Like a Dragon: Ishin! Smithing & Equipment Completion Guide

The Equipment section in the Like a Dragon: Ishin! completion list encompasses crafting all possible items and placing all possible Seals on items. This is the biggest time sink in the game, as this requires a large amount of grinding for materials and cash to craft the items and to get the required Seals. Completing this whole section is required for Taskmaster trophy / achievement which is the longest task to complete in the game.

The guide is written with the assumption that this is the last thing you do. It is recommended that you complete all other side content and completion requirements before starting to work specifically on this, as you will end up with a bunch of other materials and items you can use during the grind. It is also recommended you don’t disassemble or sell weapons until recommended in the guide, as you may end up with a bunch of weapons with Seals on them you can disassemble and save yourself extra time later.

NOTE: The newest update has added a number of Seals as drops to Dungeon missions, which are shown in the drop table you can view in the mission selection menu. This update has also drastically increased the drop rate of items from enemies, which should shorten material grind time.

• Sphere Seal: Greed
• Sword Seal: Fierce Deity
• Square Seal: Heavy Drinker
• Square Seal: Reverence
• Square Seal: Drunken Craze
• Square Seal: Virtuous
• Square Seal: Special Moves

Progress Steps

1. Explanation of “Seeding” and RNG
2. Get your Grinding Setup
3. How to Grind the Dungeon
4. Farming Golden Sneaks
5. Farming for Yoshiyuki with Repentance Seal
6. Farming for Materials and Cash
7. Crafting and Seals for Completion List
8. Charts and Other Info

Explanation of “Seeding” and RNG

This section is included first, as you will need to know how the seeding and RNG work both while making your grinding setup, then when doing the actual bulk of the work with Seals.

In video games, when something is “seeded” that basically means that a random outcome is based on a random number that is generated to determine that specific outcome. In Ishin this affects getting extra seals on crafted items and whether placing seals on items succeeds. It is also referred to as seeding in this case as the outcome isn’t generated randomly every time, it’s based on prior actions, and these are repeated when you repeat the same prior actions even when reloading your save. You work around this in the following ways:

Seals From Crafting

You will need to utilize the seeding in crafting to obtain seals to set yourself up for grinding, and then to get the final ones for completion. The basic steps to take when doing this are as follows:

1. Save your game and make sure you know which save slot you’re using.
2. Craft a number of low-level swords with Gold or Silver Hammers so that they have Seal slots.
3. Note how many you needed to craft before one dropped with a Seal.
4. Reload your save, and repeat crafting the EXACT SAME ITEMS the number of times before the one with the seal (if the seal dropped on the 4th, craft 3).
5. Save your game again.
6. Craft the item you want to get a seal from and it will roll a seal in or more of the open slots.

For example, you craft a number of Keen Blades using Silver Hammers, which gives them 1 Seal slot. On the 4th craft you get one with a Seal. Reload your save, and craft 3 Keen Blades with Silver Hammers. You need to craft the exact same item with the exact same hammer type or it changes the seeding. After crafting the third you can save your game, then craft the item you are wanting to get a Seal from, say a Chopstick Gun because you’re trying to get Greed Seals. The Chopstick Gun can only roll Greed Seals, so if you’re trying to get more than one you can use a higher-level hammer to give it more slots, which potentially roll more Seals.

If you’re trying to get specific ones for the Completion List you can try making multiple items to see which gives one you want, but reloading your save won’t give you a different Seal on the same item. For example, if you craft the Soul Beat pistol which can roll 3 potential Seals. If you don’t get one you want reloading won’t give you different ones, it will always roll the same Seal(s) in this instance of crafting, but you can reload and try crafting a different item to see if you get something else you need.

Once you get something you need, you can dismantle the item to obtain the Seal. Seals in the round circle slots are always gained when dismantling the item, whereas the ones with the 4 points are intrinsic to that weapon and aren’t gained when disassembling.

Placing Seals on Items

For the Completion List, you need to place one of each Seal on an item one time each. Due to how hard some Seals are to get you don’t want to waste potential Seals by just throwing them at items and having the placement fail, as the chance is entirely based on a percentage roll and there’s no way to make the chance higher aside from leveling up the Blacksmith. The steps for placing Seals are a little simpler than with crafting:

1. Save your game before placing any Seals (always do this every time just in case)
2. Try placing the Seal you want to place on an item. If the chance is lower than 100% it might fail, using up the Seal.
3. If it failed, reload your save, place any extra Seal on any item to reset the seeding, and save your game again. This must specifically be a Seal, as the success chance seeding seems to be specifically for placing Seals and isn’t affected by crafting weapons.
4. Place the desired Seal, and repeat as many times as needed until it succeeds.

The reason this is required is that the chance for placing Seals works in the same way as getting Seals on crafted weapons, where the chance persists through save reloads, so just reloading your save and trying to place the same Seal again will always fail if it failed the first time. This isn’t as much of an issue with placing Seals for completion but is a major issue when you are trying to increase the rank of things like the Greed and Pierce Seals on your main grinding weapon, as the percentage chance drops below 50% at the higher levels and will take multiple tries with Seals you don’t want to lose.

Get Your Grinding Setup

Before you start working on the actual grinding, you’ll want to get yourself set up with your main pistol and Trooper Cards for using in Gunman style.

Pistol

First, for the pistol, you are aiming to make a Vortex, which will then have 3 x Greed Seals, 1 x Pierce Seal, and 1 x Double Shot Seal.

The Vortex has the fastest intrinsic fire rate on a gun in the game along with 5 open slots at Gold Level. The trick with this is that none of your other weapons matter, as Seals on weapons such as Greed only apply to the weapon being used to attack the enemies, so putting extra Greed Seals on your other weapons doesn’t increase drop rate more than just 3 gold Greed Seals on Vortex. You then want Pierce because this then causes the gun to do increased damage to armored enemies, effectively negating the entire mechanic which makes the armored enemies tougher. Double Shot isn’t specifically required, but it gives a chance for the gun to fire 2 bullets at once, which with the high fire rate of the gun means quite a bit of increased damage.

When using the Vortex you will also want to go into the game settings and go to Accessibility > Simplify Combo Attacks and set it to “Press and hold”. This makes you constantly attack while holding  , which is extremely helpful for Vortex as it fires faster than you can really manually.

Smithing the Vortex doesn’t require a huge amount of rare materials but can be expensive depending on how much money grinding you’ve done. For more specific smithing requirements per level you can check out the Smithing Diagram in the equipment menu and the chart at the end of the guide for locations to obtain materials, but if you are making one from scratch you’ll need the following:

• Domestic Revolver x 1
• Volcanic Rock Fragment x 1
• Misshapen Screw x 5
• Picture of Ghost x 1
• New Screw x 1
• Obsidian Chunk x 1
• Worn Out Cogwheel x 5
• Exquisite Cogwheel x 10
• Crystal x 3
• Small Wind-up Device x 10
• Mechanical Parts x 10
• 87 ryo 0600 mon

Before placing Seals you should also make sure you have the Blacksmith leveled all the way up to Level 20 to give the maximum increase in chance to place Seals. This is the only way to increase the chance in this version of the game, so making sure it’s at max can save you a large amount of time messing around. The easiest way to level the Smith is just to buy a large number of weapons from the Arms Dealer nearby, then dismantle them to increase the level.

For the Greed Seal, the easiest way to obtain them is by crafting Chopstick Guns using the method described earlier. These are made using a Wooden Gun which you can most easily obtain using points at the Gambling Den (check Cocksure  in the trophy guide if you need an explanation on how to get points). You then need Soft Lumber x 5, New Screw x 1, Worn Out Cogwheel x1, and 1 ryo 5000 mon to craft.

For the Pierce Seal, these can be obtained from a number of weapons through crafting, such as the Stonecarver or Missilecutter swords. You may also already have weapons in your inventory you obtained as drops which have them on them, as they’re somewhat more common on a number of swords, so you can check your inventory first for any you can disassemble.

For the Double Shot Seal, if you need to obtain one through crafting the easiest gun to use is probably Quickfire, as this is in the second level of the tree from the Imported Revolver. It is also possible to get this seal as a drop from the Golden Sneaks, so if you are fine waiting a bit you can wait and see if you get one from them as a drop first, because Double Shot is more useful when working on the actual dungeon grinding.

If you get any Kiwami Sphere Seals while grinding Golden Sneaks it’s highly recommended you use them on your Vortex to save some time on this. Golden Sneaks are guaranteed to give you an item whenever you defeat them so you don’t specifically need to have the Seals all leveled before doing that, and the Kiwami Seals give a guaranteed level increase to whatever other seal you put them on, saving some time messing around.

What you place on your remaining gear doesn’t matter that much overall. It would generally be recommended you put attack or defense-increasing seals on them, as these do affect you at all times, though the increase from Seals isn’t actually that much so it’s not a big deal if you don’t worry about it.

Trooper Cards

The setup for Trooper Cards is basically for the purpose of beating mission 3-20 in the Dungeon as fast as possible. They are useful in the normal dungeons as well, but with the properly setup Vortex you can normally just beat all dungeon enemies with that. The 4 cards you want to have for this setup are:

Kasuga Ichinojo – Temporarily increases Ryoma’s attack damage by an unreasonable amount. (Placed in the Corporal slot)

Sayama Kaho – Temporarily repels all attacks.

Uta Horiemon – Temporarily increases Gunman damage by an unreasonable amount.

Kaneko Tetsujiro – Landing successive attacks increases the damage of each hit.

You want Kasuga Ichinojo in your Corporal slot as this allows you to add the 4th card to the squad, along with increasing the charge speed of all of your cards. The rest of your squads don’t matter as you won’t use them, but the health increase you gain from the cards applies from all 4 squads, so you want to not repeat the exact same cards in all squads as it only gives the bonus once per instance of that individual card (if you get duplicates of cards they count separately though).

Uta Horiemon and Kaneko Tetsujiro are both only purple and blue rarity, so you’re likely to get them eventually while grinding or from the low-level enlistment options.  Kasuga Ichinojo and Sayama Kaho are both gold rarity though, so you’re not likely to get them without aiming for them. It’s possible to get gold cards from open-world enemies post-game, but you may need to use the higher-level enlistment options to pull them, which might require some slower runs of the final dungeon to get money.

Once you level the cards up to max you can also use a Promotion Jewel on them, which resets their level to 1 (while keeping their stats) and allows you to level them up again for a bit more of a stat increase. You can purchase the Promotion Jewel from the Virtue Shop for 10,000 Virtue each.

How to Grind the Dungeons

When you aim to grind Dungeons, to save yourself time when you are set up for 3-20 you should alternate between doing a normal dungeon for whatever drop you’re aiming for at the time, avoiding using your cards during the dungeon to charge them all, then doing 3-20 and you should have all your cards charged, allowing you to run through the mission in under a minute when you know the method.

For Defeat Sanada Nobuyasu, mission 3-20 that you will spend the most time overall grinding, the method using a setup up Vortex and the cards described above lets you complete the mission in under a minute. When the mission starts you want to run to the boss room, then after the boss finishes talking run back to the doorway and start shooting into the room like the below image.

While shooting you want to immediately activate Uta Horiemon (Gunman damage increase) then after a few seconds activate Kaneko Tetsujiro (Combo damage). Watch on the minimap (your camera will likely be stuck looking down or at Ryoma’s head so you can’t really see) and when you see the boss’s purple enemy icon come into the minimap area activate both Kasuga Ichinojo (Huge damage increase) and Sayama Kaho (Repel attacks). If done correctly you’ll be shooting the boss and they’ll walk up to you, but they will be constantly bouncing off of you due to the Repel effect and you should be doing massive damage due to the stacking damage buffs.

If you don’t manage to defeat the boss before the repel effect wears off they’ll knock you to the ground, at which point you can use the ground heat action for another big chunk of damage as the first two buffs should still be active. If you don’t defeat the boss at that point then you can basically just run back and forth between the corners of the room to clean up the enemies.

Farming Golden Sneaks

Golden Sneaks are a unique type of enemy that appear rarely in the open world by themself. They’re differentiated by their yellow shirt and gold mask that they wear. They’re slightly tougher than normal enemies and have a high drop rate for a number of unique items.

You will need to farm these during your Smithing journey as they are the only way to obtain Square Seal: Special Moves, along with being one of the best sources of Aquamarine in the game. This is helpful with other things though as the Golden Sneaks can drop a number of other seals and some useful rare materials, saving you some extra grinding later. You’ll want to farm them first specifically for the Seal, then depending on how long that takes determine how you feel about the Aquamarine and other seals.

You can technically farm the Golden Sneaks at basically any time, but it’s recommended to be set up to do this for the fastest farm. You want the time of day to be Nighttime (can be changed at Teradaya) and you want to be wearing a Rogue Mask. The Rogue Mask shows the location of enemies on the map in your area, making the Sneaks easy to spot as they’re by themselves. You can grind without the mask if you want, but this saves a decent amount of time and if you’ve already done prior steps you likely will have received at least one from grinding the final Battle Dungeon as it drops from that boss.

Grinding Method

With the time of day set to night and wearing your Rogue Mask, take the palanquin to Rakugai (Kamo River). What you then want to do is interact with the palanquin again, then back of the menu. Doing this changes the enemy spawns around you (most of the time). The change occurs when you actually speak to the palanquin, so assuming you have the Rogue Mask on you can look at the location selection map as shown below. You’re looking for a single enemy to the west over the bridge, easy to spot because they’re looking either directly north or south. If it’s a group of enemies they’ll be looking in other directions.

If you’re trying to do this without the Rogue Mask you can spot them by looking toward the end of the bridge.

Run to the end of the bridge and defeat the Sneak, then run back. On your way keep a lookout for enemy spawns to the left or right along the water. The Sneaks can sometimes appear in the spots on the map marked below, letting you get a second drop on the way back.

If there’s none there go back and speak with the palanquin again, repeating the process. If you’re using the Rogue Mask and it seems like the enemy group isn’t changing when you speak to the palanquin after 3 – 4 times look left and right down the road before speaking to them again and this should reset the spawns when you speak with them again. Also note that the Sneaks can spawn down the path left of the palanquin, but these ones are walking west and by the time you catch up with them they’ll be halfway along the Scarecrow Chateau, so you’re better off ignoring them to save the extra running time.

While farming if you take a long time to get Square Seal: Special Moves then you probably don’t need to specifically farm them for anything else, but if you get the Seal early then you are probably better off spending a bit of extra time just farming them for extra Seals and Aquamarine. You need 24 Aquamarine total which you can get a decent amount of in the dungeon, but this overall saves a bit of time if you get a number here as well. You can also try farming for Gun Seal: Double Shot here, as this is a useful Seal to have and if you manage to get it here it saves time messing with crafting later for it.

Potential Seals

• Sphere Seal: Corporal
• Sphere Seal: Attack
• Sphere Seal: Fierce Attack
• Sphere Seal: Madness
• Square Seal: Raging Flame
• Square Seal: Champion
• Sword Seal: Mighty
• Square Seal: Brawl
• Sword Seal: Fierce Deity
• Gun Seal: Double Shot
  
• Square Seal: Fierce Battle
• Square Seal: Special Moves
• Gun Seal: Sure Shot
• Sphere Seal: Bewitched
• Square Seal: Reversal
• Square Seal: Bleached Cloth
• Square Seal: Chain Mail
• Sphere Seal: Endurance
• Sphere Seal: Adamantine
• Sphere Seal: Greed
• Sphere Seal: Kiwami – Note these are extremely rare and can otherwise only be obtained through microtransaction purchases. They aren’t counted in the completion list so don’t worry if you never get one, but if you do they are very helpful to save time grinding more seals to raise the level, or reloading for failed attempts.
• Square Seal: Kiwami – Same as above

Potential Materials

• Gold Chunk
• Platinum Filings
• Mechanical Parts
• Bloodstained Cloth
• Fine Silk Fabric
• Aquamarine (24 total needed for Smithing completion)

Farming for Yoshiyuki with Repentance Seal

Farming for the Repentance Seal is the first major dungeon grind you should work on before going for materials. This is because this seal is only available on the sword Yoshiyuki, which you might remember is the sword Ryoma starts the game with and can’t be crafted.

The only location it drops is during dungeon mission 3-4, Rescue the Kidnapped Official 1.

Unless you are extremely lucky, you will likely need to spend quite a while farming for this drop, as you are basically going through 3 levels of RNG hoping for a weapon, that happens to be the Yoshiyuki, which also happens to have the seal on it. Having yourself set up with the 3 x gold Greed Seals on your Vortex before working on this would be highly recommended to maximize the number of drops you are receiving. This is also helpful though because this dungeon drops a number of other rare materials you need quite a few of, so if you end up spending a long time grinding for the sword drop get a lot of materials as well.

Farming for Materials and Cash

NOTE: The update on March 16th, 2023 has drastically increased the drop rate of items from enemies, as well as added a number of Seals to the potential drops in missions.

After you get your Yoshiyuki you can start working on the other required materials. You can check out the Checklist image in the Charts section for locations on where to obtain each item and how many are required. In this step don’t worry specifically about what weapons or armor drops you’re getting or how much money you have. When you finish working on all of the materials you will either have enough money from grinding Dungeon 3-20, or will have enough extra items that you can sell off in the next step for needed Cash.

Remember to alternate between whichever normal dungeon you’re currently trying to grind and 3-20 to spend less time waiting around. If you end up getting everything else done and only need the final mission drops you can just start the mission and hang out for a couple of minutes until your Trooper Cards charge before entering the boss room.

If you are having a bad time with drops from 3-20 note that if you dismantle the Last of the Dragons you get back 4 Whiskers and 4 Fangs. This means if you’re stuck on those two you can stop grinding when you have 21 Whiskers and 22 Fangs, then craft this sword before the others and then dismantle it for those materials back.

While grinding make sure to get rid of extra Trooper Cards by fusing them into others (whether it be ones you want to level or junk ones). There is currently an issue where if you are maxed out on trooper cards (500/500 in your inventory) the game will not award money correctly after completing Dungeon Missions.

Crafting and Seals for Completion List

Once you have all your materials ready, you’ll want to do all of these steps in this order to save yourself time while you work through all of the crafting.

1. Dismantle any weapons in your inventory with extra Seals

You first want to go to the Blacksmith and dismantle all weapons you have with removable seals. These are spotted by not having the 4 points around them as shown in the menu.

Doing this you are likely to get a number of seals you won’t then need to grind for during crafting, along with a bunch of extras you can use for the trophy Bringing Down the Hammer for placing Seals 100 times.

2. Sell any weapons and armor that can’t be upgraded further

During your material grinding you’ll have received a large number of weapons and armor that you can’t really do anything with and are effectively useless. They are helpful though because they can be sold for a decent amount of money, especially a number of the items from Dungeon 3-20. The most common ones you’ll probably end up with are:

• Dragon Hawk (sells for nearly 200 ryo, drops in 3-20)
• Juzu-maru (You will likely receive a large number from grinding 3-20 and you have to craft one, so you can sell any you get as drops)
• Inviting Hat
• Rogue’s Mask
• Decorated Hagoita
• Bonbori Lantern
• Demon Smasher

You can also check through your materials inventory and compare against the checklist, and any that you only need 1 of (Provincial Dojo Certificate, Snake Eyepatch, and Torn Haori for example) you can sell the extras as they are only used for 1 high-level weapon, and you’ll likely end up with quite a few from grinding 3-20. If you aren’t sure and want to be careful don’t worry about selling them unless you actually run out of money.

3. Determine what Seals you haven’t received yet, and determine what items they can be obtained from

Now the last step before you start crafting, you should go through your list of obtained Seals and compare them against the checklist to determine the ones you still need. You should then check the Seal Drop image in the Charts section and determine what items can drop the seals you need, making note of them for the next step. The Seals in the checklist are listed in the order of the completion list which is the same order they appear in the Materials menu, though note that there are a bunch of blank spaces in the materials menu that are never filled.

4. Craft your items

Now you are finally going to be doing the crafting. To save yourself time aiming for Seals later, you will want to work on them at the same time as crafting all of the items. The workflow is as follows:

1. Save before crafting anything.
2. Craft the next item in the list.
3. If it drops with a Seal, reload your save. If it doesn’t go to step 6.
4. Craft an item that can potentially drop a Seal you need.
5. If you get a Seal you need, dismantle the item. If you don’t reload your save and try a different item.
6. Save your game and go back to step 2.

You want to work through the crafting in this specific manner to save time at the end where you’re just crafting junk weapons to get Seal drops. You need to craft a ton of items for the completion list, so you can potentially obtain all Seals before even crafting all items depending on how many Seals you have left to get.

While looking for Seals on items, you should spend some extra time trying to craft for the rare Seals first, then try the less rare items. The main ones to watch out for are the unique Square Seals on Headbands and Breastplates you have near no chance of getting as drops, such as Blessing and Drunken Craze which are potentially found on the Divine Dragon Emblem. If you go through all the items and don’t get one of the Seals you need you can just go back to making the items in order for the completion list again, as you can’t force the seeding to change until you make another item.

Once you’ve been through all Completion List items if you still have Seals to obtain you can just go back to repeating what was described in the Seeding and RNG section until you obtain the remaining ones you need. If you ever run out of Hammers you can either buy Iron or Bronze ones from the Smithing Vendor or trade points at the Gambling Den for Silver Hammers.

Finally, you should just need to craft the Enchanted Weapons, which is done by speaking with the man sitting on the ground by the Jizo Statue in Mukurogai.

He can craft the 7 Enchanted Weapons for you if you speak to him while you have one equipped. He doesn’t charge you any money (even though the smithing diagram has a price on the weapons) and you don’t need a hammer, though note that if you want to use one of these weapons they have the same rarity as the item going in, so you’d want to set that up on the weapon they’re crafted from. These weapons are as follows:

• Yaksha Blade > Skink Lizard > Muramasa
• The Radish > Blossoming Bud (You need to have the 20 x Doburoku in your inventory to craft this, they can’t be in storage).
• Worn Magical Sword > Last of the Dragons (You need 100 enemy kills with the sword as well. Can be done in Wild Dancer style with shooting enemies).
• Jumbo Saw > Nenekiri-maru
• Peashooter > Cuckoo
• Chopstick Gun > Spring in Full Bloom

Charts and Other Info

Checklist: You can download this image and open it on a computer or a mobile device and edit the image as you see fit. It includes important reminders, and extra columns to check off when you complete items (click image to enlarge).

Tips for specific Dungeons in the Checklist:

1-2 – Need to go down all 3 paths for the boxes. Most useful for Beautiful Leaf drops.
1-4 – Need to go down all paths for the boxes. Most useful for Pearl and Emerald drops
1-5 – Take the left path first, then the right path at the second split to hit all rooms. Most useful for Carved Wooden Bears and Broken Awls
1-8 – Very linear, good for Small Wind-up Device and Beast’s Tail.
2-1 – Need to go down all paths for boxes. Good for Gold Chunks, Nuggets, Platinum Filings, Fluoride, and Sturdy Lumber.
2-5 – Need to go down all paths to open the doors. Most useful for Gold Seals
2-9 – Run to the end, there are no items in the side rooms, but a bunch of breakables in the boss room
3-3 – You have to check all paths for switches. The mission is long, but lots of opportunities for drops
3-4 – Largely linear, one side room near the end with more boxes. You’ll probably be running this a lot no matter what for Yoshiyuki with Repentance Seal.

Seal Drop Chart: Items with multiple listed Seals mean that the item has the potential to drop those seals, and can rarely drop more than one at a time (click image to enlarge).

Related Like a Dragon: Ishin Guides:

• Substories Guide
• Diligence Records
• Memoirs Locations
• Wanted Men Missions
• Amon Location & Boss Guide
• Fishing Guide
• Completion List Guide
• Trophy Guide & Roadmap