Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

What do I need to do to randomize Sekiro?

See full instructions on the setup page.

What does randomization do to this game?

All item locations can be randomized, including those in the overworld, in shops, and dropped by enemies. Treasure Carp locations are turned off by default, but can be enabled. Most locations can contain items from other worlds, and any items from your world can appear in other players' worlds.
By default, all enemies and bosses except for Headless are randomized. This can be disabled by setting Randomize Enemies to false.
By default, we have added some hard region separators to make the game a little more segmented. This can be disabled by setting Additional Progression Blockers to false. Since these are custom items not found in the vanilla game, they have been documented explicitly in the Items guide.

There are also options that can make playing the game more convenient or bring a new experience. These include removing the Headless-induced slow walk, shuffling skills and prosthetic learn trees or even having the skills from the esoteric texts be separate item drops. Check out the Template YAML or the Option Builder in the Archipelago Launcher for more.

What's the goal?

There are two options available for the goal, to be selected in the YAML.

The Full Game goal is to reach the final boss of the second invasion and achieve one of the endings that require the Divine Dragon's Tears.

The Shura goal is achieved by joining Owl in the first invasion and defeating the alternate final boss.

Do I have to check every item in every area?

Sekiro has nearly 750 item locations, but you don't necessarily need to check all of them. Locations that you can potentially miss, such as rewards for failable quests or areas that become unavailable during the game state changes, will never have items required for any game to progress. The following types of locations are also guaranteed not to contain progression items by default:

Hidden: Locations that are particularly difficult to find, such as in crawl spaces, down hidden drops, behind walls and so on. Does not include large locations like Ashina Outskirts after the Central Forces invasion.
Headless: Headless miniboss drops. These locations contain the spiritfall items in vanilla.

You can customize which locations are guaranteed not to contain progression items by setting the exclude_locations field in your YAML to the location groups you want to omit. For example, this is the default setting but without Headless so that those locations can contain progression items:

Shadows Die Twice:
  exclude_locations:
    - Hidden

This allows all non-missable locations to have progression items, if you're in for the long haul:

Shadows Die Twice:
  exclude_locations: []

What if I don't want to do the whole game?

If you want a shorter Sekiro randomizer experience, you can choose the Shura goal. This will allow you to end the game after the first invasion and removes several late-game regions entirely.

If you want to reduce the number of locations containing progression items further regardless of the goal, add the Miscellaneous and Upgrade location groups to your excluded locations:

Shadows Die Twice:
  exclude_locations:
    - Hidden
    - Headless
    - Miscellaneous
    - Upgrade

Using these exclusions will make only around 150 - 200 locations eligible for progression items (exact number depending on chosen options). This will however not reduce your total location count in the log as they are still all generated!

Where can I learn more about Sekiro locations?

Location names have to pack a lot of information into very little space. To better understand them, check out the location guide, which explains all the names used in locations and provides more detailed descriptions for each individual location.

Where can I learn more about Sekiro items?

Check out the item guide, which explains the named groups available for items as well as the custom items added to the game for the Additional Progression Blockers option.