In Horizon Forbidden West, starting New Game Plus carries over your character level (up to 50), all skills and skill points, your entire inventory of weapons, armor, outfits, and mods, all crafting resources and ammo, Metal Shards, machine parts, and collectibles, plus your mount override and most progression unlocks. It does not carry over story progress, main quest completion, or the temporary abilities tied to specific story beats.
New Game Plus in Horizon Forbidden West is not a simple restart with your gear intact. It is a layered system built on how the game stores character data, how it separates permanent unlocks from quest-bound flags, and how it re-initializes the world state when a new save is created. Understanding that architecture explains why some things follow you across saves and others vanish, and it lets you plan a second playthrough that does not waste hours re-earning what you already own.
How the carry-over mechanism actually works
Guerrilla Games structures Forbidden West saves in two layers. One layer holds persistent player-state data: level, experience, skill tree allocation, inventory contents, currency, and unlocked equipment. The other layer holds world-state and quest flags: which main missions are complete, which settlements are unlocked, which story abilities are active, and where the narrative stands. New Game Plus copies the first layer forward and resets the second.
That split is the whole answer in miniature. Anything stored as character state survives; anything stored as world progress resets. The game does not evaluate each item individually. It reads your completed save, extracts the persistent character block, and writes it into a fresh campaign initialized at the opening mission.
The practical consequence is that your gear and levels transfer at full value, not scaled down. A level 50 Aloy with fully upgraded legendary weapons begins New Game Plus at level 50 with those weapons intact. Enemy scaling adjusts to the higher difficulty you select, but your own power is not stripped.
One counterintuitive detail: skill points you have not spent also carry over. If you finished the base game with 12 unspent points, those 12 points arrive with you, on top of any new points you earn. Players who rush the ending often leave points unspent and then wonder why their New Game Plus build feels overfunded early.
What the numbers look like across a full playthrough
The base game caps Aloy at level 50. New Game Plus raises the cap to 60, and The Burning Shores expansion pushes it to 70 for players who own it. That means a completed first run typically arrives with 50 levels already banked and 10 to 20 more available depending on expansion ownership.
Skill points are the resource most affected by carry-over planning. A thorough base-game completion yields roughly 80 to 100 skill points across the six skill trees, enough to max multiple trees but not all of them. Because unspent points carry over, finishing side content before starting New Game Plus is strictly better than skipping it.
Inventory capacity matters more than raw counts. Your carried resources occupy the same stash and pouch limits as before, so arriving with a full stash means no room for early-game loot. Metal Shards, the universal currency, carry over in full, and a completed run often leaves players with tens of thousands of Shards that trivialize early vendor purchases.
Weapon and outfit upgrades carry with them, including installed coils and weaves. A fully coiled legendary weapon arrives fully coiled. This is the single largest power transfer in the system, because upgrade materials for top-tier gear are the scarcest resource in a first playthrough.
Edge cases that trip up returning players
Story-gated abilities are the most common surprise. Certain traversal and combat tools unlock through main quest progression rather than through the skill tree. Those tools reset with the world state, so you re-earn them by replaying the relevant missions. The skill tree nodes you purchased remain, but the quest that grants the tool itself does not stay completed.
Collectibles split into two categories. Datapoints, survey drones, and similar lore collectibles usually carry their discovery flags, but the associated world objects respawn or re-lock depending on type. Treasure chests and supply caches reset, which is why New Game Plus is the standard way to farm upgrade materials for gear you did not finish upgrading.
Mount overrides and the Sunwing are quest-bound. You keep the override skill if you bought it, but you must reach the story point that makes flying mounts available before you can use them again. Players who start New Game Plus expecting immediate flight are routinely disappointed in the first several hours.
Difficulty trophies and difficulty-locked content do not transfer as achievements. If you want the harder difficulty trophy, you must complete the campaign on that difficulty in New Game Plus, because the trophy tracks the current run, not your carried state.
Red-flag warnings worth internalizing before you commit:
Do not start New Game Plus with unspent upgrade materials you still need for a weapon you plan to use; finish those upgrades first. Do not assume your stash space is free; clear low-value resources before transferring. Do not expect story abilities or the flying mount at the start. Do not overwrite your completed save before confirming the New Game Plus file was created correctly. Do not begin on Ultra Hard expecting to change difficulty later; the setting is locked for that run.
Misconceptions about what transfers
The most persistent myth is that New Game Plus scales your gear down to match the early game. It does not. Your weapons keep their stats and coils. What changes is enemy health and damage, which scale with the difficulty you choose, not with your inventory.
A second misconception holds that completing the base game is required to access New Game Plus. It is not strictly required to have finished every side quest, but you must have completed the main story to unlock the New Game Plus option at all. Partial completions produce partial carry-over of collectible flags.
A third myth claims that skill tree progress resets so you can respec. Your allocation carries over exactly as you left it. If you want a different build, you respec using the in-game reset option after starting, which refunds points rather than erasing them.
Players also assume that The Burning Shores content carries separately. The expansion is accessed from a specific point in the story and its progression is world-state data, so expansion quest flags reset like everything else. Your expansion gear and levels carry, but you replay the expansion's missions.
Carry-over comparison across Horizon titles and modes
| Element | Zero Dawn NG+ | Forbidden West NG+ | Fresh save |
|---|---|---|---|
| Character level | Carries | Carries | Resets |
| Weapons and armor | Carries | Carries | Resets |
| Installed mods/coils | Carries | Carries | Resets |
| Skill points and tree | Carries | Carries | Resets |
| Currency and resources | Carries | Carries | Resets |
| Story abilities and tools | Resets | Resets | Resets |
| Main quest progress | Resets | Resets | Resets |
| Collectible discovery flags | Mostly carries | Mostly carries | Resets |
The pattern is consistent across both games because the underlying save architecture is the same. Forbidden West adds more systems on top, but the persistent-versus-world-state split is inherited directly from Zero Dawn. That is why players who learned the rules in the first game find the second predictable.
The time course of a New Game Plus run
Understanding when carry-over actually takes effect helps you plan the opening hours. The transfer happens at the moment of save creation, not gradually.
| Phase | Timing | What is active |
|---|---|---|
| Save creation | Instant | Level, inventory, skills, currency transferred |
| Opening tutorial | First 1-2 hours | Carried gear available; story tools locked |
| First major settlement | Early game | Vendors accept carried Shards; stash available |
| Traversal tool unlock | A few hours in | Quest-granted tools re-earned |
| Flying mount unlock | Mid-game | Requires story progress despite carried override skill |
| Expansion access | Late game | Burning Shores reopens after its trigger point |
| Level cap reached | Variable | 60 base, 70 with expansion |
| Ultra Hard completion | End of run | Trophy granted for that run only |
The practical reading: the first two hours are where carried power feels most dramatic, because your level 50 gear trivializes early enemies. The mid-game is where the reset stings, because quest-bound abilities you relied on are temporarily gone. Most players report the balance evening out once story tools are re-earned.
Practical actions before you start New Game Plus
Treat the transition as a checklist rather than a button press. The order of operations determines how much value you extract from the transfer.
First, finish upgrading the weapons and outfits you intend to use. Upgrade materials are the bottleneck, and carrying a half-upgraded weapon wastes the transfer's biggest advantage. Second, complete side content that awards skill points, since unspent points carry and compound.
Third, audit your stash and pouch. Sell or break down low-tier resources that will clog your inventory, and keep high-value machine parts that feed top-tier upgrades. Fourth, spend time on collectibles whose discovery flags carry, because re-collecting is the least rewarding part of a replay.
Fifth, decide your difficulty before creating the save. Ultra Hard locks for the run, so pick it only if you want that specific trophy and are comfortable with the carried gear being your safety net. Sixth, keep your original completed save in a separate slot so you can return to it if the New Game Plus file is corrupted or you change your mind.
For players who own The Burning Shores, consider completing its content before transferring. Its rewards and levels join the persistent layer, raising your effective starting power for the replay. Players who skip it arrive at the same level but without those expansion benefits.
Limits of what carries and what the system cannot do
Carry-over does not make New Game Plus a victory lap. Enemy scaling on higher difficulties is aggressive enough that carried gear remains necessary rather than overpowered. Players expecting to one-shot everything on Ultra Hard are corrected quickly, because damage scaling favors the enemies at that tier.
The system also cannot transfer anything the game treats as narrative state, and that category is broader than most players expect. It includes not just quest completion but also faction standings, settlement unlocks, and story-triggered world changes. A New Game Plus run is a genuine replay of the campaign, not a sandbox with your old save's world.
There is also no way to selectively carry items. The transfer is all-or-nothing at the character-state level, so you cannot choose to leave a weapon behind to preserve difficulty, and you cannot choose to bring only currency. If you want a constrained run, you must self-impose limits by not using carried gear.
Finally, the level cap means carried experience has diminishing returns. A level 50 arrival gains little from early-game experience, so the incentive to do side content early is weaker than in a fresh save. The content that matters most in New Game Plus is the content that grants skill points and upgrade materials, not raw experience.
The overarching lesson is that New Game Plus rewards preparation more than it rewards speed. The players who get the most from the system are the ones who treat their completed save as an asset to be optimized, not a file to be abandoned. Carry-over is generous but structured, and understanding its boundaries is what separates a smooth second run from a frustrating one.