Upgrades

Upgrades are items dropped by high-tier enemies which can be used (by attempting to equip them) to grant minor permanent stat boosts to the current plane. The effects of these boosts are displayed in the Stats section of the in-game menu, within the Upgrades pane on the far right, and are also automatically rolled into the displayed stats in the Plane pane where applicable.

General Upgrades
General upgrades boost basic stats, making the plane more powerful in all situations. Use caps for these upgrades depend on the current Plane (deviations from Old Faithful use caps are indicated using underlines for unusually low caps and italics for unusually high caps). ^Each point of Damage multiplier, whether from Pilot stats, Plane levels, or Damage upgrades, increases all damage dealt with Weapons by 1% of base damage.

'Additional armor from this source is not affected by Armor multiplier from levels --- see Pilot Skills for a detailed explanation.

Elemental Upgrades
Elemental upgrades boost element-specific stats which are very useful in end-game elemental dungeons, especially when exploiting elemental weaknesses in enemies by using elemental weapons. All elemental upgrades have a use cap of 25 for all planes.

Defensive Upgrades
Damage reductions are applied multiplicatively rather than additively -- as a result, the final effect of using a certain defensive elemental upgrade several times, which is rounded to the value shown in the rightmost Stats pane, is determined via the following formula (at 25 upgrades, reduction maxes out at 20.2% ~ 20%):

(1 - (Effect per Use)^(Number of Times Used) ) * 100%

Offensive Upgrades
Increases to elemental damage stack additively with Damage multiplier for the elemental portions of weapon damage. Elemental damage upgrades (which grant a maximum of +50% elemental damage multiplier at 25 upgrades) have maximal effect on Elemental Weapons.