Cyberpunk

Night City puts a price on everything, and it only ever bills you in one of four things: eddies, Street Cred, the attribute points you are never given enough of, and hours of your own evening. Almost every page we have written about this game is a way of paying one of those four bills late, cheaply, or not at all.

So that is how this page is arranged. Not by mission order, because a single side job is the only walkthrough in our collection, and not by category, because the categories do not tell you which bill you are currently staring at. Find the thing that is stopping you below and the page underneath it will have the way around.

Moving around the map without paying for it

The network switches on the moment The Ride wraps up, and after that every terminal you walk or drive past quietly adds itself to your map, whether you interact with it or not. Using one means standing at it and picking a blue pin, and there is no shortcut to a district you have never physically stood in. There are 166 terminals in the game once Dogtown is counted, split across the seven districts, and touching all of them is what the Frequent Flyer achievement wants. Our fast travel dataterm guide maps every one of them district by district, and it is worth reading precisely because no console command in existence will hand you the set.

Between the terminals you want two wheels, and the price spread here is the sharpest illustration of how this city works. The quickest bike in the game, the Yaiba Kusanagi CT-3X at 189 MPH, asks for 22,000 dollars and a Street Cred of only 12, while the Arch Nazare a rung below it wants 138,000 and Street Cred 40. Yet two versions of that same Arch fall into your garage for nothing at all if you finish Heroes and The Highwayman, and the Brennan Apollo Basic cannot be bought under any circumstances and has to be lifted off the street. The full ranking, with horsepower, variants and where each one is parked, is in our best motorcycles guide.

Chrome is gated by reputation more than by cash

Look at the cyberdeck shelf and the eddie prices turn out to be the smaller half of the story. The Raven Microcyber M.K 4 is the cheapest legendary on our list at 2,800 eddies and still refuses to sell to anyone below Street Cred 40, while the BioDyne M.K 2 costs nearly four times that and opens up at Street Cred 12. Almost everything worth slotting sits behind the same reputation wall, which makes early gigs an investment rather than a distraction. Our cyberdeck rankings list RAM, buffer size, slots, price and the exact clinic for all ten, with the Tetratronic Rippler M.K 5 and its 20 base RAM waiting at the top of the pile in Buck's Clinic.

One of the strongest implants in the game charges nothing at all if you know where it is lying. The Tier 5 Sandevistan that slows the world by 85 percent normally means reaching level 50 and paying a Ripperdoc for the privilege, and there are two rooms in Night City where a copy of it is simply sitting on a surface, one of them behind a locked door that a Technical Ability of 10 will open at level 35. The tier you get depends on the level you are when you pick it up, which is the sort of detail worth knowing before you make the trip, so read our Militech Apogee Sandevistan guide first.

Underneath both of those sits a bill nobody warns you about at the start. Since 2.0 your armour comes off your chrome rather than off your coat, and every implant charges you capacity as well as eddies, against a ceiling that climbs three points a level unless you go looking for perks. Our best cyberware guide runs both columns, ten implants ranked by the capacity each one eats and fourteen more by the eddies each one costs, which totals 437,500 for the set and 100,350 of that for the Mantis Blades alone. The counters themselves are on our Ripperdoc locations guide, thirteen clinics by district with what our own pages buy at each, and it ends by naming two more shops our cyberware pages use that the map has never listed.

Clothes stopped carrying your armour rating when Update 2.0 moved defence onto perks and cyberware, which frees the wardrobe up to be a wardrobe again with a few useful stat lines attached. If you want to spend on the look rather than the numbers, our clothing store locations guide covers the six merchants worth the trip, from Jinguji near the Halsey and MLK station down to the shop you fast travel to out of West Wind Apartments.

The best guns are not for sale

This city sells weapons on every corner and nine of the ten best ones are not among them. Our best weapons guide ranks them and says where each one drops, from Adam Smasher's shotgun at the top, which became a launcher firing homing rockets at six targets in the 2.0 update, down to Sasquatch's hammer, which swings at a 200 percent damage multiplier and takes your sprint and your dodge away while you carry it. It opens on the three weapon classes and the implant each is waiting for, because a smart gun with no Smart Link installed is the most common reason a highly rated weapon feels broken in a new player's hands.

The wider collection is on our iconic weapon locations guide, which holds 46 of them sorted by how you actually come by one: eighteen out of main jobs, eighteen out of side jobs, nine built from crafting specs that only drop from hustles in named neighbourhoods, and exactly one sold over a counter. Three of them close behind you during a single conversation, so it is worth reading before The Pickup rather than after it, and an iconic that has been sold or stripped for parts never comes back.

Attribute points are the one currency you cannot farm

Eddies come back, Street Cred always climbs and experience regenerates every time you skip a day, but the attribute spread you commit to is the only decision in the game with a hard ceiling on it. Our Netrunner build for Update 2.0 puts 20 apiece into Body, Intelligence and Technical Ability, leaves 8 in Reflexes and 3 in Cool, and explains why the Phantom Liberty bonus of ten extra points goes back into Reflexes rather than anywhere clever. It is also the page to read on what 2.0 did to the Monowire, which is now Arms cyberware and no longer picks up the melee weapon bonuses you may have been counting on. If the netrunner is not the character you want, our best builds guide lays seven more out as seven ways of spending the same finite points, from a stealth assassin that needs the Phantom Liberty Relics tree to a tank built on Adrenaline Rush, with the two Edgerunners builds and a katana build in between, and it is honest about where each one falls down.

If you have already spent wrongly, a respec item exists and the quickest route to one runs through the console, which the cheats section further down covers.

Buying levels with time instead

Since 2.0 scaled enemies to your own level, the old rule about staying out of high-level districts no longer applies and any crowded corner of the map will pay. What matters now is density and the reset timer. Clear a pocket of gangoons, walk far enough away, push the clock forward a day or three and the whole pocket is back. Before any of that, sleep at your apartment for the Rested bonus to skill experience and take the shower for the combat regen that goes with it, then put the difficulty up, because harder settings pay more for everything you do and not only for kills. Our XP farming guide walks three routes worth repeating, two of them in Pacifica and one around a fast travel point in The Glen.

The one purchase with a sticker price on it

Four apartments are for sale and they are close to the only thing in this game gated by money alone: 5,000 eddies in Northside, 15,000 in Japantown, 40,000 in The Glen and 55,000 in Corpo Plaza, which is 115,000 for the set and less than a single Arch Nazare. What the money buys is a stash, an iconic weapon rack, the bed that pays the Rested bonus above and the shower that pays the combat regen with it; the pool tables and tea sets are scenery. Our apartments guide puts each price against what is actually in the room, makes the case for The Glen on its position in the middle of the map rather than its furniture, and covers the five more places V gets to sleep that arrive attached to people instead of to eddies.

The doors money will not open

Some of the best loot in the game sits behind a keypad rather than a price tag, and the numbers are not findable by wandering. Our door codes and passwords list collects them by mission and district, including the panel on the Militech Aegis during Brick's rescue, the endgame Easter egg door in the Kabuki market, the developer room tucked inside the Arasaka Memorial and the Longshore Skyscraper room that Phantom Liberty added. One entry on that list is not a code at all: the door you open during Chippin' In needs a shard that only exists after a particular corpse is on the floor.

That corpse belongs to the game's final boss, and our characters guide treats him, his private vault at the Ebunike Docks and Panam Palmer as three timers rather than three profiles, because all three are about being ready at the right moment rather than being strong enough in general. Our Adam Smasher boss guide is the one to open first, and it carries the phase breakdown, the chest plate weak point and the stealth alternative. The hideout page handles the dock climb and what is in the armoury, and the Panam Palmer romance guide lists the dialogue picks and the in-game waits between her calls. She is also one of the four partners a V can settle into something lasting with, and every one of those four gates was set in the character creator rather than in conversation, which is what our romance guide is really about: a female V can carry Judy and River together, a male V can carry Panam and Kerry, and no single playthrough reaches more than half the cast.

Not every locked door in this game has anything behind it. Dream On ends in a conversation with Mayor Peralez where you either tell him what has been done to his head or you do not, and our Dream On choice guide exists mainly to tell you that the two paths land in the same place, with different messages arriving in your journal afterwards. Knowing that in advance is worth as much as a walkthrough would be.

Who owns the street you are standing on

Night City is carved up between eight gangs, and the ranking worth knowing is not the one by headcount. The Valentinos are the largest at around 6,000 and they come fourth on our Night City gangs tier list; Maelstrom has roughly 1,300 and comes first, because roughly a third of them have tipped into cyberpsychosis and roughly a third more are close behind. That page runs all eight from least to most powerful with the territory each one holds, and it flags that its own tier list and its own threat column do not agree, since one measures what a gang controls and the other measures what happens if you walk into one. The threat column is the one to read before choosing where to farm.

The settings menu the game did not ship

Three of our pages exist because the options screen stops short. The field of view slider tops out at 100 and refuses to go further, so our FOV guide covers both routes past it, one editing a value in options.json and one installing a mod that widens the slider itself, along with the unhappy news that neither console has been given a slider at all. Third person is not a supported view outside vehicles and scripted moments, and our third-person mode guide walks the mod that adds it and the single key that toggles the camera, with the honest warning that the animations were never built for it.

Then there is the option to stop paying entirely. Our console commands and cheats list covers the Cyber Engine Tweaks install, the tilde key that opens the prompt in windowed mode, and the commands behind eddies, maxed attributes, Street Cred, god mode, every vehicle in the game and long lists of weapon and cyberware item names. Back the save up before you start, and be aware that this is the one page here that makes every other section on this hub moot.

The one bill CD Projekt Red actually sends you

Everything above is billed in eddies, Street Cred, attribute points or your own evenings. Phantom Liberty is the only item on this page with a real price attached, and it is the first and last expansion this game will receive, which makes V's story finished rather than paused. Our Phantom Liberty review scored it 7.0 on release: twelve hours in Dogtown across ten main jobs, the first four of which are a corridor, the best writing anywhere in Cyberpunk 2077 in the handful of scenes where it stops shooting and behaves like a spy thriller, and a cast too large for the time it has. It shipped beside the free 2.0 update, which is the thing that turned the base game into the one that was advertised, and most of the pages above were rewritten around it.

Where the city came from

One older piece in our collection is worth keeping for context rather than for play. Mike Pondsmith settled the argument about whether the game splits off into a parallel world by confirming that it continues the timeline of the tabletop original, with technology drifting rather than history restarting, and our report on the alternate timeline carries his quotes and the studio's own muddled messaging around them. It was written years before launch, so read it as a record of what was promised.

A sensible order to read these in

On a first run, unlock the terminals as you pass them, let Street Cred climb before you go shopping, because the wall on the better decks is reputation and not eddies, settle the attribute spread while you are still in the mid-game rather than after it, and leave the boss and the romance until the story pushes you at them. On a second run, start with the free Sandevistan and the door codes, because both of them turn a long grind into a short detour. Buy one apartment early for the bed rather than four late for the furniture, read the weapon classes before you decide a smart gun is useless, and settle on a build before the attribute points run out. On a second run, start with the free Sandevistan and the door codes, because both of them turn a long grind into a short detour, and take the opposite body type if you want to meet the half of the romance cast the first V could not. And if you would rather not run at all, the console is right there.