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Kyrat is a country that arrives in numbers. Seventeen towers, four fortresses, four propaganda centers, fifty-five masks, forty prayer wheels, twenty letters, twenty diaries, nine rare beasts, five trips into Shangri-La, four drug trips, four endings. Our fourteen pages on the game cover exactly those things and nothing else, so this guide is not a walkthrough of Ajay Ghale's story; it is the order in which the map opens up and what each stage hands you. The first thing to know is that almost none of it is visible when you land. Pagan Min's radio masts hide the map, and the forty-eight places our towers page says they reveal include twenty-two that hold, or sit beside, something you will later be sent to find.
Start by lighting the map
The towers used to be bell towers and are barely guarded; the work is the climb, a puzzle of ladders, ledges, ramps, beams and grapples that our towers page walks floor by floor for the sixteen you climb yourself. The first is done for you during the Propaganda Machine mission and lists no reveals. After that the opposition is usually a couple of soldiers, sometimes only snakes, bears or bees, and only the last tower near Pagan's palace throws a helicopter at you. Each of the sixteen you hack reveals three named places, and our towers and fortresses guide grades every tower by what waits at the bottom and tallies which of those revealed places hold a mask, a wheel, a letter or a journal. Do these before anything with a coordinate in it; a coordinate on a dark map is just two numbers.
Then take what the regime owns
Two kinds of place belong to Pagan Min directly. The four propaganda centers sit in and around the Abandoned Jheel, which is one of the places the seventh tower reveals, and each is a demolition job: snipe from the hills, mine the road, then blow up every printing press and computer in the yellow-marked buildings while two waves of reinforcements arrive, with a helicopter in the later ones. The four fortresses are the serious version, each with a ruler in it and a set of alarms that summon helicopters full of soldiers. Our page's method is to find the back way in and kill the alarms first, and it notes that two fortresses shrink on their own: Baghadur drops to two alarms once Shoot the Messenger is done, and Varshakot drops to one after The City of Pain. Rajgad Gulag is Pagan's own, mined along its southern wall, and the sensible last stop.
Fill the bags before you fill the map
Everything you carry in Kyrat is limited by a bag, and every bag is bought with skins. Our crafting page lists ten bags, from the weapon holster to the quiver, and the animal count for every tier; the first three tiers of the lot come to ninety-three skins from sixteen ordinary species, and the fourth tier of eight bags wants the hide of a named beast. That is where the hunting starts to pay twice. The hunting quests come in three kinds, kill contracts, meat runs done with a bow, and defence jobs where at least one of three civilians has to survive, and the meat runs put boars, sambars, bharals and yaks in front of you, all of which are on the crafting list. Mr. Chiffon's Kyrat Fashion Week then sends you after the nine rare animals, each with a mandatory weapon, and eight of their hides finish a bag. Our crafting and endings guide lays the recipes and the beasts side by side, and says which one bag has no listed final material.
Walk the lit map for the 135 collectibles
Four collections make up the completion percentage on our pages, and they ask for four different things. The fifty-five Masks of Yalung only need destroying, which can be done from range, though ten of them are in or under water. The forty mani wheels need spinning, a prayer to Kyra in the story and an achievement in practice. The twenty lost letters, a lieutenant's correspondence with his wife from the early nineteenth century, are often found deep inside a cave or an old mine and pay out in stages, with a Karma bonus at four and the Caretaker of Memory trophy at ten. The twenty journals of Mohan Ghale, Ajay's father, are in safe houses, caves and twice underwater, and the last one is in a room in the Royal Palace that only opens if you spare Pagan Min. Our collectibles guide sorts the four by that effort and points out that three of the four lists run west to east by coordinate, so they can be walked as one sweep.
Leave Kyrat without leaving: Shangri-La and the Oculus Spliff
Two strands of side content put something other than your usual guns in your hands. The Shangri-La missions are five visits to a painted otherworld, the first in the main story and four more found through hidden thangkas at the top of grapple climbs. Inside you get a bow that slows time, a tiger, and seekers who upgrade the one and heal you, and the finale is Rakshasa, a boss you beat by reading three animations and shooting down his throat when he taunts. The four Reggie and Yogi missions are the pair's drug trips, starting with a bear cave and a knife and ending with a buzzer off the roof of the main house. Our side quests guide ranks all five kinds of optional work, from the propaganda centers up to these two, by what each one leaves you to fight with.
Decide how it ends
Our endings page counts four. The famous one takes fifteen minutes and no kills: stay at Pagan's dining table when he asks you to wait, and after about fourteen minutes he comes back and takes you to bury your mother's ashes beside your sister. The other three come after the Golden Path quests, a choice between Amita and Sabal, and a fight through the Royal Guard to the palace, where you either spare Pagan and hear the truth about Lakshmana, shoot him on the spot and hear nothing, or spare him and then shoot down his helicopter. The Amita or Sabal choice is written on the page as killing the other, and a short post-credits scene shows what the survivor does with the Golden Path. Sparing Pagan is also the only way to reach the final journal, which is the one place in our pages where a story choice touches a collectible.
If you are playing on PC
The game shipped in decent shape, and our PC tweaks guide is about the last few percent. Two config files under Documents, GamerProfile.xml and GFXSettings.FarCry464.xml, control what the menu does not: the field of view scale, the alpha-to-coverage setting that our writer recommends switching off, mouse smoothing and acceleration for anyone who feels jitter, and two values that trade a little VRAM for less stuttering. Set the files read-only afterwards or the game rewrites them, delete both if it ever refuses to load, add -skipintro to a shortcut to lose the logos, and cap the framerate with RivaTuner if your machine cannot hold sixty. The one setting the guide tells you not to drop to Low is lighting, because it blacks out whole areas.
A sensible order, and what is missing
Put together, the pages suggest a loop rather than a list. Climb the towers in a region, take the propaganda center and any outpost you meet on the way, shoot the animals the crafting list wants while they are in front of you, then sweep the newly revealed places for masks, wheels, letters and journals before moving on. Fortresses fit wherever the story has weakened them, Shangri-La and the drug trips are for when you want a change of weapon, and the ending is a decision to make with the last journal in mind.
It is fair to say what our pages do not cover. There is no main story walkthrough here, no outpost list, no weapons or skills guide, and nothing on the armed escort, supply drop, bomb defusal and hostage rescue jobs that several of our own pages mention in passing. What we do have is complete for its subject: every tower, fortress, propaganda center, collectible, contract and ending our writers found, counted and placed.