Items

Rook Island is not in the habit of signposting anything, but it does repeat itself. Once you know that a Japanese letter sits behind a hole in the ground, that a memory card sits beside a vending machine, and that a Scavenger tends to sit in a faction outpost, you stop sweeping the map and start reading it. This is what our three location pages have in common: each of them describes the thing on the surface that gives the hidden thing away.

The letters: the ground opens, or a gun points at it

The Japanese occupation left its dead underground, and our letters page follows them there. Of the nineteen letters it walks you through, seven are inside bunkers, four are in caves, four are in ruins or the remains of a building, and one is down a tunnel that starts in a shed behind a house east of Gaztown. That leaves a handful in the open: one is at the base of a cannon standing in a large exposed field, another is on a body to the left of a cannon south-east of Echo Camp, and one is under a set of planks poking out of a hillside between the Hubert Shore Power and Hubris Farm encampments.

The artillery is the best marker on the island, because it points at five of those nineteen letters. Hyogo's sits at the end of a path that starts at a large gun near a bay. Sato's is at the cannon's base. Masahiro's is on a body to the gun's left. Hurk's first is inside a ruined building next to one. And Mogi's first, which the page calls quite difficult to find, is in a cave tucked into the underside of a road, where the only thing visible from above is the barrel tip poking out near the entrance.

Two entries repay careful reading. Hayato's third is in a bunker at the very top of a hill that has two more bunkers on it, one at the bottom and one halfway up, and the page tells you to walk past both and keep climbing. Ren's is in the left chamber on the eastern side of the southernmost ruin on a peninsula in the northwest, which you can pick out on the zoomed map by the Cassowary icon sitting on it.

The coordinate list at the foot of that page is the faster route if you already know what you are hunting for. It runs to twenty entries, fourteen tagged North Island and six South Island, and it covers one letter the written directions do not.

The memory cards: the vending machine is the tell

Every one of the twenty memory cards is inside a laptop, and nineteen of those laptops sit at a place the page names as an outpost, the twentieth at Cliffside Overlook Post. That already narrows the search enormously, but our memory cards page adds the detail that turns it into a two-second job once you are inside an outpost: the laptops sit next to or inside the shacks that hold the weapon vending machines. Walk over to the machine you were going to use anyway and the card is at your elbow.

Thirteen of the outposts on that list are on the North Island and seven on the South, and each card carries one drug formula, named per outpost, from the Benzodiazepine card at Welshore Wreckers House all the way to the Marijuana formula at Bridge Control, which the page flags as the last one. Finishing the set pays cash on top of the formulas themselves.

You do not need the whole twenty to get something out of it, though. Ten cards is all the Shredder asks for, one of eight guns on our signature weapons list, and six letters is all the Japanese Tanto wants. The cards pay out at their halfway mark and the letters well before theirs, so neither set has to be finished for the weapon attached to it. Pushing the cards all the way to twenty is still worth doing, since the full set adds the cash reward and the rest of the formulas, while our letters page records nothing further for the last fourteen beyond the wartime story they carry.

The vehicles: four of them turn up almost anywhere

Thirteen kinds of transport are covered on our vehicles page, seven of them on wheels, three on water and three in the air, and they sort neatly by how precisely the page can place them. Four of them are common enough that the page barely needs to give directions: the Darrah sedan across almost the whole map, the Stryus hatchback the same, Quad Bikes in what the page calls abundance, and the Buggy, which it says turns up just about anywhere on the island even as it points out two of them by name.

The armed ones go with the factions. Scavengers and Technicals are used by every side and cluster at faction outposts, the Scavenger being the better of the two thanks to its mounted machine gun, and Cargo Trucks turn up across most pirate-held ground while being rare out in isolated country. Water and air follow terrain instead: RHIBs on the western shores, Jet Skis around bays and beaches, Patrol Boats out in open water and occasionally off an occupied coast, Gliders up in the high-altitude north.

Two entries get something close to an address. The Buggy pair are Cradle Gas on the North Island and Lonely Shore on the Southern Island, where a yellow one sits permanently parked, and the page places one Helicopter inland, west of the river that drains southwards, while noting that Jason cannot fly one himself. The Wingsuit is the outlier in the set, since it is a purchase rather than a find, available at one point in the game once you have reached the Southern Island.

Kit that has to be earned rather than found is a different chapter: crafting and hunting covers the pouches and holsters you build out of skins, and the Far Cry 3 guide hub pulls the two halves together.