Mechanics

Borderlands 3 has two kinds of system, and telling them apart is the fastest way to decide what to do with an evening. One kind puts icons on your map: a fixed number of them, in fixed places, and when you have collected the last one that system is finished forever. The other kind changes how the game behaves and never asks you to go anywhere.

Sorting our twenty mechanics pages that way produces an order, and the order has a surprise at the bottom of it. Count the markers each system plants and you find that the planets are not treated equally at all. One of them is skipped by five of the seven map systems in the game.

The seven systems that plant markers

These are the ones with a number attached. Each row is a total our own pages state and then deliver, and the last column is the interesting one.

Five of those seven rows name Athenas in the last column. It is the one place in Borderlands 3 that almost nothing optional happens, and once you notice it you stop feeling guilty about leaving.

Red Chests, the only system that covers everything

Fifty-seven chests, and the distribution is lopsided in the way you would expect from the amount of story each planet carries. Pandora holds 18 across ten sub-areas, Promethea 15, Eden-6 15, Nekrotafeyo 7, and Athenas exactly 2. Our Red Chests page walks every one of them and its per-planet counts add up to the 57 it promises, which is rarer in a collectible list than it should be.

Two things make this system different from the other six. The first is that a chest is not spent when you open it: travel to another map, come back, and it is closed again, which turns the denser areas into a loot route rather than a checklist. The second is that two of the 57 are hidden behind optional objectives inside side missions, so they can be walked past permanently in a single playthrough. If that happens, joining a game where someone else completed the objective is the way back in.

Nothing else in the game refills like this. It is worth knowing before you decide the chests are the boring collectible.

Rare Spawn Hunts, which ignore two planets entirely

Fourteen enemies that are hard to find and drop something worth having. Our Rare Spawn Hunts page names all fourteen and pairs most of them with a specific gun rather than a rarity tier, which is what makes it worth reading rather than skimming: Rakkman in Carnivora drops the Night Flyer, Thunk and Sloth in Konrad's Hold drop It's Piss, Princess Tarantella II in the Splinterlands drops the Hive.

Six of the fourteen sit on Eden-6 and five on Pandora, which leaves Promethea with three and the other two planets with none. The Guns, Love and Tentacles DLC adds four more, all on its own maps, and those four are the ones the A Hunter Through and Through achievement wants. Two of that four appear reliably and two can take a long string of reloads, so save them for a session where you are doing something else at the same time.

Legendary Hunts, the only system that skips Promethea

Ten beasts, one per area, and completing all ten unlocks the Got Big Game trophy plus a rifle that arrives by mail rather than as a drop. Our Legendary Hunts page lists every one with its area and its reward, and the geography is worth reading off it directly.

Half the hunts are on Pandora, and Promethea gets none at all, which is the reverse of how the rare spawns fall. Athenas gets exactly one, the Chupacabratch, and that single hunt is a large part of everything optional the planet contains. The last hunt in the chain is not reachable until the story is finished, because parts of Pandora stay closed on the first visit, so treat the set as a post-campaign job rather than something to chip away at as you go.

Targets of Opportunity and Hijack Targets, three per planet and then a shrug

The Targets of Opportunity are ten named enemies with a shape to them that the page itself does not spell out: three on Promethea, three on Eden-6, three on Pandora, one on Nekrotafeyo, none on Athenas. They pay experience and vehicle customisation rather than gear, which puts them near the bottom of most people's list until the moment they want a planet's challenge set finished.

The eight Hijack Targets follow the same distribution and are the only marker system that hands you something permanent for a purely navigational puzzle. Most of them are locked behind a power problem rather than a fight: follow a yellow cable to a switch, shoot water at an electrified line, break a hatch. Floodmoor Basin holds two of the eight, one of which sits on a tree stump you can only reach by driving off a mountain, which is the sort of thing this system exists for.

Vehicles themselves are unlocked by story rather than by hunting. The Outrunner comes from Cult Following, the Technical from Taking Flight and the Cyclone from Hostile Takeover, and every one of them has to be stolen and then registered at a Catch-A-Ride before it is yours.

The two arena systems, and why one of them is a quest

The Eridian Proving Grounds are six timed trials, two on Pandora, two on Eden-6, one on Promethea and one on Nekrotafeyo. They are gated behind the Eridian Analyzer, which means going back through the maps you have already cleared and reading every slab you walked past, so the whole system is really an epilogue to the Eridian Writings collectible. The timer is not a formality: clearing a trial slowly and clearing it quickly pay differently.

The three Circle of Slaughter arenas are the opposite, wave fights with no clock. Each runs five rounds, and the wave counts inside those rounds are not uniform: three waves in the first round, four in each of the next three, and five in the last with a boss at the end, which is twenty waves per arena. The game saves between rounds, so dying costs you a round rather than the run. Only Slaughterstar 3000 has to be started as a side quest; the other two are found by talking to someone standing next to a lift.

The DLC systems, which claim one map each

Every add-on brings its own counted collectible and confines it to its own maps, so none of them appear in the table above. They are worth knowing as a group because they are all finite, all short, and all tied to a specific reward.

Two of those need a warning. The six Underbosses have to fall in a single run, and two of the six only turn up during the fight with Joey Ultraviolet himself, so a run that kills him early is a run you have wasted. And the Vaulthalla switches split into two sets of twelve: the first twelve, three each across four rooms, open a treasure room with a sixty second timer on it, and the second twelve, six of them on the wall you are facing and six on the one behind you, open a final room with no timer at all. Loot first and shoot switches second, because the clock only applies to the room that has one.

The Cartel Mansion Puzzle and the Inhuman Trials are the two DLC systems with no count at all. The first is a single shape-to-number substitution whose answer is generated fresh for every player, so no guide can hand you the code, only the method. The second is a mission rather than a system, and it is where Dr. Benedict is fought.

The systems that put nothing on your map

The remaining six pages never ask you to travel. They are the ones that decide what the markers are worth when you get to them.

• Elemental Damage is the one to read first. Six damage types, five of them elemental, and the matchups are blunt: shock strips shields and does less to everything else, corrosive eats armour, incendiary burns flesh for about five seconds, cryo freezes and triples your melee damage on a frozen target, and radiation spreads on death.
• Mayhem Mode unlocks with the campaign and raises enemy health by 15, 75 and 150 percent across its three tiers while raising loot quality by 100, 300 and 500. Every column climbs with the tier, which is the point of the mode: it is the only difficulty in the game where the reward scales as fast as the risk.
• True Vault Hunter Mode is the campaign again with your level and inventory intact and tougher enemies throughout. It stacks with Mayhem rather than replacing it.
• Guardian Rank is where experience goes after the story ends, and it has no ceiling. Tokens buy bonus stats across three categories, and each category also sells six perks at 10, 15, 25, 35, 50 and 75 tokens, which is 210 tokens to finish one category and 630 to finish all three.
• Anointed Gear is a random extra perk keyed to your Vault Hunter's action skills. It is not a rarity, so it can turn up on gear well below legendary, and Crazy Earl sells it for Eridium if you would rather buy than farm.
• Respec is the quiet one, and it changes how you should read every build guide we have. Any Quick-Change machine will refund your skill points for a fee that scales with your level, and the fee is small next to what you will be carrying by then.

That last point is worth sitting with. Because respec is cheap and always available, none of the choices in our class guides are permanent, and the only thing you can genuinely run out of in Borderlands 3 is unvisited map.

Frequently asked questions

Which system should I finish first?

Red Chests, because they are the only one that refills and the only one that touches all five planets. Everything else can wait for the post-campaign sweep, and several of them have to.

Why does Athenas have so little in it?

Because it is small. It carries five named locations to Pandora's seventy-eight, and five of the seven map systems skip it outright. Two Red Chests, one Legendary Hunt and one Eridian Writing is close to the whole optional list.

Can I miss anything permanently?

Two of the 57 Red Chests, because they sit behind optional objectives inside side missions that can be completed without them. Joining a friend's game is the recovery route. Nothing else on this page is missable in a single playthrough.

Do I need to finish the campaign before starting these?

For four of them, yes. The Proving Grounds need the Eridian Analyzer, Mayhem Mode and Guardian Rank both unlock at the end of the story, and the last Legendary Hunt sits in part of Pandora that stays closed until then.

What is the fastest way to see which planet I have left unfinished?

Open the world map and count challenge icons per planet, then check it against our regions guide, which breaks the crew challenges down zone by zone. Opened Red Chests stay highlighted in orbit view, so that system tracks itself.