How to Farm Rep in Need for Speed Heat
Here’s how to make reputation quickly and easily.
Need for Speed Heat places a big emphasis on rep, one of the most important currencies in the game. However, it’s also one of the hardest to make, with police repeatedly coming out of nowhere and resetting a lot of progress if they arrest you. Luckily, we’ve found a way to farm rep with ease, as well as some pointers for building your reputation generally.
How to Farm Rep
This method of rep farming was, as far as we can work out, first discovered by Reddit user parallelbird, and proved pretty effective in our testing of it. For this method, you’ll need the fastest car you have with set of on-road tires, and a good nitrous boost wouldn’t hurt either, with a focus on power rather than frequent use.
Best Method For Farming Rep
For this you’ll barely have to leave Lucas’ Garage, going round the back of his shop to the Palm City Raceway, the same area in which money can be farmed during the daytime. Once there you’re going to want to start driving round the track clockwise, trying to keep your speed up as much as possible.
How to Generate Rep
Once you’re building up the best speed possible, launch yourself over the long jump on the Southern side of the track, the one called the Rusty Takeoff (you should be able to see it on your map). This is NOT the one that leads you out of the stadium, but the one that runs parallel to the inside of the track, over a tunnel leading outside. Hit the jump as fast as possible, using nitrous for that extra speed boost, and simply do what you’d do with any long jump - try and send yourself as far as possible. For every star you make, you’ll earn yourself a decent amount of reputation, but also a small amount of heat. The cops don’t like such sick moves, and before long they’ll begin to get annoyed. That’s fine though, it’s what’s going to make this so much more profitable when you use it to your advantage.
How to Build Heat
As your heat levels up, so too does the multiplier on your reputation, effectively meaning that the more wanted you are, the more rep you’ll make. As a result, this makes the Palm City Raceway and the Rusty Takeoff a perfect lab for generating both heat AND reputation, building both in small, rapid increments to your own satisfaction. Once you complete the jump, simply do a lap of the raceway, building up your speed again, and do the jump once more. As you repeat this action over time it will become more and more effective, especially if you can get three stars with each jump (though it isn’t mandatory for this method to work). Before long you’ll be making thousands of rep every minute, far more than races or missions make, and at only a fraction of the risk.
Don’t Get Caught While Farming Rep
As your heat builds up, the problem of police cruisers becomes more and more likely. However, unlike driving about in the open world, there are several elements in your favour as you cruise in circles around the raceway.
- Cops just don’t show up that much. The raceway is mainly self-contained and the roads around it are fairly distant, meaning that the chance of a squad car simply happening upon you is pretty small. The few that do show up are spawned in automatically by the game when you reach certain heat levels, and they’re nearly always on their own. If more appear, there’s a couple of ways to avoid them.
- The jump is a good way to wreck enemy vehicles. Whenever we had a police car messing with us, more than half the time it would destroy itself when trying to follow over the Rusty Takeoff, freeing us up to keep driving. And a lot of the times when it survived, it still lost control on the landing, giving us the opportunity either to escape or keep trying to farm the circuit.
- Use the other jump for an easy escape. In the unlikely event that things do get hairy, go to the leftmost end of the track, then cut back across the middle of the circuit for a run-up, leaping the fence with the long jump activity marked “Get into the Raceway”. Admittedly you’ll be using it to get out rather than in, but it hardly matters, as you’ll effectively be leaving the police behind in a pen from which they struggle to immediately escape.
- Everything you need is close by. As opposed to driving about the open countryside where resources are few and far between, Palm City Raceway is situated right between several vital points: a garage for repairs, the safehouse that is Lucas’ Garage, and numerous streets and stunts that make it easy to lose any pursuers.
What to Do After Making Rep
Once you’ve decided you’ve made enough reputation for the night, make sure you’ve escaped the cops and simply go back to Lucas’ Garage or any other safehouse to bank everything you’ve earned. However, make sure not to annoy any wandering police cars on the way, or you’ll quickly find yourself in a dangerous chase, especially if your heat was built up especially high.
Building Rep in the Open World
If you’d rather earn your reputation by playing normally, we’ve noted several tips and tricks that should make the whole process a little easier.
- Races are one of the safest ways to earn big rep. There’s no risk-free path to building your reputation, even in the method above, but races are generally better because cops are just as likely to chase other racers rather than you.
- In an emergency, either fly away or fall over. If the cops aren’t giving you space, either take a jump (they’re bad at handling those, especially ones that go over water) or if you have the health left, simply drive off a cliff or precipice. The police are reluctant to take those and will often waste time trying to find a safer route down, giving the chance to escape.
- Don’t get greedy. Unless you’ve got a true supercar, don’t push your luck when it comes to the police. If you find yourself at heat level 3 and manage to escape, now might be a good time to go and recover, because it only gets harder from there.
- Collectibles are small but reliable sources of reputation. If you’re just a few hundred points from earning a new car, it might be worth going out and just knocking over a few flamingos in the daytime. Each one rewards a small quantity of rep and money, but over time this can really add up.
- Use daytime challenges. If you find yourself doing better in daylight hours, rep can be gained legally through the random day challenges found in Lucas’ Garage. You won’t get any heat bonuses, but you can make money at the same time.
