The Surge: How to Increase Your Experience Modifier
Learn how The Surge rewards aggression and risk taking in our guide to increasing your experience modifier.
Developer Deck13 Interactive gives you several ways to accrue experience points—known as tech scrap—in The Surge. Only one method rewards your decisions to take risks by steadily rewarding you with more tech scrap for every enemy that you kill: increasing your experience modifier.
How to Increase Your Experience Modifier
Defeating enemies in The Surge gives you tech scraps, a two-in-one system for experience points and currency that you can use to increase your core power and upgrade your armor and weapons. Normally you receive a set amount of tech scraps every time you kill the same type of enemy. Every kill increases your experience modifier by a small amount, steadily raising the experience you gain from each kill.
You can check your experience modifier after killing an enemy, when the amount of tech scrap you get appears in the bottom-right corner of the screen. Your multiplier appears next to it.
However, resting at a MedBay resets your modifier just as it refills your life meter, recharges your healing injections, and revives enemies you defeated. Eventually you'll run low on life and injections. When that happens, you'll have to make a choice: return to a MedBay to refuel, thereby sacrificing your modifier; or press on, adding to the modifier with every kill while also increasing the likelihood of your character falling in combat and dropping all the tech scraps you worked so hard to amass.
How to Protect Your Experience Modifier
Deck13 knows how to sweeten the pot: if you've been fighting long enough to run low on healing injections, you've been fighting long enough to build up a substantive experience modifier. The best way to protect that modifier is to only focusing on growing it when you're comfortable with an area's layout and the enemies inhabiting it.
For example, don't sweat losing your modifier when you're exploring an area for the first time. Your goal should be to learn the lay of the land, get a bead on new enemy types and their armaments, discover shortcuts, and collect audio logs and items such as upgrade alloy you come across as you play. Once you've learned an area's ins and outs, go back to the MedBay to recharge, then take the longest possible route through the level, killing every enemy you meet to build your modifier. Ignore shortcuts; your objective is to fight as much as possible, not skirt encounters.
Once you're satisfied with the amount of tech scrap you've accumulated, or your health is so low that engaging in another battle seems foolish, head back to the MedBay to bank your scrap and do it all over again.
Now that you know how to enhance your experience modifier, read more of our guides to The Surge to learn how to increase your weapon proficiency.
