Well, its been about 2 weeks since Halo: Reach has been out. Most of you have probably beaten it by now and are wondering what you can do to gain credits (Cr) faster so you can get some sweet armor. Cr is what you use to purchase new armor pieces (purely cosmetic) as well as special effects for your armor and voices for your spartan in firefight mode. Cr is also what determines your rank, which determines what items you have available for purchase as well as being the determining factor when it comes to who you are matched up with when you play online. Cr can be earned in all modes of Reach, campaign, firefight and matchmaking.
Just a few basic tips about garnering Cr
– Work on your commendations. Commendations are little in-game mini achievements that are tracked by Bungie, you can view your commendation progress by going to the main menu->player->service record->commendations. Every time you rank up a commendation you get a load of points (usually 2k+) added to your profile, so keep working towards each new milestone.
– Get multikills. Multikills are something that have been around for years and years now and something that everybody should be familiar with. Things like double kill, triple kill, overkill etc.. The higher level multikill you get, the more Cr you are awarded.
– Go for daily and weekly challenges. I understand that sometimes the challenges are a bit too daunting to complete in one day for some people. One of them at the time of writing this is complete 17 games in matchmaking, something that would take about an hour or two and that only counts for one challenge. On the flipside, some are quite easy and can fetch you a hefty amount of Cr for completing, going as high as 2500 Cr (as far as I’ve seen) for just one challenge.
– Play with friends. It’s no secret that playing with friends is better than randoms and while playing with friends won’t necessarily give you any more Cr than normal, it’s a good way to pass the time. What could be an hour playing with randoms feel like an eternity, playing with friends will make the time (and the Cr) fly by, allowing you to build Cr while genuinely having fun.
– Use a variety of methods to take down enemies. While I previously encouraged ranking up your commendations (which will involve using the same method of killing over and over) don’t just stick to one commendation. They become exponentially more time consuming to complete as they rank up, so spread your progress out to a handful of them. A good example is if you are trying to go for the headshot one, use a pistol as that will also rank up the small arms commendation.
– Don’t bother playing in custom games, as you will be getting an extremely reduced amount of Cr, no matter what you do in it.
Now aside from these basic tips and guidelines, there are a few “tricks” that will get you loads of Cr in no time. Note that there has been a bit of hooplah circulating recently about Bungie banning people for using unsavory methods to gain Cr (hacking/modding/cheating) but know that anything and everything I talk about here is completely legitimate and wholly sanctioned by Bungie.
– Gruntpocalypse. Go to matchmaking->cooperative->score attack. This will place you in the firefight score attack lobby. This can only be done alone (this is a good thing, you won’t need to pray that you get a competent team to win). In every set of possible matches that show up to be voted on, there will always be a gruntpocalypse. If the level selected is one you don’t like or aren’t very good on, select none of the above to cycle it out and find a better level. Once the level that you want pops up, select gruntpocalypse and go to town. 5 waves of only grunts, headshot and Cr central. Each match has a maximum of 12 minutes, though the skilled player can usually finish these in about 7 minutes. If you are just starting out your Cr farming you should be raking in an average of about 2200 Cr per match. Trust me when I say that 2200 Cr every 7 minutes is AMAZING.
– New Alexandria exploit. Play the the New Alexandria level (the level where you fly around the city on the falcon completing various tasks) on legendary. The final task will be to take out 6 turrets surrounding the ONI base. Take them out and either after you’ve taken them all out or in the middle of doing so, you will get a checkpoint. Once that checkpoint is finished completing, pause and save and quit. Now all you need to do is just load that save up, complete it (will take about 10 seconds, give or take based on when the checkpoint happened), rinse, repeat. You should be getting a couple hundred for every completion. Not much I know, but its a couple hundred for every 30 seconds or so, and the main point of this is to level up the flawless cowboy commendation (complete a mission on legendary without dying). Each time you do this it will level it up, and due to the perceived difficulty of said commendation, it will level up quite quickly, paying out tons of Cr.
– ONI: Sword base exploit. This one is similar to the previous one, though make sure you have scoring turned on so you can track your Cr. I have embedded a video of me performing this exploit below. The basic gist is that you skip all the enemies, run to the target locater (satellite missile launcher), get a checkpoint and go to town. You fire the satellite blast, often getting a killionare (the best multikill) which should be getting you about 100 Cr instantly (as shown next to your motion sensor). Once you get the Cr, revert to last save and do it again. The Cr you are getting is being saved to your profile, not to this actual save, so every time you do this you are accumulating Cr. Again, this is small pickings but it is very fast once you start it and the big payoff is the two commendations it levels up, as shown in the video.
Just a forewarning, after you do these methods several times, you will start getting lower amounts of Cr. This is normal and unavoidable. There will be a point where it’s no longer beneficial to waste your time on these unless you are doing so to rank up a commendation. After this point, just go back to gruntpocalypse or completing daily challenges.
Well, there you have it. Once again, none of this will get you banned, although there is a daily Cr limit made by Bungie so nobody can get too many credits in one day. If you happen to hit the cap, no worries, nothing bad will happen, just for that day you won’t be able to earn Cr anymore. The cap is very high as well, so if you hit the cap, kudos to you. Now go get out there and start leveling up to get some sweet armor so you can rub it in your friends faces as you teabag them. 🙂
