Mechanics

None of the ten pieces of kit you craft in Far Cry 3 makes Jason hit harder. Each one raises a limit instead: how many guns he can sling, how much cash the game will let him hold, how many slots of loot he can carry at once. Our crafting recipes page writes those limits out tier by tier, and our hunting page says which animal each tier costs. Read together they answer the only question worth asking at a workbench: what does this actually raise, and what has to die for it.

There are ten pieces of kit and thirty-nine recipes between them. Nine of the ten run through Simple, Rugged, Heavy Duty and Extended; the weapon holster stops at Heavy Duty. Eight of the nine Extended recipes say outright that Path of the Hunter has to be open before you can make them.

The three limits that decide what you walk out of a shop with

The holster, the wallet and the rucksack are the ones that change your whole afternoon rather than one firefight. The holster doubles from two guns to four across three recipes, which is the difference between choosing a loadout and carrying one for every situation. The wallet starts at a $2,000 ceiling and finishes at $10,000, five times what you begin with. The rucksack climbs 32, 48, 64, 80 slots, and the last of those steps is the one a hoarder feels.

The holster has no fourth tier at all, and the top of the other two ladders wants an animal our hunting page treats as a special case rather than a species you bump into: the One Horn Buffalo for the $10,000 wallet, which the page says to bring a shotgun for, and the Undying Bear for the 80-slot rucksack, which it also puts behind a shotgun and calls a rumour.

The limits that only show up mid-fight

The syringe kit takes you from five doses to twelve, which matters more than it sounds because every syringe recipe on the crafting page is paid for in leaves rather than hides, seven of the thirteen for one or two leaves and nothing else, and leaves are the cheapest thing on the vendor list. The grenade pouch runs 4 grenades and 4 molotovs, then 6 and 6, 8 and 8, and 12 and 12 at the top. The munitions pouch runs from 3 C4 charges or land mines up to 6.

The quiver has the oddest shape of the ten. Special arrows sit at ten in every single version of it; only the plain arrows move, from ten up through fifteen and twenty to thirty. So the Extended quiver, the one asking for a Maneater Shark's Fin, triples your ordinary ammunition and adds nothing to the special kind.

Three ladders you have to finish yourself

The ammunition pouch is the gap. All four of its recipes name their skins, the last of them the Golden Tiger, and not one says how much extra ammunition the pouch holds. The rocket pack has the same hole at its top tier only: the first three versions step from 4 rockets and 8 grenades to 6 and 12, and the Extended entry gives its skin and stops. The fuel sling is written as additions rather than totals, a hundred units of flamethrower fuel at Simple and another hundred at each step above it, so you have to do the adding yourself.

Which animals the ladders actually cost

Thirty-nine recipes draw on twenty-two different skins, and twenty of those twenty-two match an animal our hunting page names outright. The two that do not are both generic. One of them is the plain "Shark Skin" the holster and wallet ask for: the hunting page names a Great White Shark and a Bull Shark, and says flatly that the bull shark cannot be killed at all, so the recipe's generic shark is not a species you can look up. The other is the plain "Bear Skin" that the Heavy Duty quiver and the Heavy Duty munitions pouch both want, where the page offers a Black Bear and the rumoured Undying Bear and no ordinary bear in between.

Goat Skin is the busiest material on the list, wanted by four different recipes, and every one of those four is a Simple tier, so four of the ten entry-level recipes rest on the same animal. The top of the list works the opposite way: the hunting page lists thirty-six animals across harmless prey, predators and sea life, twenty-eight of which it places on either the Northern or the Southern island, and five of the eight it leaves off both of those halves are exactly the rare hides the Extended recipes want. The page goes as far as naming the crafted item for five of them, and all five match the recipe page exactly, the White Belly Tapir for the munitions pouch, the Yellow Neck Cassowary for the fuel sling, the Golden Tiger for the ammunition pouch, the Undying Bear for the rucksack and the One Horn Buffalo for the wallet.

The hunting page also pairs the animals off as bait for each other. A dead boar pulls leopards out of the woodland, a deer carcass brings both bears and leopards into the open, dead goat meat is the Komodo dragon's lure, a buffalo corpse draws tigers, and dingos come in for pigs. Three animals have a specific weapon named as a requirement, a shotgun for the One Horn Buffalo and the Undying Bear and a sniper rifle for the Yellow Neck Cassowary, while the Albino Crocodile is merely one the page says can be taken with a machete. The tortoise gets the requirement the other way round: its shell turns an arrow away, so the page says a gun is obligatory against it without naming which one.

What you can buy instead of shooting it

Vendors sell thirteen of the skins outright, which is every ordinary hide in the recipe list bar one. The Pig, Dog, Dingo and Tapir hides cost $10, the Boar, Deer, Cassowary and Komodo Dragon skins $15, Buffalo $20, Leopard $25, Shark and Bear $30, and Tiger $35 at the top. Nine recipe materials have no price at all: the eight rare leathers for the Extended tiers, which is what Path of the Hunter exists for, and, strangely, Goat Skin, the one material four recipes want.

Leaves are the other currency and they are cheap, $5 a colour with the white leaf at $10. Seven of the thirteen syringes are a one or two leaf job, three of those running for forty seconds and the fireproof shot for twenty, and four more want three leaves apiece. The last two are a different proposition: Untouchable and Touch of Death each want twelve leaves including two white ones, and each is locked behind a relic count, thirty and forty respectively. Relics are also the unlock condition on two of the eight signature weapons, so that is one collection doing double duty.

For the things sitting still on the island instead of walking around it, the letters, memory cards and vehicles guide covers where each one hides, and the rest of what we have written on Rook Island is gathered on the Far Cry 3 guide hub.