SWTOR Datacrons Guide

Datacrons are hidden objects in Star Wars: The Old Republic that you can find to earn a permanent boost for your characters. Datacrons are hidden across almost every planet, are available to free-to-play, preferred and subscribed players, and are some of my favorite secrets to hunt down in the entire game. In this video, I’ll be going over the basics of finding Datacrons.

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If you are looking for a guide on how to find each datacron, please visit my complete SWTOR Datacron Locations Guide which has each datacron’s location mapped out.

Datacrons Location Guides

Contents

Datacrons
Legacy Datacrons
Datacron Types
Are Datacrons worth it?
How do you find Datacrons?
Datacron Tips
Getting Around Faster Tips
Easy Datacrons List

Datacrons

Some Datacrons are fairly easy to find, and you may run into them just while questing exploring. Others are incredibly well hidden, and you’ll never find them unless you specifically go looking for them. There are even Datacrons that are very easy to see, but very hard to figure out how to get, as the path to get to them starts somewhere further away. Some Datacrons are restricted to Imperial or Republic side, some require more than one player working together to obtain, some will require you first obtain a special item to get them, and many datacrons are hidden at the end of a jumping puzzle. As a reward for finding one, you’ll get a small permanent boost to your stats for all your characters on your server, and a lore codex entry for the character you found it on. The easiest way to know if you are near a datacron is that you’ll hear a faint sparkling sound that sounds like this *SPARKLE SPARKLE SPARKLE*

Legacy Datacrons

At the launch of the game, Datacrons were per-character, which meant you would need to go find each one on each character. These days, datacrons are tied to your legacy, which means once you find a datacron, you won’t need to go find it again on your other characters if you don’t want to.

To see which Datacrons you have collected, open the Legacy panel by pressing Y on your keyboard, or find it in the main menu under an icon of a person. Datacrons are located on the menu on the left, under Global Unlocks. The Datacrons are sorted by planet, making it really easy for you to see which ones you have and which ones you don’t. A majority of these datacrons are available even to free-to-play players, and are a great thing to go looking for if you’re searching for things to do on your free-to-play account. Keep in mind although datacrons are considered an explorational activity, you may occasionally run into enemies while looking for them, so you may have to wait until you are at a higher level before you go looking for the ones on the planets for higher level characters. Some datacrons are restricted to certain factions, some are available to all players, and others have a separate version for Republic and Imperial side.

Datacron Types

There are three different types of hidden objects you can find related to datacrons.

Normal Datacrons

A majority of the datacrons you can find will give you a boost to your stats – these are the colorful datacrons that come in blue, green, purple, red, yellow and orange.

Matrix Shards

In addition to datacrons, there are also some other hidden objects called Matrix Shards that look like datacrons but are not tracked in this legacy list. Instead of providing a stat boost, these hidden objects will give you a matrix shard, which can be combined with other matrix shards as part of secret quest to create a relic, an item you can equip for stats. At the launch of the game, this item was worth getting, but has now been mostly deprecated, so you can choose to collect the matrix shards if you enjoy exploring or collecting codex entries, or you can ignore them entirely if you are just looking for the stat boost from the normal datacrons for your character.

Dark vs Light Datacrons

There is one last type of datacron – these are glowing white-blue datacrons that were hidden around the galaxy as part of the now-retired Dark vs Light event, but the developers decided to leave them in the game after the event ended. You can still find these hidden datacrons, but they don’t offer any stats, codex entries, or achievements.

Are Datacrons worth it?

At the time of making this video, there’s 130 different datacrons and matrix shards you can find in the game, and of those there’s about 85 datacrons you can aim to find if you’re just looking for the stat boost ones, which is what shows up on your legacy datacrons list.

Although some datacrons are very easy to get, others are quite hard, and either way with so many datacrons it can be very time consuming to collect them all. In general, each individual datacron’s stat boost is very minimal, usually only giving you 2 points of Endurance, Power, Mastery or Presence. Overall, if you collected every datacron, you’d get a nice little boost to your stats on all your characters that stacks on top of any gear you have on your character. Depending on what type of character you play, you may even skip some datacrons – for example, Presence is only for making your companion stronger, and if you don’t care about that, you can skip the Presence datacrons. You do not need datacrons for endgame combat, though they do technically provide a very small boost depending on what type of content you are playing.

Overall, datacrons are designed to be an explorational activity, with a nice little reward at the end that isn’t just cosmetic. I usually tell players that if they enjoy hunting them down it’s a lot of fun to gather them all, but if they are frustrating or take away time from playing other activities the player enjoys better, to skip them all together. Personally I love datacron hunting, and I think they are an especially great thing to go look for if you are playing on a free-to-play or preferred account and have less end-game activities available to you, or if you’re a solo player, or if you’re like me and just like the explorational and secret-finding aspects in video games.

How do you find Datacrons?

Datacrons are spread out across the entire galaxy. I’ve put together an in-depth guide about how to find every datacron in the game.

Datacron Tips

You only need to find each datacron once per server (once per legacy).
Many datacrons require jumping to get to them. You can jump on foot, or on a speeder for longer or higher jumps. Some jumps will need a running start, while others are easier to make if you just press your character against the barrier and jump upwards then forwards.
When you are on a speeder, your character’s feet are in the center of the speeder, so you need to land your jumps on the center of your speeder rather than its front. If you’re struggling with that concept, for example you fall off instead of jumping while on your speeder, try using the Rocket Boost mount or a jet pack mount so that your speeder is the same size as your character.
When falling straight down or walking across thin pipes and ledges, you can turn on walk by pressing the slash key on the top right of your keyboard, above your number pad. This will let you walk with more precision, but it will make you jump less far, so make sure to turn it off when you get to a jump.
If you need to make a very tight fall, where there isn’t much ledge to land on, turn on your walk and go off the edge backwards.
If you are picking one character to datacron hunt on, I recommend a character that has a teleport ability, if you have one. This would be the sage, the sorcerer, the gunslinger and the sniper. Each of these classes can put a circle down on the ground before they jump, and if they start falling, or miss their jump but don’t die, they can re-press their teleport ability and it will teleport them back to their circle. This can save a lot of frustration when it comes to the more difficult jumping datacrons.

Getting Around Faster Tips

Hold down the Num Lock key on the right hand side of your keyboard to make your character run forward without you have to hold down the forward key
Keybind your mount so you can access it quick while datadron hunting. To keybind your mount, place it on one of your quickbars, then press Esc > Preferences > Choose the Key Bindings tab at the bottom > Quickbar. Once you are on the Quickbar panel you will need to figure out which quickbar and position your mount is in and choose a key to keybind it to (personally I use the Y key)
If you are doing many datacrons in one day and have extra credits, buy the Legacy Travel III Unlock (it’s in the “Other” tab of the Legacy panel) that will allow you to use quick travel an unlimited amount of times
If you have a lot of credits, purchase the “Improved Mounting” Legacy Unlock that allows you to mount while running which saves you time and frustration while datacron hunting
If you have even more credits, purchase Improved Speeder Piloting V to make your speeder go even faster
Quick travel and Heroic Shuttle Travel for maximum speed.

Easy Datacrons List

Are you hopeless at jumping? I’ve put together a list of the easiest bonus stats datacrons to get in the entire game. These datacrons should require little or no jumping – most of them are just hidden well, and you can use my maps to easily walk to them!

Questions or comments? Feel free to send me a message on Twitter @swtorista, Reddit /u/swtorista, Youtube Swtorista channel or by e-mail at the same name with gmail.com at the end. Have fun out there and may the Force be with you. ~ Swtorista