How to upgrade weapons and armor in Avowed

As you explore the Living Lands in Avowed, you should take the time to upgrade both weapons and armor. As you progress through the game, you’ll naturally need more, along with better crafting reagents. Thankfully, this is simple. As long as you’re exploring everywhere, killing everyone, and looting everything, you shouldn’t have too much of an issue upgrading the important parts of your kit.

Thankfully, it works the same way whether you’re playing on a PC or Xbox Series X|S. Avowed is a deep game with plenty of equipment, several rarities, and weapon types to unlock. You will also need to upgrade quite a lot of it to survive. Here’s what you need to know.

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How to upgrade both weapons and armor in Avowed

Once you have access to at least one Party Camp in Avowed, you can start upgrading weapons and armor. However, depending on the Quality of that gear, the reagents you need will get rarer and more expensive. When you start out, you’ll need items like Pelts, Softwood Branches, and Paradisan Ladders.

You can see if it's upgrade time for your favorite gear just by going to the menu (Image via Xbox Game Studios)

However, this will change as the game progresses and you get through the various quality types:

• Common (Green)
• Blue (Fine)
• Exceptional (Purple)
• Superb (Red)
• Legendary (Orange)

The game will occasionally give you notifications when you have equipment that you can upgrade. You can also check them anytime – just open your inventory, and hover over the piece of equipment you’re keen to upgrade. You’ll see Upgrade Requirements in the bottom right, along with how much you have of each or the amount you need to upgrade.

To upgrade weapons and armor in Avowed, visit any Party Camp and walk to the Workbench – it should have a hammer and anvil symbol as you get close to it. A red cloth, boxes, and barrels make up this table. Interact with it to open a new menu with Upgrades and Crafting on it.

Hover over the piece of gear you want to upgrade, and you’ll see where you’re at on the quality scale, what you need, and what the next upgrade is. You will also see what kind of stat improvements you’ll receive to help you judge if it’s currently worth upgrading your weapons or armor in Avowed or not.

It can be expensive to upgrade your gear, but it's worth it to take less damage - and hear your allies nag you less (Image via Xbox Game Studios)

You can find crafting reagents almost anywhere – in shops, treasure chests, and corpses as well. Another great way to get crafting reagents is to break down gear you aren’t going to use. There are tons of weapons and armor lying around unused in Avowed. Also, there appears to be no penalty for theft, so take your pick.

However, select Crafting if you have a large supply of reagents you don’t need. This system allows you to either take old supplies and craft higher tier reagents, or take the more powerful reagents and break them down to make more of a weaker one. If you break down a higher reagent, you typically get 3 for 1.

When making higher-tier reagents, you will need three or four lower tier items to get one of as better item. It can be incredibly useful if you’re short a few pieces of crafting materials. But how do you know when you need to upgrade armor? If you take a lot of damage during battle, your allies will constantly tell you that your armor is too weak.

You can even upgrade/break down materials, if you need more (Image via Xbox Game Studios)

We recommend constantly upgrading gear, but also staying on the lookout for better replacements. However, don't break the bank for this. You never know when you’ll find a better Unique with must-have enchantments on it.

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Avowed launches on February 18, 2025 on PC and Xbox Series X|S. If you purchase the Premium edition, you also get early access for February 13, 2025.