Space Marine 2 Campaign Collectibles: Dataslates and Cleanup

What they are

Dataslates are pickups scattered through campaign missions. Collecting them unlocks lore entries and counts toward the game’s completion tracking, and the mission select screen shows what you have found per mission — which is the only reliable way to know what you are missing. The important part is that they do not carry over between mission replays in the sense of being saved mid-mission: if you abandon a mission, you lose what you picked up in that run.

How to sweep efficiently

Do it on a difficulty you can clear comfortably. Collectible hunting is exploration, and exploration at high difficulty is just a slower way to die. Drop the difficulty, take your time. Clear the room before you search it. A dataslate is usually off the main path, which means the side rooms and the dead ends. Those are also where ambushes happen. Check behind the obvious. Collectibles are placed to reward looking, so look up, look behind consoles, and check the corners that the objective marker pulls you past. Do one mission at a time. Mission select tells you which missions are incomplete, so there is no reason to re-sweep a finished one.

Why bother

The lore is genuinely the point for most players — the campaign’s context lives in these entries rather than in dialogue. For others it is completion tracking, and for a few it is the achievements tied to finding them. Either way, the cost is one slow replay per mission, which is the cheapest thing in the game compared to grinding Operations for Requisition.

The interaction with progression

Campaign progress and Operations progress are separate: campaign levels do not carry into Operations, and Operations gear does not affect the campaign or PvP. That means a collectible sweep is a pure campaign activity and does not need to be scheduled around any other system — see the Operations guide for how the other half works. If you are sweeping after finishing the story, lower the difficulty, take a class you enjoy, and treat it as a second pass through a good campaign rather than a chore. The difficulty page explains what each tier changes, though for a collectible run the answer is simply the lowest one.