Horizon Zero Dawn – Tips and Tricks for Getting Started

Before you play the Horizon Zero Dawn game, you will definitely want to know these simple but useful tips and tricks. If you have any tips feel free to share with us!

Things to Know Before Playing

• Do the hunting lodge quests, they are a pile of XP.
• Always keep at least one of every item to trade for gear
• Make sure you clear the sidequests in the first area, one gives you an upgrade to your spear that you can’t get any other way.
• Drawing back a shot is for accuracy, not damage. Feel free to shoot wildly if you are close enough.
• While you always want the highest tier equipment you can get your hands on, the game does expect you to have a large variety of types of equipment and change out as the situation demands.
• Always kill and harvest normal wildlife you come across, a few of the higher tier weapons and all the mid to high tier carry capacity upgrades require animal bones and skins. Their drop rate isn’t too great.
• Also you can craft meat into health potions.
• Harvest arrows are incredibly useful for ammo crafting resources; for example if you were to shoot off a blaze canister with a harvest arrow you’d get 6 blaze from it instead of 1.
• All the collectibles have more details if you look at them in the notebook after you’ve picked them up.
• You don’t have to be hidden in the tall grass to make use of silent strike. You can use it in the open as long as the enemy is unaware of you.
• The DLC area is late to post-game content. The enemies there are on the tougher side, plus the new weapons you can get from there will trivialize the rest of the game if you get them too early.
• Once you get to the point where you’re buying purple armor/weapons, you can sell all the green lens drops from enemies; they’re exclusively used for the blue mid-tier upgrades.
• Also, you can safely sell the vast majority of the blue Hearts too. Don’t really worry about ‘I might need it later!’ since there’s a vendor in Meridian who sells nearly all of them anyway, and managing inventory space is usually more important anyway. The game throws plenty of shards at you to just buy what you need for the few quests that call for something weird.
• You can buy multiples of the same weapon and mod them differently (say, a bow with all fire mods for your fire arrows, and another one with all damage mods).
• To make the above tip even more useful, once you get the double/triple shot upgrades, you can put two or more of the ‘same’ weapon on your wheel, and load up 2/3 arrows on each one before entering a fight. Combine that with the bullet time talents to really maximize your opening nukes on tough opponents.