Far Cry 3

Rook Island hands its contents over in three different ways, and our guides to Far Cry 3 divide along the same lines. Some things are simply lying somewhere, and finding them is a matter of knowing where to stand. Some things have to be cut off an animal first. And some things are held back until you finish a piece of work, at which point the game hands them over and, more often than not, still charges you for them. This page is arranged in that order, with the PC side of the game kept for the end.

What is not here: mission walkthroughs. We have no story pages for Far Cry 3, so nothing below will tell you how to get through a mission. What it will tell you is where the collectibles are, what the crafting ladder actually buys you, which animal each rung costs, and which guns are sitting behind a task list rather than a shop counter.

Things that are already lying there

Two of these are finite sets with a fixed count, and one is not a collection at all. The Letters of the Lost are the leftovers of a failed Japanese occupation, which is why sixteen of the nineteen our page walks you through are underground or inside a ruin, one of them at the end of a tunnel entered through a shed behind a house. There are twenty map coordinates for them, split fourteen on the North Island and six on the South. The memory cards are the modern equivalent and behave in exactly the opposite way, since all twenty sit in laptops at named posts, nineteen of them outposts, thirteen in the north and seven in the south, each holding one named drug formula.

Vehicles are the uncounted third: thirteen kinds in all, seven that drive, three that float and three that fly, taken one at a time with whatever the page can say about where each of them turns up. Our collectible and vehicle locations guide puts all three together by the thing you spot before you spot the prize, because on this island that is a bunker doorway, a rusting artillery piece, or the vending machine shack inside an outpost.

Worth knowing before you start either collection: neither has to be completed to get the weapon behind it. Six letters unlocks the blade and ten cards unlocks the SMG. From there the two part company, because running the cards out to all twenty adds a cash payout plus every formula you have not picked up yet, while the fourteen letters past the sixth pay only in the wartime history they record.

Things you have to take off an animal

Crafting in Far Cry 3 comes in two halves, and the larger of them buys a single commodity: room. Kit stitched out of skins does not improve a gun, it improves how many guns you can hold. Our crafting recipes page runs to thirty-nine recipes across ten pieces of kit, and what they raise is a ceiling rather than a stat: a holster that goes from two guns to four, a wallet whose limit rises from two thousand dollars to ten, a rucksack that ends up holding eighty slots of junk. The smaller half is the thirteen syringes on that same page, mixed from leaves rather than hides, and those are the only recipes in the game that change what Jason can do instead of what he can carry, from two extra health bars up to a shot that makes him immune to damage outright.

The bill is paid in skins, and there are two prices. The ordinary hides can be bought over the counter for between $10 and $35, so the lower tiers can largely be shopped for rather than stalked, with Goat Skin the odd exception that four recipes want and no price list carries. The top tier is another matter: the leathers the Extended recipes want are not on any price list, which is why eight of those nine recipes tell you to have Path of the Hunter open first. Our hunting page catalogues thirty-six animals in three groups and quietly admits that there is no way to kill the bull shark and that the manta ray is impossible to hunt. It also names the weapon you need for a few of the awkward ones, and the bait that pulls the dangerous ones into the open.

The crafting and hunting guide lays the two side by side, sorted by which limit each upgrade lifts, and flags the three ladders the recipes leave you to work out.

Things handed over for work done

Eight guns in the game cannot be bought off the shelf at any price until you have done something specific first, and our signature weapons guide lists what each one wants along with the in-game description. Half of the eight are waiting on a collection, which is what ties this section back to the top of the page: two of them are the letters and the memory cards, and the other two are relic counts.

Read that right-hand column against the crafting ladder and the three sections above turn into one loop. Five of the eight guns carry a price, and every one of those five prices is above the two thousand dollars a Simple wallet will hold, so the first thing a signature weapon costs you is a hunting trip for a bigger wallet. Two of them, the AMR at $4,800 and the Ripper at $4,200, are beyond even the Rugged wallet's four thousand, meaning you need at least the Heavy Duty version on your belt before the money will sit still long enough to spend.

Six of the eight conditions rest on something we have no page for: the two relic counts, the radio towers, the seventeen outposts, the six Trials of the Rakyat and a Uplay code. Relics turn up twice more in the crafting list as well, since the two special syringes are locked behind thirty and forty of them.

Before the island can hide anything from you

Far Cry 3 is an old PC release and it shows. Our crashes and performance fixes page works through sixteen specific faults in order, from a startup crash that traces back to the Uplay overlay and a black screen the page meets with windowed mode first, through stutter fixes that lean on adaptive or dynamic V-Sync, to the small absurdities: a bug that traps you in a vehicle until the controls are reset to default, a skill tree that will not advance, and a parachute that shows the wrong prompt when two keys are bound apart.

If the game runs but does not run well, the PC performance tweaks page is the one to open instead. It is nine changes in all, three of them single lines in GamerProfile.xml, covering depth of field, ambient occlusion and iron sight toggling, plus a DirectX switch for Radeon stutter, two SLI scaling fixes, and a hex edit for anyone who wants the interface and its notification sounds gone entirely.

With that settled, the island is mostly a knowledge problem rather than a skill one. What our pages give you is where the letters and the cards are, which animal the pouch you want is currently walking around inside, and which of the eight job listings you feel like closing out first.