Understanding Nioh's region screen

After you defeat the boss in the Isle of Demons, you’ll find a new interface — the region screen. Here, you can pick a new mission, sub mission or twilight mission to tackle, or you can visit your starting point.

• Missions are your chunks along the main storyline.
• Sub missions are smaller and shorter (and more difficult) missions in areas you’ve already cleared.
• Twilight missions are difficult, high risk-high reward challenges. These also take place in mission locations you’ve previously cleared, but they’re much, much more difficult.
• Starting point is is your home base. We’ll go into detail on this below.

Mission levels

Missions, sub missions and twilight missions all have a mission level. Presumably, this is the minimum recommended character level you should attain before attempting it. Meeting the minimum level is basically suicide. You’re going to want to be at least a few levels higher than the mission level. And we can say from experience that five to 10 levels higher makes a mission much more manageable, but still challenging.

Starting point

The starting point is your home base for a region. It’s like a shrine, but broader — if a shrine lets you prepare for a battle, your starting point is where you prepare for the war.

Your starting point lets you improve William’s stats, buy new gear or improve what you already have, practice your techniques (technique is jutsu in Japanese — who’s not learning anything from video games now, mom?) or help out your fellow Williams in their fights.

• Shrine is the shrine you know and love with all of the same options. We wrote about it in our Nioh beginner’s guide, where you can read all about your options at a shrine, what they do and how to use them to prepare for your battles.
• Blacksmith is for making and upgrading gear. And haircuts. There’s a lot going on in the blacksmith shop, and we go into detail in our blacksmith section.
• Dojo is the same dojo you visited between the "Tower of London" and the "Isle of Demons" missions. You can practice fighting and refresh your memory on any of the concepts that’ve gotten rusty.
• Torii gate is the other side of the summon companion option at the shrines. Go here to make yourself available for online co-op.
• Hidden teahouse is the hub for Nioh’s clan battles (another method of online play) and another store with different items, weapons and character customization options than the blacksmith. It unlocks after you complete the "Spider Nest Castle" mission.
• Storehouse is your inventory overflow. Certain items are transferred here automatically (like elixirs).