Tomb Raider Salvage Guide: Farm Materials and Upgrade Every Weapon

Salvage represents scrap material Lara recovers and repurposes: metal, cord, machine parts and fittings. At any base camp it converts directly into weapon upgrades, each weapon having its own ladder of improvements to damage, handling, reload speed, capacity and special functions like silencers and grenade launchers.

It is not spent on ammunition or skills, which use their own systems. That separation matters for planning: salvage decisions are purely about which weapons grow stronger, and the bow's early claim on your salvage is the subject of half this guide.

Salvage buys, per weapon:

• Damage increases
• Faster handling and reloads
• Bigger magazines and quivers
• Special functions like silencers

Crates and salvage nets are the backbone supply, scattered through every region and often hanging in nets that must be burned or cut down. Fallen enemies drop small amounts, animals provide some through hunting, and larger caches hide in tombs, bunkers and the corners of story areas that impatient players sprint through.

Salvage rewards exploration in direct proportion. A region swept thoroughly, every building entered, every net burned, yields several upgrades' worth of material, while the critical path alone yields barely one. The map's region percentages are effectively a salvage progress report.

Reliable salvage sources:

• Crates and burned salvage nets
• Weapon and salvage caches in tombs
• Fallen enemies after firefights
• Hunting deer and boar between missions

The Survivor branch contains the economy skills, and they compound. Upgrades that make Lara extract more salvage from crates and enemies, and more experience from everything, pay for themselves many times over across a full campaign. They are unglamorous and they are the best early skill points in Tomb Raider.

Take them before combat luxuries. A player who buys the salvage multipliers in the first third of Tomb Raider will afford every weapon upgrade that matters, while a player who rushes flashy finishers ends the story choosing which single weapon to finish upgrading.

Buy early, in this spirit:

• More salvage from every crate
• More experience from every action
• Better returns from hunting
• Then return to combat skills

Bow first, because it is the stealth and hunting tool that funds everything else: damage, then draw speed, then stability. Pistol second, as the reliable sidearm for when stealth fails, favouring damage and magazine size. Rifle and shotgun follow as their ammunition becomes plentiful in the later acts.

Within each weapon, damage is almost always the first purchase. Capacity and reload upgrades feel invisible until the fight that needs them, while damage changes every single shot, including the one-shot headshot thresholds stealth depends on.

Separately from salvage, each weapon has hidden parts scattered across the island, usually in tombs, strongboxes and guarded caches. Collecting a weapon's parts lets it evolve into its next form at a camp: stronger base statistics across the board, new appearance, and access to the next tier of salvage upgrades.

Parts are the real reason completionists outgun everyone else. Our exploration and tombs guide explains how the optional areas hiding parts are signposted, because a missed part can delay a weapon's best form by hours.

Farming rarely needs dedicated loops, because story progress constantly opens new regions rich in crates. When you do need a top-up, revisit the shantytown and mountain village through fast travel: dense buildings, respawning crates and enemies, and short distances between camps make them the island's best salvage ground.

Hunting fills gaps between objectives. Deer and boar respawn across the forest regions, and a ten-minute hunt with upgraded Survivor skills returns meaningful salvage and experience without a single firefight.

Best farming ground traits:

• Dense buildings with many crates
• Respawning enemy patrols
• Camps at both ends of the loop
• Deer and boar in the fields between

By the final acts, salvage income rises sharply: bigger caches, richer enemy drops and regions dense with crates. The constraint flips from income to opportunity, because upgrades must be bought at camps and the story's closing sequences limit your access to them.

Spend before the endgame run begins. A player entering the final areas with unspent salvage and a half-upgraded rifle has simply donated difficulty to themselves, since the last fights assume near-complete arsenals on higher settings.

Late-game salvage habits:

• Spend before the final story push
• Finish the bow completely
• Top up the rifle for the finale
• Convert every haul at the last camps

Hoarding is the classic error. Salvage unspent is power unused, and there is no late-game shop where it buys anything better than the upgrades available now. Buy damage the moment you can afford it, every time.

The second error is even spending: a little on every weapon leaves all of them mediocre. The game's fights reward one or two excellent weapons far more than four average ones, so concentrate spending the way the priority order suggests.

On Easy, upgrades are a comfort. On Hard, they are the difference between a headshot that kills and one that merely angers. Enemy durability on higher settings is tuned assuming upgraded weapons, which makes the Survivor economy skills effectively mandatory for a smooth Hard run.

This is also why the bow-first order matters more as difficulty rises: stealth kills that stay silent keep Hard fights small enough for upgraded weapons to finish.

First camp with meaningful salvage: bow damage. Next: Survivor economy skills with your skill points while salvage continues into the bow. Mid-game: pistol damage and capacity, bow tier parts from every tomb you pass. Late game: rifle damage, shotgun for the close fights, and every remaining bow upgrade before the finale.

Followed loosely, that plan ends the campaign with a fully upgraded bow, a strong pistol and serviceable heavy weapons, which is precisely the arsenal the final acts were balanced around.

The plan in one list:

• Bow damage first
• Survivor economy skills alongside
• Pistol damage and capacity mid-game
• Rifle and shotgun for the late acts