Following Titus’ journey as a Lieutenant is only the beginning in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. During your campaign, the game will present you with what it calls Operations, a co-op PVE mode that gives the game virtually endless replayability.
Alone with bots or with up to two other Ultramarines, you’ll fight through hordes and hordes of enemies in missions that take place in parallel with the ones you completed during the campaign, leveling up your own class and your weapons.
With experience being the main progression tool in Space Marine 2, an item that directly boosts the XP you receive at the end of a mission is excellent. That item is the Gene Seed, and here’s everything you need to know about it.
Gene Seeds are one type of progression item that you can get during Operations. There’s one available per mission, hidden in one of multiple possible predetermined locations.
Once you find it, you can pick it up, and take it with you in the same item slot in which you’d keep your Guardian Relics.
If you take it to the end of a mission, you’ll receive around a 30% bonus on top of the XP received from the operation itself. That means that, for example, in the Minimal difficulty, you’ll get 185 bonus XP on top of the base 630.
The caveat is that, unlike a Guardian Relic, the Gene Seed disappears if the person holding it gets knocked out. With this in mind, plan accordingly. If you pick up the seed yourself, play safer and let your teammates take the more aggressive positions.
As we’ve said previously, you can find one Gene Seed per Operation. There are a few predetermined locations where these can spawn, and you can learn them relatively quickly to speed-up your grinding. We’ll have a guide for all maps soon.
Given that there’s only one Gene Seed per mission, you can ignore the remaining locations once you find one. The XP bonus isn’t influenced by when you pick it up, but it is definitely beneficial to find it early on, as you don’t waste time searching in the remaining locations.
On the other hand, the longer you carry it, the higher the chance you might be knocked out while holding it. This becomes a much bigger problem in higher difficulties, in which the Gene Seed is even more important, as the % bonus scales alongside the higher XP rewards in the harder difficulties.
If you’re carrying the Seed, stack up on bonus armor and stims. If you have a Sniper on your team, just let them pick it up, as their invisibility cloak is an excellent panic button. The carrier has no extra benefit, so there’s no point in getting selfish with it.
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