quest markers. This means that you no longer have to suffer through the frustration of seemingly being at the right spot to activate the quest, but unable to find the actual NPC that gives it to you. By shifting the map to look at it from the horizontal view instead of a top-down one, you can get the rough location and verticality of the quest marker itself.

Pray, Retrieve, Repair

NieR: Automata doesn’t feature an auto-save system, so if you happen to die, you’ll respawn at the last access point you interacted with. If you do die, make sure to retrieve your body. Dying in Automata means that you’ll lose all of the chips you had installed at that point in time, and dying again without retrieving it means that those chips will be gone forever. You really don’t want that to happen.

That said, if you’re playing online, you will also stumble across the dead bodies of other players. You’ll have three interaction options: pray, retrieve, and repair. Praying for a dead android will restore your health, retrieving the corpse will grant you money and some temporary combat bonuses, and repairing it will allow the corpse to act as your ally for a short period of time.

Praying is a really handy mechanic in the early game, as it restores your HP completely. If you’re short on HP recovery items, or if you don’t have any chips that help with regeneration, you’re going to want to pray. A lot.