ABI Map Level Requirements: Why Your Map Is Still Locked

You hit the level everyone quoted, opened the deploy screen, and Lockdown is still greyed out on the map you actually want. Nothing is broken. You are almost certainly missing one of three other things.

Blocker one: level is only one of the requirements

Level gate is the famous one, and it is real — maps open progressively as your character levels, with Farm available from the start and the later ones asking considerably more. But every raid tier above Normal stacks two more conditions on top: a minimum loadout value you carry in, and an entry fee in Koen.

When Lockdown was rolled out for Farm, Valley and Armory, the published requirement was level 12 alongside a loadout floor and a paid entry. Forbidden demanded a far heavier kit and a bigger fee. Later maps — Airport especially — sit well above those numbers.

Miss any one of the three and the button stays grey. Most “I’m still locked” posts turn out to be a loadout worth less than the floor, not a low level.

Blocker two: you queued as Covert Ops

Higher tiers are Tactical Ops only. That means your own gear, pulled from your own stash. A Covert Operator borrows a random kit and cannot select them, no matter what the level counter says.

If the tier has vanished from your screen, check which operator you have selected first. This one catches people constantly.

Blocker three: the map has its own gate, or the mode is not running

Modes gate separately from maps. The PvE wave mode, for example, is locked to Airport and opens at a very low level — the kind of thing you can reach in an evening. Zombie-flavoured content is deliberately accessible; the regular high-tier raids are not.

There is also a fourth thing that is not a requirement at all but feels like one: the mode simply is not in rotation. Season content rotates in and out, and a mode you played last month can be absent now.

“Do maps unlock one by one at set levels?”

Roughly, yes — but pinning exact numbers to each one is how guides end up wrong. Between patch adjustments, seasonal changes and the difference between PC and mobile versions, any list you read today is already suspect. Open the map’s own info tab in the deploy screen; it shows your account the real gate.

Farm first is the one reliable rule. If you are choosing where to start, the best maps for beginners walks through that ordering.

“Is my gear even legal for that tier?”

Different question, same screen. The current season applies tier caps to ammo and gear: T4 and below in Normal, T5 and below in Lockdown. So even once the level gate opens, your kit still has to fit inside it. Bringing a top-tier rifle into Normal does nothing except get it rejected.

Our difficulty tier breakdown goes deeper on what each tier changes.

Getting unstuck

Two things unblock nearly everyone: building a cheap kit that clears the loadout floor deliberately rather than padding a backpack with sellables, and levelling faster. For the first one, see the budget loadouts — several are built to clear exactly this kind of floor.

And do not rush up a tier the moment it opens. A 100k kit you lose twice in a row costs more than ten Normal raids you walked out of.