Far Far West sold 250,000 copies in 48 hours and sits at Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam, but the "yeehaw button" memes are masking something sharper: this Deep Rock Galactic-meets-Helldivers shooter punishes early build decisions harder than its cheerful robot cowboy skin suggests. The tutorial teaches you to shoot and mine. It does not teach you that your first three upgrades lock you into a resource economy you'll spend ten hours digging out of if you choose wrong. Here's how to avoid that trap.
What the Tutorial Hides: The Salvage Tiers Aren't Cosmetic
The game presents three salvage types—Scrap, Gear, and Data Cores—as "find these to craft stuff." That's technically true. What's under-explained is that these tiers gate each other in ways that create dead ends.
Scrap is abundant and respawns. Gear is mission-gated. Data Cores only drop from elite spawns and world events. The hidden variable: your first crafting bench upgrade determines which tier the next tier of missions scales to. Upgrade Scrap-focused first, and missions start spawning Gear-locked objectives before you've built the infrastructure to farm Gear efficiently. You're now undergeared for the content that would fix your Gear shortage.
The asymmetry here is brutal. A Scrap-first player spends 3-4 missions grinding low-tier content to catch up. A Gear-first player walks into the same mid-game missions with functional weapons and bench space to use Data Cores immediately when they start dropping. The time difference isn't marginal—it's the gap between "this feels great" and "why am I suddenly struggling?"
Decision shortcut: Ignore the early Scrap weapon recipes. Pick one starting weapon and don't craft a replacement until you've unlocked the Gear-tier bench upgrade. The starter pistol is viable longer than it feels. That Scrap is better spent on carry capacity and movement tools that keep you alive in missions where Gear actually drops.
The Network Anti-DDOS Incident Tells You Something About Session Pacing
Remember that 250,000-in-48-hours figure? The servers tripped anti-DDOS protections. What the developers haven't fully fixed—and what affects your early decisions—is how the game handles mission state when connections hiccup.
Far Far West checkpoints mission progress at extraction, not mid-mission. Lose connection during a world event fight and you keep experience but lose all held salvage. This matters enormously for build planning because world events are the reliable Data Core source. Early players see a world event, get excited, burn consumables fighting it, then disconnect or wipe and walk out with nothing.
The trade-off most miss: world events are not mandatory for progression. They're efficient only if you finish them and extract safely. Early on, when your movement toolkit is limited and your weapons chew through ammo reserves, skipping the world event to guarantee extraction is often higher expected value. You get the mission's guaranteed Gear drop, you keep your consumables, you don't lose 20 minutes of Data Core farming to a host migration.
Practical rule for hours 1-3: If the event is more than 30 seconds' sprint from your extraction route, mark it and leave. Come back when you have the zipline tool or a mobility-focused weapon mod. The FOMO is fake. Data Cores become more common in later biomes anyway; what you actually need early is consistent Gear income to unlock those biomes.
Squad Composition Assumptions That Waste Runs
The game lets anyone revive anyone. The tutorial implies this means "bring whatever, work together." The player consensus forming in Discord and Reddit—visible in how veterans host lobbies—is that this is dangerously incomplete.
Far Far West's enemy spawn system scales to weapon noise profiles, not just player count. Two players running suppressed scout weapons face fewer total enemies than two players running heavy revolvers, even at identical DPS. The hidden variable is that "suppressed" here means a specific mod tier, not a base weapon property. New players see "suppressed barrel" as a minor accuracy trade-off and skip it for raw damage. Veterans know it's a spawn-budget reduction that compounds across the whole mission.
The asymmetry: one loud player doesn't just make their own life harder. They pull additional spawns into shared spaces, drain squad ammo pools, and force reactive positioning that wastes the mobility tools of quieter builds. A full squad of loud weapons can face 40-60% more enemies than the same squad suppressed, with the same mission timer.
What to do differently: If you're queueing random, build for self-sufficiency first and suppression second. If you're playing with friends, have one designated loud weapon—typically a shotgun or LMG—for burst DPS on elites, and suppress everything else. The loud player carries the team through bad world-event RNG; the suppressed players keep the baseline mission playable. Random queues can't coordinate this, so default to suppressed and let someone else be the problem.
Your First Three Purchases Shape Everything
The hub vendor rotates stock on a real-time timer, not a mission-completion timer. New players see something shiny, buy it, and discover the next rotation had the actual upgrade they needed. The trap is worse because early currency feels generous—you get a lump sum from tutorial missions—then tightens dramatically once those run out.
Priority order based on how the economy actually flows:
| Purchase | Timing | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Carry capacity upgrade | First | Lets you bring back full Gear drops without leaving Scrap behind; Scrap converts to consumables, consumables let you attempt harder missions |
| Movement tool (zipline or grapple) | Second | Unlocks safe world-event extraction, which unlocks Data Core access, which unlocks endgame crafting |
| Bench tier unlock | Third | Everything before this is hoarding for this moment; buying weapons early delays this by 4-6 missions |
The trade-off: buying a shiny early weapon feels like immediate power. It is. But weapons don't persist across the bench upgrade that makes them obsolete. That "rare" revolver you bought in hour two? Bench tier 2 has a green recipe that outperforms it. You don't get refunds.
The one exception: If the vendor rotation has a movement tool and you're at bench tier 0, buy the tool. Skip everything else. The mission time saved translates directly to more missions per hour, which translates to faster bench progress, which translates to actual power.
What to Actually Demand From Developers
The yeehaw button is funny and will probably sell cosmetics. But the real player demand bubbling under the memes—visible in Steam reviews mentioning "progression walls" and "grindy midgame"—is a respec option or clearer tier gating. The current system creates bad-feeling sessions not because it's hard but because early decisions are irreversible and under-explained.
Until that changes, treat your first hour as build planning, not power fantasy. The players having good sessions in week one are the ones who looked at the salvage tiers, asked "what unlocks what," and played conservatively until the bench tier 2 breakpoint. Everyone else is posting about "sudden difficulty spikes" that are actually just early decisions catching up with them.
The one thing to do differently: before you spend anything, open the full crafting tree and trace three items you want. Note their salvage tiers. Now look at what bench upgrade unlocks those tiers. That upgrade is your only goal until you have it. Everything else is distraction dressed in cowboy chrome.
