Marathon Faction Upgrades Guide: How to Plan and Track Your Progression

Faction upgrades are the backbone of long-term character power in Marathon. Every run you complete feeds into an upgrade tree across six factions — each specializing in a different combat role. This guide walks you through how to use the Runner Terminal Faction Progression Tracker to plan, track, and optimize your path to a maxed-out Runner.

What Are Faction Upgrades?

Marathon has six factions: CyberAcme, NuCaloric, Traxus, MIDA, Arachne, and Sekiguchi. Each faction offers a tree of upgrades across several categories:

• Stat — passive bonuses to your Runner’s baseline stats, such as Heat Capacity, ability cooldown reduction, health recovery speed, etc.
• Functions — active improvements like Data Cards being worth 50% more, opening containers rewarding credits, abilities having more charge at the start of runs, stc.
• Armory — unlock the ability to buy items and/or receive daily free items from the armory, such as Shield Charges, Patch Kits, Shield Implants, Backpacks, weapons, etc.
• Inventory — vault space and credit capacity
• Capstone — powerful passives that can be unlocked once you reach enough nodes in the tree

Every upgrade tier has a rank requirement, a credit cost, and — for most tiers — specific salvage materials you need to collect from Tau Ceti's zones. You unlock upgrades one at a time by visiting the ction vendor in-game after gathering the required materials.

Browse the full upgrade tree for each faction on the Factions page, which lists every tier, rank requirement, credit cost, and material needed.

Using the Progression Tracker

The Faction Progression Tracker is the fastest way to plan your upgrade path across all six factions without switching between pages. Sign in with your GitHub or Bungie account to save your progress — it syncs across devices automatically.

Once you're in, the tracker has three main tabs:

Factions Upgrades Tab

This is your full upgrade browser. Every faction's upgrade tree is laid out in digestible and sortable tables with a description of each upgrade, as well as each tier's rank requirement. Clicking a tier gives you two control options:

• Set as Goal - flag a tier you want to unlock next. Goals flow directly into the My Goals and Farming Plan tab.
• Mark as Unlocked - mark a tier you've already purchased in-game. The tracker remembers this and your unlocked benefits panel updates in real time.

You can sort upgrades by rank order or alphabetically. Each faction card also links through to the full faction detail page if you need deeper context on a specific upgrade.

My Goals Tab

All the tiers you've flagged as goals appear here, sorted by rank so you can see what unlocks first. Each goal shows the materials required and the credit cost at a glance. If a tier is credits-only, it tells you that too - no farming needed, just accumulate credits and head to the vendor. You can also filter this list by faction, to view goals for a specific faction or factions.

Mark goals as complete from this tab once you’ve unlocked them in the game.

Farming Plan Tab

This is the most powerful feature. Once you have goals set, the Farming Plan aggregates every material you need across all your outstanding goals, then ranks the in-game zones by how many of your materials drop there. The zone at the top covers the most ground in a single run.

Each zone entry breaks down which specific materials are available there and in which sub-area, so you know exactly where to look. This eliminates the guesswork of deciding which zone to queue into before a session.

Material Finder

If you want to farm materials for a specific goal, you can click the “Farm Materials” button on any upgrade tier (can be seen in My Goals tab) to be brought to the By Faction Upgrade screen in the Material Finder tool. This will break down exactly what zones and what sub areas have the materials needed to unlock that upgrade!

By using the By Goals section of the Material Finder, you can get a similar breakdown of where to farm as the Farming Plan tab gives you. The difference here is that you’re able to filter out certain goals that you may not be actively working on in a given run.

The Material Finder allows you to find where to farm by the specific material you’re looking for if you’re hyper focused on one or more specific mats, and it also can give you a zone-wide breakdown of all the materials a certain zone contains.

Faction Upgrade Priority: Where to Start

New runners often spread credits and materials too thin. Start with CyberAcme, NuCaloric, and MIDA — they're the easiest factions to unlock and cover the essentials: shield charges, patch kits, enhanced shields, backpacks, heat management, faster looting, and credit income. Get those locked in before touching Traxus, Arachne, or Sekiguchi.

For the full breakdown with direct links to each upgrade's material requirements: The First Faction Upgrades You Should Unlock In Marathon

Tips for Efficient Farming

• Set goals before loading up into a run. The Farming Plan will tell you the single best zone to run, saving you the mental overhead of planning mid-session.
• Materials are shared across factions. If two factions both need the same salvage, the Farming Plan stacks the quantities - you collect for both goals in one run.
• Credits-only tiers don't need a farming run at all. The Goals tab flags these clearly so you can knock them out between sessions without queuing.
• Capstone upgrades unlock passively. You don't purchase them directly - they become available automatically once you have enough upgrade nodes in the tree. Focus on filling out tier nodes first.

Ready to plan your next run? Head to the Faction Progression Tracker and start marking goals.

See you on Tau Ceti!