Platted That! – Death Stranding
Disclaimer: This delivery order contains a lot of cargo, consider a floating carrier or vehicle. This Platted That! also contains some minor gameplay spoilers. Thanks to Alec, Handsome Phantom Phriend, who assisted with strategies.
On a personal note, I was not interested at all in Death Stranding. I loved watching my oldest brother play Metal Gear Solid growing up, and had to be convinced by friends and PlayStation Plus incentives to give Ground Zeroes and Phantom Pain a try. I ended up loving all of Kojima’s games reluctantly. With all the weird cutscenes and odd gameplay videos, I just wanted to wait-and-see with Death Stranding. Just as before, a friend helped convince me to give it a try when it when on sale during the holidays. The first hour or two had me interested, but not hooked. But once the world finally opened up and sent me on my way, I found I was thinking about optimal delivery routes at work. I found myself trying to explain to the girlfriend my complex feelings on Deadman. During later stages, I found myself way too concerned whenever BB started crying.
It’s an intriguing game. We recommend giving it a try. If you’ve invested the time to finish the lengthy campaign, it doesn’t take much more to get the Platinum Trophy. Here are some tips for gettin’ that Plat.
Difficulty Preference
Here’s some general tips to keep in mind during the campaign. There are no missable trophies, so the only question is difficulty preference and keeping an eye on infrastructure.
When you start up the game, consider setting the difficulty to hard. There is one trophy locked behind difficulty, and this requires getting S-Rank on deliveries on hard difficulty. S-Rank requirements vary on what makes them top-grade, including cargo condition, cargo quality, delivery time, and miscellaneous (usually a combination of two or three requirements and cargo needs recovered from an unsafe area). You’ll need to S-Rank twenty of each delivery type on hard. You can do it the way I did, by just putting the game on hard and doing your thing. This still requires grinding timed deliveries and miscellaneous deliveries, as these tend to populate less often, but will reduce the time you spend post-campaign to Platinum. Or dedicate that to the post-game, when you’ll be incredibly familiar with the terrain, maxed out equipment, and have even attempted the deliveries before. Its really a question of preference. Combat is harder on hard (obvs), but nothing else really is, and combat is so few and far between that you won’t often notice it.
All Roads Lead to [Blank] Knot City
Listen up porters, take a page from Dwight D. Eisenhower, the U.S. president who oversaw the vast expansion of the American highway system, and develop your infrastructure. Build roads, build ziplines, bring a couple ladders and PCCs with you everywhere. The general gameplay cycle goes like this: make delivery, make second delivery if necessary, once the facility joins the network/UCA, connect that area to zipline network and use materials to build out the road. keeping basic tools for infrastructure on you will reduce slow backtracking and increase efficiency.
The challenge of the game is grappling with terrain and timefall, a mechanic that damages any material exposed to rain for too long. Especially long deliveries have a high chance to be damaged, as do deliveries in mountainous, canyonous (new word I invented to not break my flow), or snowy regions. The game’s asynchronous multiplayer will provide you with paths created by other players, safehouses, generators, timefall shelters, equipment, and ziplines, but until areas are connected to the network, these won’t appear. And even then, these creations will be spread out based on an algorithm, and won’t provide an efficient route for deliveries. Focus mainly on ziplines and roads as roads will make large deliveries terribly easier, and ziplines as they provide the faster routes. The game restricts the amount of structures players can build on their map (described as bandwidth), so to reach all the places you’ll need to, avoid building bridges and safehouses and stick to what’s going to make your gametime more efficient. Walking is for pleb porters and newbs.
Bonus: your infant companion, BB, loves to ride ziplines, which will increase your connection level needed for a trophy.
Sam the Builder
Most trophies will be popped along the way, either as direct parts of the story, or as unavoidably popped by story completion. Wrap up will then be spent on popping a couple miscellaneous trophies related to minor mechanics (like playing music in a safehouse), building and upgrading all structures, and collecting the memory chips.
Building all the structures may be popped organically, as they’re all useful. As for myself, the only structure I had not built was a bridge. However, building all structures means building all signs as well. These signs pop up in other players maps as gameplay tips, or even just an encouraging message of “keep on keeping on.” The signs cost no materials, and you can build them all in a couple minutes by just placing them all along a stretch of road. To be fair, these are very helpful when you come across them in the wild, so try to be aware of placing signs for others to point towards collectibles, hot springs, or to ask for infrastructure improvements.
A little more complicated than building all strcutures, is upgrading them to the maximum level. Here’s what I did. First, I waited till nearly the end of the game in order to ensure I had the maximum bandwidth. Then I went and got a truck from a facility that had a ton of resources in it. In this case, it was Lake Knot City. Bring a ton of metal and special alloys, as well as some chemicals in the truck, as well as enough PCCs to build everything. Build a few items in order (post box, zipline, generator, timefall shelter, etc.) until you run out of bandwidth. Use the materials in the truck to upgrade each one. Once a structure reaches level three, delete it and build the next one, i.e. a bridge or safehouse, and continue. If you run out of materials, take the truck to another facility via the sweet roads you’ve built. All-in-all, this only took me a few minutes, and most of that was just waiting for the upgraded structures to load.
Last, or near last, you’ll be looking for the game’s only collectibles, known as “memory chips.” As always, we reccomend Power Pyx for help with collectibles. You’ll notice that most memory chips have been marked with signs by other players, making the whole process easier. Every enemy camp has a memory chip, as does every major abandoned structure, and normally one spawns near a settlement. If you’ve been keeping out a keen eye during the story, odds are you’ll have a significant portion already found. And with your sweet zipline network and road system, even the most out-of-the-way memory chips won’t take very long to track down. Turn them all in at the closest terminal, and the trophy will pop in a few seconds.
If either of these trophies, “Trail-Blazer” or “Fount of Knowledge,” are your last trophies, both of them take 5-15 seconds before they trigger and take the screenshot. This gives you a little bit of time to set up a scene for your Platinum screenshot. For myself, I took out BB and got them to give the camera a smile. Others may want a shot of Sam finally resting, or falling down a hill. Whatevs, fam. Get creative.
The only other trophy that may need particular attention is getting all of your evaluation categories to rank sixty, particularly the delivery time category. For this, prioritize timed deliveries that are very far away, or contain a lot of cargo, as these will level you up faster than smaller, shorter deliveries. Even then, the majority of time spent in Death Stranding is centered on the narrative, and trophy wrap up is pretty low-key and short.
Now is a great time to give Death Stranding a try, especially given the star-studded cast and easy Platinum trophy.
As always, send us a tweet and let us know what you’re up to, your thoughts on Death Stranding, or what we should Platinum next. Be sure to check out other Platted That! articles for God of War or Marvel’s Spider-Man.
