Cyberpunk 2077 Best Cyberware: Two Bills, Capacity and Eddies

Update 2.0 moved your armour off your clothes and onto your chrome, which turned cyberware from a shopping list into the character build itself. It also put a hard ceiling on it. Every implant costs eddies at the counter and capacity in your body, and the second bill is the one that decides what you actually end up wearing, because eddies come back and capacity does not. This page runs both columns: what the best implants take out of your capacity, what they cost at a Ripperdoc, and every way the game lets you raise the ceiling.

Capacity is the real currency

The game will not let you exceed your cyberware capacity, and it is not being awkward for the sake of it: the in-fiction reason is cyberpsychosis, which is also the defining trait of the gang at the top of our Night City gangs tier list. Each implant shows a requirement and a number of capacity points it eats, drawn as a red bar against your limit. Four things raise that limit and one of them is luck.

The shards are worth understanding before you go hunting them. They are uncommon rather than rare, they drop from fallen enemies and occasionally out of lootboxes and lockers, and picking one up consumes it immediately: there is no inventory step and no choice about when to spend it. That makes them a reward for playing rather than a resource to farm, which is the opposite of how most guides treat them. The reliable routes are the perks and the levels, and the Edgerunner perk in particular is the single largest jump available, at the price of a permanently thinner health bar.

Ten implants, by what they take out of your capacity

All ten together come to 153 points of capacity, which is a useful number to hold in your head, and a large enough one that almost nobody ends up running all ten at once. The Sandevistan alone takes 44 of it, nearly a third, and that is the decision the whole build turns on: fit it and you are playing a time-dilation character who cannot afford much else, or skip it and spread the same 44 points across five implants that each do a smaller job all the time. Kerenzikov at 12 is the cheap version of the same idea, slowing things only while you are aiming during a movement, and the two are not mutually exclusive.

One entry in that table is cheaper than its row suggests. Our Militech Apogee Sandevistan guide covers the two places in the city where a copy is left out on a surface, at a tier that depends on what level V has reached by the time it is collected, so the 44 points can be paid without the eddies ever changing hands. Where that page and this one disagree about availability, take the dedicated one.

Fourteen implants, by what they cost at the counter

That is 437,500 eddies for the set, and the Mantis Blades are 100,350 of it on their own, which is why so many players end up taking the free pair from the Phantom of Night City cyberpsycho sighting and living with the lower tier. Look down the requirement column and the pattern is the one our main Cyberpunk 2077 guide keeps returning to: the gate is usually an attribute or a Street Cred number rather than the money. Titanium Bones at 2,000 eddies is the best value on the page by a distance, and Second Heart and the Netdriver both sit behind Street Cred 49, which is a long way past the point where money has stopped being the problem.

Two of the fourteen need a caveat. The Netwatch Netdriver Mk.5 is a cyberdeck rather than an implant in the ordinary sense, and our cyberdeck rankings compare all ten of them on RAM, buffer and slots, which is the page to use if the deck is the decision. And the free Mantis Blades mentioned above are the lower-tier version; the legendary pair is the one behind the six-figure price.

Where our two cyberware pages disagree

This page merges two of our older articles and they do not agree on everything, so here is what to watch. Optical Camo is described on one as dropping your visibility by 30 to 90 percent for 4 to 7 seconds with a 70-second cooldown, sold at Octavio's Clinic in Rancho Coronado, and on the other as full invisibility for 45 seconds with a 60-second cooldown, sold at West Wind Estate in Pacifica. Those are not small differences and we have not been able to settle them from our own pages, so both are recorded here rather than averaged. Heal-on-Kill is filed as circulatory system cyberware on one and frontal cortex on the other. Titanium Bones is credited with a 66 percent carry capacity increase on one and a figure printed as 605 on the other, which is a typo for 60. And the clinic columns differ for Reinforced Tendons and Titanium Bones, which is less alarming than it looks, because several implants are stocked by more than one Ripperdoc.

Can you finish the game without any of it?

Technically yes, and we would not advise trying. Since 2.0 your armour rating comes from chrome and perks rather than from what you are wearing, so a V with an empty cyberware screen is a V with no defence at all, in a game that scales enemies to your level. You would also be giving up the double jump, the Monowire and the time dilation, which are three of the things that make the combat feel like this game rather than a shooter. The full list of clinics that sell any of it is on our Ripperdoc locations guide.

FAQ

What is the best cyberware in Cyberpunk 2077?

The Militech Apogee Sandevistan, which slows time by 85 percent. It costs 44 capacity, about a third of a mid-game budget, so the rest of the build has to be built around it.

How do you increase cyberware capacity?

Three points per level, four per attribute at 9 or higher through Renaissance, fifty at once through Edgerunner, fifteen across the Engineer skill, and random capacity shards.

Where do you find cyberware capacity shards?

On fallen enemies mostly, and sometimes in lootboxes and lockers. Picking one up spends it straight away, so there is nothing to save for later.

What is the cheapest useful implant?

Titanium Bones at 2,000 eddies and 5 capacity, needing Body 13. It adds health, armour and carry capacity for less than a twentieth of what Mantis Blades cost.