Upgrading chips and armors

In AoA you can upgrade your chips and most armor parts, and create armor parts as well. You can also upgrade weapons, but that is explained in another section of the guide. Creating armor parts can be done through the Black Market Munitioner npcs, but they only create gray parts, which are pretty much useless.

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Upgrading Chips:

In order to upgrade a skill or enhancing chip, you need to have at least 2 of the same chip, and same rank. Example, 2 rank 1 Laser Enhancers. This process can be done through the Composing Service Provider npc, under the Equipment Composing option. The process has a varying success rate, which depends on how many chips you use. 2 chips would give you the lowest success rate, 5 chips (the max) will give you the maximum success rate (90%). You can optionally use another cash shop item, an "Optimizing chip type 2", to add an additional 10% success rate (thus giving you a 100% success rate if you use 5 chips).
If you are successful in upgrading, all the chips used for the upgrading process will disappear, and you will be given one higher rank chip. Laser enhancers 1 become Laser enhancers 2, 2s become 3s, and so on.
If the process fails though, all chips used for the upgrading process will be destroyed.

This is the Equipment Composing interface, used to combine chips.

Don't pay attention to the right panel right now, its just the ingame explanation of the process. Check the left side, there are 5 boxes in an X shaped pattern. These is where the chips to be combined are to be dropped (one chip must be placed in the middle, the rest go on the other slots, no specific order is required). Below them, you can see the success indicator (showing 0/100, since there are no chips in there). And below that indicator, you can see a single slot, that is where the Optimization Chips are placed. The process is activated by clicking on the Compound button.

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Parts (Reconfiguration):

Parts reconfiguration is a very important part of this game. As I have explained before, only blue parts can be reconfigured (not all of the blue parts though). This process will improve their stats and rank. The reason why we upgrade parts is that a low rank part reconfigured to a high rank, will always outmatch a part that is of a high rank already.
An example are the rank 2 arms with +35% hitpoints that I have listed before. When these arms reach rank 10, they have on average around 8x% hp, and the rest of their stats are slightly above those of a rank 12 part. A "normal" un-reconfigured rank 12 blue part comes with no more than 70% hitpoints only.
Another example are the bodies. There are rank 17/18 blue un-reconfigured bodies in this game, they come with +10 ar/esr. However, the rank 1 +2 ar/esr bodies I have listed before, can reach around +20 ar/esr when they reach rank 15 (more than twice of what a blue one has), and the rest of the stats are slightly above those of a rank 17 body.
Thus, by reconfiguring armor parts, you can obtain very good bonuses while using the lowest amount possible of knowledge points.
Part reconfiguration is explained in more depth in the next section of the guide.