Believe it or not, you can upgrade your weapons in Atomfall, but you will need to find a few things before you can do so. There’s no blacksmith or firearms vendor who does all this for you in exchange for your hard-earned materials, and instead, you’ll need to learn the ability to upgrade weapons yourself.
This is done using a Mastery Manual, which are magazines that will teach you new skills upon reading them. With the right manual, you’ll learn exactly how to touch up your weapons and get more out of them. So without further ado, here’s how to upgrade weapons in Atomfall.
How to upgrade weapons in Atomfall
To upgrade weapons in Atomfall, you will first need to retrieve the Firearms Manual from Data Store Charlie in the Interchange. To do this, you will need to find at least one Atomic Battery to restore power to the area.
After collecting the Firearms Manual, three new Firearms-related Skills will become available to you under the ‘Survival’ tab in your Skills menu. The top-middle one, Gunsmith, is what allows you to unlock gun-upgrading recipes, but it will cost seven Training Stimulants to unlock.
Once you do unlock the Gunsmith Skill, you’ll be able to upgrade guns via your Crafting Menu. Simply click on them as you would a Bandage or Antidote, and provided you have the necessary materials – which are two copies of the weapon you wish to upgrade, and an amount of Gun Oil and Scrap – you’ll be able to upgrade a weapon right away.
Gun Oil, Scrap, and various firearms are looted across the map, and often found on the corpses of Outlaws or Protocol Soldiers. If you see a hostile NPC with a weapon you want to upgrade, kill them and loot it!
Weapons have three rarities in Atomfall: rusty, stock, and pristine. Rusty is what you’ll find most often, with stock weapons being rare, while pristine weapons can only be obtained by crafting them. As you’d expect, each rarity comes with an improvement to the weapons characteristics, and there’s an achievement to be unlocked if you manage to upgrade five weapons to pristine.
For more on Atomfall, take a look at where to find all Atomic Batteries, how to access Datlow Hall Conservatory, and how to solve the murder in the church.