While the ships in Tenebris: Terra Incognita aren’t in the spotlight and don’t do the fighting your characters do, they are also extremely important – and the most important thing about them is upgrading them in the correct order.
Today, I am here to share my guide to flawless ship upgrades in the game, helping you get everything in the correct order to get the most out of the ship. Let’s jump right in!
Cryocenter First
Ignore whatever your gut tells you to upgrade first and go for the Cryocenter instead.
While you might tweak this a bit based on your own experience on the ground, I recommend going for Identification level 2 first, then bringing Prioritization and Systematization up to level 2 as well.
This helps a lot from the beginning, and you’ll be pulling level 12 heroes much faster than otherwise, and this will be a major bonus for you.
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Hospital: Buy the Extra Beds Immediately
Open the two additional infirmary slots the moment you can afford them. That’s the difference between rotating your exhausted squad through one at a time and clearing your whole tired roster in a single pass.
Rest and Rescue: Two Operations the Hospital Doesn’t Cover
A quick mention and something worth considering: the infirmary is not the only recovery option you have.
The “Rest” operation lets you send a team off to recover in a way that’s even more effective than standard hospitalization, though you won’t see it turn up on every mission.
So don’t build your whole recovery plan around it, but use it whenever possible.
There’s also a “Rescue” operation, which adds a hero to your roster on successful completion, giving you a second route into new recruits alongside whatever the Cryocenter turns up.
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Arsenal: Tempting, but Leave It for Last
The Arsenal looks like the most important upgrade, because you always think that better gear means better results.
While this is obviously true, upgrading the module is only half of the thing you should do. The other half is affording the equipment sitting behind it, and early on that’s not useful.
So treat the Arsenal as your last upgrade, not your first – but don’t delay it too much. By the time you hit level 21, the Aresnal should become your main focus.
Legendary gear unlocks starting at level 21, arriving alongside new character classes, and it remains the strongest equipment in the game all the way up to level 30.
At level 30 you start pulling Mythic gear, marked in red, which becomes the best-in-slot target as you close in on the late game.
Stimulants Are a Trap Until the Economy Backs Them Up
Same story as the Arsenal here: unlocking a stimulant and being able to actually use it without going broke are two separate problems.
Rare stimulants cost 75 biomaterial, while Epic ones cost 200.
To make things easier, you need Efficiency at level 3, which requires 6700 social rating to unlock. Which takes us to this important next step…
How to Farm Social Rating or Biomaterial
This is something that can completely change your runs. There’s one mission that you can keep looting without finishing it – “Behind Closed Doors.”
Here’s how to do it to farm social rating or biomaterial:
- Load into the mission “Behind Closed Doors.”
- Open the crate sitting in the corridor right at the start.
- Fight through one battle.
- Push forward until you spot the edge of a flickering door. Stop there and interact with it. Walk past it instead, and you’ll trigger a battle you didn’t need to fight.
- That interaction drops you into a room with several interactable objects.
- Leave the room and you’ll skip an entire battle location, no penalty attached.
- Keep moving. When you reach the edge of the second flickering door, repeat the same interaction. Past it, you’ll hit a dead end. Search it, then head down to the second tier.
- At the entrance to the second tier, there’s another crate waiting.
- Now, quit the mission without finishing it. Because it was never completed, it stays active on your map. Your squad takes a 20% fatigue penalty and gets zero experience for the run, but every item picked up along the way stays in your inventory.
- Sell everything and convert the honor into social rating or biomaterial, whichever you’re short on. Anything else that’s useful should go to your squad members.
- Then, send the squad that just ran it to the infirmary to burn off fatigue, which costs one raid cycle. While they’re resting, run your second squad through the same mission, or any clearing mission you’ve got queued. Loop this and you level your ship faster, gear soldiers heading into the level 13-16 bracket, and stockpile enough biomaterial to be able to use the stimulants you unlocked earlier.
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Wrapping up
Basically, the upgrade order is this: Cryocenter first, Hospital next, then Arsenal and stimulants once your economy can support them. Then, as you get close to level 21, your main focus becomes the Arsenal for Legendary and eventually Mythic gear.
The “Behind Closed Doors” exploit is the fastest way to fund all of it, run it on repeat with a second squad while the first one recovers – and do it fast before the devs fix it!
Got any other tips or comments? Let us all know in the section down below!
- Tenebris: Terra Incognita Ship Upgrade Guide - September 18, 2026
- RIG Riot: All Hidden Weapon Locations: How to Find All 10 Secret Weapons - September 18, 2026
- Scavland Guide: Tips & Tricks to Survive - September 18, 2026