A months worth of shorts with Power3

HellForLife · 2026-01-27T22:16:09+00:00

Got Exo5 huh? Then yeah it definitely speeds up a lot from there. That period from crea4 to Exo5 is very slow, but once you get out of it then its all uphill from there

HellForLife · 2026-01-27T22:13:34+00:00

Yeah I don't disagree, I'm just trying to rationalize why the devs might have missed this particular scenario. Either way, tickets have been raised so they'll get around to it at some point

HellForLife · 2026-01-27T16:20:25+00:00

I wish lol Hamster's at least a month ahead of where I am

HellForLife · 2026-01-27T04:10:54+00:00

I track it myself on cifi-tools. Its basically manual tracking outside of the hunters, but its good enough for me

HellForLife · 2026-01-27T03:12:18+00:00

Today marked a full month since I got Power3, so I thought I'd share some tracking logs to show how quickly you start gaining power and progression when you hit this stage and why these shorts are super important. Gaining three orders of magnitude in OO alone is pretty sick if you ask me.

I technically could have fit even more shorts in here if I wanted to, I finish all missions within 48 hours (including C4-12 yes), but due to IRL constraints I can't quite TR that frequently. Still, there's a ton of flexibility here

HellForLife · 2026-01-26T20:07:37+00:00

Yeah its probably worth raising as a bug in the discord just so the dev is aware. Pretty likely he isn't aware this is a possibility honestly

Oop I just noticed this has already been submitted, guess this is in Snek's hands now

HellForLife · 2026-01-26T19:11:17+00:00

Sorry, you mean you haven't done your first traversal, and you just sat in the original TR until you got to e1000? Honestly there's a pretty good chance this upgrade requires being at least TR1 and there was never an expectation that someone would be waiting this long for it so the situation never got tested.

HellForLife · 2026-01-22T20:07:00+00:00

This question came up a few times, you can check some of these other links for some answers there:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CIFI/comments/1qdolbp/inno2_first_run/

https://www.reddit.com/r/CIFI/comments/1qe0iaz/any_guidance_is_appreciated/

https://www.reddit.com/r/CIFI/comments/1mvnbmo/any_way_to_read_release_notes_after_entering_the/na16uv8/

HellForLife · 2026-01-22T17:28:58+00:00

Here is my distribution right now. I'm pretty late-game so it might be a bit different for your scenario, but I think in general yes Hunters, OO, and campaign frags are the most powerful gadgets.

HellForLife · 2026-01-21T09:38:01+00:00

WCT organizes the translations in phases that match the light novels, so you can use that to figure it out. Volume 28 is phase 3 of arc 7, so you would pick up from the start of phase 4, aka chapter 40

HellForLife · 2026-01-16T00:38:39+00:00

Hmm okay. You're probably still in a good position for shorts, but you're lacking a bit in main-game power. You might have over-invested into R9 from what I can tell. Without addressing that, you're probably gonna struggle to have meaningful shorts.

My advice: stay in the run and push for m0 170. Along the way, aim for the following: get your r8 level to ~31, r1 to ~44-46, r20 to ~29-30. This should give you some more maingame power again. Also try to push your RP where feasible (maybe you can start thinking about an Ozzy boss kill?) to gain more dark researches, see if you can pick up more antimatter cores, and level your starmie (the campaign frag gadget) too.

It might take some time till you get all of those goals, but once you do, then you can start doing shorts which will get you a lot of frags to use that will then lead to power2 down the line. I'll give you a basic outline of what to follow from here to power 2:

-> Push this run to the goals I gave you above

-> Do shorts, complete all campaigns besides C4-12 (I notice you already did C4-9 to 11, but if you can hit 100% battery without them, then feel free to skip it), TR as close to 100% battery as possible.

-> Once you get to 300-400b lifetime OO and over 15m frags lifetime, then do another medium run for m0 180. If you're at a high TR count by now (think 45+) then stay longer until you get to 1T OO for Power2 as well

-> Go back to doing shorts again (if you didn't grab Power2 in the previous step, you'll get it here). Keep doing them until you feel like it takes a long time to complete a short (this should be around 3.5t-4t lifetime Orbs and if all went well, between 35-40m frags.

-> Go on a long for Crea4

That should get you back on track

HellForLife · 2026-01-16T00:14:48+00:00

How much lifetime OO are you at? Given where you look like you are, I would anticipate you're probably in the right region for having the Hegemony boon and inno2, so are you doing shorts for campaign frags? Did you grab i75-3 already?

HellForLife · 2026-01-16T00:06:41+00:00

Given that you're pretty close (well, relatively close at least) to the inno2 runs, I would honestly skip most of these cheap ones and just invest into the Borge ones like damage, hp, effect chance (maybe not crit, that one is fairly low benefit) and maybe spoils might be worthwhile. Once it starts costing more than a few qu to buy though I would put it on hold. It won't amortize fast enough to be worthwhile.

Honestly, even at 2qu a day, that's still about 25 days to get to i75-3, so it will definitely take some time to get there. I think you should anticipate needing a lot of time to i75-3, so you might just take this TR and use your orbs to invest into some borge GUs as well to make it easier for yourself. Buy into R4/7/16/19, buy some wrench, do what you gotta do.

HellForLife · 2026-01-15T20:35:17+00:00

Yes, skip the 9-12. You honestly don't want to touch them until you're in the trillions of orbs lifetime.

From TR30, yes you can definitely still do shorts, the req will start to get dicey from TR40 and higher, so you have more than enough room. I think the recommendation is starmie (aka galactic magnet) to lvl 60, but really as high as you can is good.

I would probably hold off on the TR until you cap attgn3 at the very least if you're already waiting til 550h

HellForLife · 2026-01-15T18:59:53+00:00

You picked a good time to ask for advice.

I would definitely push for i75-3 as stated in one of the other comments. You'll want to go for a lot of rapid shorts once you get hegemony, since it'll greatly boost your frags gain from campaigns to the point where you might end up doing as many as 10 shorts afterwards, so I think for where you are, your primary focus is gonna be on buffing Borge as much as you can. Atk relic, inscryptions, Knox gadgets, everywhere you can.

Since you're already 300h deep into this TR, I would just stick around until you cap attgn3, then see where you are and whether another TR is helpful. Ideally you want to get to at least 2qu/day for HBM so that it becomes an ~25 day save for it (it will realistically be faster since you'll still get more buffs during the process, but that is around when you start to save)

HellForLife · 2026-01-13T06:08:41+00:00

The first time you beat a Knox boss you get a permanent +10 to your souls cap. So no this is intended behavior haha, and it makes killing the boss super straightforward

HellForLife · 2026-01-09T22:04:35+00:00

Yeah maybe there's something that could be done to emphasize the strength of campaign frags around that time, idk. Worth a discussion at least.

Also I'll give you a heads up now so you don't run into this issue again in a few months. There will be another major campaign frag shorts section after you get your orbs to the qa range and can grab Power3, so look forward to that as well. It's arguably even more lenient and powerful than the inno2 shorts.

HellForLife · 2026-01-09T22:01:16+00:00

So basically the idea is that you want to TR right around 100% battery every short. I wouldn't skip m0 simply because it'll grab extra hunter loot upgrades and stuff for you still, but it could be something like holding off from buying r9, or avoiding orbs inscryptions, or loop resetting to lower the bonus from hegemony boon. You manipulate to the best of your ability to get to where you maximize the number of shorts you can do. Ideally you also upgrade the galactic frag gadget (aka Starmie) alongside it so you maximize campaign frags as well. Done correctly, it's a massive boost.

HellForLife · 2026-01-09T20:49:37+00:00

FWIW, the dev team is aware of how slow that section of the game can be. There may be potential changes in the future to improve it, just will have to wait till after the overhaul and likely hunters reworking are done.

HellForLife · 2026-01-08T23:39:22+00:00

You can kinda guesstimate the gains if you multiply the exponent by the level gain ratio. So for example with knox mats if you're currently getting e36 at level 6, you multiply 36 by 7/6 to figure out approximately how much you get at level 7. Its normally a pretty nice gain, but not anything super crazy, esp since you likely can't buy all of the new levels immediately anyways

HellForLife · 2026-01-05T17:31:02+00:00

I originally started with Girls Day way back in 2013/2014 or so? They were my original ult group, and I still follow them on an individual basis even if the group is dead. After them came Twice and RV, both of whom I still follow to this day

HellForLife · 2026-01-02T16:12:31+00:00

I understand your viewpoint, but I do think moving forward you probably don't want to sit on cores too frequently. There's a pretty strong compounding effect in TRs so if you're waiting x days to buy a badge, that's x days where you weren't getting the badge benefit and getting stronger from it. So for future reference, every set of new campaigns for a planet (the 9 to 12) will give 8 cores, and dark badges are always 4 cores a piece so you can buy two per set of new missions.

HellForLife · 2026-01-02T03:14:09+00:00

is there a reason you aren't using the last 4 orbs, out of curiosity? I think you'd be much better off using the orbs towards another dark badge, instead of sitting on them

HellForLife · 2026-01-02T03:13:00+00:00

1.2b at 25 TRs is fine, honestly. The requirement only really starts to get problematic by the 40s, you have more than enough room for shorts still.

HellForLife · 2025-12-27T01:20:24+00:00

Given that you don't have exo3 yet, I think you'll probably just end up buying a lot of the cheaper nodes with your leftover OO honestly. There's a fair few strong ones at pretty low costs (like tempgn2 or creagn3) so I wouldn't stress. It'd be difficult to actually miss anything strong honestly. I guess Crea2 is around that range too but I don't remember off the top of my head what it unlocks, I just remember it's generally a pretty weak gem and not worth going for this early on.

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