Helldivers 2 Ship Modules: What to Unlock First

The six sections

Section	What it upgrades
Patriotic Administration Center	Support weapon ammo, support weapon cooldown, backpack cooldown, resupply quality
Orbital Cannons	Orbital explosion falloff, barrage salvos, orbital cooldown, barrage spread
Hangar	Eagle cooldown, Eagle rearm, Eagle charges per rearm, bombs per strike
Bridge	Orbital deployment time, minimap detection, Hellpod steering, fire damage, global cooldown
Engineering Bay	Sentry, emplacement and resupply cooldown, sentry health, emplacement deployment
Robotics Workshop	Sentry deployment speed, sentry ammo, sentry rotation, sentry durability
Early modules cost common samples only, which is why the first tier of every section is cheap. The fourth and fifth modules in each chain add rare and super samples plus requisition slips — Superior Packing Methodology alone wants 150 common, 150 rare, 15 super and 20,000 slips.

The three that pay first

Liquid-Ventilated Cockpit in the Hangar halves the global Eagle cooldown. It is the largest single power spike in the tree, it costs 80 common samples, and it is the first module in its section, so nothing blocks it. Donation Access License in the Patriotic Administration Center gives every support weapon extra magazines on deploy. 60 common samples, first in section, works on every loadout that carries a support weapon. Targeting Software Upgrade in the Bridge cuts orbital deployment time by a second. One second is the difference between a railcannon hitting a Hulk and a railcannon hitting the crater it left.

The trap

Expanded Weapons Bay adds one Eagle charge per rearm and reads like the best module in the game. It sits third in the Hangar behind Pit Crew Hazard Pay, and it costs 10 super samples on top of 80 common and 80 rare. That is fine — but buying it before the two cheap modules in other sections means you spend your first super samples on a fourth Eagle use you cannot yet rearm quickly. Super samples only start at Extreme, so the moment you begin earning them is the moment to check whether your next purchase actually needs them. The super sample page covers the spawn rules.

When to stop buying

Ship modules stop being the best use of samples once the modules you actually use are bought. A player who never calls a sentry gets nothing from the Robotics Workshop, and a player who never uses a backpack gets nothing from Hand Carts. Read your own loadout history rather than the tree. Requisition slips become the binding cost at the top of each chain, and they cap at 50,000 — see requisition slips for where the overflow goes.