Gears 5 may have lost its Gear Packs and Season Pass, but that doesn’t mean it’s microtransaction-free. Gears 5 still offers Supply Drops that you can get while playing the game, and which contain unique items.
The Supply will rotate its items every once in a while, but the good news is that the items on offer will be available to everyone that’s playing, no matter what team they’re on.
What are Supply Drops?
Supply Drops are loot boxes - there’s no going around that fact. While they’ve replaced the more questionable Gear Packs from previous Gears titles, there’s plenty of RNG present here still. The good news, though, is that all of the Supply items are available to all players at any given moment. It’s just that it’s RNG what you get.
According to official release info, Supply Drops work in a particular way: “With Supply Drops, every minute you play (across every multiplayer mode) contributes towards a random item drop from a unique pool of content we call Supply.” Supply Drops and the Supply items cannot be purchased with real-world money, and if you happen to get a duplicate item in your Supply Drop, it’ll immediately turn into Scrap. Scrap can then be spent on specific Supply items you want to purchase.
There’s a catch here, but we’ll get to that later.
How to get More Supply Drops?
It’s simple: play the game. As we quoted above, the only way to get more Supply Drops is to spend time in-game. Since the system seems to count the amount of time you’re spending in one of Gears 5’s game modes, there’s little potential for abusing it here. We bet anti-AFK features have been in place from the get-go, so we’d advise avoiding those “tactics” outright. Instead, just go and play the game. Whether it’s campaign, Versus, Horde, or whatever else you enjoy, Supply Drop progression should move along normally.
Theoretically, your income of Scrap should allow you to eventually buy whatever Supply Drop item you might want but cannot get, so there shouldn’t be a problem in the long run. This will, however, require lots of playtime. With that in mind, you may be wondering if there’s a way to speed things up…
How to get Supply Drops faster?
We did tell you there was a catch, didn’t we? Since the Supply Drops count your playtime for the items to actually drop, this system allows for plenty of monetisation. Gears 5 isn’t what we’d call predatory, but it does have purchase options that can greatly speed things up for you, if you spend money. Here’s what the game offers at the time of writing:
- 2x Multiplayer XP
- 2x Escape/Horde Mode Character XP
- 2x Supply Drop progression
Obviously, this can greatly speed up your Supply Drop rate. Since the devs are monetising the game in this regard, there’s little wiggle room for other farming techniques. Here are the different price points you can invest into:
- 1 Day - 250 Iron
- 7 Days - 600 Iron
- 30 Days - 1200 Iron
Note that Iron is a real-world currency. With that in mind, we don’t think you can actually speed up your Supply Drop progression aside from buying the booster. Good news is that this does allow for 2x XP events, where the entire community will be awarded faster progression, though there’s no telling if devs will go down this route.
In any case, we hope this guide provides you with some much-needed context on the how and why of Supply Drops. Happy hunting.
