Item Upgrading

Equipment Items in the Nine Chronicles World have the ability to be upgraded in order to increase their base and secondary stat values. When an item is initially crafted it starts with a grade level equal to zero. For an item to be upgraded, an item of the same type and grade must be consumed. Players generally refer to these consumed items as fodder items.

As the difficulty of the Campaign stages increases, players will inevitably have to use upgraded equipment in order to keep progressing.

When an Equipment Item is upgraded, the values of its stats increase based on the following formulas. At certain grade levels (+4, +7, +10, +13..) items require an amount of NCG to be upgraded which varies based on the type of the item.

Grade	Base Stat Increase	Secondary Stat Increase	NCG Required	Items Required
+1	+(8-12)%	0%		2
+2	+(8-12)%	0%		4
+3	+(8-12)%	0%		8
+4	+(8-12)%	+(25-35)%		16
+5	+(8-12)%	0%		32
+6	+(8-12)%	0%		64
+7	+(8-12)%	+(25-35)%		128
+8	+(8-12)%	+(8-12)%		256
+9	+(8-12)%	+(8-12)%		512
+10	+(8-12)%	+(8-12)%		1024

It is noteworthy that in the current implementation of Nine Chronicles, Items can be theoretically upgraded infinitely. However, since the fodder requirement cost increases exponentially, there is a practical limit to how much an item can be upgraded by the players. When this document was lastly updated, there was only a single item in the whole Nine Chronicles ecosystem to have reached a grade of +11

Upgrading Times and Probabilities.

The Upgrading mechanism introduces the Success Rate probability. After a certain upgrade level, the upgrade may fail which will cause the fodder item to be destroyed while the item being upgraded remains intact. While it will be explained thoroughly in the Economic Design section, this mechanism is crucial to the sustainability of the economy of Nine Chronicles.

Similar to Item Crafting, when an item is being upgraded, it is placed in one of the four slots of the Crafting Queue for the number of Required Blocks displayed on the Upgrade page. Players have the ability to use Hourglasses to speed up the process and finish the upgrade immediately.