Achievement Help Guide

This guide contains help for the more challenging achievements of this game, general tips, as well as links to other useful resources when hunting the trophies in this game.

About

This guide contains the following:

• Help with the more challenging achievements of this game
  
• General tips and information when hunting achievements in this game
  
• Links to other useful resources

This guide does not contain the following:

• Guide for every single achievement of this game (though following both this guide and the ones linked here will likely get you there)

Essentially, I will be mainly tackling the achievements that might pose problems and that do not (or did not when I played) have help anywhere yet.

Achievements will be divided to generic categories for ease of searching, but not each to their own section, to avoid cluttering the guide.

I will try to keep spoilers to the minimum, but achievements themselves can always have slight spoilers ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to comment them below.

General

• You can get 100% achievements in one playthrough, but you will need to play on Expert, as 3 achievements are Expert only. Be warned though, that some of the combat achievements will be quite spicy on Expert.
  
• Most things are technically missable (time-gated story-wise), but on the other hand, normal methodical approach will be sufficient to practically not miss anything. I'll explain the way I did it shortly a bit later.
  
• After clearing the story, you can load any chapter in it, and hunt missing achievements straight from there, meaning any achievement basing on single or couple of events will be simple and quick to snatch even if you happen to miss it during your normal playthrough. There are some exceptions too though.
  
• Few achievements are one-or-the-other, and you will need to do the above loading and play the story from that point on, picking the different choice for the other achievement.
  
• Challenge mode is a post-story mini-game, so don't worry about the achievements related to it. It will be accessible from the main menu.

Approach

This is basically how I went around playing the game, and I missed only one recipe/item throughout (which is pretty much the most missable single thing in the game). This is mostly the usual way a lot of people play these kinds of games anyways ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• When in new area, explore it as much as you can before hitting the object location. This is especially true if the location is a city.
  
• After getting the ability to teleport to different areas late in Act 1, visit all the areas regularly, especially towns. They will have more NPCs around as well as the Questboards that can have quests not visible on map. Side quests, while normally visible on map and tracker, will usually only be so when you are in that specific area, meaning you should do quick in-out teleportations every now and then to check if an area has new side quest
  
• After getting Lotuscape, frequent it. You don't exactly need to be religious with it and get stressed all the time, but do visit it regularly and put your working force to use. It is not only straight related to few trophys, but also source of money and a lot of materials required for quests (and indirectly other trophies).
  
• You will be granted a scan ability fairly early on. Use it. A lot. When running around, hit that button every now and then to see if there are some kind of collectibles around. Materials might or might not be too useful after early game, but there will also be a lot of lore and similar interactable objects, some of which are also related to achievements.

Links

These are the guides I used when playing this game, and they will be your friend with a lot of things - everything that this guide doesn't cover at the very least. All credits go to the original creators.

Remember to also check the comments in the Steam guides, as they may contain some useful tidbits as well.

• Achievement Guide I mainly used, bases on this one.
  
• Lotuscape: Researching
  
• Lotuscape: Exploring
  
• Fishing[gameplay.tips]
  
• Guide for one fairly missable hidden side quest ending[gameplay.tips]
  
• Outfit list (some will be recipes and part of an achievement, and couple of them are easily missable)

Additionally, here's seemingly very comprehensive Chinese achievement guide. I did not use it myself, but stumbled upon it couple days back looking for information. With some translation magic I'd imagine it can prove very helpful.

Another very detailed Chinese guide here (thanks to pavod3 for showing it to me). Used it to find the NG+ exclusive Lost Tales rare cards when I had otherwise missed them, but it contains plenty other things as well.

Story Achievements

As long as you don't rush around and miss side quests, all of the story achievements are easy to manage. Here are couple that might cause some questions to arise.

Wild Soul

Complete the side quest Wild Souls.

You will receive this side quest fairly early on visiting Skyelk with Cen Ying. You will be asked to bring 3 different items to Qingxue with Cen Ying in the party. Two of them are very common and no worth worrying over here, but the third item on the list is 5 softscents. You will only receive softscents - that exact amount too - from a questboard quest later in the game, so try to keep up with the quests.

The quest in question is called Homesick and it requires you to give 5 perches. The quest becomes available after leaving Redwater for the second time, after the story parts in Stag Creek and Jishuang, basically somewhat late in act 3.

When you have all the items, teleporting to Skyelk with Cen Ying in party and walking a bit towards the marker initiates a cutscene, after which the achievement will pop.

Green Tung

Complete the side quest Green Tung.

This side quest is an optional boss fight (or two of them, kinda). It will happen in Weishui Swordforge.

Some time after the story parts located there, revisiting the forge will give notification along the lines of "something being close-by" (but way more specific). At this point, locate "Green Tung" in your inventory, and investigate it. Side quest marker will appear on the map. Hit the location, and battle some people for the first half of the quest.

It will be quite some time later before the second half of the quest. After all the Spirit Storm business, there will be a side quest in Qixia. Approach it for a cutscene. In it, the man who talked to you in the post-battle cutscene from the first half will talk to you again, and invite you to a battle. At this point, hit the Weishui Swordforge again, kick his butt, and complete the quest.

Lantern Smasher

Find the quickest route while chasing Ye'changeng in the Threshold.

This is fairly simple achievement, but also quite easy to fail without guidance. It will take place in Lotuscape, right before you go for the finale in Xiling. You will have a story quest telling you to go rest. Upon interacting with your house, short cutscene will be initiated, after which you are presented with a choice:

• Follow the Dreamsoul Twig's aura
  
• Leave

There is no one in their right mind who would just skip possible developments, but do make sure to follow the aura. This will land you in the Threshold. Note that this is also the requirement for two other achievements: Heartless, which just requires you complete this sequence, and Demon Devoured, which is also automatically completed after this sequence if you chose the cub in Beiluo's memories earlier on in the story.

In any case, inside the Threshold you will be eventually tasked to smash lanterns with your ranged ability, creating new pathways and finding your way to Ye'changeng. There is no real map in the area, and thus it's easy to lose your way around and fail the achievement. Here's a map of the area I scrapped together in Paint while messing around, containing all the points of interest, explained more in detail under the picture. The map shares the orientation of your character in the world (since that does still exist even without a proper map).

• Purple X is the room you start at
  
• Yellow filled circles are rooms where you meet Ye'changeng
  
• Yellow X is the final room
  
• Rooms are the big black circles
  
• Lanterns are marked with colored hollow circles, with lines drawn to where they will move after being hit, opening the wall where they end up at (burning it). Lanterns do not actually have colors like this inside the game.

The picture is a bit lacking in explaining the order of things, so here is how it plays down with the lanterns:

1. Smash the orange lantern
   
2. Clear the room
   
3. Smash the light blue lantern (looking from the middle of the room, it is the left one)
   
4. Clear the room
   
5. Smash the green lantern
   
6. Smash the greyish blue lantern
   
7. Clear the room (At this point, the dark blue lantern will appear between the first room and the current room you are in. It is only destructible from the first room.
   
8. Find your way to the first room
   
9. Smash the dark blue lantern

After that, the achievement will pop up.

Combat Achievements

None of the combat achievements are particularly missable either, but some of them are very quirky or challenging. Or both.

One Stone Three Birds

Freeze three enemies with one ice ball at Lake Ding.

Like Relay Race, that requires you to hit one ice ball with another, this one feels fairly buggy as well. Unlike Relay Race though, where just smacking your head against the wall ice balls enough (with some aim) will be the best way to handle it, there are couple of things that might help you with this one.

This is not exactly that buggy. The painful part is just that the enemies in Lake Ding are all resistant to freeze (probably at least -80%, considering that is the number Yun'wuyue receives from a freeze resistance skill), which makes it quite the ordeal to hit three freezes with one ball.

Your party seems to bypass this, however (or otherwise mess around in the code somehow for better chances), since I have seen a video of a party member freezing the enemies, and my successful run with this achievement also ended that way. So your best bet is hitting the middle-ish area of Lake Ding with the three huge groups of enemies and just smash around, hoping to God that your mates hit a lucky one. Took maybe 30 mins for me.

Worth a note too, that it will be likely you also accidentally get the Relay Race achievement during this mess.

Free Falling Demon

Use Energy Skill to knock a dying Fogblade Demon off Cetacea.

At one point during the story (just around the time of your first visit to Wuzan), you will be flying on top of a giant stingray Cetacea. There are also two other achievements related to this sequence, but those are fairly easy and straightforward.

This one requires you to know a dying Fogblade Demon off. Fogblade Demons are those annoying mid-tier enemies with their spinning scythes. The important part to note here is that this sequence seems to be timed (take note of this for the other two achievements during this as well), and there will only be one Fogblade Demon during this time, and it will leave shortly before the ride ends. You will need to kill it - and knock it off - before that.

Knowledge is half victory here, as the execution part itself is not particularly difficult. Energy Skill means just your usual combat skills that cost energy (who would have guessed). I personally used and recommend the skill Fulgur: it deals nice damage, and ends up with a slash that can yeet the body the hell away, which is perfect for this achievement. Might require couple of tries to match the damage so the final slash or the ones right before it kill the demon.

Another Block

Successfully block 15 attacks during the He'chong, Dreamsoul battle.

Claw for a Claw

Defeat He'chong, Dreamsoul while transformed.

This is the He'chong battle you have in Yanling after the big change in the city. Both of the tasks are fairly straightforward, but there is one big gotcha: this battle has two phases separated by cutscene, and the achievements only count the latter part. This much should be obvious for the killing part, but remember to block full 15 attacks during the latter part.

Also in case you haven't stumbled upon it, transformation is the Flame Surge special skill which you will have to set to your morale skill slot once you have unlocked it in Constellations.

Block Master

Successfully block 40 attacks during the Solwrath battle.

Darkchasing Might

Defeat Solwrath while transformed.

This fight is very soon in the story after the He'chong one described above, and functions practically the same. Note that Solwrath has three phases instead of two though.

Excuse Me!

Defeat 20 demons as they are absorbing Demon Cores in Redwater.

Might not sound terrible without trying, but this was absolutely cursed achievement to go through. It has relatively the same idea as later achievement Sneaky Surprise (I'd recommend using this same damage tactic if you are having trouble with that one as well), but not only is this harder to execute, you need to do it 20 times instead of only once. God bless.

There are multiple problems killing demons while they are absorbing cores:

• They might not always go for the cores. I thought it was because they already absorbed one, or because the core was from a demon of same type, or whatever dark magic, but in the end they always contradicted themselves and I couldn't find concrete logic. AI just does not want to suck the rocks at times, and it can fail you quite some amount of tries.
  
• They heal while they absorb the cores. Not like instant full health style, but enough that you will not be able to push them down practically ever, without some planning.
  
• The time they absorb the cores for is not very long, so accumulating combos or such is not possible in the act, which strictly relates to your lack of damage

You won't be able to bypass the first problem. AI is a fickle mistress at times, but fortunately most of the time it should not be too nerve-wracking. For the other two problems: only way you will reliably deal enough damage within the time (essentially, you need to burst hard) is with Shieldbreak or Kill, both of which require over 30 combo. Even with that, the demon must be quite low before it starts absorbing the core.

Here was my strategy:

• Set team to Follow. As you will need to whittle demons to low and get them to start absorbing, you cannot afford your party members decimating them at that point. Only set them to setups containing attacking if you need that extra bit of damage when the demon starts absorbing.
  
• Gather two (or more, but will end up in chaos usually) demons and whittle them both to low health. Getting above 30 combo in the process is usually essential. Then kill the other one, preferably close to the other, and wait for the absorbing to start (while keeping your combo up however you can). When the animation starts, you can optionally set team to aggressive, but most importantly get in as fast as you can and smack the Shieldbreak/Kill in.

If done correctly, and with a bit of luck, you will get kills with this, sometimes fairly fast too. If you feel like there ain't enemies, hit Lotuscape and get back, and you will have some respawns.

Remember to save after every single successful kill or you are asking for trouble for when you accidentally get yourself killed trying to juggle enemies around

Alternatively, or to complement this, you can try to utilize the arrows raining down the mountain. They will do nice damage, but also contain two big risks:

• Kills made by the arrows do not count
  
• You will take plenty of damage in the whole process too

Crafting and Collection Achievements

Most of crafting and collection achievements are, as usual, piece of cake if you just don't rush too much. For achievements in this section though, frequenting Lotuscape is especially important.

Unexpected Harvest

Fish up a Pale Wyrm in Lake Ding.（Use a special bait found in Ancient Cloister）

Like the description already tells, the key is the Ancient Cloister, which you visit already very early in the game. You can postpone fetching it for quite long though, since it is not until late Act 3 when you revisit Lake Ding in the story that you can fish there.

The location of the bait is not exactly hard to miss, but it might be easy to miss due how it seems like you can't get it from the only place you can get it from. How convoluted.

UPDATE: did some replaying around and found the proper intended way to to bait. You can still use the workaround, I'll leave it explained as well, but the intended way is probably easier, what with a bit more platforming.

Here's picture of the map and the view in the game from where you find the bait (location circled in red).


Intended: keep going past this spot and all the way until the platform besides the main road where you complete the Pale Wyrm treasure side quest. From this platform, after completing the side quest, there will be another moving platform. It will take you up to the platform with the pots and thus the bait. Easy peasy.

Alternative: To hit the pots with the ranged skill from the area seen in the pictures above, you need to jump to the (not visible in the picture) platform in front of the one the characters are currently, go as close as you can and then throw your daggers. You barely see the pots, but the projectiles will obey gravity a bit and hit the pots, unseen to you.

Afterwards, just teleport to Lake Ding and go fish that bad boy (do not fail the fishing mini-game though, you are likely in trouble if that happens as the bait is unique).

Unmatched Craftsman

Follow crafting recipes and create 365 different items.

Research Center achievement (73 researches) is closely tied to this, but since researches tell when you've done it it is way easier. Besides, it is practically mandatory to complete for this achievement anyways.

This is simple yet tedious achievement, as there is no reliable way to track in-game which recipe you have done yet. Additionally, without counting the Challenge Mode 20-ish recipes, the game only has couple more recipes than the requirement for this, making it quite the tight fit if you happen to miss something.

The way I tracked this was the following:

• Keep track (in Notepad or similar) of all the recipes you have discovered but not used
  
• When you discover new recipe, do it instantly. If you can't, add it to the list.
  
• When you craft with recipe in the list, remove it from the list.

This way the tracking list won't get absurdly long, but you will be keeping up with what you have to do. For this to work remember to use your new crafting recipes whenever you can though.

Ancient Swords Collector

Find and collect 125 entries.

This is real wild card of an achievement. I got it, and I still have no clear idea what it is related to. I speculate it is related to lore entries (and this is what I also got from gracefully Google-translating this achievement in that one comprehensive Chinese guide that can be found in the links section), either related to main story or then collecting the scraps of paper and books around the world. Depending on which one it will be, it is either automatic, or requires you to keep your eyes open for collectibles while running around.

Either way, for me it opened up after a cutscene in Act 4 in Yanling, right before we move on to Xiling. The cutscene contained talks about one specific story-related ancient sword, and was preceded by area with plenty of collectible books, so take from these things what you will.

Recruitment - detailed artisan lists

Recruitment

Complete the side quest Recruit! and hire all artisans.

Putting this in separate section, otherwise guide section character limit will smack me 'round the corner.

This is essentially "do quests or die" -type of achievement. Most of artisans are recruited through Questboard quests or side quests, so keep your eyes open for those.

There are 24 artisans in the game.. As you go around recruiting them and visiting Lotuscape, Persimmon will occasionally have next step of the Recruit-quest for you, where he talks to you for a bit about your recruiting progress. After you recruit your 24th artisan, visit Lotuscape and talk to Persimmon to complete Recruit IV, thus the whole Recruit-quest, and get the achievement.

There are couple things worth mentioning in the recruiting process though. While most of the time you will get the artisan as you complete the quest, there are times when you need to talk to them again, or go talk to the artisan if the quest was returned to someone else related to the topic.

Here's list of all the artisans in the game, in order of appearance. Do note that artisans appearing relatively at the same time might of course end up in different order in your playthrough.

Also note that I cannot say all the possible dependencies (previous quests) of each artisan quest appearing, though I did list couple more obvious ones.

This list was constructed by me speedrunning through the game a second time. I skipped most cutscenes, and thus missed some details regarding artisans that seem to join you automatically. Fortunately they should not pose any problems in any case.

Yan Caichou - tailor

• side quest first time visiting Yanling
  
• talk to when teleporting back to Yanling after initial Lotuscape story quests

Persimmon - cook

• story related, cannot be missed

Porky Li - carpenter

• story related, cannot be missed

Xu Yan - blacksmith

• story related, cannot be missed

Luna Liang - cook

• side quest in Yangping right after recruiting the story related artisans

Ai Jiamu - herbalist

• side quest in Yangping right after recruiting the story related artisans

Fang Chenning - enchanter

• side quest in Yanling right after recruiting the story related artisans

Weasley - cook

• questboard quest in Yangping after the Jinyun sequence in Demonbones

Wei Conghua - blacksmith

• questboard quest in Yanling after the Jinyun sequence in Demonbones

Xia Chuhong - tailor

• side quest in dreamworld Yangping after the cutscene with Yu Mengzhi
  
• talk to in Yangping after receiving the Heaventhaw Orb in story

Fatty - cook

• side quest in dreamworld Yangping after the cutscene with Yu Mengzhi
  
• talk to in real Yangping after learning about major happenings in Yanling

Luo Chendong - carpenter

• side quest in dreamworld Yangping after the cutscene with Yu Mengzhi
  
• after completing the quest, leave real Yangping for some other place and come back, for the next part to pop up. Might be tied to other factors as well. For me it popped up after completing Xia Chuhong quest in dreamworld and coming back to real Yangping. Talk to him to hire.

Zhou Mu - carpenter

• side quest first time visiting Onyx Kingdom. Requires some additional platforming to reach. Note that his NPC is named "Woodpecker" before you hire him

Giorgio - herbalist

• questboard quest in Yangping after the story branches in Onyx Kingdom and Undersea Palace

Stonewall - blacksmith

• questboard quest in Yangping after receiving the Heaventhaw Orb in story

Lu Huizhu - carpenter

• seemingly story related, had appeared in my artisan list at some point during act 2

Feng - enchanter

• seemingly story related, had appeared in my artisan list at some point during act 2

Lu Miaoran - herbalist

• side quest in Yangping clinic after learning about major happenings in Yanling

Yuan Chaoyin - enchanter

• side quest in Yangping after learning about major happenings in Yanling

Lina Ye - tailor

• questboard quest in Yangping after learning about major happenings in Yanling. Does not appear straight away, so might require clearing the couple side quest artisans or questboard quests that appear at this point

Guzhuo - blacksmith

• side quest in Skyelk after the second attack and the sequence as Jinyun. Note that the marker only appears after the dialogue with Yun'wuyue

Xu Baolan - carpenter

• side quest in Yanling after story takes you to Yangping and you are unable to return to Spirit Realm
  
• after completing the side quest, talk to Xu again until she has no new lines
  
• go to Yangping and talk to the house Wu servant until he has no new lines (until he says "My poor lady...")
  
• go back to Yanling and talk to Xu to hire her

Fusu - cook

• automatically acquired visiting Lotuscape after the first visit to Celestial Wheel / Redwater

Manisha - tailor

• questboard quest in Yangping after returning from the first visit to Celestial Wheel / Redwater

Below is list of all the artisans in the order they appear in your Lotuscape to serve as a quick lookup table for what you have and are missing still. Refer to above list for all important information.

Blacksmiths:

• Yan
  
• Conghua
  
• Stonewall
  
• Guzhuo

Carpenters:

• Porky Li
  
• Huizhu
  
• Chendong
  
• Zhou Mu
  
• Baolan

Cooks:

• Persimmon
  
• Luna
  
• Weasley
  
• Fusu
  
• Fatty

Tailors:

• Caichou
  
• Chuhong
  
• Lina
  
• Manisha

Herbalists:

• Jiamu
  
• Giorgio
  
• Miaoran

Enchanters:

• Chenning
  
• Feng
  
• Chaoyin

[辻斬り]

Edited the Excuse Me -section to more explicitly state that the same strategy is likely helpful with Sneaky Surprise as well

[辻斬り]

I'm assuming you have found the location and enemy for the achievement already, but just in case, relatively late in the story (don't remember exact time or place name anymore, sorry) you visit this mountain location that has golden flying fish enemies, those are the Deepgolds. During the fights they will occasionally go towards the statues (Qiang’liang) and start channeling which would eventually turn the statue into active enemy. You need the kill the Deepgold during this channel, not before it begins, and not after it is complete.

Basically the same thing as Excuse Me, but I found this way easier to do to begin with, and you need to do it only once, so I didn't include it in the list here (other than mentioning it alongside the Excuse Me -section). In any case, you may find the damage strategy I describe for Excuse Me to be helpful - or necessary - with this achievement as well.

Good luck!

[Guji]

How did u complete the Sneaky Surprise? I'm having trouble getting it done.