Death Stranding: How to Get Sandalweed & What it Does

If you’ve been playing Death Stranding for a bit, then chances are you’ve noticed some strange plants that look like footwear. What this plant does may still elude you though, so we’re here to walk you through how to get Sandalweed and what it does in Death Stranding.

How to Get Sandalweed and What it Does in Death Stranding

Found from Chapter 2 onward in Death Stranding, Sandalweed is a survivalist’s answer to your shoes degrading to the point of being useless. Just as their name suggests, they allow you to make sandals which you can wear as emergency footwear and keep you trekking along toward your next delivery point without issue.

Finding and using them is easy too. Anytime you’re in a particularly grassy or wooded area, you’re likely to see tall plants with what look like sandals hanging off of them. Just head over to these plants and hold down the square button to collect the Sandals from them.

You can then equip the sandals you collected by pressing and holding the up directional button on the D-Pad and cycling over to the Sandals option on the equipment wheel with the right analogue stick.

When You Should Use Sandalweed

As for when you should use Sandalweed in Death stranding, there are two key scenarios you should keep in mind.

The first is the one mentioned above, that being when your normal footwear is torn to tatters. Using Sandalweed as sandals in this situation can allow you to continue on with a delivery, or at least push forward toward an outpost where you can produce some new boots for yourself.

The other is when you wish to save the durability of your normal footwear for a later portion of your journey. Though it may not come up as often in early portions of the game, there will be points in the late-game where you’ll see yourself guiding Sam across wide swaths of terrain to reach the next destination.

This can leave the condition of your footwear in a dire state, and if you want to avoid wasting the durability of your boots early on, swapping in some Sandalweed sandals can be a great alternative.

Do be aware, though, that in either situation the Sandalweed sandals won’t hold up for very long. To that end, they should only be considered a stop-gap and not a long-term solution.

Hopefully this cleared up how to get Sandalweed and what it does. For more on Death Stranding, check out our guide wiki as well as guides on some hot topics like how to get Sam’s glasses and how to use decoy cargo.