Airport Baggage Simulator Best Tech Upgrades: Early Automation Tier List
If you are drowning in a sea of unsorted luggage, finding the Airport Baggage Simulator best tech upgrades is the only way to survive the early game. Released by Three River Games on May 28, 2026, this immersive sim quickly scales from a relaxing manual inspection job into a chaotic logistical nightmare. You start by hauling suitcases by hand, scanning labels with a tablet, and placing suspicious bags on the floor for the substance sniffer dog. But to hit maximum profit and unlock major hubs like the Farmbrook Terminal, you must transition to full automation.
Because your starting capital is painfully limited, buying the wrong machine can stall your progress for hours. This tier list breaks down exactly which tools offer the highest return on investment so you can build a flawless conveyor empire without going bankrupt.
Why You Need to Prioritize the Airport Baggage Simulator Best Tech Upgrades
In the opening hours of Airport Baggage Simulator, the core gameplay loop is entirely manual. A bag arrives. You pick it up, place it on an inspection table, and scan the label to verify the destination. You check the weight against the airline's limit (often 23kg), and if the bag looks suspicious, you drop it on the floor for your sniffer dog to check for illegal substances. Finally, you manually haul it to the correct departure gate or toss it onto the red belt for rejected contraband.
Doing this manually takes roughly 15 to 20 seconds per bag. When you only have one flight to manage, it is manageable. But once you unlock Terminal 2, the volume of luggage skyrockets. The game’s economy is unforgiving: you receive strict financial penalties for sending bags to the wrong destination, missing overweight fees, or letting contraband slip onto an aircraft.
This is where automation comes in. The goal is to design a continuous conveyor layout where machines handle the sorting, scanning, and rejecting. However, you order all your parts via an in-game tablet, and they are delivered by Horst, your trusty delivery driver. Since capital is tight and delivery takes time, blindly buying every shiny new toy will leave your production line broken. You need a strict priority list.
S-Tier: The Absolute Airport Baggage Simulator Best Tech Upgrades
These are the non-negotiable investments. The moment you have the cash, these upgrades should be ordered immediately. They fundamentally alter the speed of your terminal and remove the most tedious manual bottlenecks.
The Table-Mounted Sniffer Dog
By default, checking for illegal substances is a massive time sink. You have to physically pick up a suspicious suitcase, walk it over to the dog on the floor, wait for the sniff animation, and then pick it back up to route it to the red belt.
Upgrading the dog to a table mount changes everything. This upgrade allows you to route your conveyor belt directly past the dog. The dog sits on a raised platform and passively scans bags as they roll by. If it detects contraband, it instantly flags the bag, allowing an automatic sorting gate to kick it directly onto the red belt. At a cost of roughly $1,500, this upgrade saves you an average of 40 seconds per flagged bag. It is mathematically the highest ROI upgrade in the entire game.
Auto-Scanner Gate
Before this upgrade, you are married to your handheld tablet. You have to manually scan every single barcode to determine the bag's destination and verify its safety status. The Auto-Scanner Gate is a pass-through module that you snap directly onto your conveyor line. As luggage passes through the archway, it instantly reads the barcode and transmits the destination data to your downstream sorting gates. Combining the Auto-Scanner Gate with the Table-Mounted Sniffer Dog creates the foundation of a fully "hands-off" inspection line.
Horst Delivery Speed Upgrade
Horst is your lifeline. Every piece of conveyor belt, every scanner, and every tool is brought to your terminal by Horst in his delivery truck. In the early game, his baseline delivery speed is agonizingly slow. If you realize you are one straight conveyor piece short of connecting your automated line to the Farmbrook Terminal gate, you are forced to halt operations and wait for him to arrive. Upgrading Horst’s delivery speed ensures that your expansion projects are never bottlenecked by logistics.
A-Tier: Essential Routing and Weight Checks
Once your S-Tier upgrades are humming, your next goal is to eliminate the secondary manual tasks. These upgrades are vital for scaling your operations but aren't quite as urgent as the S-Tier selections.
Inline Weight Scales
Overweight luggage is a massive source of lost revenue if you fail to flag it, but manually lifting every bag onto the starting scale breaks the flow of an automated line. The Inline Weight Scale snaps into your conveyor system and automatically reads the weight of passing luggage. If a bag exceeds the standard 23kg limit, the scale flags it in the system. You still need an automatic sorting gate to route flagged bags to an exception line, but removing the manual lift-and-weigh step drastically increases your bags-per-minute (BPM) throughput.
Automatic Sorting Gates
You cannot run a multi-terminal airport without these. When you unlock Terminal 2 and start processing flights for destinations like Farmbrook, your single output belt is no longer sufficient. Automatic Sorting Gates read the data provided by your Auto-Scanner Gate and physically push luggage down branching conveyor paths. You will need multiple gates programmed with specific parameters: one to divert red-belt contraband, one to divert overweight bags for manual fee processing, and several to route cleared bags to their respective flight gates.
B-Tier: Situational Airport Baggage Simulator Best Tech Upgrades
These upgrades are useful but highly situational. Buying them too early will drain your bank account without providing a meaningful boost to your overall throughput.
Thrower Modules
Thrower modules are physics-based launchers that literally catapult luggage across gaps in your terminal. They are incredibly fun to watch and can theoretically save you money on conveyor belt pieces if you need to cross a large open space. However, their physics can be unpredictable. A slight misalignment means suitcases will violently bounce off walls, scatter across the floor, and trigger massive delays. Save the thrower modules for the late game when you have the capital to experiment with chaotic layouts.
Backpack Skill
The Backpack skill increases your character's personal inventory slots, allowing you to carry more tools, scanners, and small conveyor parts at once. In the first hour of the game, this feels like a godsend. But if you are following this tier list, your goal is to stop carrying things altogether. Once your terminal is automated, you will spend 90% of your time managing layouts on your tablet rather than physically hauling items. It is a nice quality-of-life perk, but not worth prioritizing over actual machinery.
C-Tier: Trap Upgrades to Avoid Early On
Do not touch these until you are swimming in late-game profits. They are resource sinks designed to test your impulse control.
Cosmetic Conveyor Colors
The game offers the ability to paint your conveyor belts in vibrant colors, including bright pink and yellow. While color-coding your lines (e.g., pink for Terminal 2, yellow for Farmbrook) sounds like a great organizational strategy, the upgrade costs are steep. The luggage doesn't care what color the belt is. Spend your money on actual sorting gates first; paint the belts when you are rich.
Janitor Skill and Premium Decor
Airport Baggage Simulator features a decor rating system. A cleaner, better-decorated terminal yields slight passive bonuses. The Janitor skill helps you clean up messes faster, and the tablet offers expensive premium furniture to boost your rating. This is a trap. The current meta strategy to hit Level 2 decor is simply to buy the cheapest green potted plants and spam them in a corner of the room. It costs a fraction of the price of premium furniture and completely negates the need to waste skill points on the Janitor upgrade early on.
Step-by-Step Early Game Upgrade Order
To dominate the early game economy, execute your purchases in this exact sequence:
- Phase 1 (The Grind): Suffer through the manual labor. Save every dollar. Do not buy cosmetic items or minor tools.
- Phase 2 (The Dog): Purchase the Table-Mounted Sniffer Dog. Build a basic straight conveyor that passes the dog and leads to your primary gate. Manually scan the labels, but let the dog handle the contraband checks.
- Phase 3 (The Brain): Buy the Auto-Scanner Gate. Place it immediately after the dog.
- Phase 4 (The Split): Purchase your first Automatic Sorting Gate. Program it to divert any bag flagged by the dog or the scanner directly to the red belt.
- Phase 5 (The Scale): Integrate the Inline Weight Scale to catch heavy bags without lifting them.
- Phase 6 (The Expansion): Upgrade Horst’s delivery speed so you can rapidly buy the extra conveyor belts needed to connect Terminal 2.
- Phase 7 (The Polish): Once your main line to Farmbrook and Terminal 2 is flawless, you can finally invest in the Backpack skill to make minor layout tweaks easier, and drop a few green plants to hit your Level 2 decor rating.
FAQ: Airport Baggage Simulator Best Tech Upgrades
What is the fastest way to make money in the early game? Focus entirely on accuracy. The penalties for sending a bag to the wrong destination or missing contraband will wipe out your profit margins. Automating your contraband detection with the Table-Mounted Sniffer Dog is the fastest way to ensure zero penalties.
Do I need to buy the Backpack upgrade to carry heavy luggage? No. The Backpack upgrade only increases your inventory slots for tools and small items. It does not allow you to carry more luggage at once. Your goal should be to build conveyors so you never have to carry luggage anyway.
Why are my Thrower Modules dropping bags on the floor? Thrower modules require precise alignment and spacing. If the receiving catch-basin is too far away or angled incorrectly, the game's physics engine will cause the bags to spill. Stick to standard conveyor belts until you can afford to test layouts safely.
Can I skip the manual weight checks before buying the Inline Scale? You can, but you will be fined for every overweight bag that makes it onto a plane. If you are overwhelmed, it is sometimes mathematically better to take the occasional overweight fine rather than letting your entire conveyor line back up, but you should buy the Inline Scale as soon as possible to plug the leak.
Does the Table-Mounted Sniffer Dog require upkeep? Unlike manual scanning where you have to constantly manage the floor space, the upgraded dog works passively. However, you must ensure your conveyor speed does not exceed the dog's scanning animation frame rate, or bags might slip past un-flagged.
Sources
- Three River Games Official Steam Page and Patch Notes (May 2026)
- Community testing and conveyor routing layouts via r/pcgaming and the Airport Baggage Simulator Steam Community Hub.
- Early Access gameplay mechanics documented during the May 2026 Steam release window.