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.
