Basics

Learn the essential mechanics of Horizon: Steel Frontiers, including difficulty settings, skill progression, Focus usage, fast travel, resource management, crafting, and hunting.

Horizon: Zero Dawn does a fairly decent job of teaching you the game basics in the first couple of intro missions. Still there are some things we should probably go over here in this section. Additionally, I've included notes through the Walkthrough about various game features to keep in mind.

Difficulty

As you start your new game, you'll be prompted to select your difficulty setting. This setting modifies the damage you take from enemies as well as the amount of damage you deal to enemies. This setting will NOT affect drop rates of items or the amount of XP gained from tasks in the world.

Level Progression

The amount of abilities (skills) you have is directly dependent on your level in-game. You start at Level 1 (obviously) and progress by gaining XP through general world actions such as killing machines/enemies and through completing quests and tasks for NPCs in the various locations you visit. With each level upgrade you gain 10HP and a single Skill Point.

Skills

With each level upgrade, you'll gain a Skill Point that can be spent to unlock various Skills for Aloy. Some Skills are passive, like increasing capacity/duration upgrades, and others are active that improve your combat abilities and unlock special attacks like double- and triple-nocking arrows in your bow and heavier hits with your spear.

Visit the Skill Tree section for a full overview.

Focus

The most useful tool in the game by a landslide. The Focus, which Aloy gets as a young child, is used for scanning and analyzing everything in the world around you. You'll use it to pick up Datapoints, scan Machines, find tracks, tag enemies, etc. It's a very interesting mechanic and wholly unique to this game. To activate it, press [button prompt] to open the interface and look around. Target a machine, animal, Datapoint, or other object with the reticle to obtain more information about it. While Focus is active, you will move slowly and not be able to access your weapon wheel or items, so be careful not to accidentally engage Focus during a battle or other important moments.

Objectives

Horizon: Zero Dawn is a quest-based game, so you'll typically always have an objective of some sort while you're navigating the world. Whatever quest you're currently focusing on will place objectives on your map and compass HUD so that you can more easily navigate to your destination. If I ever refer to a waypoint in the walkthrough, this is what I am talking about.

Fast Travel & Campfires

You'll discover a plethora of campfires as you travel the world of Horizon: Zero Dawn. These campfires serve as save stations and also fast travel points. You can also fast travel to major areas like towns, cities, bandit camps, and hunting grounds. To fast travel, select the area on your map you wish to jump to and use [button prompt] to fast travel.

Fast travel works based on a token system where you need fast travel packs in order to fast travel. A single fast travel pack will get you to one destination. This is only limiting for about the first half of the game since you can purchase an Infinite Fast Travel Pack once you reach Daytower.

Resources

Resources exist in three forms: plant resources, animal resources, machine resources. Resources are gather by picking plants and harvesting the carcasses of machines or animals that you kill. These resources are used for crafting the various items you use/need throughout the game

Inventory & Capacity Upgrades

Every weapon, outfit, item, consumable, and resource that you need and use throughout the game is carried in your inventory. Rather than having one singular inventory space, each type of item is carried in its own inventory satchel. Once you are full of a single item, you cannot pick up anymore of that specific item, but you can still pickup other items whose inventories still have space. You'll want to continuously manage your inventory so you don't run out of space by selling off valuables/unneeded items to Merchants frequently.

You can also upgrade each of the inventory satchels with the Carrying Capacity upgrades in the Crafting tab in the Game Menu. Each upgrade requires certain resources to craft like animal skins or bones, but will expand the maximum number of items you can carry in that category.

Visit the Crafting Recipes section for more information.

Crafting

Though we touched on it briefly above, Crafting is a major component of Horizon: Zero Dawn. You'll be continuously crafting the various ammunition items (which can be quickly crafted from the weapon wheel) you use with your weapons as well as crafting upgrades for your carrying capacity. Additionally, the crafting system is what allows you to apply Mods to your weapons and outfits. All Crafting Recipes require various resources to complete, so you'll want to constantly be collecting resources and crafting your upgrades as you continue through the game.

Hunting

Hunting is how you gather animal resources that you'll need for crafting. Anytime you spot an animal in the wild, you can kill it and harvest it to get resources like meat, skin, and bones. Also, you can fish and the game does not tell you that at all. To fish, use your Focus near a body of water to locate the fish in the water and tag them. Then shoot them with arrows and swim out to harvest them.

Supplies, Caches, and Treasure Boxes

Beyond looting animals and machines, you can find lots of resources in Supply Caches located in various places throughout the world. You'll find supply caches in ruins, bandit camps, hunting grounds, towns, vantage points, and other random areas you might not expect. Always keep an eye out for these little boxes of goodies.

Treasure Boxes are items that you can acquire as quest rewards or