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40+ Tips & Tricks You Might've Missed (+Video)

Caedo GenesisCaedo Genesis
(31 ratings)
Mar 20 @ 7:54am1,74820
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10+ Tips & Tricks I Wish I Knew (Video Version)
This is the most polished version of the information listed below! No story spoilers are present, just a few early equipment reveals.
Deliveries & Traversal
  • While Death Stranding 2 isn’t limited to just walking everywhere, it’s nice to know what Sam has to work with while he is on foot. I’m not talking about your standard mantling and sprinting, I’m talking about things like the shuffle, which can be pulled off by holding a single grip button while pressing jump. This input will shuffle Sam to the side of the grip button being held. The real power is when both grip buttons are held while pressing or holding jump, which will allow Sam to perform long distance hops with incredible stability, even when carrying lots of cargo on his back. These hops do cost stamina, but fortunately Sam doesn’t totally topple if you hop too much. You probably already know that you can correct Sam slanting to one side by holding the opposite grip button, however, did you know you can just hold both grip buttons and press the pick up button to fully stabilize? This, while combined with the hops I previously mentioned make you an absolute mountain goat when it comes to balancing big stacks of cargo. When Sam is less encumbered and has picked up enough speed from sprinting, pressing jump then pressing it again at the apex of his jump will perform a double jump! When you start getting skeleton legs, this double jump will see you easily hopping rivers while keeping Sam’s feet dry. Speaking of traveling at sprinting speeds, pressing the crouch button during a sprint will put Sam into a slide to quickly get into sneak position, get behind cover, or continue sliding down massive hills. If you choose the latter of those options, sliding will do continuous damage to your footwear, but it sure is a fun quick descent. If you end up sliding like this and ever want to slow to a stop before reaching flat ground, that just requires both grip buttons to be held. The more gnarly of the downhill descent gear is the floating carrier, unlocked at the end of Main Order 12. Carrying 6 XL containers of cargo is one thing, carrying Sam quickly down a mountain with some sick jump ramps along the way is entirely another, and solidifies that the Floating Carrier stays in my standard loadouts for basically every order.
  • If you're coming directly from the first game, the controller button layout has some noticeable changes, so your muscle memory might fight you a little for the first hour or so. The main one is that the attack button has switched sides. Some of these changes make sense to prevent button overlap, while others make room for new mechanics, like being able to throw grenades and shoot your weapon from a vehicle without taking your finger off the brake! (The PC Version lets you rebind controls via Steam Input).
  • Ladders can go vertical or horizontal, just like the first game, but now you can connect two ladders together for twice the distance! Also if you’ve got some precarious placement, you can still use the first person compass view to more safely step onto the ladder.
  • You can hold your cargo pickup button for a short time to drop your whole backpack, instead of the cargo you’re carrying. Your speed and combat effectiveness in this mode will be unmatched, like dropping training weights you’ll float like a cryptobiote and sting like a phantom pain. *imsosorry*
  • We now have a full Cargo Radial menu for fine tweaking equipment, without the need to go into the full cargo menu. From here you can quickly access all nearby storage, auto-arrange your pack, drop empty or ruined items, and unload your backpack, or just your cargo.
  • Take all the chiral crystals from storage you can, it'll help you in the field, and if you need them for fabrication, the game will simply ask to take what it needs from your inventory anyway. There's no reason not to haul around thousands of chiral crystals. They’ll never weigh you down, in fact it’s the opposite! Every 1k chiral crystals reduces Sam’s cargo load by 1kg. These will also be used as a resource for heavy ordinance in some later cases, so it feels good to not worry about it once you hit that point.
  • In Death Stranding 2 you are likely to spend a lot of time picking up chiral crystals and cryptobiotes. If you have both hands free and crouch, picking up crystals and cryptobiotes is quicker than doing it while standing.
  • If you’re looking for the best place to harvest chiral crystals without too much fuss, I suggest the animal shelter area. Just on the other side of the cliffs of this location, is a tar pool with some big groups of these swarm enemies known as Chiral Rodents. If you start scanning around this area, you might see several golden variants out on their own. Gold enemies generally mean more crystals if they’re defeated. If shot the golden chiral rodents will split into smaller ones, and only drop a few crystals. Knowing that, I found that a well placed blood grenade takes care of all of them at once, and each of these little adorable gold mines can grant you around 800 chiral crystals total! These little blessings from midas do respawn too, so after a delivery or two, come back to stock up on more chiral crystals.
  • Keychains, AKA Backpack Accessories have bonuses just like the first game, but are far more useful in various situations. You can equip up to two at a time to your backpack, and these can help you fight better, use less stamina, and even sneak around BT’s easier.
  • Container damage does not affect your score, only contents damage. In the majority of cases, timefall will only wear out containers, and won’t harm the contents even if the container is fully ruined. So long as you don't suffer any major impacts or collisions that damage the contents, you'll still get an S Rank even if the container is completely covered in rust from timefall. An exception to this is exposed containers that look like a frame. Vog Canisters for example will start to leak if the container is fully damaged, so you’ll want to either keep them covered, bring container repair spray, or a PCC to build a quick timefall shelter.
  • If you’re not fully loaded up for a delivery, be sure to check the shared locker for players’ lost cargo for your destination. These are bonus likes with minimal extra effort!
  • The tools and weapons made available to you during mission prep often help with your next main order. When someone talks about the helpfulness of a floating carrier, or the range of a rifle, take that as the hint that it’ll be useful pretty soon! If you’re not confident in using the new gear, the fully featured training room provides a space for zero-risk testing with the chance to get some stat progression with Sam!
  • Helping people on the second map will quickly unlock backpack addons, like grenade pouches and spare ammo. There are also some later addons that will improve Sam’s personal battery, or even help it regenerate! While the battery upgrades do sound helpful, there are so many ways to keep it charged outside of backpack bits to keep them charged. This is especially true if you play online where players are all too happy to place generators, generously. This was a similar case for the first game, but now we also have electrobiotes that are harvested from glowing coral formations, which will recharge Sam’s batteries when consumed. So if you’re finding your battery full the majority of the time, maybe swap in some extra pouches instead.
  • One of the best tools returning to the second game in my opinion is the sticky gun. While its primary use is cargo retrieval from ledges, lakes, and limbs, it can even come in handy when you face hostile humans. You’ll be surprised how much havoc you can wreak on bandit camp with just a sticky gun in your hands, give it a try! Help out the Bokka on the first map and you’ll get plans for the Sticky Gun in no time!
  • Carriers now auto attach when deployed from storage, vehicles, and the radial menu. Provided the vehicle can hold it, a carrier will also stay attached to Sam when jumping into a truck or cruiser.
Combat & Stealth
  • Just like options for foot travel, Sam has tons of different moves that don’t require a weapon in hand and just rely on the raw power of his fists and feet. Something I think is worth mentioning here is that training melee combat is definitely something you can grind out in VR training against brigands, and not just for practice. Building up Sam’s stat in melee will increase both his attack power and number of attacks in a combo! Speaking of combos, let’s talk about a bunch of other moves Sam can pull off in melee. When you get into a hostile area, signified by Sam’s health bar appearing, the grip button inputs will switch to a combat moveset. The first move is simply holding one or both grips, which will let you block incoming melee attacks, leaving you a small window to counter with the attack button. The second move with both grip buttons held is a tackle, and you can perform that by moving towards an enemy while still holding your grips and pressing attack at the same time. The third move you can perform while holding both grip buttons is the dodge, which is similar to the tackle, but pressing the jump button instead. Timed right, this’ll make Sam impossible to hit in close quarters scenarios. The next series of moves are more aggressive. The knee strike can be performed by simply jumping and attacking immediately after. Adding a sprint prior to the knee strike will turn it into a drop kick. If you choose to sprint at an enemy, jump, and press crouch instead, Sam will perform a body slam! If you’d prefer to make the enemy do a flip when they fall to the ground, you can also slide into them while tapping the crouch button mid-sprint. Now moving onto when you KO an enemy, there’s a slow that happens each time you take down a foe, that gives you a moment to use a grip button to pick up the cargo dropped by them. If you’ve picked up something you don’t need, that means you’re holding an improvised weapon that will likely one-shot whoever you hit with it, ruining the cargo in the process of course. The really fun part about wielding cargo containers, is that you can throw them at enemies by releasing the grip button mid-swing. If you are holding one piece of cargo, and swing a second time, Sam will spin and lob it even further on release.
  • While aiming a weapon or readying the strand, Sam’s jump becomes a dive and you can quickly get out of the way of a charging foe this way. Without a backpack on, this becomes a much more elegant roll instead. This’s particularly useful when dealing with the later enemies that are airborne or use big projectile attacks.
  • Rubber Bullet or RB weapons are non-lethal and only useful for taking down humans. These are fully replaced once you have weapons with MP, or Multi-Purpose Rounds. MP firearms are also non-lethal by default, and the key difference is that they work mech type enemies.
  • There are moments where I’d accidentally killed humans, but it was my own fault for using explosives or the lethal weapon code by accident. So, just like the first game, most times you have to make a conscious effort to kill humans. If you happen to kill a human by accident, or on purpose, basically all large facilities now have incinerators to dispose of bodies.
  • Using Sam’s shout during intense moments like fighting catchers often result in some help from other players' avatars. They’ll pretty accurately throw useful items your way to help in the fight. Shouting can also be used as a way to get an enemy to investigate, isolating them for a takedown.
  • If you choose to consume cryptobiotes to heal, Sam will eat as many as needed to replenish lost health. If you’re wondering where all your cryptobiotes went after a boss fight, it’s probably because Sam was shoveling handfuls into his face.
  • When you regain the ability to stealth takedown BT’s, you’ll need to get close. In order to get close to a BT unnoticed, Sam needs to muffle his breathing. So on top of the stress of taking down a BT, you also have to worry about a stamina bar slowly ticking down before Sam loudly gasps for air. You can level Sam’s breath stat by simply holding it often during low risk trekking. However, once you unlock the Oxygen Mask for higher altitude areas, this completely muffles Sam’s breathing too while equipped, removing the need for Sam to hold his breath around BT’s at all!
  • If you’re taking a stealth approach, standard boots sometimes make too much noise. (And avoiding BTs?) The cheap replacement sandalwood however, create almost no noise and are great for stealth operations without using a footwear slot.
  • The strand doesn’t need to be equipped to perform stealth takedowns anymore, and instead is used if you get close enough for a takedown prompt. The strand can still be an effective parrying tool when fighting brigands, but still leaves sam open to other attackers if you follow with a strand takedown.
  • If you go to snatch a weapon from a fallen enemy or the ground with your grip button, then hitting right on the D-Pad will immediately equip it for quick use!
  • When you’re holding empty throwables and have more in your inventory, instead of using the radial you can replace them by pressing your confirm button! One of the prompts will allow you to drop your weapon as well when aiming, which you can use to quickly offload more cumbersome empties.
Construction & Connection
  • Resource containers can consolidate into close to double of what their XL container holds. Simply pull one of each size (Small, Medium, Large, and Extra Large) from materials storage onto Sam’s back, auto-arrange, and BAM, suddenly an XL container of metals that would normally be 400 is glorious 750 instead! Since a fully loaded drawbridge truck can hold 20 XL containers, instead of 8,000 metals, consolidating like this would let you pack 15,000 into your truck instead! Unfortunately mines only spit out the standard XL amounts, so some recycling at a distro center or city might be necessary to mass-consolidate containers like this. (After releasing the video and playing the new update, I realized that consolidating now actually CAN double the contents of the material cargo now.)
  • When mass storing or retrieving materials, you can collapse the whole category and then select it to check the box of every item within that category.
  • Even though the bridges you can construct with your PCC are still a great shelter for vehicles, Timefall Shelters can now fully cover trucks, letting you protect them much more cheaply than before!
  • The addition of monorails and resource mines has made it easier than ever to get the materials you need for mass construction of more roads and rails. Mining facilities can be repaired with Resins and Special Alloys, and each use of the mining equipment requires chiral crystals. In turn, it will give you a bulk amount of a resource all at once. Monorails attached to these mining facilities of course aren’t just for resources, but can be used for cargo transport without penalizing your delivery score. Since I tend to outpace the story when building, I did find out that monorails are totally usable without a chiral network connection! So if you get a full rail line constructed, you can pack Sam, his vehicle, and the rest of his cargo into a container and catch the train right back to where you started!
  • If a player’s PCC structure is in the way of your path you can simply bring up the map, put your cursor over it and hold this prompt to dismantle it. This can also be done to remotely break down your own structures. Don't feel bad if you remove other players' structures this way, since these are copies from their world and meant to be helpful. If they're not helpful, they don't need to be there!
  • Each delivery point has a limit on raw resources it can hold, however, you can claim those materials and put them in the private locker at that site to have them ready to go for large construction of roads, monorails, and other structure upgrades. This will prevent stored materials at any delivery point from maxing out. If the packed materials are needed in fabrication, the menu will ask to break down what you have in the locker and your own inventory anyway. With the addition of the DHV Magellan, this is also a mobile base for storage purposes, so your vehicles and materials will always have a safe private storage and garage to use, with the ability to call it to a closer location if need be. This also means that you can travel back to the locations of the first map, load up all their resources into the ship, and take them with you into the second map for mass construction! While claiming all materials has no real downside at delivery points, I would recommend that you keep the magellan’s resources up, because there’s a moment about 75% into the story that wasn’t letting me recycle things, and in turn I couldn’t print the gear I wanted.
  • You can view several details about structures remotely. Auto-Pavers and Tracklayers will tell you exactly how many resources are needed when you hover over their icon. If you select any structure that has a storage and press confirm, you will be able to view the private locker, as well as shared equipment without needing to be on-site!
  • ziplines are just as helpful as they were in the first game, but while you’re placing them in Death Stranding 2, you can now bend their path around obstructions and link with monorail constructors as well as zip down the entire train line if you want. Ziplines also maintain the ability to bring floating carriers just like the director's cut of the first game, just be sure to strap that cargo down first. When setting up your own zipline network, I have a couple recommendations: First, is to utilize the shared ziplines that are already in place to save yourself on chiral bandwidth, as these are still pretty costly to place. Second, is that you can use your first person compass to accurately mark your next zipline location instead of wandering around trying to get the perfect distance. Remember that Level 2 Ziplines can reach up to 350 Meters, so you can get more overall distance if you plan around that extra 50 meter distance.
  • zipline dismounts are based on the direction you're looking, some of them are really high up, and you don't wanna do something foolish like dismounting 200 meters off a cliff
  • Beach jumping can be useful if you desperately need to rest, or just want to get to an objective quickly, and if there's a transponder nearby, simply popping to a shelter then returning is totally viable. You’ll be able to keep your equipped items, including your handgun, everything in your pouches, and exoskeleton, it also thankfully won’t take your spare boots. Everything in your backpack however, as well as shoulder and hip mounts and delivery cargo gets stored in the locker of the transponder you came from, so be sure to pick it back up when you've returned.
  • Once you make it to the second map, take note of the shoreline south of the lone commander, there is a good amount of chiral creatures to get past, but if you make it there, you’ll find a veritable feast of cryptobiotes and their mutated variants, depending on your main delivery progress.
  • Postboxes not only store valuable cargo, but now have portable recyclers and printers too! You can take enemy equipment directly to a postbox, recycle their gear into raw materials, and consolidate!
  • You can place a generator as close as you can to a zipline or a road and level it up to 2 for a quick recharge point of your batteries without needing to dismount. If this is already a well traveled path, you know you’ll get likes from other players this way too!
  • Watchtowers, which are an early PCC structure, are the most effective way of marking enemies at a hostile outpost, as well as the loot you can acquire there. These can also now be remotely accessed within 200 meters from the map. Your camera facing will also determine the tower facing when you link up to it. Even though I didn’t realize they had remote usage for the longest time, I also recently found out that they have heat map displays which show where other players have been seen by the enemy; this makes watchtowers even better for plotting stealth approaches too!
Vehicles
  • You can pickup cargo, crystals, and cryptobiotes from tri-cruiser without dismounting, whereas the truck needs you to dismount, or specific equipment to do so.
  • You can recycle vehicles if you take them to a garage, and recycle from the garage storage as well. If you’re not happy with the vehicles being shared, recycle them so you can convert them into something you can use! The same process can be applied to a pile of vehicles that sometimes are parked outside of a delivery point!
  • Before you get drawbridge trucks, just like the first game you can commandeer brigand trucks if you wish to carry more materials for early road construction.
  • There are multiple ways to access the cargo menus now, and that also determines which cargo shows at the top. If you access from the radial, it’ll prioritize what is on your back, if you access the carrier or vehicle near you, it’ll show that inventory on the top of the list instead. A subtle way the menus help with efficiency!
  • Vehicles can now be quickly repaired at large delivery points or the DHV Magellan by simply walking up to the parked vehicle inside and holding your attack button. This will also recharge the vehicle’s battery in the process, and conveniently turn it around to face the exit.
Interface
  • In the options, you can set Minimum Hold Button Duration to 2 for your timed button presses. Timed presses are for things like skipping repeated cutscenes, resting, and accessing cargo. Since there’s enough menuing for this game already, speeding some of it up is lovely. The reason for setting it to 2 will stop you from using your odradek flashlight by accident every time you access the radial menu.
  • Cutscenes not only get to the point a lot more quickly in the second game, but dialogue is also no longer linear! Instead of all the exposition being fed to you all at once, you can choose dialogue options or just go on your way!
  • The Corpus is a greatly improved glossary in the sequel of Death Stranding, telling you the story so far if you’ve been away for a few days, bios story characters and terms, as well as locations. If you still have some connection rating to gain with someone, the Corpus gives a general hint on what you can expect as your next reward if you scroll to the bottom of the entry!
  • You can quicksave from the menus selection area, and it’ll show the teeny tiny prompt on the lower right hand side. If you’re looking to have more immersive saves, you can hold the confirm button so long as you’re not in danger and rest. During a resting state, you can also take a drink from your canteen, and sleep to change the time of day. If you do this on rough terrain, it’ll prompt you to catch breath instead, which can also save your game and takes less animation time than resting.
  • I tried the game on normal difficulty and found it a bit too easy, the only times I died were during a couple catcher fights, and gravity from pressing the wrong button. If you're experienced with Death Stranding already, bringing it up to Brutal might be worthwhile to keep it at least a little bit more challenging if you're used to constant S ranks from missions.
  • As soon as you make your first delivery on the second map, you’ll unlock APAS enhancements, which are basically perks you can toggle on and off, with their own point cost system. As if you needed more incentive to improve standing with each delivery point, doing so will also give you Memory, which can be spent on these APAS upgrades. Some are incredibly powerful, while others have some tradeoffs. Be sure to read these enhancements before you decide to activate every enhancement you see, as you might handicap yourself by accident.
  • The map can get messy thanks to the shared structures and signs by other players, most times they're helpful, but other times, it can be a chore to find your own buildings in this mess. on the upper right is an icon filter, and the furthest option over is the custom setting, which lets you decide what all shows on your map. I use the custom markers setting to disable all the online icons, which dramatically cleans the map up to let me find objectives and my own PCC structures easier. Also a note on icon visibility, sometimes icons are hard to see due to the map itself being too bright. A workaround I found for that is using the weather filter once unlocked via Main Order 16, which will black out the map but leave the icons still visible.