How to increase your Nightingale Gear Score

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
Guides Writer

Will Sawyer is a guides writer at GamesRadar+ who works with the rest of the guides team to give readers great information and advice on the best items, how to complete a particular challenge, or where to go in some of the biggest video games. Will joined the GameRadar+ team in August 2021 and has written about service titles, including Fortnite, Destiny 2, and Warzone, as well as some of the biggest releases like Halo Infinite, Elden Ring, and God of War Ragnarok.