This was originally part of a larger bit of work put into figuring out what the very best weapons were in the modpack I'm running that I decided to split off into it's own smaller guide.

It should be fairly complete but of course I may have missed something - feel free to add on further notes if there's an exceptional item that has been missed.

Frackin Universe adds a large number of gear items that transform or gain bonus stats when upgraded to higher tiwers, and this is just a little thing both pointing out this fact as well as talking about the ones that gain a lot from it.

As a general rule, the more forms a weapon can take, and the lower level it started with, the better it gets in the final form. I really like this feature so I explored as much of it as I could.



Nightarian Shortsword
Nightarian Knife
The two Nigharian weapons transform multiple times, first into a Honed Nightar Blade, gaining increased crit chance and damage and changing damage type to Silver, then to Peerless, then to Legendary Nightar weapons, continuing to gain crit chance and damage.
They go from fairly poor weapons to among the best one-handed weapons melee weapons in the game.

Protectorate Broadsword - Upgraded from the Broken Protectorate Sword from the Vanilla Quest, later further upgrades into the Power Sword - gaining a red blade empower effect and increased damage and crit stats.

Vai - Upgrades into the Daravai, in my opinion the single strongest one-handed melee weapon in the mod, gaining significant DPS and a spiffy visual upgrade.

Chain Blade - Upgrades into the Massacre Blade, gaining visual effects and causing every swing of the weapon to inflict heavy bleeding.

Solus Katana - Forged from the Solus Sword, upgrades further into the Valiantus Katana and Essenus Katana. It gets faster, deals more damage, has a longer combo, has better crit stats, and flings increasingly more projectiles with it's special.


Protectorate Pistol - Upgraded from the Damaged Pistol in the Armory station. Transforms into the Protectorate Incapacitator on enough upgrades, gaining significant damage upgrades and burst-fire.
Upgrades again into the Protectorate Decimator, a multi-shot burst-fire pistol.

Fusion Cannon - Upgrades into the Blastmark, gaining crit stats, fire rate, lower energy cost to fire, faster projectile speed and heavier knockback.

Breach Weapons (Pistol, Rifle, SMG) - Each upgrade into a variant that causes Frostburn instead of Burning as an elemental effect.

Auto Crossbow - Upgrades into Assail, gaining (Not expressed in the tooltip but you can definately feel it) a faster firing rate.

Laser Pistol, Laser Rifle - Upgrade into the Scatterlaser Pistol and Laser Carbine, gaining all-around very good and efficient statlines. There's nothing super stand out they're just efficient, solid weapons. The humble laser carbine's Secondary Fire is otherwise unique for a gun and is frankly excellent.

Fellshot Revolver - Upgrades into the Deadeye, and then into the Equalizer - firing two, then three pistol shots in a very tight spread. Among the best 1-handed weapons in the mod fully-upgraded.

Hailstrike - Upgrades into Deathstrike, firing twice as many projectiles per shot. Yeah.



Protectorate Shield - Continues upgrading the shield's appearance and health. At max tier it is among the best shields in the game. It doesn't provide any immunities or resistances but has a decent health pool and a massive shield regen bonus.

Shadowstaff - Upgrades into Shadowreap. I'm still not 100% sure of everything this does, but it seems to significantly increase the reaponsiveness of the weapon which was its principle weakness, so quite a strong upgrade.