Horizon Forbidden West Pouch Upgrading Guide

For ages, players have battled against their inventory space, deciding what to keep and drop. Inventory space is a common game mechanic in RPGs, especially in Witcher, Skyrim, and even Horizon Forbidden West. However, Horizon Forbidden West handles inventory space elegantly by allowing players to expand it through pouches and pouch upgrades. Let’s dive into learning about Horizon Forbidden West’s pouches and their upgrades.

Key Highlights

Upgrading your Pouch in Horizon Forbidden West will allow you to have more Inventory space which will overall improve your gameplay.
There are five major Pouches. Resource Pouch, Food Pouch, Trap Pouch, Ammo Pouch, and Portion Pouch.
Upgrading your Pouches requires two things. Shards and animal harvest.
For the Animal Harvest, you need to hunt animals that can be found in their natural habitat. Or you can simply buy the materials from a Hunter.

Horizon Forbidden All Pouches

Due to it being an open-world game, Horizon Forbidden West makes you explore quite a bit. With its crafting system, weapons, traps, and potions, you constantly need items that you can pick up. But how does Horizon Forbidden West manage its inventory?

The inventory in Horizon Forbidden West is split between so-called pouches. There is a different pouch for each type of ammo or resource. You acquire the base version of each pouch automatically the very first time you pick up the relevant item. Meaning the first time you buy food from a merchant, you will get the food pouch. That’s quite convenient for the player as you now don’t have to buy each pouch separately.

More From Exputer: Horizon Forbidden West Best Weapons

Horizon Forbidden West pouch upgrades — Horizon Forbidden West – Resource Pouch

There are five major pouches in the Horizon Forbidden West, with subcategories for each type.

Resource Pouch – This pouch is available right from the beginning of the game. This is because right from the start the main quest has you gather resources. So that is most likely where the player gets it from.
Food Pouch – This pouch is first unlocked when you buy any food item at any large settlement or town. Each town has a Cook from which you can buy any food item to get the pouch.
Trap Pouch – Yet another pouch that is available right from the start. And this is also because the first mission requires you to craft traps.
Ammo Pouch – This pouch is sort of complicated as there is no exact “ammo pouch”. There are pouches for each ammo type. For example, the “Hunter Bow Quiver” is something you get at the start. But as you progress, you pick up more weapon-related pouches like a bomb satchel, tripwire pouch, precision arrow quiver, and a bunch more. All of the available pouches in this category and others are mentioned in the ingredient requirements section of this article.
Potion Pouch – Just like the Food Pouch, you need to buy or attain an item to unlock the pouch. From a Herbalist/Remedies vendor, you can purchase a potion. Alternatively, you can find them in resource chests. Regardless, once you get your first potion, you will get the pouch.

You Might Find This Interesting: Horizon Forbidden West Survey Drones

Why Upgrade Aloy’s Pouches

Horizon Forbidden West pouches certainly have a variety to them. However, despite the various pouches for each item, you will eventually run out of space. And when you do, you will need to upgrade your pouch. Luckily, upgrading pouches this time around is not as time taking as it was in the prequel, Horizon Zero Dawn.

Most pouches have three levels of upgrade, with the third being the maximum capacity. However, some may have an extra level, level 4, to their upgrades.

Upgrading requires resources progressively from level to level, but initially, you need 25 shards and some sort of animal harvest. Then onwards, the number of shards doubles till the max upgrade (50, 100, 200). If you are looking to upgrade every single pouch, it will cost you up to 5275 shards in total.

Simply head on over to a workbench and go down to “pouch upgrades”. You’ll be able to view all the pouches you’re currently holding and upgrade those for which you have materials. You can either hunt for the materials or buy them, which we will not discuss.

Upgrade Materials For Pouches In Horizon Forbidden West

For upgrading your pouches, you mostly need two things. Shards and animal harvest. This is exactly why you would need to either hunt for materials or buy them from merchants.

The animal loot that is being used in the upgrades consist of three rarities:

Common – Grey colored
Rare – Blue colored
Very rare – Purple colored

The higher rarity items are used for, the higher levels. The common items are something that you would pick on a regular basis. However, Hides are rare, whereas feathers and animal bones are very rare. Because of this, it could take you a couple of tries to get the desired material.

Hunting

Despite the rarities, the animals that you need to hunt are not that hard to find. With modern technology, the developers have been able to make animals more abundant than in the first game.

For the Horizon Forbidden West Pouch upgrades, the animals are mostly found in their natural habitats. For example, in forests, you can find boars, squirrels, foxes, and rabbits. In comparison, pelicans are on beaches near the sea, with vultures being in the desert. We have also discussed these locations in-depth in this article, but there is an easier method.

It can get tedious to constantly look up locations and then make your way over there. Instead, you can use a feature that Horizon Forbidden West provides players. In fact, this is a feature that can help you out with any task which requires the gathering of resources. This feature is the “create job” feature over any craftable item.

Simply go to the pouch you want to upgrade and press the triangle button to create a job. You can then find the jobs in your quests log and activate them anytime. This job feature calculates locations where you will be able to find the materials you’re looking for. It will highlight that area and also create a waypoint on your map towards it.

The location on the map is guaranteed to find you that animal; however, there can be instances where you can find the animals closer to you. For this, you can read the objective log, which mentions the common locations for the animal in question.

Additionally, make sure to utilize your “focus” whilst hunting the animals. As the smaller animals may move fast as you approach them, it can be hard to keep track of them. Highlighting them with the focus can help keep up with ease.

Buying from Hunters

If you want to take the short route and skip all the grinding and hunting, you can just buy some of the materials from hunters.

Mostly in some of the larger settlements, hunters are willing to sell uncommon and rare animal parts. However, the number of materials is limited so you might not be able to get everything for every upgrade.

As with the theme of the game, you pay with shards and sometimes valuables gained from other animals. So technically you cannot skip hunting entirely, you’re mostly trading what you have hunted for what you haven’t.

Other Guides: Horizon Forbidden West Signal Towers

Additionally, if you have a job quest set for the items, an icon will appear next to “resources” in the shop menu.

Aloy’s Pouch Ingredient Requirements

It’s good to know in advance what exactly you need for each level so you can start hoarding all the right items. That is why we have the list of all the ingredients required to upgrade Horizon Forbidden West’s pouches. The items needed are as follows:

Food

Level 1 – 25 Shards, 1 Fox Hide
Level 2 – 50 Shards, 1 Peccary Bone, 1 Prairie Dog Hide
Level 3 – 100 Shards, 2 Duck Feather, 1 Salmon Bone

Resource

Level 1 – 25 Shards, 2 Boar Hides
Level 2 – 50 Shards, 1 Horned Lizard Bone, 1 Goose Feather
Level 3 – 100 Shards, 2 Bass Skin, 1 Iridescent Crab Shell

Potion

Level 1 – 25 Shards, 2 Squirrel Hides
Level 2 – 50 Shards, 1 Prairie Dog Bone, 1 Rabbit Hide
Level 3 – 100 Shards, 2 Carp Skin, 1 Bighorn Sheep Bone

Trap

Level 1 – 25 Shards, 1 Squirrel Bone
Level 2 – 50 Shards, 3 Horned Lizard Skin
Level 3 – 100 Shards, 1 Duck Wishbone, 2 Bighorn Sheep Hide

Ammo pouches/quivers/satchels

As mentioned earlier in the guide, these are the subcategories of the ammo pouch and tend to have four levels instead of three.

Light arrow

Level 1 – 25 Shards, 2 Jay Feathers
Level 2 – 50 Shards, 1 Vulture Wishbone, 1 Prairie Dog Hide
Level 3 – 100 Shards, 3 Salmon Skin, 1 Owl Wishbone
Level 4 – 200 Shards, 1 Moonfish Bone, 2 Bass Skin, 1 Gull Wishbone

Hunter Arrow Quiver

Level 1 – 25 Shards, 2 Raccoon Hide
Level 2 – 50 Shards, 1 Rabbit Hide, 1 Peccary Bone
Level 3 – 100 Shards, 3 Bighorn Sheep Skin, 1 Salmon Bone
Level 4 – 200 Shards, 1 Iridescent Lobster Shell, 2 Peccary Hide, 1 Pelican Wishbone

Precision Arrow Quiver

Level 1 – 50 Shards, 1 Fox Bone
Level 2 – 100 Shards, 1 Vulture Wishbone, 1 Horned Lizard Skin
Level 3 – 200 Shards, 3 Moonfish Skin, 1 Owl Wishbone
Level 4 – 300 Shards, 3 Bass Skin, 1 Moonfish Bone, 1 Iridescent Lobster Shell

An Interesting Read: Horizon Forbidden West Best Bows

Tripwire pouch

Level 1 – 25 Shards, 1 Jay Wishbone
Level 2 – 50 Shards, 3 Rabbit Hide
Level 3 – 100 Shards, 1 Bighorn Sheep Bone, 3 Owl Feathers
Level 4 – 200 Shards, 3 Crab Shell, 1 Iridescent Lobster Shell, 1 Gull Wishbone

Bomb Satchel

Level 1 – 25 Shards, 1 Boar Bone
Level 2 – 50 Shards, 3 Vulture Feather
Level 3 – 100 Shards, 1 Salmon Bone, 3 Owl Feather
Level 4 – 200 Shards, 3 Lobster Shell, 1 Iridescent Crab Shell, 1 Peccary Bone

Spike Holster

Level 1 – 25 Shards, 2 Fox Hides
Level 2 – 50 Shards, 1 Rabbit Bone, 1 Peccary Hide
Level 3 – 100 Shards, 3 Owl Feather, 1 Duck Wishbone
Level 4 – 200 Shards, 1 Bass Bone, 2 Crab Shell, 1 Peccary Bone

Boltclip Satchel

Level 1 – 50 Shards, 2 Peccary Hides
Level 2 – 100 Shards, 1 Pelican Wishbone, 1 Peccary Hide
Level 3 – 200 Shards, 3 Gull Feather, 1 Bighorn Sheep Bone
Level 4 – 300 Shards, 1 Iridescent Lobster Shell, 1 Iridescent Crab Shell

Rope Pouch

Level 1 – 50 Shards, 1 Fox Bone
Level 2 – 100 Shards, 1 Bass Bone, 1 Duck Feather
Level 3 – 300 Shards, 1 Iridescent Crab Shell, 2 Moonfish Skin, 1 Bass Bone
Level 4 – 300 Shards, 1 Iridescent Crab Shell, 2 Moonfish Skin, 1 Bass Bone

Shredder Satchel

Level 1 – 50 Shards, 2 Pelican Feathers
Level 2 – 100 Shards, 1 Iridescent Crab Shell, 1 Duck Feather
Level 3 – 200 Shards, 3 Moonfish Skin, 1 Bighorn Sheep Bone
Level 4 – 300 Shards, 1 Bass Bone, 2 Peccary Hide, 1 Iridescent Lobster Shell

Animal Locations For Pouch Resources

In case you are distrustful of the “create a job” feature and the location it describes, we have a list of animals and their most common locations:

Squirrel

All over The Daunt, south of the bonfire near Redhew Quarry.

Jay

Like squirrels, all over The Daunt, south of the bonfire near Redhew Quarry.

Boar

Again, all over The Daunt, south of the bonfire near Redhew Quarry.

Raccoon

The last one is at the same location, all over The Daunt, south of the bonfire near Redhew Quarry.

Fox

South of the Cinnabar Sands Tallneck. These become more common once you leave the daunt after attending the Embassy.

A Similar Read: Horizon Forbidden West Tallnecks Locations

Carp

Within the waters south of the Plainsong.

Horned Lizard

Southwest of The Base, east of Arrowhand. The road which can be found there is full of them.

Scorpion

Southwest of The Base, east of Arrowhand. The road which can be found there is full of them. They’re smaller to find, so use your focus.

Vulture

Same place as Horned lizard and scorpion. Southwest of The Base, east of Arrowhand. The road which can be found there is full of them.

Peccary

East of Arrowhand, they’re all over the place.

Salmon

West of Salt bite, northwest of Scalding Spear, north of the middle region, below the Sunwing site in a body of water.

Bighorn Sheep

Many in the mountainous regions but also above the salmon pool below the Sunwing site.

Owl

Owl is rear the Salmon pool location, north of it exactly. Be quick as they may fly off as you approach.

Prairie Dog

North of Salt Bite, near the giant lake on the banks of the river.

Goose

North of Scalding Spear has a large lake. The northern and Southern banks of the lake have them.

Rabbit

Same location as the goose. North of Scalding Spear has a large lake. The northern and southern bank of the lake has them. Runaway and come back if they do not spawn.

Duck

North of Scalding Spear has a large lake. Northern and southern banks of the lake have them. However, you can also try the waters southeast of Thornmarsh near the Fireclaw site.

Pelican

Near the Clawstrider campfire, on the sandy west coast.

Lobster

On the sandy west coast, northwest from Thornmash near the Thunderjaw.

Crabs

Anywhere on the sandy west coast.

Gull

Similar to crabs, anywhere on the sandy west coast.

Summary

With that being said, that is everything about Horizon Forbidden West pouches. We have listed everything in our guide from pouch types to upgrading them and the materials needed. We wish you the best of luck and if you have any questions, let us know in the comments below.

Next: Horizon Forbidden West Face Paint

Was this article helpful?

Thanks! Do share your feedback with us. ⚡

How could we improve this post? Please Help us. ✍