Tomb Raider Upgrades Guide: Gear Upgrades – Compound Bow



During your journey trough the Island trying to survive is one of the most important things to do. In Tomb Raider you will have plenty of ways to improve your performance, making surviving the harsh environment easier than it looks like. We have already covered pretty much all the skills that Lara can learn by acquiring some experience points by doing a lot of different actions like gathering loot from the ground and from dead animal bodies, fighting enemies and so on. While all skills may not be too useful in the beginning, unlocking and mastering all of them will bring you some important advantages. Together with the skill system, you will also be able to improve your gear and weapons by finding spare parts for the four weapons in your possession: Bow, Hand, Rifle and Shotgun. Some of the extra parts will be available as part of the story while others need to be found and are completely optional. Each new part comes with a salvage cost so think carefully before buying one of the upgrades: at the same time there’s enough salvage to purchase all the upgrades but you will have to find all crates, hunt all animals in each area and loot as much as possible. Just make sure to buy the upgrades you really need in a specific moment. In this guide we will cover all the possible weapons upgrade starting with the Bow and then moving on the other three weapons.

  • Gear Upgrades

Gear Upgrades, unlike the weapons’ upgrades, aren’t found randomly: they’re all part of the story and most of them won’t require you to go the extra mile to obtain them. The only one requiring some Salvage to obtain is the Pry Axe upgrade, which is also a mandatory update since you’ll need it to open the Mountain Temple gate for Whitman.

Compound Bow

The Compound Bow upgrade is found after a specific section on Shipwreck Beach: you’ll get this after completing Reye’s task of tackling one of the blocks from one of the wrecks of the beach. The Compound Bow is an upgraded version of the regular bow which unlocks some of the bow’s upgrades. The Compound Bow also allows you to fire rope arrows into climb-able rock surfaces, allowing you to reach new areas to explore.