The Cycle: Frontier Insurance guide – How to use Gear Salvage and Insurance

As an extraction royale game, The Cycle: Frontier’s main appeal is its unforgiving nature. The whole game loop revolves around looting items and resources on the planet’s surface and getting away with them, and this premise fosters brutal competition between players. Whatever items you happen to bring into the map are forfeit if you get killed on the surface — unless you have insured them in advance, that is. Using Insurance and Gear Salvage is key to staying afloat in The Cycle: Frontier, and this guide will explain everything you need to know about these systems.

The Cycle: Frontier Insurance basics

When you prepare to drop on Fortuna III, you will be faced with the Insurance screen. There you can drag and drop certain items into one of two tables to insure them. Only weapons, helmets, body shields, and backpacks can be insured — items you bring in your backpack or Safe Pocket are not insurable or salvageable.

Each item may be given either Standard Insurance or Salvage Insurance — not both. Note, that once an item is insured in any way, it remains insured until you lose it. You can extract with it multiple times and it will keep its insurance status, so you won’t have to re-invest in it.

Standard Insurance in The Cycle: Frontier

The basic and more budget-conscious way to insure your items in The Cycle: Frontier is with Standard Insurance. By dragging them onto this table, you pay a fraction of the items’ K-mark cost (the total of which is shown below the table) and they become insured. In the event of your death, you will receive a payout for your insured items worth roughly three times the cost of insuring them; this amount is visible at the top of the table, and will naturally be less than the purchase price of these items. This means that Standard Insurance in The Cycle: Frontier will never be a way to generate profit, but rather a way to partially mitigate losses.

The insurance payout is not given to you instantly, but it instead arrives at your player Quarters 12 hours after you lose the insured items. You can pick up any insurance payouts by interacting with the Income Generator station in the back right corner of the Quarters.

Gear Salvage in The Cycle: Frontier

If you really value a certain item in The Cycle: Frontier, you can insure it with Gear Salvage. By dragging it onto this table, you put out an order for the item to be returned to you in the event of your death. Controversially, Gear Salvage costs Aurum, which means that you can pump real-life money into the game for a tangible advantage. You can also pay for the Gear Salvage option in The Cycle: Frontier with Salvage Tokens, a rare currency that you only get a handful of at the start of each Season. Salvage Tokens are also found on the free track of the Season Pass.

If you die on the surface, any items insured with Gear Salvage will be returned to you after 45 minutes, provided no other player picks them up and manages to extract with them. Ironically, this means that insuring high-tier items with Gear Salvage is next to pointless, as they are guaranteed to be looted by other players. If your item is looted by another player, you will receive a K-marks payout as if you had purchased Standard Insurance for it. If it stays on the surface of the planet for 45 minutes, it despawns and is returned to you. Either way, you will receive your Insurance payout at the Income Generators in your Quarters.

Related: The Cycle: Frontier best weapons tier list

Insurance voiding in The Cycle: Frontier

There are two sets of circumstances in The Cycle: Frontier under which your items’ Insurance will be voided. If you throw away an insured item, you will not get a payout for it, and it will not be returned to you with Gear Salvage. For that reason, insuring low-level items is generally a waste of K-marks, even if you are a beginner in The Cycle: Frontier, since you are more than likely to leave them behind for something better you find on the surface.

Similarly, if you die and your teammate picks up one of your insured items, the insurance is voided. You will not receive a payout of any sort for these items, although your friends may agree to give them back to you in a future drop.