Like a cavewoman stumbling out of the confines of her tribe for the first time, it's easy to feel overwhelmed by Horizon Zero Dawn's massive world. While the game does a good job of imparting the basics of combat and progression, a lot of questions remain. What are the best skills to go for? What inventory upgrades should I prioritize? What loot should I hold onto, and what can I sell? Keep reading for the answers to these questions and much, much more.
I've played a lot of Horizon Zero Dawn lately, and while I haven't completed everything there is to see and do in the game, I have learned plenty of valuable lessons during my 50+ hour playthrough that I wish I had known sooner. Here's my list of spoiler-free recommendations for beginners.
Skill Upgrades: What To Get And When
Horizon Zero Dawn features a variety of abilities that you can unlock via skills points earned from leveling up and completing certain missions. These skills fall into three main categories: Prowler (stealth), Brave (combat), and Forager (crafting and enemy overrides). While the abilities are aligned across nine columns, pay special attention to the lines that connect certain skills – some trees end early or fan out into other columns, so make sure you aren't buying up the wrong skills to get to the ability you want.
Assuming you do a good chunk of the side content, you should have enough points to buy almost every ability, but some are definitely more helpful than others. Here are my recommendations on what to focus on, which provide a well-rounded mix of stealth and strength.
First Priority Buys:
Silent Strike: Without a doubt, this ability should be your first buy. The stealth move lets you instantly and silently kill a nearby enemy when you are hidden, which is of great help for clearing out bandit camps and taking down early, but formidable, machines. Later robots will not be killed by the attack, but it will knock them down for a period of time.
Concentration: Another must-have, activating Concentration temporarily slows down time when aiming one of Aloy's weapons. Like Silent Strike, this ability is vital for a stealthy approach, allowing you ample time to line up headshots, or target specific components on mechanical foes.
Lure Call: Aloy can use the rocks she collects to distract patrolling enemies, but the Lure Call is far more efficient for stealth kills. The ability allows you to whistle at a specific enemy (whoever is closest to your center view), who will then come to investigate without fail. Find a patch of tall grass to hide in, whistle, and take them down with a Silent Strike attack. Piece of cake.
Second Priority:
Gatherer, Scavenger, Disarm Traps, Tinker: The first three skills you bought provide the basis for Horizon's stealth combat, and will serve you well for the opening hours. After that, I recommend making a beeline for the Tinker ability, which allows you to remove the stat-boosting mods that you slot into your weapons and armor. Tinker is a heavy investment; it's located at the end of one of the Forager lines, requiring you to buy three other abilities before you can unlock it. However, it's definitely worth it. You will only acquire a handful of weapons in the game, but will consistently be finding better and more powerful mods to boost them. Having the ability to experiment with different combos or effortlessly move your best mods to a different weapon is a big help. Additionally, the abilities you need to unlock first are also helpful: Gatherer and Scavenger provide more resources from plants and downed foes respectively, and Disarm Traps lets you pick up unused or misplaced traps.
Third Priority:
Precision, Precision +, Knockdown: Thanks to weapon mods and the myriad different arrow types you'll be unlocking, you won't have to worry about your ranged capabilities too much in the early hours of the game. That's why we're focusing our next group of skill points on melee abilities instead. Precision and Precision + will boost your light attacks and help knock off armor and components, while Knockdown will – surprise! – knock down foes, leaving them vulnerable to follow-up attacks. Which leads us to...
Critical Hit, Critical Hit+: These two abilities allow Aloy to stick a downed enemy for major damage. Thanks to their position in the skill tree, they are also cheaper – you can pick both of them up for the price of a single skill further down the tree. That said, you may want to check how much damage the standard Critical Hit attack is doing; if it's consistently killing off the enemies you're up against, you can put off buying the bonus damage until you need it.
Fourth Priority:
Heavy Lifter, Double Shot, Triple Shot: At some point, your standard bow damage won't be cutting it anymore – precision arrows will no longer pack enough of a punch to take down elite bandits, and bigger machines shrug off standard arrows. That's where the Double and Triple Shot arrows come in. Aloy can notch up multiple projectiles before letting loose, which will once again boost your stealth game back into one-hit-kill territory. Like Critical Hit, see how Double Shot does on its own – if you're already happy with the amount of damage it's doing, hold off on the final upgrade until later. As for Heavy Lifter – it's a rather useless upgrade, but necessary purchase to get to Double Shot, so you'll just have to eat the loss.
Concentration+, Fast Reload: What good is having the ability to rack up multiple arrows if you don't have enough time to fire them off? Concentration+ gives you a few more seconds to line up a slow-mo headshot, and Fast Reload will help mitigate misses by taking less time. If that isn't an issue for you (either you've boosted reload speed via mods or you're the type of braggart that never misses), then ignore this upgrade.
Fifth Priority:
By this point you have acquired Horizon's most useful abilities, so what you purchase next depends on your playstyle and preference:
Silent Drop, Low Profile, Dodge Prowess, and Quiet Sprint are quality-of-life upgrades that will let you move around more freely without alerting enemies.
Healer and Herbalist are cheap health upgrades that will keep you alive longer (if you're dying a lot, you may want to consider purchasing them earlier).
Ammo Crafter and Scavenger+ will help alleviate resource gathering.
Combat Override and Combat Override+ will keep allied machines fighting by your side longer.
I purchased these ability chains in this order, but feel free to deviate as you see fit.
Not Worth It:
Finally, we have the skills that I didn't find particularly useful, though your mileage may vary based on play style.
Hunter Reflexes: The ability to trigger slo-mo when jumping or sliding sounds cool, but in practice I barely ever use it. You're better off just using Concentration, or firing off arrows in real-time.
Balanced Aim: How often do you think you'll need to balance on a rope and fire off arrows at the same time? If you answered "never," you're correct! Just keep the two skill points and shoot your arrows from the platform the rope is connected to. Duh.
Fighting Back: This ability deals extra heavy spear damage when you're health is low. But guess what? If you're health is low, you don't want to be running up to a deadly enemy to perform melee attacks. Hang back, heal, and use your arrows instead – you'll stay alive and save yourself three skill points to boot.
Call Mount +: This ability lets you call in a mount even if you don't currently have one tamed. I guess that could be helpful, but I didn't use mounts all that much to begin with, and you don't have to search too hard to find one in the wild.
All The Other Strike Abilities: The Strike abilities make up a big chunk of the Prowler skills, but aside from Silent Strike, they can be easily skipped. Strike From Above/Below are both highly situational attacks; landing a headshot with one or more arrows is far quicker and easier than getting into position to pull off one of these specialty kills. Leader Strike, which allows you to perform silent kills on elite humans, might be worth it if it wasn't at the bottom of the skill tree – instead you can still one-hit kill them with a headshot if you use precision arrows and Double/Triple Shot. The last two Strike abilities, Strong Strike and Strong Strike +, simply up the damage on these skills that you probably don't want to buy or use anyway, making the entire branch easy to ignore.
Coming up next: We outline our favorites weapons, which inventory upgrades to prioritize, and more...
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