Marathon Inventory Guide: How To Increase Your Vault Space
There is no worse feeling in an extraction shooter than surviving a brutal firefight only to realize you have to leave a rare weapon on the ground because your pockets are completely full.
Managing your inventory is half the battle in a game like Marathon. When you first drop into Tau Ceti your default storage feels relatively generous. You have 160 slots in your permanent vault to hold your weapons, medical supplies, and crafting materials. That sounds like a lot of space until you actually survive a few raids.
If you are running the free sponsored kits and successfully extracting, the game dumps all that surviving gear directly into your permanent stash. Within a few hours you will be staring at a completely full inventory screen, paralyzed by the choice of what to delete just so you can unequip your current loadout.
You are not doing anything wrong. The game is specifically designed to choke your storage capacity early on to force you into engaging with the faction economy. The problem is that Bungie buried the solution behind a highly unintuitive user interface. I spent my first night playing this game needlessly deleting valuable crafting materials because I simply could not find the upgrade screen. I am going to walk you through exactly how to fix your storage problem so you can go back to hoarding digital weapons.
The CyberAcme Vault Expansion
Your permanent storage is called the Vault. You cannot increase this space by picking up items during a raid. You have to purchase permanent upgrades from a specific corporate vendor back at your base.
If you read my Marathon factions guide, you already know that CyberAcme is the most important faction for early game survival. They specialize in utility and quality of life improvements. Expanding your Vault is entirely locked behind their specific progression tree.
Navigating The Confusing Menus
To actually find the upgrade button, you need to open your main menu and select the Factions tab. From there, click on the CyberAcme icon located in the top left corner of your screen.
This opens the main CyberAcme interface. Look to the far left side of the screen and select the Upgrades tab. Scroll through the available nodes until you find the one labeled "Expansion." This is the golden ticket. Assuming you have the required credits and crafting materials, you just click purchase in the bottom right corner and your Vault instantly grows.
The Resource Tracking Trick
The Expansion upgrade does not just cost credits. It requires specific rare materials like Unstable Diodes and Unstable Gunmetal.
Finding these items randomly in the wild is incredibly frustrating when you do not know what boxes to look in. Before you deploy into your next raid, highlight the Expansion upgrade in the CyberAcme menu and hit the "Track" button. This places a permanent highlight on the required resources when you are actually running around the map. It completely removes the guesswork. If you see a glowing item that matches your tracked materials, you stuff it in your bag and run for the nearest extraction point.
The Diminishing Returns Trap
Look closely at the data in that table. The pricing structure for these upgrades is a massive trap designed to drain your economy.
Level 1 and Level 2 are incredible values. You pay a relatively small amount of credits and common materials to gain a massive sixteen rows of storage space. I highly advise prioritizing these two upgrades the moment you start playing the game. Securing those first two tiers gives you enough breathing room to comfortably store multiple backup loadouts.
However, once you hit Level 3 the math completely falls apart. You start paying significantly more credits and incredibly rare Gunmetal for fewer rows of storage. Level 5 asks you for ten thousand credits and fifty Diodes for a miserable four rows of space.
Do not bankrupt yourself chasing max capacity early in the season. Stop at Level 2. Take all those extra Diodes and credits and invest them into the CyberAcme Heat Sink upgrades instead. Having a massive vault does not matter if you keep dying in the raid because your synthetic shell overheated during a gunfight.
Upgrading Your Active Backpack
While your Vault dictates your permanent storage, your Backpack determines what you can actively carry during a live drop.
If you load into the map using the basic Rook shell or a free sponsored kit, your default backpack is painfully small. You will only have enough room to carry basic ammunition and a few medical injectors. If you stumble across a high value loot room, you will have absolutely no space to extract the salvage.
You cannot upgrade your backpack capacity through a permanent skill tree. Backpacks are treated as physical, disposable gear. If you want to carry more items during a run you have to equip a larger bag before you deploy.
You can purchase enhanced backpacks directly from the Armory using your hard earned credits. You can also earn them as rewards for completing specific faction contracts. The most common way to upgrade your bag is to simply find one during a raid. High tier weapon lockers occasionally spawn them, but the most reliable method is prying a purple backpack off the corpse of a rival runner who got a little too confident.
Just remember that a bigger backpack makes you a highly lucrative target. If another squad scans you and sees a massive, fully loaded bag, they are going to hunt you down.
The Philosophy Of Hoarding
Upgrading your Vault and buying bigger backpacks will absolutely ease your inventory pain, but it will not cure the underlying disease of gear fear.
A larger stash often just means you are going to hoard more useless garbage. I know how comforting it is to look at a vault filled with pristine precision rifles and fully charged shields, but if you never actually equip them, they are just taking up space. You have to learn to liquidate your assets.
If a weapon has been sitting in your Vault for three real world days, you are never going to use it. Sell it to the vendors. Turn that stagnant inventory into liquid credits so you can buy the light ammo and basic medical supplies you actually rely on. Stop treating your stash like a museum display and start treating it like a working armory. Expand your space to Level 2, sell the gear you refuse to risk (And maybe keep a few museum pieces to enjoy, I know you can’t resist), and get back to the extraction zone.
