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Two people left rubbish lying around Chicago and Aiden has to gather all of it. Maurice Vega threw away the phones he used while he was being paid to kill Aiden and his niece Lena, and a hacker calling himself Giggles painted messages on walls and daubed them where nobody would think to stand. Between them that is 24 objects, and the only thing you really need to know before you set out is how near each of them you have to get.

The two trails at a glance

TrailObjectsHow you take itHeaviest districtsPayout
Burner Phones8Walk up and hack itPawnee 3, Brandon Docks 2Vespid LE and Sanity Check
QR Codes16Read it through a hacked camera at rangeThe Loop 4, Brandon Docks 4The Gangster weapon, then a virus on Giggles

Eight phones you can put your hands on

The phones are ordinary objects sitting in ordinary places, which is exactly what makes them hard to see. One is handed to you by the story and cannot be lost. The other seven are on a blue cabinet behind a fish restaurant, on the roof of two joined trailers, tucked behind the big motel sign next to the letter L, on a bare wooden floor up a staircase in the Rossi-Fremont Tenements, on a mattress inside a container in Brandon Docks, on a desk in the far corner of a white warehouse, and on another mattress out in the shanty town by the Bunker.

Read that list as a map rather than a checklist and something stands out. Three of the eight are in Pawnee, on the poor edge of the game where the trailer park and the cheap motel are, and not one of them is in Mad Mile among the skyscrapers. Play them back in order and you get Maurice's half of a conversation with a caller he never names, which is the reason to collect them at all. Finishing the set signs the Vespid LE over to you and closes out Sanity Check.

Sixteen codes you are never allowed to touch

Giggles works the other way round entirely. Every one of his codes is painted somewhere a person on foot cannot line up: across a river on the Tidis factory wall, above the L-train tracks by the water tower, on a far building seen from a rail bridge, behind a dish antenna on raised track, on a freeway pillar you have to zoom in on from the opposite bank. You do not collect these, you find the camera that already looks at them, and on several you hop from one camera to a second before the angle comes good. Four of the sixteen are in the Loop and four more in Brandon Docks, so those two districts are worth a dedicated afternoon while the rest come one or two to an area.

Both trails hide until the district's mast is yours, so the thirteen climbs in our investigations and activities guide come first, and the same trick that finds a QR code at range will find half the routers in the Privacy Invasions list too. Our pages credit the Read Only trophy both to this set and to twenty Crime Detection call outs, so treat that one as unsettled and go by the weapon instead: the codes hand over the Gangster, and then a call comes in asking you to walk a virus into the man's own apartment in Mad Mile. For everything running alongside these two lists, including the minigames covered in our side systems guide, start from the Watch Dogs hub.