Items

Yharnam almost never sells you a thing outright. Nearly every piece of equipment in this game is held by somebody or something first, and the interesting question is not what an item does but who has to be satisfied before it is yours: a Messenger who wants a badge, a Messenger who wants Insight, a corpse in an area you have not opened yet, or a Root Chalice you have to dig for. Our four item pages cover weapons, attire, Caryll Runes and hunter tools, and sorting all of it by the gate rather than by the category is what tells you where to go tonight.

What you own before anyone asks for anything

The free tier is small. Two of the fifteen trick weapons on our weapons page, the Hunter Axe and the Saw Cleaver, are listed as default choices, the Threaded Cane can be bought from Messengers at any point, and the Hunter Pistol and Hunter Blunderbuss are the two starting sidearms in Hunter's Dream. On the wardrobe side only the Foreign Set is unlocked from the beginning. Everything else in Yharnam sits behind a person, a place or a price.

Badges: how a dead boss turns into a shop

The badge system is the clearest gate in the game. You kill something or finish somebody's story, a badge lands in your inventory, and the Messengers quietly start stocking what that badge represents. Six of them run through our pages.

Three of those six are handed over by a covenant or a questline rather than by a boss, which is why our covenants guide is really an equipment guide in disguise. It also explains why the Chikage sits at the top of the price list at 50,000: you have to reach Cainhurst Castle, join its queen and then still pay.

The Insight counter upstairs

The second till in Hunter's Dream takes Insight instead of echoes, and our Insight guide puts the entry price at ten points before those Messengers appear at all. Three of the eighteen attire sets are bought that way, the Ashen Hunter, Bone Ash and Gascoigne's sets, and two more, the Tomb Prospector and Yharnam Hunter sets, come from the Bath Messenger. The same counter stocks the Small Resonant Bell and Sinister Resonant Bell that our multiplayer guide needs, so a hunter who spends the first ten points on clothes has postponed co-op to buy a hat.

Blood Echoes buy keys as well as gear. The Hunter Chief Emblem costs 10,000 at the Lower Bath Messengers, and it is what opens the road to Vicar Amelia if you would rather not take the Old Yharnam detour first.

What nobody sells you

All nine hunter tools are lying somewhere in the world, and each one is really a gate on an area rather than a gate on a shop. The Old Hunter Bone waits in the Abandoned Workshop, which only opens once the Blood-Starved Beast is dead. The Beast Roar is a Forbidden Woods pickup after Vicar Amelia. The Augur of Ebrietas needs a key found in the Lecture Building's other lecture hall. A Call Beyond is in the Lumenflower Gardens and asks for the Celestial Emissary first. Two of them, the Messenger's Gift and the Choir Bell, are guarded by Winter Lamps that will Frenzy you in seconds, so carry sedatives to both. Collect all nine and the Hunter's Craft trophy is yours, and our tools page is clear that you only have to own them, not equip them.

The wardrobe leans the same way. Twelve of the eighteen sets are simply out there on corpses and in chests, from the Charred Hunter Set on a rooftop drop in Old Yharnam to the Knight's Set in a Cainhurst library corner, which makes attire the one category you can build up purely by exploring.

What the chalices and the oaths keep

Caryll Runes are the deepest gate of the lot, and they need a tool before they need anything else: no Rune Workshop Tool, no Memory Altar, and that tool is behind the optional fight covered in our bosses guide. Our runes page lists twenty-two of them. Seven have a third tier, and this is where the Chalice Dungeons stop being optional content: the Lower Ailing Loran Root Chalice alone holds four of those seven top tiers, with the Isz chalice keeping the best Arcane Lake, the Cursed and Defiled chalice holding a middle tier of Blood Rapture and the Lower Hintertomb chalice hiding the first Stunning Deep Sea.

Three of the twenty-two double as membership cards, and each one only arrives when that group's business is settled: Corruption for the Vilebloods, Hunter for Eileen the Crow's covenant, and Radiance once Alfred's hunt for the Executioners is over. Since memorising a rune is what makes the oath, those three are the only pickups on our pages that also decide who treats you as an enemy.

Before you spend anything

Two details on our pages will save you echoes. First, every trick weapon exists in Normal, Uncanny and Lost versions, kept in different places, with stronger gem imprints on the later two, and a trick weapon carries three imprints where a firearm carries one. Second, those imprints open at +1, +3 and +5 rather than all at once, so the sequence explained in our workshop guide decides when a Blood Gem is worth slotting. If you are picking a first weapon to sink stones into, the loadouts in our builds guide show which of them the strong spreads are actually built around.

Two gaps are worth flagging while you read. Our runes page has no location for the Great Deep Sea rune, and the Great Lake rune that one of our PvP spreads asks for is not on the page at all, so treat those two lines as open questions rather than as missing pickups you have somehow walked past.