Beginner Tips - Ultimate Guide - Cyberpunk 2077

In this post I would like to go through Cyberpunk 2077 Beginner Tips, to get you started on the journey! I will look at the main mechanics and how to get the most out of your playthrough early in the game.

I would slowly like to build up big and important tips for Cyberpunk 2077 so that new players can look up and have all the needed knowledge to play the game without missing out.

Character Creation Tips

Difficulties

Picking difficulty is a personal preference. For example, I always play on Very Hard and all of my Cyberpunk 2077 Builds are made using this difficulty. However, I do not recommend this to everyone.

The main difference compared to other difficulties is that enemies may easily one-shot you, if you don't manage your mitigation chance and armor well, this also requires some knowledge of the game mechanics.

I would recommend starting with Normal, and if you feel the game is too easy just up the difficulty. Higher difficulty just means stronger enemies, not other benefits.

Lifepath Choice

This is one of the first decisions you will be making and from my experience, they have minor differences. Each of them offers a unique start and additional quest throughout the playthrough.

Regarding unique dialogue options, they were nothing major and would not impact the world in any way.

Still, I prefer the Nomad, as the beginning of the game is intense, and lets you see Night City from a different perspective before you enter it.

Picking attribute points

This is a much more important decision than one would think. Of course, if you don't care about min-maxing just take what looks good, OR... don't pick anything and decide later.

The attributes are important for some perks, like 1 point in Body will give access to Painkiller, which I think is mandatory for any character. Without it, you will be stranded for health regeneration.

Generally, if you are lost, for all my Cyberpunk 2077 builds I recommend what attributes to pick on character creation.

General Tips

This is the section where I included tips, but I couldn't decide which section to include.

Perk Points Refund

You can easily refund perk points if you find that your particular pick has not been useful. For example, you may invest in Cool and start with Throwing Knives. However, for some reason, if you do not like the weapons, you can refund those perk points and invest points into Pistols. Both of these are under the same attribute tree - Cool.

Refunding is straightforward. Just check the tooltip when you hover on the perk. For PC this is a mouse-wheel button click. However, if you want to refund attribute points things become quite complicated, which I will cover next.

Respec or Refund attributes

So CD Projekt Red was kind and after the 2.0 release gave a single attribute respec. Of course, this was already possible with mods, but not on the vanilla game. You may want to redistribute points if you want to try different Cyberpunk 2077 builds.

Sadly, this can only be done once per playthrough, so only do this when you have your eyes set on the build that you like. I have covered some Beginner Builds, which may help with the decision as they touch some of the end-game mechanics before you fully dedicate yourself.

Crafting items

Cyberpunk 2077 offers a crafting mechanic, which is pretty straightforward. Collect correct materials from item dismantling and use them to create or upgrade items.

Overall, it's pretty simple, but I thought you should know about it as it is easy to miss, but benefits are huge.

Exploration Tips

Steadily progress with the main story to finish Act 1

So Night City is huge, however, at the start of the game, you can only explore around Watson. For this reason, I recommend not delaying and finishing Act 1 main story relatively early. I would say level 8-10 is perfect to start The Heist quest.

There are a lot of things to explore in Night City - NCPD scanners, GIGs, Side Quests, collectibles, etc. So staying in Watson for too long will start feeling that the game is becoming boring.

Regina Jones GIGs

There is, however, one reason to stay longer in Watson and it's Regina Jones Gigs. After you finish them (there are 20+ of them) you will get access to Axolotl, which is one of the best cyberware to get. However, it costs a lot of Cyberware capacity, so this can be delayed until you are higher level (25+).

Dismantling and Selling Gear

So one thing that you may find is a lot of items, and I mean a lot. Almost every enemy you kill will drop something. This can become tedious, but in Night City you need two things:

• Eddies - to buy better cyberware, quickhacks, items, and upgrades
• Item Components - these are used to upgrade items and cyberware

So try to juggle between the two. Early on getting eddies is better as there are a few quests where they could be used and you can buy better cyberware.

However, once you get access to Tier 4 and higher (level 30+) I would start dismantling items as these components will be used to improve your gear to Tier 5 and Tier 5++. This will give a nice boost to damage, armor, and other stats.

Data Access Points - new Quickhacks and Components

The main question is how to get new Quickhacks. Well, there are a few main ways, which are fairly simple:

• Purchase from Netrunner vendors throughout the Night City. New quickhack tiers become available as you level up. if you do not find the one you need, just rest for 24 hours, so that their inventory will reset. Quickhacks that you have will not appear in their inventory.
• Hack access points. These can be found near groups of enemies with NCPD scanners. Just use Ping which will reveal everything in the network. Generally, access points are highlighted with red color on the minimap.

Cyberware

Ripperdoc Inventories and Cyberware

So after the big update of 2.0, ripperdoc mechanics were changed. Now all Night City ripperdocs have the same inventories. This means that you will get the same cyberware options from all of them. So just go to the closest one and don't waste time going through the whole town for specific options.

However, there is one outlier and it is Dog Town Ripperdocs, accessed with Phantom Liberty Expansion. These give access to additional normal and iconic cyberware, that can be much better than you get regularly based on your build.

Moreover, Ripperdoc inventories update with higher rarity every 10 levels:

1. Level 1 - Common (Tier 1) cyberware.
2. Level 10 - Uncommon (Tier 2) cyberware.
3. Level 20 - Rare (Tier 3) cyberware.
4. Level 30 - Epic (Tier 4) cyberware.
5. Level 40 - Legendary (Tier 5) cyberware.

Mandatory Ripperdoc visit at Level 10

Be sure to visit any Night City ripperdoc at level 10. They will give access to upgraded operating systems:

• Berserk, makes you invincible and provides unlimited stamina. Perfect for melee builds
• Sandevistan - slows time, works well with both ranged and melee weapons
• Cyberdecks - gives access to quickhacks.

So these will be a huge upgrade for the playstyle you want to play, and I recommend trying them all.

Managing Cyberware Capacity

This mechanic was introduced with the 2.0 update. This limits the amount of cyberware you can have and creates a way to min-max your builds. Early in the game, it will be difficult to chrome yourself up fully due to eddies and cyberware capacity limits. However, there are ways to increase it:

• Each level up gives additional capacity.

• Chrome Compressor cyberware.

• 50 from the Edgerunner​.

• Renaissance Punk​ perk

• Leveling Engineer Skill tree.

• Random Cyberware Capacity Shards

• Killing Special Psychos.

So there are plenty of ways to increase it which will allow you to equip the strongest iconic versions of many items.

Armor - is it that useful?

So the main thing that you may see in the Cyberware menu is the Armor bar. This is resistance to damage which should increase as you level up.

However, one of the Reddit posts, covered that max armor reduces damage by 60%. Which is a bit disappointing... Why? You have to fit the highest-cost cyberware to reach this, which can be expensive and only reachable in the late game.

Second, there is a big alternative - mitigation chance and mitigation strength. With a few perks and access to cyberware you can crank it up to reduce damage even more than 60%, and have almost full uptime. Here are a few combos:

• Countershell + Spring Joints + Neofiber + Kinetic Frame - Every time you lose substantial HP you can have an 80% mitigation chance and 80% mitigation strength on top of your armor
• Defenzikov + Kerenzikov +  Spring Joints + Neofiber - 100% mitigation chance after using Kerenzikov.

Don't Forget Cyberware Upgrades

This is an important mechanic if you have some spare Item Components. You can access the special menu on cyberware that allows you to upgrade them:

This is very useful to maximize the effectiveness of the items and also increase the armor that you get from some of the equipment. I just thought I would mention this so that you would not skip it.

Combat Tips

Clothes' impact on Combat

The main difference that the 2.0 update brought was that clothes now provide minimal stat boosts for the character. So you can just look however, you prefer and not worry whether this will impede your build performance.

Relic Perk Points (Phantom Liberty)

One important mechanic that expansion bought is the new relic tree. To level up it you will need to progress with the initial expansion story and collect perk points from special terminals

You will be able to find them throughout the Dog Town, and once you are close hear the "beeping" sound.

Quickhack Combos

This is a huge change that was introduced with the 2.0 update. Now quickhacks cost more RAM, but they can create powerful combos, that create unique effects. This requires a separate post and I have covered it in my Quickhack Combo guide.

If you plan on using Cyberdeck, I urge you to check it, so that you do not waste your RAMs on weak quickhacks that could be used to one-shot enemies.

Smart Weapons

If you wanna breeze through the story and not worry about precise shots, Cyberpunk World offers a solution - Smart Weapons. Overall, without any upgrades they are weaker than normal weapons, but they target automatically, making combat easier.

However, later on, with the correct perks, you can just landslide any game encounter. If you are interested I recommend checking my Smart Weapons Build.

Healing Items

So Healing items are now limited and have timed recharge. This can be daunting especially early in the game and on harder difficulties. However, you can easily improve their recharge rate with various perks and cyberware:

• Glutton for War​
• First Aid​
• Transfusion​
• Adrenaline Rush​
• Pain to Gain​
• Dorph-head​
• Health Freak​ - An additional healing charge is almost mandatory if you have free perk points.
• Borrowed Time​ - amazing perk, that with Reflex Tuner cyberware can ensure you will heal no matter what if close to death.
• Blood Pump - great cyberware, that gives a good instant health restore and then substantial restoration over time.
• Biomonitor - in my builds, I keep this cyberware mandatory. It automatically uses Healing items for you and increases their effectiveness

Skill Progression and leveling

You may have missed this but there is additional skill leveling that you can access via Character screen with attribute selection:

These are leveled passively when you do specific actions, mostly related to combat. To get information about them just hover on the progression to get information:

Why are these relevant? They give substantial benefits, like additional perk points, increased cyberware capacity. The last ones from the progression are even more powerful - 40% crit chance boost during sandevistan, EMP discharge, etc.