Samples are used for unlocking an entire category of upgrades in Helldivers 2. Without these, you'll miss out on a ton of ship upgrades that provide invaluable bonuses to your stratagems, which you'll need to beat the harder difficulty levels that contain rarer Samples needed for even more advanced upgrades.
Helldivers 2: How To Change Ship Name
Helldivers 2 allows you to rename your ship as you like, and here is a step-by-step guide on how to do it.
Unlike Medals and Requisition, Samples are generally harder to come by. Returning to your ship with a hefty Sample payout depends on what your squad does while on a mission. If you're itching to get more of these upgrade materials, here's a quick Helldivers 2 guide showing some of the best practices you can do to farm Samples.
Updated March 15th, 2024 by Russ Boswell: There are a lot of upgrades for players to unlock in Helldivers 2. Getting new stratagems is pretty simple but ship upgrades can be a bit more difficult as players will need to grab special samples to use as currency. Thankfully, finding and farming samples in Helldivers 2 isn't particularly difficult if players know where to look but they'll need to extract successfully without dying to keep their hands on the valuable items. To better showcase how to farm samples in Helldivers 2, the following guide now includes a companion video.
Play Eradication Missions
Eradication missions are the best ones to play when farming Samples. They're set on small maps that often have high concentrations of Samples within the playable space. All you have to do here is run around the vicinity (usually outside the area you're supposed to defend) and search for Samples along possible points of interest, like craters or ruined fortifications. Also, since the only objective of Eradication missions is to kill a specific number of enemies, these tend to finish within 10 minutes, depending on the team's performance.
The only downside here is that Eradication missions appear randomly. Check all the available planets to see if any are available. If you're having trouble joining an existing public game, you're better off hosting a match yourself.
Loot POIs
The most basic way to get Samples is to loot POIs like research bases, frontier homes, and crash sites in other mission types. You can also spot them in enemy outposts, though their appearance changes depending on where you find them. For example, on Terminid territory, Samples can appear as bulbous growths attached to thin stalks near bug holes and nests. If you're on a human POI, they'll appear as flat, rectangular containers.
The best way to spot additional POIs is to activate Radio Towers. Activating these not only gives you a nice bump of EXP and Requisition, but they also reveal every single POI in the map. With the fog of war lifted, you and the squad will be able to plan out a path that nets you the most Samples possible.
Keep in mind that rarer Samples only start appearing in Challenger difficulty and above. For Super Samples, you'll want to play on Helldive difficulty in order to get the most out of your runs. Just don't forget to pick your Sample Containers up when you die so you don't lose them forever.
