Death Stranding guide: Fighting BTs to farm chiral crystals

In Death Stranding, BTs are horrifying ghost creatures that you need avoid at first. But chiral crystals appear in areas with high BT activity, so if you want more chiral crystals, you have to deal with BTs.

BTs are always dangerous, but you’ll eventually have tools that make your confrontations much easier. And after you kill them, you can harvest chiral crystals. So let’s talk about chiral crystal farming, fighting BTs, and when it’s worth the danger.

Types of BTs and when to fight them

There are two kinds of BTs in Death Stranding.

First, there are the floating ghosts you encounter while walking around the world. These ghost-like BTs grab and pull you to boss fights with big, animal-like BT monsters. Kill a ghost BT, and you’ll get a small number of chiral crystals.

Early in the game, if you’re looking for chiral crystals, find an area where it’s raining or it previously rained — like the land between the first city and the first waystation — and hit R1 to scan the area. Whenever you find BTs or wherever you once found BTs, you’ll find chiral crystals.

The monster Giant BTs are the ones we’ll focus on below. They’re the best way to maximize your chiral crystals later in the game.

Fight BTs when you need chiral crystals

Lots of things that you fabricate at a facility’s terminal require some chiral crystals. The autopavers that create roads require a lot as well.

Kojima Productions/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Polygon

When you defeat one of the large BTs, it will die (re-die?), crystalize, and float into the air. BB will like it, and it will also leave behind a cluster of chiral crystals that you won’t even have to move to collect.

How to fight BTs

The first weapons you’ll get for fighting BTs are hematic grenades. You can fabricate these at any delivery terminal on the chiral network. Hematic grenades are your weakest weapon against BTs.

A little further into the game, you'll get the anti-BT handgun. This gun fires, basically, blood bullets. The handgun works slightly better than the hematic grenades against BTs.

You’ll also pick up regular guns (eventually). These aren’t effective at all against BTs on their own.

Kojima Productions/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Polygon

The most effective way to fight Giant BTs is to combine hematic grenades and guns firing standard ammo. Hit a BT with a grenade to cover it with blood, and then fire your gun into the blood-covered part of the BT. This will deal more damage than either weapon can do on it’s own.