In Upload Labs, token upgrades shape how quickly you advance through the tech and research trees. Picking the right ones early can be the difference between breezing into the late game or getting stuck grinding inefficiently.
This guide focuses on what matters most — reaching the endgame efficiently and unlocking your entire Research Tree as fast as possible. Once that’s done, you can keep playing for achievements and optimization, but in truth, that’s where most players consider the “core” game complete.
Let’s break down which token upgrades you must prioritize, which are optional, and which are simply not worth your time.
S Tier — Must-Haves (Get These First)
These upgrades define your early and mid-game pace. Each one offers either massive automation or essential control.
1. Autocollector
The ultimate early-game accelerator. It’s cheap, reliable, and cuts out manual micromanagement right away. Pick this as your first upgrade — it makes every aspect of your progression smoother by collecting automatically while you focus elsewhere.
2. Automated Crypto Seller
Set it, forget it, and watch your money flow in. This upgrade allows you to max out your sell sliders and automate income from crypto mining. Despite crypto’s drop-off in the late game, it’s still a key money source in your early and mid runs, so don’t skip it.
3. Thread Manager
Critical for managing Enhancer, Data Refiner, and Pre-Analyzer efficiently. It optimizes your processing chain and ensures your research cycles never stall. Usually, I grab this second or third, depending on how fast I’m pushing research.
4. Download Manager
An essential control tool that lets you manage download ratios for individual resources. Especially early on, when you’re juggling Image downloads for research while uploading other materials, this level of control is invaluable.
5. Network Limiter
The counterpart to Download Manager. It allows you to balance your upload and download speeds to prevent bottlenecks. Both are great — you don’t need them at once, but make sure you own both eventually.
Pro Tip: Pick either the Download Manager or Network Limiter first (whichever fits your playstyle better), then grab the other later after finishing your core S and A Tier purchases.
A Tier — Should Get (Highly Recommended)
Strong upgrades that improve efficiency and long-term scaling. You’ll need most of these to reach and sustain endgame performance.
6. Network Duality
Adds an extra Network Node, expanding your data capacity. It’s not an instant power spike but becomes important later when you’re juggling multiple networked processes. You’ll need to invest more funds to upgrade it fully, but it pays off.
7. Extensive Research
This one’s huge for progression. Each rank boosts your research gain and grants an extra Data Lab Node. Since higher research increases portal benefits, this upgrade directly accelerates your run completion speed.
8. System Upgrade
Think of this as an all-around performance booster. It amplifies the processing speed of your nodes, making everything — from refining to analyzing — noticeably faster. Two or three levels in this and your entire setup starts to hum.
9. Cheapskate
A solid mid-game pick. It effectively reduces costs, letting you stretch your income further. It’s not urgent early on but worth getting as soon as you stabilize your income.
10. Hack Specialization
Improves your hacking output, which translates into faster research and reduced costs. You don’t need to max it out; even one point provides noticeable utility once you start integrating hacking into your research strategy.
B Tier — Optional but Useful
Nice to have, but not essential for your first full Research Tree completion.
11. Tether Mining
If you’re tired of managing crypto manually, this automates it decently. Not the most efficient use of tokens, but better than ignoring crypto entirely. Still, early-game crypto is too strong to skip, so you might end up using this anyway if you prefer automation.
12. Node Group
Quality-of-life feature for managing clusters of nodes. Helps when you’re moving setups frequently, though you can easily get by without it. Useful, not transformative.
C Tier — Low Priority (Skip Until Late Game)
These provide marginal or situational benefits. You’ll likely outgrow their usefulness before they pay off.
13. Luck
The most debated upgrade in the community — and for good reason. It’s just not efficient. You’d need to click hundreds of random spawns for this to start paying off, and even then, the math doesn’t justify the cost.
In theory, it should scale exponentially with investment, but in its current state, it’s just an expensive novelty. You’re better off investing your time and tokens elsewhere.
14. Antivirus Pro
A comfort pick for your early portal runs. Helps during resets or first playthroughs by softening malware effects. However, the cost-to-benefit ratio makes it poor value overall — skip it unless you’re struggling early.
D Tier — Very Low Priority (Almost Never Worth It)
Time Cache & Idle Catalyst
These only matter if you plan on running Upload Labs as a true idle game — meaning your PC stays off while the game accumulates progress. If you’re an active or semi-active player, skip both. They add nothing to the speed of your research-focused runs.
F Tier — Avoid Entirely
IDE & Coding Specialization
These upgrades sound tempting but don’t deliver. Coding, as a system, feels underpowered and overly tedious for what it offers. The rewards are small, the process is long, and none of it compares to the raw speed of progressing through portals.
The few exceptions — like Compressed Upload, Compressed Download, and Compressed Enhancer — can be handy early on if you’re desperate for a bit more money or resource flow. But the rest? Not worth your time. You’ll achieve better results just by resetting and portaling forward.