Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 guide: ISO-8 crystals

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3’s ISO-8 system can add some serious stats to your favorite characters. This guide will teach you how to unlock and upgrade ISO-8 crystals.

How do I unlock ISO-8 crystals?

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At the end of the third chapter, Shadowland, you’ll face down Kingpin. Instead of an Infinity Stone, you’ll pull an ISO-8 crystal from the big man’s hands. When you get back to Avengers Tower in the next chapter, Vision will hook you up with the new ISO-8 system.

To upgrade your ISO-8 crystals, you’ll need to complete the fifth chapter, Xavier Institute.

What type of ISO-8 crystals are there?

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ISO-8 crystals come in multiple rarities and colors. The colors determine what kinds of bonus the crystal offers. You can slot up to four of these on each hero to add buffs.

• Purple: Strength and attack bonuses
• Green: Durability and other bonuses
• Blue: Extreme and energy bonuses
• Red: Vitality and critical bonuses
• Orange: Mastery and stagger bonuses
• Yellow: Resilience bonuses
• White: Bonuses to credits and survivability

For rarity, the crystals aren’t quite as specific. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 doesn’t ever call them out by name, and a Tier 3 red crystal will have the same name as a Tier 1 (Red ISO-8). You’ll have to use your eye to tell the difference. We’re going to call them small shards, big shards, small chunks, and big chunks.

How do I upgrade and modify ISO-8?

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Once you have the ability to upgrade, you can use ISO-8 Fragments to enhance your crystals.

In the ISO-8 management menu, you have a few options. You can lock crystals so you don’t dismantle them, break them down into Fragments, select a group of them to lock or dismantle at once, view your ISO-8 slots, or modify. The rest are self explanatory, so let’s tackle modify.

Modifying ISO-8

To upgrade your crystals, pick the one you want to enhance and tick the meter up (you can apply up to +5 to any crystal). Depending on your crystal’s rarity, you’ll need different resources.

For the first few levels, you’ll just need a load of ISO-8 Fragments and some gold. But crystals of a higher rarity require at least one crystal of a lower rarity to upgrade. For example, to upgrade a Blue ISO-8 big shard to +5, you’ll need one Blue ISO-8 small shard. Big chunks use the most crystals, and you’ll need 10 small chunks of the same color to get one +5 big chunk.

Once you have a crystal at +5, you can upgrade its rarity tier. Not only do you need to sink the currency to reach +5, but you’ll also need to sacrifice several crystals of the same rarity.

Once the ritual is complete, your small shard will be a big shard.

Where do I get ISO-8 and ISO-8 Fragments?

To find ISO-8 related items, you just need to play the game. It sounds reductive, but killing bigger enemies and opening treasure chests around the world will net you quite a few resources.