The fact that The Last Faith is a Soulslike means a lot of things, but in the context of gameplay mechanics, it means specifically that it slavishly follows certain FromSoftware tropes we’re all familiar with. Weapon upgrading is, for sure, one of these tropes.
In much the same way as you need to lug around fat stacks of Sou… er, sorry, Nycrux to level up your character in The Last Faith, so too do you need both Nycrux and a specific rare resource to level up your weaponry. On top of that, you won’t be able to upgrade your weapons right off the bat. Instead, you’ll need to do some travelling and exploring before you’ve come across Mariano, the resident trader and weaponsmith NPC.
Where is Mariano in The Last Faith?
Almost all of The Last Faith‘s important NPCs will stick around Oxnevylle’s Manor after you’ve found them, and Mariano is a major example of this being the case. At the very start of the game, your version of Oxnevylle’s Manor is going to be fairly empty, outside of a few NPCs, and you’ll need to explore the overworld to fill it out with new people and functionality. Mariano is the first major tradesmith you’ll find this way, and his features will be instrumental to your progress.
The good news is that Mariano isn’t tucked away into an obscure part of The Last Faith‘s impressively complicated levels. All you need to do is to keep progressing rightwards from Oxneyville until you’ve reached the Federal Inquisition building. Mariano is going to be hanging out in one of its many rooms, so your job will be to reach the Inquisition Foyer, specifically, and talk with him.
After that’s all done and sorted out, you’ll be able to take a teleporter back to Oxneyville’s Manor and head to the leftmost wing of the building. There, Mariano’s got his own room, and he’s going to sell interesting new gear, weapon upgrading resources, and – of course – allow you to upgrade your weapons in the first place.
What do you need to upgrade weapons in The Last Faith?
You’ll need to be fairly tactical about which gear you upgrade in this game, keep in mind. Much as is the case with The Last Faith‘s handling of character stats, so too are you able to spend your hard-earned Nycrux and Moonsilver on gear that just isn’t a good fit for your specific build.
Instead of doing that, we recommend first building up a small arsenal of different weapons, just to get a sense of what’s what. Then, identify the weapons that you both enjoy using and that your stats support to begin with (Strength vs Dexterity, depending on your dump stat). After you’ve got all of that figured out, build up a stack of Nycrux and Moonsilver Stones to invest in your favoured gear.
Note that each upgrade costs a single Moonsilver Stone, and the Nycrux cost goes up with each subsequent improvement, too.
Certain weapons won’t even use Moonsilver Stone for their own specialized upgrades. These (embedded) armaments will instead call for Demishade Ore, which is rarer and more difficult to get than Moonsilver. Aside from that, upgrading these weapons is much the same as it is with regular gear.
