What if EFT’s progression wasn’t built and balanced around the various pay-to-win editions? What if you could actually level up skills in a realistic amount of time? What if you could actually choose which ones to level up? What if trader levels were more meaningful and rewarding? What if i was in charge of how the game’s player progression worked?

This mod overhauls everything progression, from trader offerings and economy to soft skill levelling. The main design pillar was to make each and every ounce of progression more important and rewarding.

Everything is insanely customizable, the config allows to disable and configure each and every aspect of this mod down to the finest details. All config options are extensively explained by comments in the file itself. In fact the comments are so extensive that one could get a better idea of what this mod does by just reading the config file rather than this description.

Full list of features:

• Rework of secure containers
  • Start with a 2x2 waist pouch
  • All other containers are slightly buffed and obtainable through quests
    • Alpha has 6 slots and is obtained after completing Delivery from the Past
    • Beta (8 slots) is rewarded for finishing Setup
    • Epsilon is buffed to 10 slots
    • Gamma (12 slots) is awarded upon starting Network Provider - Part 1
    • Kappa is buffed to 16 slots
• Economy changes
  • FiR is removed from all aspects of the game, including quests
  • The flea market only sells keys
  • Hideout builds are made cheaper
• Stash progression rework
  • All editions start with level 1 stash
  • All stash levels are bigger (sizes are: 40, 55, 70, 85 lines)
  • Stash upgrades cost less rubles and require less trader loyalty
• Skills rework
  • Each PMC level you earn one skill point that you can freely allocate to any skill you want (also works retroactively on an already levelled up profile!)
  • Skills passively level up overall faster than vanilla (with some exceptions like metabolism)
  • Some skill bonuses are buffed like mag drills or charisma
• SPT-friendly ref rework
  • Killing PMCs will award Ref reputation depending on their level
  • Ref will only buy dogtags from you but he will buy them for GP coins
  • Playing with “Ref - SPT Friendly Quests” and “Bosses have Lega Medals” is highly recommended
• Bitcoin changes
  • Bitcoin value is fixed at around 650k (traders will buy them for around 400k)
  • The bitcoin farm is slower with fewer GPUs but it’s faster if you have more. Upgrades are now more important
  • GPUs cannot be purchased for currencies. You can only barter them or find them in raid
• Trader offerings are algorithmically rebalanced
  • Weapons and ammo are assigned a score according to customizable rules (caliber, penetration, fire modes and so on contribute to score)
  • The score will then determine at what trader level they will be unlocked
  • Since this is systematic and automatic it also works with any additional traders, weapons or ammunitions
    • No need to worry about installing mods that give OP weapons or ammo too early!
  • With default rules this doesn’t deviate too much from vanilla EFT offerings but it does make them more consistent
    • Biggest change is probably bolt-actions that are more available early on and have access to better ammo
    • Quest-locked items also get unlocked at earlier levels. For example, after doing the quest, m80 will be available at tier 2 instead of 4 (default rules would consider it a tier 3 ammo but it gets bumped down to 2 because it’s quest locked)
  • For details read the config file and the comments it contains
• Miscellaneous changes
  • SICC container can also hold anything that the docs can on top of keytools
  • All traders will start with a loyalty of 0.05 except Fence who will start at 1.00
  • All crafts are twice as rewarding and twice as fast
  • Stirrup awards an additional early game ammunition case
  • The Streamer Items Case can be bought at Ref level 1
  • Ammunition, Magazine and Med cases buffed to 8x8
  • If “Pack ‘n’ Strap” and/or “Tactical Gear Component” are installed their ammo and medical pouches are made smaller and much more expensive

Many thanks to ODT and his Softcore mod for partially inspiring some of this mod’s features and providing code examples i used to learn how to mod the game

This is the full 1.0 config, read it if you want the details of the mod. I would suggest downloading it and opening it in Visual Studio Code or some other editor like Notepad++. Normal notepad or this very webpage work but they don’t make it very readable

The config file is found in the server part of the mod (inside user/mods/drunkgeko-gekos_betterprogression/config in your SPT installation)

I’ve received some reports of Friendly PMCs causing a very weird incompatibility with my mod

Some mods like AmandsSense 2.0 use flea availability to assign a value to items, making unpurchasable items count as very valuable. Since my mod bans most items from the flea market that behavior will be broken and will tag all items as very valuable and you may want to check the other’s mod config to fix that. Beyond that no incompatibility is known

Raid Overhaul’s DisableFleaBlacklist will make it so that any item will be purchasable on the flea, overriding the flea disabling module of this mod

“Ref - SPT Friendly Quests” and “Bosses have Lega Medals” are highly recommended for use together with this mod

If you’re gonna use “WTT - Pack ‘n’ Strap” please do change its config so that you lose belts on death otherwise they act as better and cheaper safe containers, breaking the progression system i built. With default configs my mod makes med pouches and ammo pouches from both “WTT - Pack ‘n’ Strap” and “Tactical Gear Component” nerfed to be much smaller and much more expensive to buy

For a full list of mods i recommend (regardless of whether you’re using this one or not) check this out

Like any other mod you simply need to unzip the files into your SPT folder. This mod is technically split into a server mod and a client mod but you don’t need to concern yourself with that, just move both the BepInEx folder and the user folder in your installation. The config is found in the server mod (inside user/mods/drunkgeko-gekos_betterprogression/config)

If you want to try the mod in a way that almost resembles a hardcore run i suggest heading into the config and in the algorithmicalRebalancing settings bumping up the globalDelta for both weapon and ammo rules to 1 (or even more if you’re sadistic). This will make it so that at tier 1 you’ll only have access to the worse weapons and ammunitions the game has to offer, mostly pistols. You can pair that with clampToMaxLevel to false. You could also make the global even higher and compensate it with a bigger negative barterDelta if you like the game to be more barter-centric with currency trades only available at later tiers and for worse items

If you do any of that i would also suggest emptying out your stash at the start

You could also try pairing this mod with “Bronzeman”, i haven’t personally tried if they work together but i don’t see why not and they should pair nicely