Metal Gear Solid 5

Our Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain coverage is five pages, and none of them is a main mission walkthrough. What they describe instead is the loop around the missions: a side ops walkthrough that runs from four interpreter extractions to the target practice decks, two collectible pages whose entries sit at the same 21 outposts, a Mother Base guide about what happens to everything you Fulton home, and a codenames and emblems page about what the game calls you afterwards. This hub is sorted in the order a single deployment uses them: choose the side op, collect on the way, bring it home, and see what the last three missions earned.

Reading Order

Choosing the Side Op: A Chain, Not a List

The side ops walkthrough opens with the point that these are short, ungraded jobs, extractions, retrievals and target practice, and that doing them alongside the main missions matters because several have prerequisites. Forty of its first 46 entries carry a location and a prerequisite line (the six blueprint side ops are handed off to a separate guide), and reading those lines together shows a chain rather than a menu. Twenty-eight of the 40 need both a story mission and an earlier side op: the second highly skilled soldier wants Side Ops 5 and 11 done, the third wants Mission 6 and Side Op 12, and the prisoner rescues mostly run the same way, each pointing back at the one before. Seven need only a mission and five need only a side op. Those 40 split 21 to Afghanistan and 19 to Africa.

After the prisoners the page stops printing prerequisites and simply walks the groups: three legendary animals and a lost sheep, seven wandering Mother Base soldiers, five Unlucky Dog rescues, sixteen heavy infantry squads, nine minefields, twelve armored vehicle units, ten tank units, fifteen puppet soldier groups, five escaped children, three visits to the same legendary gunsmith, and single entries for Emmerich, a materials container, an intel agent, the AI pod, and two side ops that are about Quiet. The last entry is the seven target practice missions, which the Mother Base guide places one per deck at home and says can be replayed as often as you like with nothing to lose.

On the Way: Tapes and Invoices Share Their Addresses

The invoices page and the cassette tapes page were written separately, but the places in them are the same places. The invoices page lists 21 fast travel points, one per listed outpost, twelve in Afghanistan from the Central Base Camp to the Mountain Relay Base and nine in Africa from Lufwa Valley to Munoko ya Nioka Station, each an orange loading zone that opens fast travel for its area and counts towards the Collector achievement. The tapes page locates 35 music tapes, and our tapes and invoices guide lays one list over the other to show that 31 of those 35 are playing inside one of the 21 outposts, with Lamar Khaate Palace holding three. The remaining four are tied to Spugmay Keep or to Missions 30, 43 and 46 and cannot be picked up on a fast travel run.

The side ops walkthrough uses the same outposts as its stage. Munoko ya Nioka Station, Bampeve Plantation, Da Smasei Laman and Yakho Oboo all stage more than one side op, so the sensible order is to take the invoice on arrival, deal with the target, and listen for the radio before you leave. The eight acquired tapes are the practical ones: three come from the field, and five appear at the Animal Conservation Platform one at a time as you extract a bird, a goat, a horse, a wolf and a bear, each one keeping that animal calm for a Fulton.

Bringing It Home: What Mother Base Does With the Haul

The Mother Base guide describes the base as a place that grows in whatever direction you feed it. Soldiers arrive by Fulton and join the Diamond Dogs on landing; the page's one caution is to check their stats first because balloons are limited per mission. Decks are paid for with the materials the Base Development unit gathers, four per platform, each adding staff. The page names six departments, from Research and Development and the Combat Unit down to the Medical Facility, and 36 team functions unlock through missions across seven teams, from Merc Deployment to Weather Modification. Four of the Support Unit's functions are Comms Support in Russian, Pashto, Afrikaans and Kikongo, which is exactly the set of interpreters the side ops walkthrough has you extract in its first four entries.

Specialists are the other thing worth Fultoning. The page lists 11 action skills that work when the soldier is deployed in Snake's place and 40 base skills that only apply once the recruit is assigned to a suitable team, half of them a gate on something R&D can then build. The Animal Conservation Platform opens once six wild animals are extracted and Missions 7 to 10 are done, weapon customization at the Aerial Command Center opens after Side Op 109, and the page's develop-first list puts the Fulton Recovery Device at the top with the WU S. Pistol second. It also states plainly that other players cannot attack Mother Base; that only happens to a Forward Operating Base, where a defender respawns and an attacker gets one life.

After the Mission: What the Last Three Earned You

The codenames and emblems page closes the loop. A codename is shown at the end of a mission but judged mostly on the previous three, and 20 of the 26 come down to which method neutralized most of your enemies, one codename per weapon class or buddy. The other six are feats, from never being detected (Fox) to not having finished Mission 06 yet (Chick). Emblems are assembled at the Aerial Command Center from two words plus a front and a back pattern, and the page lists 75 that must be earned: 31 back patterns for completing every task in a named mission, and 44 front patterns, 30 of them for an S-rank, the rest for finishing a mission or side op, reaching 150,000 Heroism, or picking them up on a Mother Base platform. Our Mother Base, codenames and emblems guide sorts all of it, along with the base's own unlocks, by what each asks of you.

Questions Our Pages Answer

How many side ops does the walkthrough cover?

Its entries are numbered from 1 to 138, running from the four interpreter extractions to the seven target practice missions on Mother Base's decks, and only 40 of the first 46 carry a prerequisite line.

What are invoices for?

Each one opens fast travel in its own area, and together the 21 earn the key items behind the Collector achievement. OKB Zero has none.

How are codenames decided?

By the method used on most enemies across your last three missions. Six codenames are feats instead, and every animal you save adds a codename and an emblem of its own.

What These Pages Do Not Cover

Our five pages hold no main mission walkthrough, no page on Quiet, Skull Face or the ending, and no S-rank, Heroism, key item or FOB infiltration guide, though the side ops and Mother Base pages mention several of those in passing. The side ops walkthrough refers readers to blueprint, animal and poster location guides that are not among our pages, and the Mother Base guide to equipment, weapons and GMP guides that are not either.