Death Stranding roads are some of your best and truest friends. Using the auto paver that unlocks in chapter three, these devices automatically create massive stretches of solid road for you and players in the same online instance to use. That comes with a lot of perks! Although the machine also comes with some steep requirements: tons of Metals, Ceramics, and Chiralium. Even with several players working together in the same world, you need to put a lot of effort into building roads. That’s why we’ve created this auto paver guide to Death Stranding — with tips on how to finish them, what they do, and why you want one. Let’s take a look!
The first thing to know about the auto paver is how it works. Once complete, the device instantly prepares a section of flat road in your game world. The sections are preset and not determined by players. However, they generally create easy-to-parse ground near and between major outposts throughout a given region. More than that, paved roads have thin strips in the center that provide free power to whatever vehicle you’re using. So you can traverse long distances on trikes and trucks — even while boosting — without worrying about battery life.
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A single auto paver won’t make your life a breeze, however. The strips of road they create are actually very small. Completing one will only bring the pavement close to another auto paver. The idea is to daisy chain one auto paver to another, and another, and another. Only then can you create a fully realized road.
But even a tiny stretch of asphalt will help! They can mean the difference between reaching an outpost with battery left to spare and having to abandon your vehicle mid-journey. In Death Stranding, roads also aid your delivery bots (also unlocked in chapter three). These autonomous helpers can complete missions for you in real-time, but usually damage their packages in the process. The more road they have between them and their destination, the less damage the final delivery entails.
Now let’s talk about tips! While these will help you build roads in particular, they can also be useful for a great many things in Death Stranding. So be sure to keep them in mind when building other structures as well!
MULEs Are Your Friends – Death Stranding Road Guide
Chiralium, Metals, and Ceramics are strewn all about the world of Death Stranding. You can spend a lot of time just going around and collecting them all in one place. Or you can let your angry buddies do it for you… MULE camps always have multiple postboxes (marked in orange on your map) full of lost cargo and other goodies. That includes raw materials.
As such, raiding their camps for supplies should always be your first step when collecting crafting materials, since that’s where you’ll find them in the highest individual concentrations. They even usually have convenient trucks for you to drive on out with your loot. Besides the vehicle, however, you should also make use of towers and the Bola Gun. The gun makes combating MULES much easier (just make sure to stomp on them to knock them out after they’re tied up). Whereas the watchtowers will let you mark the orange postboxes on your map — saving you the trouble of searching for them.
Pray for Rain – Death Stranding Road Guide
Chiralium is a fairly rare material, but you can still find it just about anywhere. Just make sure to scan periodically with your Odradek as you walk through the world. If you really want to up your chances, however, you should head for some Timefall. You can even track the rain and its movements partway through chapter three. Just complete the mission where you link up the weather station first!
Chiralium deposits appear more frequently, and seemingly in larger clusters, inside Timefall and around BTs. Obviously that’s a bit of a problem. BTs are dangerous and Timefall will erode not only your packages, but also equipment like your Power Skeleton.
There’s a useful trick around this, though! You can just bump down the difficulty on Chiralium runs. Assuming you don’t care about trophies, the only rewards for higher difficulty are personal satisfaction and better delivery rankings. And if you just care about the rankings, you can simply kick the difficulty back up before returning to main and side missions. You can do this as many times as you like in Death Stranding.
Stay Focused – Death Stranding Road Guide
Death Stranding roads take a lot of time, effort, and materials. Those same materials can be a pain to haul. It’s easy to go out on a run for items, start heading back, and suddenly realize you could just stop partway by dumping minerals into a different auto paver. But don’t get distracted! Unless your load is completely full, and some nearby Metals or Ceramics would otherwise go to waste, make the whole trip. It’s way better to focus on just one road than spread it out between multiple at a time. That’s because building a strip of pavement will make subsequent building much, much easier.
Excess Doesn’t Help Anyone – Death Stranding Road Guide
Honestly, one of the more frustrating aspects of Death Stranding is that raw materials function the same as singular packages. By that I mean you can’t dump a specific number of Metals or Resin into an auto paver and get your road without wasting anything. You have to dump the full amount, whatever that may be, into an incomplete structure.
That’s usually not a problem! Ninety-nine percent of the materials you deliver will just go towards the total. And if you’re not the one to actually finish the road, you won’t have to worry about overage at all. But let’s say you do finish building a road. Odds are that you will deliver more than the exact amount necessary — and lose the overage in the process.
While this is unavoidable, you can at least reduce the total loss. Just go to an outpost in the Chiral Network! There you can “recycle” materials like Metals, adding them to an overall pool of resources. Then select “Claim Materials” from the terminal. This way you can select from a variety of package sizes. If you only need 190 Metals to finish a road, for example, you can grab a box of 200 to complete the job, instead of 400. This will save you a lot of hassle in the long run!
On the bright side, none of this applies to Chiralium. The precious mineral is the only one of its kind that can be added a structure in manually selected amounts. It also doesn’t go into packages like other crafting materials. Feel free to carry as much as you want to any given structure!
Check and Build Towers – Death Stranding Road Guide
Watchtowers are some of the most underappreciated constructs in Death Stranding. They function like a supercharged version of your Odradek scanner — marking lost cargo, materials, enemies, and more with holographic icons in all directions. You just need to look in an item’s general direction to have it placed on your screen. Make sure to look in 360 degrees around the watchtower!
The major benefit here is that it will show you materials and Chiralium in a much wider radius than normal. That way you don’t have to walk in a random direction, spamming the scanner button, and hoping you will find what you need. You can just plot a course directly from the tower. The building also lets you create custom waypoints without opening the map! Just press the Square button on whatever point you want to walk towards.
And that’s that! Thanks for taking the time to read our guide to building roads in Death Stranding. We hope it helps you make the most out of auto pavers and the like. Even if you don’t need a road, personally, it’s a great way to help out other players and passively earn Likes in the process. Have fun!
