Items

Yara charges a toll for everything. Not in pesos, usually, but in the thing standing between you and the item: a body you have to find, a puzzle you have to solve, a material you have to farm, or a mission flag you cannot skip. This guide sorts the whole item economy by that toll, cheapest first, because knowing what a thing costs is what tells you whether to go and get it now or park it for later.

Here is every item topic we cover, on one screen, sorted that way.

Toll one, free: things you walk up and take

The 15 USB sticks are the purest example. Every one of them is a straight pickup, none are missable, and you can go back for them at any point in the game. They are well hidden rather than guarded, and the tell is a set of red and green glowing lights on the drive itself. Progress lives in the USB Songs section of your collections, and all 15 unlocks the That's My Jam trophy.

One thing worth knowing before you start hunting them: there are two ways to play what you find, and only one of them is useful. From the player menu you can open your collection, pick a specific song and inspect it, but the music stops the moment you close the menu. In a vehicle, songs play automatically and F4 opens the station menu, but you cannot pick a track. The car shuffles your collection. So if you collected a stick for one particular song, the menu is the only place you will reliably hear it.

Two other things are free and easy to forget you own. The La Palmera horse is yours from the start of the game, and the EXTERMINADOR Supremo, which fires a lock-on rocket salvo, is equipped before you have earned anything at all. That second one matters more than it sounds, and the wave jammer section below explains why.

Toll two, a body: keys carried by one specific man

Two locked doors in Yara have a named man holding the key, and both have a way around him.

At the Aguda Cliffs checkpoint, the key sits on an officer you can pick out by his yellow health bar. Clear the checkpoint however you like, take the key off him, then destroy the billboard to liberate the place and use the key on the armory door. But a second key sits on top of a concrete barrier across the road from the guard station, and almost nobody looks there. Worth knowing, because this checkpoint has a bug where it spawns with no guards roaming at all: if that happens, leave, do something else and come back.

At Fort Quito, the armory key belongs to Captain Gabriel Alvarez, the officer of the fleet, and scanning enemies identifies him by a special yellow military insignia. The guaranteed alternative skips scanning entirely: take the stairs across from the armory, go through the door in front of you, and drop one of the guards inside for a key.

The comparison worth drawing is that in both cases the door is sometimes cheaper than the key. Any blast damage will open the Aguda Cliffs armory, a frag grenade included, which is the fastest fix during the no-guards bug. And the Yaran Contraband in the Fort Quito basement, the one that pays out The Autocrat pistol, sits behind security fencing you can either blow open with the red barrels conveniently parked beside it or quietly break through by hitting the wood panelling with a melee weapon. Reach the basement by swimming in from the back entrance or by taking the ladder on the ground floor.

Toll three, a puzzle: containers that want their parts first

A Criptograma chest is a lock with two keys, and the keys are Criptograma Charts. Every chest needs exactly two, they are always nearby rather than across the map, and once you have both you go back to the chest to open it. There are 15 chests and therefore 30 charts, spread across all five regions, and clearing them all is the That's Puzzling trophy.

The game gives you two cues while you are looking. Charts glitter and chime, so audio is genuinely the fastest way to find one when you know you are close, and blue markers point at the route. What the game does not tell you is which armour piece any chest holds, which means most people collect them in region order and end up with four incomplete sets. Sorted by reward instead, the whole thing becomes a plan.

Pivot that and something useful appears: each set is almost entirely one region's worth of work.

One honest note on that table. Our chest guide names the gear for 14 of the 15 and says only that you receive the gear for the Sabiduria Valley chest. The arithmetic suggests it is the fifth Fuego piece, but we are not going to print an item name we cannot source. Everything else is confirmed.

Two more puzzles sit in this tier. El Unicornio, the unicorn horse, is the prize at the end of the Sweet Fifteen treasure hunt in Sierra Perdida, and the hunt is a power puzzle: a podium with a red button that has no electricity until you have found and flipped four switches scattered around one warehouse. The step people get stuck on is not a switch at all, it is a locked door on the far side of a wooden platform that you have to shoot open with your pistol, because the fourth switch is behind it.

The McKay wave jammers are the other one, and they are the hardest thing in this bucket to complete, because none of the 11 appear on your map. They are all in El Este, they belong to the We're (Un)Jammin' Yaran Story, and reaching each one means climbing a tower or a container and interacting with the circuit at the top. Two things make this a short job instead of a long one: spot them from a helicopter rather than on foot, and bring the EXTERMINADOR, the free Supremo mentioned above, which clears a jammer site with one button.

Toll four, a currency: what each upgrade material really costs

Four materials pay for almost every upgrade in the game, and they are not equally hard to get. Our own pages rank them: Gunpowder is one of the rarest, Industrial Circuits are rare and mostly matter for endgame builds, Depleted Uranium is difficult to find, and Durable Plastic is the softest of the four.

Three practical rules sit behind that table. Moneda is not Pesos, and Lola will not take the wrong one, so circuits stay out of reach until you have the right currency regardless of how rich you are. At an Anti-Aircraft site, kill everyone before you touch the crate, or you will end up destroying the crate to get at the contents. And when you hunt an alpha animal for its meat, do not use ballistic weapons, because you will not get the meat at all. That restriction lifts once your Hunter's Lodge is upgraded far enough.

One more piece of sorting worth knowing at a glance: on the map, military bases show as a white box, and inside them the black FND caches are the ones with upgrade supplies. The caches with weapons drawn on them are a different thing entirely, holding new arms rather than materials, so if you are farming Gunpowder those are the wrong boxes. As for fish, our page names Reef Shark, Squirrelfish, Tarpon, Tench and Tilapia as raising your odds of Durable Plastic, without claiming that list is complete.

Military vehicles belong in this tier too, because they cost you risk rather than resources. They cannot be scanned, so there is exactly one way to own a tank or a chopper: drive it out of the base and take it to a pickup point, after which you can summon it from any phone booth. Tank depots are the sensible place to start, guards at these sites are heavily armed, and holstering your weapon while you approach helps more than you would expect. There is one more warning worth repeating: strip a chopper of its air cannons before you fly it into another territory's airspace.

Toll five, a story flag: gear you cannot buy, steal or farm

The most expensive tier is the one where money and skill do not help, because a mission or a rank gates the item. Supremos are the clearest case: seven backpacks, each an ultimate ability on a cooldown, and three of them simply do not appear in Juan's stock until you have the rank.

Owning all seven from Juan is the Backpacking trophy, and since three of them are pure rank gates, that trophy is really a measure of how much of the map you liberated rather than how much you explored.

The Triada Stealth Armor Set is the other big story-flag item, and it comes out of the same chain as the Triador above. It starts at the Cabeza Fuel Depot with an NPC who tells you about a sacred site and marks the Oluwa Cave on your map, and it ends with three relics carried back to a magic circle in that cave. The set is the reward for finishing the chain, and it is worth understanding that the chest inside the cave and the set itself are separate payouts. Our Amigos guide covers the relic run itself, since the same chain is also how you recruit Oluso.

Chorizo's Mysterious Key belongs here for the same reason. The key is not findable: it only exists after two of the dog's loyalty quests are done, and it opens exactly one chest, on Guau-Guau Island off the Armonia coast, holding a poison weapon that counts toward Armed to the Teeth.

And the Angelito FW Turbo, the flying car, is the item people search for a location for when the location is not the problem. It will not spawn until you have made enough story progress to reach a Guerrilla Hideout and have bought the Hideout Network upgrade from the person in charge there, which is what makes hideouts spawn vehicles at all. Once that is done it is at Hideout Conjunto in East Barrial, whose map pin you can buy from the Chief Scout at your main camp. Drive it to the nearest pickup depot to keep it, and press Y or Triangle to fly.

Transport, sorted by whether you can scan it

Every ride in Yara splits on one question: can you scan it with your phone, or do you have to physically bring it home? Scanning is instant and works at a distance. Everything military has to be mounted or driven to a pickup point before it is yours, which turns acquisition into a small heist.

The three Gran Premio posters are worth naming individually because they are easy to walk past: the one at Serpentino Park is attached to a building wall and enters you into the International Waters Relay, the Fuego Valley poster runs the Biplane Blitz, and the Mercurio Mecanico poster runs the Malecon Miracle Mile. Any one of the three wins you the same car, so there is no reason to run all three unless you want to.

One last transport note, because it comes up constantly: the game's field of view slider does not apply to horse riding, driving or fishing. There is no fix for that on console. PC players can mod around it.

The collectible trophies, and what each one really asks

Road Rage is the one people leave until last and should not. Ride alongside a vehicle with a machete equipped, wait for the Hijack prompt, and press the weapon button. Dani takes the vehicle and the driver in the same motion. It costs nothing but a horse you already have, and our horses guide walks the controls if the prompt is not appearing for you.