Early Wipe Guide (Factions and Cradle tips)
Faction upgrades are the best way to raise your gear floor.
The first priority is to unlock the daily free loot from each faction by unlocking the first capstones, which is a bonus after you get a few upgrades. Most of the gear you get from these aren't that useful for gearing up, but having free cradle fodder every day helps a lot. Nucaloric also has upgrades that give you free patch kits and free shield charges daily, which has been buffed from 3/day to 5/day. Make sure to collect those two upgrades ASAP as that's a 2000 credit/day profit.
Some folks from SeraphMax's discord figured out the most cost effective items to turn your credits into cradle XP. By far the most efficient way is buying the sidearm and punch from Traxus, and those became even more effective because their costs were reduced by 35. It's a small amount of cradle XP, but it's practically free so you should look to cradle the whole stock every day. At the later levels it's a pretty small amount of XP but it's a big help early on.
After you've unlocked your initial capstones in each faction, I recommend focusing hard on Cyberacme. Bag upgrades make every run more profitable, and it isn't hard to get the needed salvage for those upgrades.
Make sure to hoard as much biostripping as you can, because the Nucal upgrades that we're moving to next requires a lot. The only places to find biostripping is in Hauler, Cryo, and Arms Lockers. So basically just Hauler. Shield upgrades are the most important gear for combat. So once you've unlocked purple backpacks from Cyberacme, purple shields is the next priority. Shoutout to Counterintel, which is in my opinion the best head implant that is purchasable in the armory. It's not great on Cryo where you typically know where the other players are, but it's so strong on the other maps for helping survive an ambush or giving instant comms to your teammates.
After initial capstones, cyberacme, and nucal, the next best options are less clear, but my pick is Arachne. Arachne gets great implants early (Parting Gift and Edge Runner), and later it gets Bits Per Second and True Shot Barrel. Blue weapon mods from Traxus are nice, especially the far reach optic, and doesn't take too long to reach. Later Traxus gets purple chip mods and gold weapon mods. Sekiguchi gets cores, which can be pretty important depending on which shells and cores you prefer. Sekiguchi also gets The First Law and Checkmate which are great options for most shells.
The most time efficient way to rank up in your factions is pretty boring, but I'll let you know anyways. It's repeatable contract farming. To farm contracts, grab one that you know you can finish quickly like Activate a Tad and Defeat 5 UESC. Try not to settle for one that only has one objective though because it gives less reputation. Just go into perimeter solo on a free kit, speedrun the contract, and leave. You don't get any loot from your run, but you also don't have to wait around 10 mins for exfils to show up just to exfil with a few green mods and a little salvage, assuming you don't die in a pvp fight. Every faction has repeatable contracts that can be spammed this way, but Cyberacme has the best ratio of easy tasks in its contract pool. This is also doable with a squad or duo.
TLDR: 1st Capstones in each Faction, Cyberacme Purple Backpack, Nucal Purple Shield (6th capstone), and then it's dealer's choice but I recommend Arachne, Traxus, Sekiguchi, then Mida.
Hopefully folks find this helpful!