This would be all well and good, except the bar fills very slowly, requiring five-to-six plants to fill up most of the time, and the problem is that there are a bunch of other kinds of plants out there, elemental-based plants that are used to craft other potions. There’s no life regeneration, so you have to seek out specific plants in the wild to fill a “medicine” bar in order to heal you on the fly without using up consumable health potions. Speaking of obnoxious, we quickly arrive at the worst aspect of the game: the health system. I don’t know why this mechanic was even in the game in the first place, as it’s just more obnoxious than anything, but at least there’s a solution.

It’s relatively easy to trade for as it just costs a fox skin and some meat, and you should seek it out as soon as possible so you no longer have to stress about fast travel for the rest of the game. The game never tells you this item exists, I didn’t even see it in a tooltip, and you have to dig deep into the store to find it. I don’t know if this item appears from the very start, but talk to any normal vendor and it should be at the bottom of the materials list.

This is uncomfortable, as you have to make choices about when it’s “worth it” or not to use a fast travel pack or whether you should just walk, but lo and behold, 12 hours into the game, I discovered that there’s an item that lets you fast travel infinitely like any normal open-world game. One thing you’ll notice early on about Horizon Zero Dawn is that weirdly, the game’s fast travel system is consumable based, like we’re back in the days of Diablo Town Portal scrolls.

Horizon modding tool tutoril