If you’ve spent hours wandering the snow-covered forests and abandoned villages of Hokkaido in Ghost of Yotei, you’ve almost certainly stumbled on a locked wooden puzzle box tucked under a shrine or hidden in a bandit camp. I spent three full playthroughs tracking down every one of these chests, and I put together this walkthrough for Ghost of Yotei all puzzle boxes to save you the hours of guesswork I went through. Most boxes give you rare upgrade materials, exclusive cosmetic skins, or even side quest triggers that you won’t find anywhere else in the game. You don’t need any special tools to solve them, but you will need to pay attention to small environmental clues scattered around each box’s location.
Ghost of Yotei All Puzzle Boxes: Core Mechanics to Know Before You Start
You don’t need to beat any part of the main story to start solving these boxes, but there are a few basic rules that apply to every single one you’ll find. All puzzle boxes follow one of three core puzzle types, with no random generation, so once you learn how to solve each type, you can crack any box you find in 30 seconds or less. The three types are number sequence locks, symbol match locks, and pressure plate activation locks.
You can’t brute force any puzzle box — if you enter the wrong solution three times, it locks for 10 in-game minutes, so it’s always worth taking 10 seconds to look for clues first. If you’re playing on hard mode, the clue locations are slightly further from the box, but the solution itself stays exactly the same across all difficulty settings. You also don’t have to solve a box the second you find it; you can come back to any unopened box at any point in your playthrough.
All Puzzle Box Locations by Region
There are 30 total puzzle boxes spread across four main regions of the game map: 7 in the Northern Sleet Plains, 9 in the Central Timberlands, 8 in the Southern Coastal Villages, and 6 in the Volcanic Foothills. Most of the Ghost of Yotei all puzzle boxes are in plain sight, but a handful are hidden behind environmental obstacles or quest locks. The easiest way to track unopened boxes is to toggle the “collectible” filter on your map — any unopened puzzle box will show up as a small wooden chest icon once you’re within 200 meters of it.
4 of the 30 boxes are only accessible during or after specific side quests, so if you’re missing a few even after exploring every region, make sure you’ve completed the “Shrine Keeper’s Request” and “Stolen Heirlooms” quest lines first. The three most commonly missed boxes are:
- Under the frozen bridge in the Northern Sleet Plains, only accessible when you complete the “Frozen River” side quest to melt the ice blocking the path under the bridge
- Inside the locked attic of the abandoned sake brewery in Central Timberlands, you’ll find the attic key on the body of a dead bandit in the cellar below the building
- Tucked behind the giant stone torii gate at the top of Mount Yotei’s lower hiking trail, hidden behind a pile of loose snow that you have to brush away with your sword
If you’re playing co-op, any puzzle box solved by one player will count as solved for everyone in the party, so you can split up to cover more ground if you’re working through the collection together. I did this with a friend on my third playthrough, and we found all 30 in less than two hours total.
Step-by-Step Solutions for Every Puzzle Box Type
As I mentioned earlier, every puzzle box falls into one of three types, and each has a consistent clue system you can learn to spot instantly. For number sequence locks, you’ll see small stone markers with numbers carved into them within 50 feet of the box, each marked with a different animal carving. Always read the numbers in the order of the smallest carved animal to the largest — most players get this wrong by reading left to right, which gives the wrong code. For example, if you see a rabbit, fox, bear marker with numbers 2, 7, 4, the code is 2,7,4 because rabbit is smallest, fox medium, bear largest.
Symbol match locks have four symbols on the lock, and you’ll find matching symbols painted on trees, shrine walls, or rocks around the clearing where the box sits. The order of the symbols is always the same as the direction they’re placed relative to the box: north, east, south, west. So if you see a cherry blossom symbol on the north side of the clearing, that’s the first symbol you enter, followed by whatever is to the east, then south, then west. If you’re not sure which direction is north, you can quickly check your compass at the top of the screen.
Pressure plate activation locks have four pressure plates spaced around the box, and you have to step on them in the right order to unlock it. The clue here is almost always the number of lit candles next to each plate — step on them from the least number of candles to the most. If you’re playing with a companion NPC, you can ask them to point out the clue for you if you’re stuck, a little-known feature that saved me a lot of time on my first playthrough.
Rewards You Can Expect From Solving All Puzzle Boxes
Even if you’re not a completionist, solving these boxes is worth your time for the rewards alone. Individual boxes usually give you gold, healing items, or low-tier upgrade materials, but a handful give exclusive items you can’t get anywhere else. Rare weapon upgrade ore called Yotei Steel only drops from puzzle boxes, and you need 45 pieces of it to upgrade your katana and bow to the highest tier. If you skip these boxes, you’ll have to grind for 10+ hours of lower-tier materials to get the same weapon stats.
If you solve all 30 boxes, you’ll unlock the “Puzzle Master” title, a unique snowflake-carved skin for your katana, 5000 bonus experience points, and a hidden side quest called “The Shrine Keeper’s Gift.” Completing that side quest gives you a unique bow that deals 25% extra damage to supernatural enemies, which makes the final boss fight significantly easier. I used this bow on my hard mode playthrough, and it cut the final boss fight time almost in half.
You don’t have to hunt all the boxes down in one go either. I usually stop to solve any I spot while I’m working through main story quests, so it doesn’t feel like a chore. Even if you only solve half of them, you’ll still get enough Yotei Steel to upgrade one of your weapons to max tier, which is a huge help early in the game.
At the end of the day, tracking down and solving the Ghost of Yotei all puzzle boxes is one of the most rewarding side activities in the game, even if you don’t care about 100% completion. The rewards make the main story significantly less grindy, and the puzzles themselves are a fun break from fighting bandits and supernatural entities. If you get stuck on any specific box, take a step back and look for small details you might have missed, most clues are a lot more obvious than you think. Don’t forget to check your map filter regularly for unopened boxes, and you’ll have all the rewards in no time.