Dead Island Riptide weapons guide and blueprint locations

DEAD ISLAND RIPTIDE WEAPON CRAFTING GUIDE

One of the main staples of the Dead Island games is the ability to create and upgrade fantastical weapons by using the blueprints you find around the islands. With each blueprint you find, you will be told what the ingredients are needed to create the mod and which weapon it can be attached to.

For the more simple mods, you can do things like add spikes and nails to baseball bats or batons for a little bit of extra damage, but can get much more crafty and intricate by adding such things as electricity to knives, fire to shovels or even poison to guns. As you find different types of mods, you’ll notice that they come in different colors of text. The colors that you’ll be able to find are White, Green, Blue, Purple, and Orange; the latter being the more rare and usually the more powerful mods.

The strength of mod also depends on the type of weapon you chose to use with it. While a regular weapon may make a weapon that does okay damage, finding an “Awe-Inspiring” version of the same type and then fully upgrading it before modding it can make it a brutal instrument of destructive. There are a ton of blueprints to find throughout the island, but most people will want the best weapon type for their play style so we’ll list some of the best different types of weapons that you can make with the some of the best mods we found, and those that we used the most.

BLADED WEAPONS

DEATHSTALKER MOD

This is a weapon mod that can help you get out of sticky situations. It adds toxicity to your weapon of choice, and there are a lot of choices to use it with, and when an enemy gets hit, there’s a chance that they will stop in their tracks and start puking up their guts, allowing you to go to town on them. Most of the ingredients to make the weapon are simple enough to find, except for one. The Stingray Tail. This item is incredibly rare to find, so when you do, make sure that you use it on the best weapon you have available to you for your mod. Look for this mod to the north side just before you cross the bridge to the Military Base. There will be a ladder that takes you up to meet Damien and the mod will be behind him.

HOT ROD

To make this awesome weapon, you’ll need to use the best machete that you can find and then a couple other easy to find items. The rarest item needed for this mod is a LP4000 Battery which you’ll be able to find in your travels eventually. The Hit Rod mod makes your blade red hit and does some great additional fire damage while also setting enemies on fire from time to time. Like all the mods, it depends on what weapon you are choosing to mod, and you aren’t given many options as it can only be used on a machete, but thankfully the ingredients aren’t all that rare so you can keep creating a new Hot Rod machete when you find better ones. When you complete the quests for Miya in the Flooded Jungle, you will receive this mod from her.

SAW DISC AXE

For this weapon, basically think of it as a shovel with a circular saw blade strapped to the end of it. It may seem simple enough, but shovels are pretty good weapons and the addition of a cutter on the end of it, makes it very deadly. Like the Hot Rod mod, the requirements to make it aren’t all that rare, so being to create another, more powerful one, when you find a higher rank of shovel is easily possible. Once you clear the starting area of Henderson of the zombies, the mod will be in the shop that everyone gathers in.

BLUNT WEAPONS

BLOODY MARY MOD

With this wrapped around your pole, you won’t be chopping off any limbs, but holy smokes the blood will be spraying. This mod makes each enemy you smack with it turn into a fountain of blood and does some pretty hefty damage at the same time. You can find this mod on some crates, just to the east of the Infected Apartments in Henderson.

OLD SMOKEY MOD

This is a mod that will turn an axe or similar swinging device into a lightning storm of epic proportions. With this mod, you can also turn a personal favorite; a golf club, into a weapon that deals massive electrical damage with each swing and thankfully, none of the parts needed for this beast are all that hard to come across. You can find this mod in the large basement room, at the back wall of Joel Chubalba’s Motel Dead Zone on the southern west side of Henderson.

SLASH MOD

Like the Bloody Mary mod, this also adds cutting and bleeding damage to blunt weapons. This mod however can be used on a ton of different types of blunt weapons so it isn’t quite as limited as the Bloody Mary or Medieval mods. The Slash mod can be added to everything from sticks, to baseballs bats, and even bronze knuckles to give each weapon type that little extra oomph…and blood. This mod can be found in Metzger Sloat’s Dead Zone which is located on the east side of Henderson, directly south of the cinema.

GUNS

SHOCK GUN

Adding different abilities to guns may seem a little weird, but hey, it works. This mod lets you add electricity to your pistols and shocks the enemies that you shoot. The nice thing about this mod is that it can also be used on nail guns and harpoon guns, something that a lot of other gun mods are not able to do. When you enter the Military base in Henderson, go to the most western side and there will be a couple of white tents. Look to the right side of the right most tent to find the blueprints there.

DETOX SHOTGUN

One of the best types of mods to add to bladed weapons is the toxic variety of mod. This goes especially true for the guns you can find as well. With the shotgun detox mod, you can add poison to your bullets and give additional inflictions to your already incredibly high damage. While it may not seem needed since the shotgun is so powerful, but the poison will usually finish off any enemies that the initial shotgun blast didn’t. This mod can be found up the ladder and in the small room where the workbench is to the west of the Infected Apartments in Henderson.

PRIDE RIFLE

This mod will add electrical damage to your rifle much like the Shockgun. The difference being of course that this is for basically any assault rifle and adds a DPS of electricity while you hit the enemy with a barrage of bullets. It’s a decent mod for the rifle and can do some really awesome damage when combined with the more high powered rifles. You can find this mod in the Tower at Fort of Henderson when you eventually reach it.

GRENADES

SONIC PULSE GRENADE

Although the title of this grenade makes it sound like a toothbrush, this is a pretty bad-ass grenade to create. The good thing about grenades is that you don’t need a base weapon to create them and you just need the ingredients- which themselves are not all that rare either. The Sonic Pulse grenade, when thrown at a group of enemies, will detonate a wave outwards which then makes any zombie caught in the blast have their head explode. Head’s a poppin’ everywhere. Yep, it’s that awesome. You can find this mod in Henderson, at the Town Hall where the stage is set up. Look behind the stage to find the mod on the table there.

POISON BOMB GRENADE

Much like the Sonic Pulse grenade, the poison bomb grenade does a lot of damage over a wide area, although it doesn’t instantly make zombie heads go pop. Again the grenade mods don’t require a base item to build upon, so if you have the ingredients needed, which the only one that can be tough to come across is the wrist watch, you can make the grenades at your leisure. If you don’t have the sonic Pulse grenades, the poison grenades are pretty good second choice to have in your inventory. This mod can be found in the in the circular fenced in room above the huge spill of green ooze within the tunnels.

Jeff McAllister is a freelance journalist who has contributed to 12DOVE over the years. You'll typically find his byline associated with deep-dive guides that are designed to help you scoop up collectibles and find hidden treasures in some of the biggest action and RPG games out there. Be sure to give Jeff a thanks in the comments while you're completing all of those tricky Achievements and Trophies.