Need for Speed Unbound Trophy Guide & Roadmap

For Bears and the other collectibles, you will see a green circle on your minimap when you are within the area of them, helping you to find the location. Bears are basically always on ground level, typically in parking lots or other areas near roads. The Bears are then also represented on the map with an icon that looks like the head of a bear.

For a map showing the location of Bears and other collectibles, along with individual locations if needed, you can check out the following page:
» Need for Speed Unbound – All Collectibles & Activities Locations

Escaping chases in NFS Unbound can sometimes be frustrating due to how relentless the police can be, especially at Heat 5. Outrunning isn’t extremely viable until you are driving S or S+ tier vehicles, so you will need to be craft about ramming them or getting them stuck. Going off jumps helps, especially long jumps if you spot them. When helicopters show up you can continue driving and they will leave after a short period, allowing you to continue escaping. When this happens and no other cops are near you it is possible to pull into a spot hidden from the road and turn off your engine with to escape faster. You can also enter event meetup spots or garages to instantly escape as long as the cops are in “searching” mode and not actively chasing you, regardless of the progress on the escape bar.

This trophy is awarded for completing the Qualifier at the end of Week 1. This qualifier requires having an A tier car, along with $20,000 for buy-in.

This and the other two qualifiers consist of a set of 3 races in a row, with the slowest two/three racers being eliminated in the first two races. This means you don’t actually need to win all three races, just the final one (there’s not any extra reward for placement during the first two races). If you need you are allowed to use restarts during the qualifier and it will just restart the current race, not make you start all 3 races over.

If you don’t have enough cash for the buy-in on Saturday or fail to win the race and run out of restarts, the game will put you back on Friday night so that you can try again, meaning that you can’t get stuck and need to restart the story or anything like that.

This trophy is awarded for completing the Qualifier at the end of Week 2. This qualifier requires having an A+ tier car, along with $50,000 for buy-in.

This trophy is awarded for completing the Qualifier at the end of Week 3. This qualifier requires having an S tier car, along with $100,000 for buy-in.

This trophy is awarded for completing the Grand at the end of Week 4, which is the final story-related weekend series. This requires you having one of each of the prior 3 tiers of cars, along with an S+ tier and $200,000 for buy-in.

The Grand is a series of 4 races this time, one in each tier of car. This is why it’s recommended you just make a new car for each tier instead of upgrading the prior one because then you don’t really need to worry about re-upgrading lower levels of cars.  You can upgrade the lower-level cars with things like Differential and Auxillary parts though as these don’t actually increase car ratings, but still provide bonuses. You can then also tune cars to favor grip which is more useful during races.

Otherwise, the races are the same as the Qualifiers. Slower races are eliminated in the earlier races, with the final race being just the top 3, which you then need to come in first to win.

This is awarded for completing the prologue, which is the short section you play through right at the start of the story. The game introduces you to the basic setup of starting races and how they work, along with upgrading your vehicle. Once you complete the prologue all the money you currently have is taken away, so don’t worry to much about doing every single possible event to earn cash.

For a map showing the location of Billboards and other collectibles, along with individual locations if needed, you can check out the following page:
» Need for Speed Unbound – All Collectibles & Activities Locations

For a map showing the location of Street Art and other collectibles, along with individual locations if needed, you can check out the following page:
» Need for Speed Unbound – All Collectibles & Activities Locations

For all activity types, it’s easiest if you just wait until Week 4 where you can set up an S+ tier car with maxed stats. This makes the 3 star requirement on most of the activities very easy, as they are typically a decent amount lower than the “Rival” requirement which isn’t needed for any trophies.

Whatever car you use is basically a personal preference, just make sure you have everything upgraded to the highest level part, then you can tune your car fully to grip setting which is better for cornering and top speed. The only activity this doesn’t apply for is Drift Zones, but you can just tune the handling setting as far toward drift as it can go.

For a map showing the location of all Speed Runs and other activities, along with individual locations if needed, you can check out the following page:
» Need for Speed Unbound – All Collectibles & Activities Locations

For a map showing the location of all Long Jumps and other activities, along with individual locations if needed, you can check out the following page:
» Need for Speed Unbound – All Collectibles & Activities Locations

For a map showing the location of all Drift Zones and other activities, along with individual locations if needed, you can check out the following page:
» Need for Speed Unbound – All Collectibles & Activities Locations

For a map showing the location of all Speed Traps and other activities, along with individual locations if needed, you can check out the following page:
» Need for Speed Unbound – All Collectibles & Activities Locations

• The Bear Champ – Smash all bear collectibles
• Heaven Spot – Collect all street art collectibles
• Adbusting – Break all billboard collectibles
•  In The Zone – Get 3 stars on all Speed Run activities
•  Frequent Flyer – Get 3 stars on all Long Jump activities
•  Catch My Drift – Get 3 stars on all Drift Zone activities
•  Caught On Camera – Get 3 stars on all Speed Trap activities

You can check the following page for large maps of all collectible and activity locations, as well as pages that include images of each individual collectible and activity map location if needed:
» Need for Speed Unbound – All Collectibles & Activities Locations

250,000 points is quite a bit in Takeover, and is basically impossible until you are in Week 2 or 3 with higher-level cars, along with much longer events compared to the ones available in Week 1. Some tips for how to do this are as follows:

• Try and get to 5x multiplier as soon as you can, then never drop it for the duration of the event. Try to continue scoring all the way until your hit 5x multiplier, because then your initial combo is multiplied by that much as well when it is fully “counted”.
• Only use your blue nitrous to continue your combo. Boosting contributes a small amount to score, but as long as you are scoring your combo won’t be dropped, so you can use your blue nitrous sparingly on straight sections where you can’t drift to keep scoring and hold combo.
• Hit as many scoring obstacles as possible, but avoid all of the red obstacles at all costs. Scoring obstacles give big points, but the red ones take away big points, so be careful what you are aiming for. For example hitting flaming barrels is -1,000 points per barrel.
• Tune your car to drift handling if you’re struggling with scoring around corners. You can still do this in the race selection before starting the Event, but can’t do this once the Event has started.

If you are having issues doing this in Takeover you can also try in Drift events, which also count even though they aren’t specified. Setting up an S+ drift car makes scoring in drift events quite easy, then you also don’t need to worry about the obstacle scoring aspects of Takeover events.

It isn’t recommended that you worry about doing this right away in the story. You aren’t actually able to upgrade your cars past the level required for the weekly qualifier, which means that using parts of a higher level is not really worth it. You can just upgrade the garage one tier per week so that you are doing the Elite upgrade in Week 3, though if you are doing as many races as possible and have a ton of extra money in Week 2 you can do the upgrade then if you really want.

There isn’t a single place to track this total, but if you want you can check the challenge menu under the Skill category where there are challenges for escapes in each Heat tier. Add the total together to know how many times you’ve escaped chases.

The cost to upgrade the garage is the same as story mode, so Pro costs $7,500, Super costs $50,000, and Elite costs $100,000, for a total of $157,500 required to fully upgrade the garage.

You shouldn’t specifically worry about this until you are finished or close to finishing your 25 playlists for Mixtape, but you can aim to join playlists started by other players if a number of others are joining. If you need to specifically go out of your way to try this, I found the best method was to wait for other players in the lobby to start playlists, joining immediately and waiting through the countdown to see how many players join. If not enough join you can quit the countdown with 1 second left and try again. If it seems not a lot of players are joining you can check on the map and beside player icons it will show a checkered flag if the players are currently in a race, so if many are you can try waiting for them to finish or find a new lobby by quitting to the main menu.

Once you do get into a race with enough players, I’d recommend staying in last place the entire time to try and bait players to stay in. Players are more likely to quit if they fall way behind, but if there’s still someone else behind them they’re less likely to quit. If you DNF during a race (the timer that starts after a player finishes runs out before you finish) you can still continue racing and this doesn’t affect the completion of the playlist.

For this and the other win-based online trophies, you can boost them with another player if needed. Have a friend join your party then go start a playlist. If other players try to join and you don’t want to deal with them you can just back out of the countdown and try again. Once you’re in the playlist you can then finish it out, letting whichever player win and repeat for the other tiers.

For A tier and above you are offered a loner car if you don’t currently own one in this tier, and that’s completely fine to use instead of using your money to buy cars in each tier.

Note that for A+/S/S+ there are playlists that have you race once in each tier of car called “Mixed Tier” playlists. These DON”T count for any of the win trophies, it needs to be a playlist only for the single car tier.

If you want to know how many playlist completions you have, you can check the challenge menu and scroll down almost to the bottom (the list is sorted in alphabetical order of car reward). You can then pin the “Finish any 30 playlists” challenge which awards the Volkswagen Beetle, allowing you to quickly check how many you have completed so far.

It would be recommended that you don’t sell any cars until you earn this trophy, then you can do whatever you want with them as long as you have enough cars to compete in each Qualifier and the Grand.

If you do Online first and want to be optimized and get this out of the way as quick as possible, you will want to not spend any money online until you have a total of $243,000. Once you do this you can buy the Volkswagen Golf GTI (1976) 9 times, which is the cheapest car immediately available immediately at $27,000.

Once you have purchased 9 and earned this trophy you can sell them to get back half of your money. You should then use this to upgrade your online garage (if you do this first you can’t “get back” the money for the garage, meaning you might need to spend extra time to earn more money).

Note there are some cheaper possible cars, but they require completing a large number of races to make available for purchase (for example the Chevrolet C10 Stepside Pickup costs $18,000, but requires finishing 30 Tier B playlists in a Chevrolet so you can finish all the other requirements before you actually have this available to buy).

If you don’t manage to earn this during normal online play, the easiest way to get max Burst is just by holding +  while not moving. This causes you to do a burnout, filling the burst gauge after 5 – 10 seconds.