tl;dr: Tinkers upgrade your equipment up to +9 for Credits and parts, and combine modules. An upgrade can't fail and you can't lose the item. With a bit of luck an upgrade is a critical success, which adds a gold star and extra stats. Since crafting is disabled in this version of the game, tinkering is the way to improve gear beyond what drops.

Where to Find a Tinker

The item descriptions name Copacabana, Dredge and Kanaloa Research Station. There are more of them though, players have found Tinkers at these places:

A P.U.C.K. is a mobile tinkering station you can call down anywhere. The single-use version is sold in the PvP store for 30 tokens.

Upgrading Equipment

Weapons, auxiliary weapons, abilities, head, chassis, arms, legs, reactor and medical system can be upgraded nine times. The rank shows up as a suffix of the item name, so a Meteor Strike you've upgraded five times is a Meteor Strike +5. Operating systems and gadgets can't be upgraded.

Every upgrade costs Credits and parts, and both go up with the rank and the level of the item:

	Part	Used for	Salvaged from
	Weapon Parts	Weapons	Weapons
	Ability Parts	Abilities and ultimate abilities	Abilities
	Battleframe Parts	Head, chassis, arms, legs, reactor, medical system	Battleframe gear

The upgrade to +9 costs roughly 30 times the Credits and 10 times the parts of the upgrade to +1. Keep in mind that tinkering an item binds it to you, so decide whether you want to sell it before the first upgrade.

What an Upgrade Adds

The bonuses are stored in the static database of the client as one block per rank, so these are the totals an item has at that rank, not what a single upgrade adds. The other stats are rating points, the same kind modules add.

The steps get a bit bigger with every rank: the power rating goes 2.5, 5.1, 7.7, 10.4, 13.2, 16.1, 19, 22 and 25.1. A weapon doesn't get all its stats at once either, rate of fire and charge-up come with +1, accuracy, range and area of effect with +2, the rest with +3.

Gold Stars

Every upgrade has a base chance of 10% to be a critical success. The item then gets a gold star next to its rank, and the stars are what separates a good +9 from a great one. The stars have their own block of bonuses, which comes on top of the one for the rank:

So a +9 weapon with nine stars has twice the power rating bonus of one without and +15 instead of +6 on its stats.

Tinker's Tools raise that chance. You can add up to three of them to one upgrade, and each kind only works for a certain range of ranks:

	Tools	For the Upgrades	Bonus to the Chance
	Bronze Tinker's Tools	+1 to +3	5%, 8%, 12%, 18%
	Silver Tinker's Tools	+4 to +6	2%, 4%, 6%, 10%
	Gold Tinker's Tools	+7 to +9	2%, 3%, 4%, 6%

Three tools of the same kind and quality can be combined into one of the next quality, e.g. three Bronze 5% into one Bronze 8%. The tools come from hardcore campaign missions and operations, from the chests at the end of missions and raids, from Elite Ranks, from the Red Bean store and from other players.

If your item has reached +9 and you'd like more stars on it, the Tinker can reset it. A reset removes all upgrades that weren't critical, so a +8 with three stars becomes a +3 with three stars and you can try again with the remaining ranks. Note that you don't get anything back for the removed upgrades. That option exists for people with resources to burn.

Modules

The second job of a Tinker is combining modules:

• Rank up: A module plus two other modules of the same color and rank become one module of the next rank.
• Hybrid: Two basic modules of different colors and the same rank become one hybrid module of that rank.

The Credits aren't the expensive part, the modules are. A Mk.9 takes three Mk.8, which take nine Mk.7 and so on, down to 6'561 Mk.1 modules. Guess that's why nobody complained about modules cluttering the inventory anymore.

Hybrids can be ranked up as well, with two other hybrids of the same color and rank. Since hybrids don't drop, it's a lot cheaper to rank up the two basic modules first and to combine them at the end.

Special Upgrades

Some items have their own upgrade paths at the Tinker: prototype weapons can be turned into their stabilized or epic version, and certain items can be raised to level 35, 40 or 45, so a favorite piece doesn't have to be thrown away after a level cap increase. These plans ask for specific ingredients instead of the usual parts.

Salvaging

Parts come from salvaging. Select an item in your inventory and salvage it, and you get parts of the matching kind, for an upgraded item also a portion of what went into its upgrades. Salvaging modules returns Crystite since update 1.7. Before you sell white and green drops to a vendor for a handful of Crystite, check whether you're short on parts.