Borderlands 3

Most loot games are built on scarcity. Borderlands 3 is built on the opposite, and once you notice it the game gets easier to plan. Spend your money and you can farm it back. Spend your Eridium and there is a mission you can loop for hundreds a run. Spend your skill points badly and a Quick-Change machine will refund the lot for pocket change. Open a red chest, walk to another map and walk back, and the chest is closed again.

Even experience stops being finite: once the campaign ends, everything you earn pours into a rank with no ceiling on it. There is exactly one thing in this game you can permanently use up, and that is places you have not been yet. So that is what this hub is organised around.

Everything the game gives back

• Cash. Safes and lockers hold nothing but money, side missions end in reward rooms, and the Lost Loot machine by the Sanctuary bridge has been quietly saving everything you walked past. Our money farming guide works through all of it.
• Eridium. Bosses drop it, and after a certain point in the story an artifact lets you smash it out of the purple crystals sealing vault chests. Our Eridium farming guide explains the loop, which involves deliberately not finishing a mission.
• Skill points. Refundable at any Quick-Change machine for a level-scaled fee, which means no build in our classes guide is a commitment.
• Red chests. Fast travel away and back and they refill, which turns the denser zones into a farming route rather than a checklist.
• Levels, and then rank. Our levelling guide gets you up the first climb; after that, experience keeps arriving as Guardian Rank tokens forever.

The parts that are actually counted

Against all that, here is the finite list. These are the numbers that only go one way, and between them they are most of what a completionist run in this game consists of.

Two of those 57 chests are the only genuinely missable things on the list, and they are missable because they hide behind optional objectives inside side missions. Everything else waits for you indefinitely.

Your first few hours

Read our beginner tips first, mostly for two habits that are easy to skip: check your mail, because rewards arrive there with no notification worth noticing, and register every vehicle you steal at a Catch-A-Ride so it stays yours. It also covers the five elements and which health bar colour each one beats.

For gear in that window, our early game weapons list is more useful than a general best-of, because eight of its ten come off a specific enemy rather than a random roll. Once you are past that, best guns is the broader picks list.

If you are bringing friends, our co-op guide covers the decision that matters most: Cooperation gives every player their own loot and scales to the party average, while Coopetition puts one loot pool on the floor and does not scale at all. Getting that wrong with a lower-level friend makes the whole session miserable.

Picking a Vault Hunter

There are four, and every build we have written for them spends the same 48 skill points across at least two of three trees. Our classes guide pulls all 56 of those builds together and shows how differently the four characters spread that budget, with FL4K reaching into every tree and Zane usually staying in two.

If you are playing alone, our solo builds guide carries two loadouts per character written specifically for having nobody to revive you, and it is honest about Amara being the hardest of the four without a partner.

The story, and the missions beside it

Our walkthrough collects the campaign and the DLC missions, sorted by what each one is actually asking of you. Almost every chapter finishes with a named enemy standing between you and the next area, and the handful that do not are the ones where the plot moves.

Side content sits separately in our side missions guide, arranged by where you pick each one up, with rewards attached. Those rewards scale to the level you turn the mission in at, which is the single best argument for saving them. And if you own Bounty of Blood but cannot find the way in, our guide to starting it exists for exactly that.

The planets

Our regions guide covers every zone through the collectibles it carries, and it turns up a rule worth knowing before you buy an expansion: each DLC throws out the base game's challenge categories entirely and ships its own, with no overlap in either direction.

For the raw geography, Named Locations lists all 223 places by planet and is the fastest way to work out which world a place name belongs to. It also puts the size difference in perspective: Pandora has 78 named places and Athenas has 5.

The things worth killing twice

Our bosses guide covers the DLC and raid fights, arranged by how many attempts each one really expects from you, which runs from a Bounty of Blood duel you are not allowed to shoot in up to a raid boss charging 500 Eridium every time you walk through its gate.

The campaign roster lives in bosses overview, which assumes you are alone, and its recurring lesson is that most of them are shield puzzles wearing a health bar. When you want a specific gun rather than a specific corpse, best bosses to farm pairs seven of them with what they hand over.

Loot

Our items guide takes a different angle on a category where everything is orange and nothing is obviously better: it sorts the legendaries by the price each one quietly charges, whether that is ammunition, a stat, cash, or eventually the weapon itself.

Underneath it, legendary weapons is the full stat list, and unique gear covers the quest rewards you cannot farm at all, sorted by weapon type and planet.

After the credits

Finishing the story turns on three things at once, all covered in our mechanics guide: True Vault Hunter Mode for a harder second run with your gear intact, Mayhem Mode for enemy scaling that raises loot quality as fast as it raises health, and Guardian Rank for somewhere to keep putting experience.

That is also when the last of the collectibles open up, since the final Legendary Hunt waits inside a stretch of Pandora the game keeps shut until the campaign is done, and the Proving Grounds need an item you only carry at the end. The Guns, Love and Tentacles rare spawns behind A Hunter Through and Through are in the same bracket: entirely doable after the story, and much easier to hunt when nothing else is pulling at you.

None of which is urgent, because the game is not going to take any of it away.