What are Schemas in Marathon and how to get them?

Schemas are one of the many items in Marathon that players can find on Tau Ceti. These special item types can be unlocked and extracted through a range of methods, offering players the ability to purchase the named item from various vendors in the Vault section. There are quite a few too, so here’s everything you need to know about Schemas in Marathon.

The Escapist recaps

• Schemas in Marathon unlock the ability to purchase specific weapons from Armory traders.
• Players can obtain Schemas through the Rewards Pass or by extracting them during runs.
• Schemas can appear inside weapon bins and other loot containers while playing.
• Extracting a Schema allows players to buy a limited number of vouchers for that weapon.
• Weapons unlocked through Schemas are typically base quality and require mods to improve.

How to get Schemas in Marathon

As it stands, there are two main ways to get Schemas in Marathon:

• Through Rewards Pass
• Extracting Schemas from runs

If you play the game, you’ll naturally get Silk, which is the currency used to buy free and premium items from the Rewards Pass, aka battle pass. Some of these rewards come with skins for guns, while others offer Schemas.

Then, when you go into runs, you can sometimes find Schemas inside of weapon bins and other lootables. They come in different rarities from what we can tell, so be prepared to find different tiers of them naturally. Not even a Thief Runer can help you out there, maybe it knocks her down on the Marathon Tier List eh?

What do Schemas do in Marathon?

When you get a Schema, you can often find that it has a prerequisite on it. For example, if you get a Schema, it unlocks the ability to buy that weapon the Schema is named after, up to a set amount from the Armory traders.

If you manage to extract with one, then you can easily go and check the Armory and buy up to the cap of vouchers for that weapon and stock up on something. It’s handy if you find a Schema for a weapon you want to build around, and can then get different weapon mods and get really good and easy to build back-up inventory in case it all goes wrong.

Alternatively, it’s a relatively cheap and risk-free way to try a weapon out if you want to.

We are not sure what weapons have Schemas, but it’s likely all weapons, considering how many are in the Rewards Pass and what we’ve seen in the runs ourselves. These are often base quality, though, so you will need to mod them out using weapon parts to actually make them good. It’s worth noting if you plan on doing the harder raids, especially when they launch later on in Season 1 and beyond.

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