How does the whole weapon transformation work?

[arthasbg]

I used to do it a while ago but i have completely forgotten how it works. Can someone remind me how do you exactly go buy transfering/upgrading stats?

[Signal 40]

Man, I gave up trying to figure that stuff out. Better stuff usually drops right after I try to do it anyway. Just buy the colognes from my waifu, Argo.

[adobo]

Been doing it alot and it's pretty simple. You can unlock half the memory chips so keep in mind on which ones you want to be stuck there forever. The rare the weapon, the more chips it has.

Anyways, just farm for an epic or legendary and make sure half of the chips is things you want on it, then unlock the other half.

To increase the stats, shop from the dubious merchant for something cheap that has the chips you want. The selection changes every time you completely exit from the buy/sell menu.

[Guh~hey~hey~♫]

Also keep in mind that there's a soft and a hard cap on chips.

It's important when you upgrade them because below the soft cap they will only increase of 1-2% no matter the score of the weapon you using for the upgrade (so using high score for upgrade here is a waste), on the other hand once you reach the soft cap, if you wanna upgrade further, you will need high % chips to get more than 0.01% per upgrade (usually using chips with the exact same % that what your weapon currently have gives the best result).

The soft cap depends on the type of the chip, for damage against specific type of ennemies it's 20%, for critical damage/rate it's 30%, for auto-reload it's 50%, for accuracy it's 75%, for stability it's 100%, etc...

The hard cap depends on Lisbeth smith level (max is 12).

It's not a waste to upgrade a weapon even if you know you will have to change soon. Because you can use that upgraded weapon to give chips to the other NPCs (equip the ones you often take into your party first). It's even more interesting than just using your old upgraded weapon to upgrade the new ones because NPCs will keep their chips even when they change weapon while leveling up. You can also give chips to their accessories that way, it allow to "fix" those NPCs that have very bad VIT or AGI, or turn them into good luck charm for loots...

Give them maxed legendary and they will turn way more usefull for your party.

You will need to purchase the 10 millions upgrade from Argo to be able to do so though...

[SCamp]

A) Direct weapon upgrade. You just upgrade a weapon to be up to 2 levels higher than the base form.
B) Transforming...

1) Traits are locked or unlocked (all traits are active). This is easy to figure out. Depending on how many traits are on the weapon, you can unlock up to half of the total traits. If you have 8 traits on a weapon, you can have 4 unlocked. If you have a weapon with 4 locked traits, you can unlock 2 traits.
2) Unlocked traits can be traded out with traits that are not already on the base weapon... Or they can "eat" stuff on another weapon for a small gains towards a hard cap (1-2% gain to this cap) then towards a max cap (0.0x% gains). Locked traits will automatically eat other traits.

3) Fodder. Either you find it in the field (save it) or you go to the shady weapon merchant in Glocken (he's opposite of the general store) and refresh his stock (talk to him again) and search for weapons with traits you can use in order to up stats and buy multiple of those. Costs alot of money, but you'll eventually get to a point where you're swimming in money.

Only "tricky" bits are techniques dealing with swapping/juggling in traits that are already on the weapon. Requires "temporary storage" in the form of a garbage traits on weapons.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1630039266

Gamefaqs guide (old)
* https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps4/217398-sword-art-online-fatal-bullet/faqs/75678/farming-guides#weapon-crafting-guide
* https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps4/217398-sword-art-online-fatal-bullet/faqs/75696

The great thing about this game is that the only RNG involved is with finding good weapon drops. After that it's just a direct upgrade grind. In the dev's previous game, Freedom Wars, RNGing good traits was a huge factor in weapon manufacturing and resulted in hourse of savescumming results to keep past traits while getting a single trait (think of it like selective breeding of weapons). Also weapon manufacturing was based on real time production cycles... being several hours (so you had to grind up to reduce that). So... Savescumming.