Death Stranding 2 is replete with quality-of-life touches that are easy to miss. You can find many of them in the Corpus, but that exhaustive text is quite long, so they're easy to miss. You’ve got a game to play, after all.

Well, we’ve read it, we’ve internalized it, and we’ve put the things that the game only whispers to you into action. In this Death Stranding 2 guide, we’ll teach you about the little hidden things that will make your journey a lot more pleasant. 
 

Secure your backpack cargo with Strand rope for better deliveries

Who among us lowly porters hasn’t watched several boxes of cargo float down a river because we got punched or lost our footing? Death Stranding 2 has a mechanic to prevent a lot of the chasing. 

Put your backpack on the ground (holding the Triangle button by default), equip your Strand rope, and approach your backpack. When you get close enough, you’ll see a prompt to "tie down cargo." You’ll use your strand to tie it all together. The same trick works with your floating carrier too. 
 

Stealth and combat: how to remove your backpack for a tactical advantage

Knowing how to remove your backpack also leads to a couple of bonus strategies. 

Consider removing your backpack if it’s filled with damageable items and you’re heading into combat. 

Also, if you’re trying to be stealthy and hiding in tall grass, you can remove your backpack so that enemies don’t spot it peeking up above the foliage. 
 

Maximize your stamina eating and drinking in Death Stranding 2’s private rooms 

Before you leave your bedroom, gulp every energy drink and eat every cryptobiote. You’ll get stamina and blood level bonuses for only a few seconds of work. If it seems tedious, just skip the animations. It’s worth the short wait. 

Also, at certain points, there are other things you can access from the shelf. Move the camera around for more prompts. 
 

Why you should always plan and replan your route

You can learn a lot from Death Stranding 2’s map, but you can’t learn everything. You’ll gain broad knowledge from the map, but you’ll gain specific knowledge on the ground. 

Before setting out on a delivery, it’s useful to plan your route, if only to avoid literal pitfalls and unwanted skirmishes. Another big, but easy-to-overlook benefit of planning your route is that you don’t have to open your map to figure out where to go. Just ping your Odradek and follow the dotted line. 

Pinging your surroundings with Odradek also gives you reasons to deviate from your planned path. You’ll invariably find interesting things along the way, which makes detours all but inevitable and lucrative. And if you find yourself way off the beaten path, just open up the map and plan a new route. Remember: You can plan your route at any point just by bringing up the map and creating some waypoints. 
 

Set your default weapon for quicker access in combat

Death Stranding 2 includes menus to quickly access the weapons you have on hand, but it also includes the ability to set a weapon as your default. Look at the bottom right of the Weapons/Tools screen to find the prompt. (Default is R3.) 

All it really means is that it’ll be quicker to access your default weapon without having to scroll through the menus. And the less scrolling you do during stressful combat, the better. 
 

Scan for loot and safe terrain to avoid danger
 

Spam your scan button (L1), and that’ll tell you what’s around. That’s an elemental part of Death Stranding 2. 

Pay special attention to chiral crystals that dot the environment. Every 1000g of chiral crystals you gather and carry decreases Sam’s load by 1g. So pick them up when you see them in the world and collect chiral crystals from the people and places you help. 

Compared to the original Death Stranding, walking in Death Stranding 2 feels much less perilous. Still, you should avoid terrain marked with red Xes, and always scan a stream or a river to look for blue and yellow areas, which make it easier to cross. 

The secret to protecting cargo: container repair and timefall shelters

When you deliver a package, a significant part of what you earn depends on the condition of both the cargo (the actual items you’re delivering) and the container it’s in. The more damaged the container, the more easily damaged its cargo can get. 

Carry container repair spray and give your containers a coating before you turn them in, or use a timefall shelter, which provides the same benefit. But keep in mind that container repair spray can’t repair cargo. It finally sank in for us when we realized that it’s container repair spray, not cargo repair spray. 
 

Customize your map’s icons for a more efficient gameplay experience

Death Stranding 2’s map is full of useful information, but not all information is useful all the time. That’s why the developers added map filters. 

Let’s say you’re really, really into building roads, but you can’t quite figure out where the next auto-paver station is. Open your map and look to the top right of the screen for the button next to Filter. (It’s the touchpad on a DualSense controller.) In the menu, you can choose from dozens of icons to display or hide. 

There’s a convenient Hide All button at the top of each tab in the menu (Online, Orders, Structures, Vehicles, Cargo, and Other), so you can hide everything and work back up to the map you want, like only seeing the auto-paver icons. 
 

Unlock hidden knowledge in VR training: what the game doesn’t teach you

VR training might seem like a minigame at best and a distraction at worst, but it's actually neither. Spend 30 minutes there and you’ll learn things that you won’t during the campaign. 

There are two broad modes in VR training. In Weapons/Combat Training, you’ll learn how weapons feel and enemies react without having precious cargo on the line. The Porter Fundamentals Program is full of short missions that have direct corollaries to the things you’ll be doing in the actual game. 

You can access VR training via the View/Test Weapons prompt that’s floating on the door in Sam’s private room, or at some terminals.
 

Connect ladders and cross difficult terrain with ease

You can connect two ladders together. This is particularly useful in Mexico, where you begin, which is filled with wide canyons. 
 

Fast travel made easy: how to use the DHV Magellan for quick movement

After a certain mission several hours into Death Stranding 2, you’ll unlock fast travel via the DHV Magellan. 

The narrative explains the way fast travel works. Tarman, the captain of the Magellan, deems certain locations safe. Those areas are often quite conveniently placed near places you’ll want to visit and deliver items to. So, he’ll pilot the ship through the chiral network and surface in a pool of black gunk. 

Open your map, hold down a button (default X button on a DualSense), highlight your destination, hold down the button, and you’ll see “DHV Magellan Docking Area” at available fast-travel locations. Just make sure you’re in the Magellan, or you’ll send it someplace without you. 

Also, you’re perfectly free to use the Magellan to transport cargo for an order. But if you do, you’ll receive the Magellan evaluation, which just means that you get a bit less credit for those deliveries. The implication is that you’ll still get credit, but you’d get more credit for lugging cargo to its destination yourself instead of ferrying it through black tar on a magical ship. 
 

Stealth mode: using special shoes for silent movement

Sam’s got footwear options, and you should always carry two pairs of shoes—one to wear, and one to hang on the boot clip hook of Sam’s outfit. Walk without shoes, and you’ll suffer blood loss and lose speed. 

There’s one oddball piece of footwear that doesn’t seem to make a ton of sense until you consider the material it’s made from: sandalweed. Equip these shoes, and you’ll move silently and stealthily. 
 

Be kind to others: how helping players rewards you with likes

Death Stranding 2 is a game that treats you well if you treat others well. 

If you build structures like bridges, recharge stations, postboxes, timefall shelters, and watchtowers, they appear in others’ games, too. Kind players will see them and give you "likes"; the more likes you and other players give each other, the more of their structures you’ll see in your game. 

Another easy way to get likes is to leave signs in the world. Whenever you’re in a high-traffic area, drop a sign. That’s why everybody drops signs in places like the ramps into facilities. 

We hope these tips make your life a little easier when you play Death Stranding 2: On the Beach on Epic Games Store.