How to spend your first $10,000

It is not a budget, it is a bankroll

Here is the thing that catches everyone. The $10,000 you start with is not money for a loadout. It is money for a run of loadouts, and it never comes back.

You get it once per account. It carries between matches. When you die, whatever you were carrying is gone and you buy again from what is left.

So a player who spends $9,000 on one beautiful kit and dies to a grenade has $1,000 left and no way to get more, because earning cash requires being alive and effective.

Here is the part that surprised us. A kit with everything you actually need, a full bag of magazines and bandages included, costs about $3,300. The opening balance is three of those. Not ten.

The opening kit we actually buy

Around $1,700, and it wins fair fights.

The AMP-9 kills a bare chest in five standard rounds at 900 rounds per minute. Load flesh and it drops to three, with two to the head. Against the unarmored bodies you meet in the first ten minutes, that gun is doing rifle work for SMG money.

Notice the magazine line. The vendor sells you the magazine and the rounds that go in it, so a gun is never its sticker price. The AMP-9 is $900 and the loaded 30 round mag is another $145, which is a sixth of the bill on the part nobody budgets for.

The Binoculars go in the specialist slot, which is slot three on your kit. They cost $75, they take nothing out of your pack, and they are the most undervalued item in the game, because spotting for someone else's artillery pays whether or not you can shoot.

The Pouch is free and opens a 3x2 grid. Take the 20 round magazines rather than the 30s: they fit one cell each instead of two, so the same free bag carries six of them. That is 120 rounds for $600.

Armor before guns, every time

The instinct is to buy the best rifle you can afford. We did it too, and it is wrong.

The gap between a $600 T-21 and a $2,800 M4 is one hundredth of a second on a chest kill. The gap between wearing nothing and wearing $1,500 of Level 2 is three extra chest shots and one extra headshot that the enemy has to land on you.

Buy the helmet before the vest. It is cheaper, it weighs 1.6 kilos against 4.5, and headshots are how most people die.

What we skip on the first buy

• Level 3 and Level 4 armor. $2,000 and $4,000, weighing 10.5 and 18 kilos. You cannot afford to lose either one yet, and the weight will lose you fights you would otherwise win.
• Any vehicle. The cheap ones seat two and cannot cross the map. The first one worth owning is the $3,000 Kodiak Pickup, and that is most of an opening balance.
• Snipers. The Mosin is $4,500. That is three opening kits, and it only earns its price back if you can already hold an angle.
• Big backpacks. The Ruck is $2,400 and the Arsenal is $5,000. The free Pouch holds a spare magazine and your bandages, which is what a first life needs.
• Armor piercing rounds. A loaded AK magazine costs $155 on armor piercing against $80 on standard, and nobody has plates in the first ten minutes. Switch once the lobby does.

The two purchases that pay for themselves

Most of what you buy is a cost. Two things are closer to an investment.

Binoculars, $75. They turn you into a spotter, and spotting is paid work that does not require winning a gunfight. If your team has anyone on a gun line, this is the highest return on 75 dollars available to you.

A stack of bandages, $1,000. That is a third of this kit, and it is the line people cut first. Do not. A bandage is what turns a fight you survived into a fight you can walk away from, and walking away is how the money accumulates.

A seat in someone else's vehicle, free. Moving people to the Control Zone pays per passenger, and the person driving is collecting it. Ride along early, learn the routes, then buy the $3,000 Kodiak Pickup once you can and start collecting it yourself.

You will hear that driving is a waste of a slot. Per trip it earns better than most of what you can do on foot, so that advice is half wrong. What is true is that the cheap two-seaters are not worth buying, which we go through in the vehicle guide.

The order we buy in

• Life one to three. The $3,275 kit above. Learn the map, stay near your team, collect the easy money.
• Once you clear $5,000. Move to Level 2 armor, an AK74 and armor piercing, and buy a Field Backpack so you can carry two loaded spares. That build runs $7,105 and it is the one we live in.
• Once you clear $20,000. Now buy the gun you wanted. FAL at $5,500, Mosin at $4,500, or the Super-45 at $2,600 if the fighting is close.
• Once you clear $40,000. Vehicles become reasonable. This is where an SPH-2 or a helicopter stops being a gamble.

Price any of these out before you commit in the loadout planner. It totals the cost and the weight as you fill the slots, magazines and their rounds included, which is faster than doing it at a vendor while your team leaves without you.