How To Get Crystal Braiding

An essential part of getting stronger in Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered is getting enough resources to buy new weapons and armor from Merchants, but the higher tier you want, the rarer the resources you need will get. Crystal Braiding is one of these resources, and you’ll need to find it in order to get some of the strongest gear in the game.

Finding Crystal Braiding can be tough if you don’t know where to look, and it’s also not one of the resources you can purchase from any Merchants. Here’s where you can find Crystal Braiding.

Where To Find Crystal Braiding In HZD Remastered

The best (and only) way to farm Crystal Braiding in Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered is to take down and loot Thunderjaws, Stormbirds, Behemoths, and Rockbreakers. You can also loot it from Deathbringers, but you’re usually only able to fight them during major story moments. These are some of the toughest enemies in the game, so you need to be prepared before you take them on. Here are a few tips:

• Use your Focus to identify weak points in machines and break them off using Tear damage.
• Use Freeze attacks against them to make their armor brittle for extra damage.
• Aim for weapons you can tear off (like the Thunderjaws’ Disc Launchers), and use them against your targets.
• Use the Ropecaster to tie it down for easy and relatively risk-free damage.
• Wear armor that protects you against the damage type each enemy uses.
• Don’t get too close; try and kill them with ranged attacks.
• When fighting Rockbreakers, try and find high ground against them so you can avoid their Leaping attacks.
  • Try to tear Rockbreaker’s feet off so they can’t dig underground anymore.

It’s important to note that, even though you may take down one of these machines,
Crystal Braiding is not a guaranteed drop
. It’s an incredibly rare resource, so you could find that you need to take down quite a few more to get what you need.

If you’re struggling to find any of the machines mentioned above, make sure to check your map for machine sites. This will indicate where you can find and track them down. Alternatively, there are also a few quests which will require you to take down Thunderjaws and Stormbirds (like the Hunter’s Lodge questline). You can also find some corrupted Rockbreakers near Cauldron ZETA, but beware that this fight will be significantly tougher.

You need Crystal Braiding to buy the Oseram Arrow Breaker Heavy and Adept armor sets, and the Shadow and Adept Sling. Both are the strongest level of gear you can unlock, with the only difference being that Adept are the versions of armor you get in a New Game Plus save.

You can also use it to buy the Hunter Big Game Box, which contains some metal shards and a chance to loot small, medium, and large machine cores. If you find that you’ve been fighting enough big machines that you have a surplus of Crystal Braiding, you can also trade it with Merchants in Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered for some extra Shards.