If you’re playing Helldivers 2 and wondering how to earn medals quickly, you’re in the right place. Medals are the in-game currency you’ll need to unlock better gear, Warbonds, weapon upgrades, and other nice rewards. Below is a practical, easy-to-read guide on how to rack up medals efficiently, with tips anyone can use.
Medals function as a reward currency in Helldivers 2. You earn them by completing missions, challenges, and picking up loot during operations. They are essential because:
- You use them to progress through Warbonds (the game’s version of a battle pass) and unlock weapon skins, armour, stratagems, and more.
- Higher medal counts let you upgrade your loadout faster and stay competitive as you face tougher enemies.
- They encourage you to play at higher difficulty levels or push through more challenging missions, which in turn keeps the game engaging.
Knowing how they’re earned and where to focus your efforts helps you make the most of your time.
How to Earn Medals
Here are the primary ways to get medals in Helldivers 2 — each with its own advantages.
Daily and Personal Orders
Every day you’ll get a set of personal orders (challenges) which grant medals once completed. These could involve tasks like “kill X enemies” or “complete Y mission type.” They’re generally quick and give a reliable baseline of medals each day.
Missions and Operations
Completing standard missions and multi-mission operations is one of the main ways to earn medals. The medal reward depends on the difficulty of the mission and how many missions in a chain you complete.
For example:
- Lower-difficulty missions give fewer medals but are easier to complete quickly.
- Higher-difficulty missions yield more medals but require better skill or teamwork.
Exploring and Looting
While on missions, you can find containers, bunkers, and minor points of interest (PoIs). These may yield one-off medal rewards (often in smaller amounts) that add up over time.
By actively exploring rather than just rushing objectives, you’ll pick up extra medals along the way.
Farming Strategies (for Efficient Medal Gain)
If you want to optimise medal collection, you can adopt specific strategies:
- Focus on high-difficulty missions you can reliably complete, since they pay out more.
- Seek out missions with “Blitz” or “Eradication” modifiers, which often allow faster completion and thus a higher medal-per-minute ratio.
- Use solo or small-team play if you can coordinate well — fewer delays, smoother execution.
- When you finish the primary objective, extraction isn’t always necessary if you’ve already met the mission’s goal — some players suggest ending early to save time.
Recommended Strategy: Step-by-Step Plan
Here’s a simple plan you can follow as a beginner or intermediate player:
- Check your Personal Orders at the start of each session → complete them first for quick medals.
- Pick your highest difficulty mission you’re comfortable with → aim for something you can complete reliably without too many retries.
- Loadout wisely → choose weapons and stratagems you’re comfortable with; you don’t have to use the top gear yet, but be efficient.
- During the mission, prioritise the objective → speed matters. If exploring further slows you down too much, focus on the main goal.
- Grab loot when convenient → if you see a container or PoI on your route, open it. It may yield extra medals.
- Extraction or finish early? → if the objective is done, some players choose to finish the mission quickly (even by intentionally dying) rather than wait for extraction, especially when farming medals.
- Repeat → pick new missions or operation chains and keep the momentum going.
