As you may have heard, Death Stranding is all about cargo - stacking it up, lugging it around, battering people in the face with it. In this guide, we’ll talk you through how it all works and what happens when you lose it.

Death Stranding has online functionality that sees signs other players create appear in your world. Likewise, structures you build and signs you leave appear in the world of others. You might even come across cargo that’s been dropped by other players.

Death Stranding lost cargo

Cargo becomes ‘lost’ if you drop it and walk away from it. Once you get to a certain distance, that cargo will leave your instance of the world and be transported to someone else’s. From there, they’re free to finish what you started. Likewise, you will come across cargo other players have abandoned, perhaps as they ran, Benny Hill-style, away from some attacking Mules. Each piece of lost cargo is like a small piece of environmental storytelling.

Lost cargo is specifically cargo that you were meant to take to a mission objective as part of a Standard Order. Other materials and gadgets also get transported to other players’ worlds, but this isn’t marked as lost cargo.

When you find lost cargo, you are free to ignore it, you can run it to a nearby post box and hope someone else finishes the delivery for you, or you can take it to its intended recipient to earn likes. To find out where it needs to go, highlight the cargo from your inventory and check out the recipient at the bottom right of the screen. You can deliver the lost cargo by selecting the Deliver Lost Cargo option from a shelter’s terminal, or you can choose to ‘entrust cargo’ to someone else, getting a smaller amount of likes for taking it a portion of the way.

Just like Standard Deliveries, delivering lost cargo to its intended recipient will also raise your connection level with that outpost. This has a number of benefits, different for each facility. For example, if you raise the connection of the cosplayers, you unlock the Otter Hood and a hologram of Conan O’Brien.

Entrusting cargo

If you don’t want to do all the legwork yourself, you can put your cargo purposely at the mercy of other players by entrusting it at a facility. If you open up a facility’s menu and choose the Entrust Cargo option, it will appear in the share locker for other players.

If someone fulfills your delivery, you still raise connection like doing a Standard Delivery yourself, but you and the happy stranger both benefit. However, the delivery will be cancelled if someone doesn’t pick it up after a set amount of time.

Porter Grades

When you complete a mission, you are graded for your efficiency and the amount of connection and likes you gain will increase or decrease based on that. You’re rated on five different points, and these ratings are influenced by how many likes you received through different actions as you completed the mission.

Here’s how it’s broken down:

• Delivery Volume - how much cargo you’ve ferried across the map. The bigger the order, the bigger the reward.
• Delivery Time - how fast you are. It’s pretty forgiving, but clever use of vehicles and finding good routes is key here.
• Bridge Link - this is your connection with other players. Have you used equipment other players left behind? Have you left equipment for other players to use? Did you like their structures? All of this influences your rating here.
• Cargo condition - this is dictated by how damaged your cargo is. Keep it tip top by staying out of the rain, taking careful routes, and staying away from enemies. You can use a Cargo Repair Spray to patch things up before turning deliveries in, so make sure you have some on you.
• Miscellaneous - this is everything else, such as traversing enemy-filled environments and forging new and brave routes.

Keep increasing these facets of your five-pointed star and you’ll upgrade your Porter Rank. Increases here offer up multiple benefits, such as increased stamina, more likes received, and the ability to request more materials from compounds.

For more, here are some general Death Stranding tips.