Locations

Pagan Min holds twenty-one fixed positions on our pages: seventeen bell towers he has turned into radio towers, and four fortresses, each with a ruler in residence. Both pages measure the same thing, which is what stands between you and the switch. For a tower that is whoever or whatever is loitering at the base, since the towers are barely garrisoned and the real obstacle is the climb. For a fortress it is the alarm count, because every fortress on our page gets weaker once its alarms are down or its ruler is dead, and two of them lose alarms outright when a story mission is finished. The towers come first here because they are what light the map.

The seventeen towers, graded by the welcome

Our towers page gives a coordinate, an opposition report and a floor-by-floor route for every tower, and it names the three places each one reveals when the radio is hacked. Read the middle column as a difficulty grade: by our count, one tower is taken for you by the story, one has nothing at all in the way, two have only wildlife, eight have only soldiers, five have soldiers and animals both, and the last adds a helicopter.

The climbs are the towers page's real content, and they are all built from the same parts: a ladder or a broken wall to get in, ledges taken clockwise or anticlockwise around the shell, ramps, balance beams, crumbling walkways, boxes to smash, and near the top a grapple or a hole in the roof. Three towers start somewhere other than the door. Tower 15 is locked, so the way in is a grapple down beside the barrels into a tunnel that comes up inside. Tower 9 has a ladder on its western face that drops you on what used to be the third floor, with the option of going back down for ammo first. Tower 17 is entered by standing outside and grappling straight up to the second floor. Most towers have a chest somewhere on the way up, seven of them keep one beside the radio, and only towers 3, 5 and 7 put a health pack up there as well; tower 7 is also the one with a weapon rack, which the page says holds an A2000, an SVD and an M133 once the guards are dead.

Sixteen towers name three places each, forty-eight in total, and that census is the reason to do them early. Twenty-two of the forty-eight hold, or sit beside, something from our other pages: ten Masks of Yalung, nine of them at the named place and one on a riverbed just north of Danger Dashed, seven mani wheels, three lost letters reached from Yalung's Mind, Mansa Market and Jhankri Ashram, one of Mohan Ghale's journals at Banashur's Tree of Life, and the Abandoned Jheel that the four propaganda centers cluster around. Our collectibles guide is where those coordinates go next. Two names differ between pages, which is worth knowing when you match a reveal to a collectible: the tower list has Raski Still and Bhutan Ghat where the masks and mani wheel pages have Raksi Still and Bhutan Gati, and Ska'i Cave here is Ska'l Cave on the masks page.

The four fortresses, graded by alarms

A fortress is an outpost with a ruler, more defences and a reinforcement helicopter, and our page's whole method is to count its alarms and then take them from behind. Two of the four can be made easier before you ever arrive.

Reinforcements are the tax for leaving alarms up. At Baghadur helicopters drop beheaders and defenders while you are still fighting; at Ratu Gadhi the first wave already brings a helicopter and the second brings two; at Varshakot the page says plainly that more helicopters come the more alarms you left active. Rajgad Gulag is different in kind, because it is mined. The path along its southern wall is unsafe, the eastern side is the safer approach from the hills, and a heavy gunner circles the main structure the whole time, so the page's advice is to duck into the huts whenever you can. Varshakot has two mortars and Baghadur one, each with a gunner beside it, and the fortresses page treats a captured mortar as the fastest way to empty a courtyard.

If you take the page at its word, the order is set by the story missions: Baghadur after Shoot the Messenger, Varshakot after The City of Pain, with Ratu Gadhi and Rajgad Gulag taken at full strength whenever you like, Rajgad last since it is Pagan's own. The rulers themselves are only named here; what happens to Pagan at the very end is a choice covered in our crafting and endings guide, and the point in a playthrough where fortresses belong is settled on our Far Cry 4 guide. The animals that keep turning up in the towers table are not incidental either; the wolves, tigers and bears are three of the sixteen species on the crafting list, and the same three animals are what attack the civilians in the survival hunts our side quests guide walks through.