Quests

Kyrat hands out five kinds of optional work on our pages, and the cleanest way to tell them apart is not where they sit on the map but what the game leaves in your hands when they begin. The propaganda centers and most of the hunting quests let you bring whatever you like. The supply hunts and Mr. Chiffon's Kyrat Fashion Week contracts dictate a single weapon. The Shangri-La missions and the four Reggie and Yogi trips are fought with what the trip itself provides, a seeker's bow and a tiger in the one, a knife and whatever a corpse or a Sherpa gives up in the other. Read down the table and the difficulty climbs with the restriction.

Bring your own guns: propaganda centers and the open hunts

The four propaganda centers are the most forgiving side missions in the game, because the site itself arms you. Buildings holding Pagan Min's printing gear are marked yellow, a counter tells you how much is left, and crates around the compound hold C4, grenades and mines. Our page treats all four the same way: snipe from the surrounding hills before the first explosion blows your cover, seed the approach road with mines, and expect two reinforcement waves. At the first center they arrive as three ATVs and a truck from the north once half the equipment is gone, then the same again from the south as you finish. The third and fourth bring a helicopter with the reinforcements, so a rocket launcher earns its slot there, and at the fourth the parked vehicles count towards the percentage as well. Grenades do more than bullets at the second center because the machines are packed into one building.

The control hunts are four kill contracts handed out by locals: dholes for a yak herder at Shanath, honey badgers for a fur trapper at Tirtha, pit vipers at Utkarsh to avenge Anuj's brother, and macaques strapped with proximity mines by an ex-prisoner west of Sahi Jile Checkpoint. Weapon choice is yours, but each site has a trick. Harvest the red and blue flowers at Shanath before you start, because the northern dholes move as a herd and syringes matter. Use a hunting syringe for the vipers, which are small and hide in a cabin with about a dozen of them. Stay well back from the monkeys and shoot the mines on their bodies rather than letting them close. Pagan Min's soldiers turn up at Utkarsh and can at the monkey site, so the fight is rarely animals alone.

Survival hunts are the ones our writer calls the hardest, and the reason is that three civilians have to be kept alive, or at least one of them does. The six sites each have a shape worth knowing. At the Border Observation Post the snow leopards only come in from the sides, and the climber on the upper ledge is out of reach of their leaps, so she is your guaranteed survivor. The Royal Guard Kennels send exactly six bears, one from each side, two out of the cave, then one from each side again. At the Shanath Training Ground and at Shikharpur two of the three civilians are armed, with AK 47s at the training ground, and can look after themselves. Varshakot is a terraced field the dholes cannot jump, which funnels them into visible lanes. Everywhere else the answer is mines on the flanks and something with a high rate of fire, an LMG for the tigers at Rochan Brick Co. Storage in particular.

One tool only: supplies hunts and Kyrat Fashion Week

The four supplies hunts share the control hunts' locations but strip you down to a bow or an auto cross. The counts are small and fixed: six wild boars at Shanath, three sambars at Tirtha, four bharals at Utkarsh and five yaks west of Sahi Jile Checkpoint, with the meat handed in at a freezer. Our page gives the arrow economy too. Boars and sambars take two good hits, a bharal drops to one, and a yak needs three, which makes the yak contract the only one where the quiver size matters. A snow leopard tends to wander near the Utkarsh freezer, and since it is not part of the contract you can kill it with anything.

Kyrat Fashion Week is Mr. Chiffon's rare-animal line, opened at his hideout west of the Kyra Tea Weigh Station and then offered from safe houses around the map. Nine beasts, each with a prescribed weapon, and the prescription is the whole difficulty. The animals around two of the targets can be killed however you like, which is how our page handles the dozen ordinary wolves guarding the Mad Devil and Tenzin's pack of dholes; around the Sky Tiger and the Shadow Leopard the advice runs the other way, because the page warns against drawing in the other tigers and leopards living nearby.

Two of the nine deserve a plan. Thick Skin is already rampaging when you arrive and stays busy tossing bystanders, so the page's advice is to lob molotovs from cover while the elephant is distracted. Karkadann charges straight through the wrecked cars on his bridge, so they are not cover; a survival syringe cuts the damage he deals and a level 2 hunting syringe lets you get close without provoking him, and the fight is won with headshots landed before he starts. These hides are not trophies, either. Eight of the nine are the fourth-tier material for a crafted bag, which is why our crafting and endings guide reads the contracts as a shopping list.

Something else in your hands: Shangri-La and the Oculus Spliff

Shangri-La is entered through thangka pieces, and only the first of the five visits, The Protector's Arrival, is a story mission; the other four are optional and each begins with a climb to a hidden cave, from the grapple points west of the Crazy Cock Bar to the hole above the rafters at Anadekhi Ruins. Inside, the fight our walkthrough describes is built on a bow and a tiger. A seeker at the start of the second visit hands you a bow whose arrows fly flat and fast and whose aim slows time, and a seeker on the third upgrades it to a five-arrow blast. A tiger fights beside you throughout, useful for flanks and for finishing moves on anything that gets close. Three more seekers hide in each of the three visits before the finale and each grants a health boost, which is the difference between surviving the last arena and not; our page places all of them, under a stone bridge, hanging from a tree, behind Kyra's statue by the pool, in the right corner of a courtyard's middle level, at a gazebo, near a small shrine past a fallen tree, and so on.

The four enemy types are all introduced by the end of the second visit, and the beasts are the ones to respect: skinny masked dogs that explode on contact, but whose corpses can be shot to blow up their friends. The fourth visit puts you on an elephant that can break gates and should be parked when the room gets tight. The finale is Rakshasa, and the fight is a pattern read. Crossed wings mean demons are about to spawn next to you, so move. A deep breath with flame at the mouth means a fireball barrage you sidestep rather than hide from, since cover still takes splash. An open-mouthed taunt is the window: slow time through the bow and put an arrow down his throat. Three clean shots drop him for the tiger, a fourth arrow follows, and the whole cycle repeats three times before he dies.

Reggie and Yogi's four missions start at the tent in the yard after you have thrown the pair out of the main house, and each is a hallucination that replaces your kit with the situation. Lost and Confused wakes you in a bear cave with a knife, though you can see the bears through walls and only the one at the mouth is unavoidable; later, two cars turn into rhinos and a nearby mani wheel serves as cover because they cannot destroy it. The Burning Forest is pyros and fire, with a river to put yourself out and a rooftop where the pair turn out to be an illusion. Naked and Screaming is a flooded cave, a flare-lit tunnel, a jet ski, and a sky that rains vehicles onto the water. Fly or Die Trying loops you through the same abandoned compound, a cliff shack, a cage with a snow leopard and a stairway that ends in a fall, until a buzzer on the roof of the main house flies you to the real pair. Stock health syringes before any of them, and in the first one, find the roaming Sherpa before you fight anything with more than a knife.

Questions our pages can answer

How do you unlock the optional Shangri-La missions? Each one is a thangka to find in Kyrat, and the finding is a climb: grapple points west of the Crazy Cock Bar at x:213 y:520 for the second visit, a small bell outside a cave at x:553 y:455 for the third, a boat near Jalendu Temple and the Ratu Gadhi fortress for the fourth, and a drive to x:756 y:795 for the last. Our walkthrough gives every grapple in order.

What do the seekers give you? One per visit changes the bow, first by handing it over and then by adding the five-arrow blast, and the three hidden ones in each mission each give a health boost. A lost letter also waits inside a cave partway down Kalinag's Descent during the third visit, which belongs to the collection in our collectibles guide.

Which side activity should come first? On our pages the answer is the hunts, because the supply and control contracts sit next to the animals you need for bags anyway, and because the Fashion Week hides finish those bags. The rest of what Kyrat asks of you, from the towers to the fortresses, is laid out on our Far Cry 4 guide, and the places you will be shooting your way into are ranked by their defenders in our towers and fortresses guide.