How to increase your Nightingale Gear Score

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Increasing your gear score is one of the first major challenges you'll face in Nightingale

Nightingale gear score character inventory
(Image credit: Inflexion Games)

Nightingale gear score effectively acts as your level, representing your strength in combat and gating off certain story objectives, sites of power or bastille challenges. However, bolstering your gear score is a slow process, and at first it's not wholly clear exactly how that's done in the first place. You'll need to hit Gear Score level 20 at first, and later 40 and 50, so it's a system worth getting to grips with - so I'll explain how you increase your gear score in Nightingale below.

Increasing your Gear Score in Nightingale

Nightingale simple headwrap item gear score

(Image credit: Inflexion Games)

Like lots of other games with gear scoring, Nightingale measures the average score of all your currently equipped and held gear to give you an overall Character Equipment Rating. Here are all the gear slots you can fill and boost to increase your overall score:

  • Hat
  • Gear
  • Back
  • Top
  • Bottom
  • Gloves
  • Shoes
  • Item held in main hand, for example, a mining pick

You'll start the game with Shoddy clothes, and then the tutorial will get you to craft some Makeshift tools using scavenged raw materials. Once you're past the tutorial, you'll unlock the Basic Workbench and Tanning Station, letting you craft some Simple tools with higher scores. A bit later, you'll be able to craft your own clothes by paying some Essence to the Essence Trader outside the Antiquarian site to get a recipe for the Sewing Station. Of course, to craft any of these items, you'll need resources like wood, stone, leather, straps, and more.

As you progress through the game, unlocking new realms and crafting recipes, you'll eventually get to a point where you can upgrade and even enchant gear to increase its power and score.

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Will Sawyer
Will Sawyer
Guides Editor, GamesRadar+

Will Sawyer is a Guides Editor at GamesRadar+ with over five years of experience in writing online guides, news, and features, and has a BA (Hons) in Journalism. Starting as a freelancer, Will contributed to startmenu and Game Rant before joining the GamesRadar+ team in August 2021. Since then, he has written hundreds of guides about a huge range of games, with shooters and action games being his areas of expertise. Outside of writing about games, Will hops between multiplayer shooters with friends, such as Darktide and Helldivers 2, and delves into whatever has been on his backlog for far too long. He also tries to get through his never-ending Warhammer pile of shame of grey Tyranids, Aeldari, and Chaos Space Marines.