Horizon Forbidden West Machine Weakness List: How do I trigger elemental statuses and reactions?

The dangerous and beautiful machines of Horizon Forbidden West are some of the real stars of the show.

To take them down, Aloy has to employ cunning and strategy. One of the main ways to do that is by exploiting each specific machine’s weaknesses and leveraging them to her advantage.

There are lots of different elemental types to consider, each inflicting their own kind of status condition.

These status conditions can also be used by machines to target Aloy, so it pays to know your types for defensive as well as offensive reasons.

• Fire inflicts Burning which deals damage over time
• Electricity inflicts a Shocked status which stuns a target
• Cold inflicts Brittle which increases the target’s susceptibility to impact damage
• Acid inflicts Corrosion which melts armor and deals damage over time
• Purgewater inflicts the Drenched status which makes enemies easier to shock, freeze, and stops them doing their own elemental damage
• Plasma builds up over time and creates an explosion - if you deal more impact damage as it builds, the explosion is stronger
• Adhesive makes enemies sticky and stuns them for a long time
• Explosive ammo destroys armor and deals heavy damage

How do you trigger elemental reactions in Horizon Forbidden West?

There are two main ways to trigger elemental damage in Horizon Forbidden West: weaknesses and chain-reactions.

Scan a machine with your Focus and you can see what elements it’s weak to and what it’s resistant against.

Elemental statuses a machine is weak to build up more quickly, while resistant ones will take longer.

Hitting unarmored parts and weak points on a machine will also cause elemental status to build more quickly.

Once the status indicator has been filled, the machine will be affected by that elemental status condition for a limited time.

You can also afflict machines with elemental statuses they are usually resistant to. However, this is done by causing a chain-reaction.

To start a chain-reaction, isolate the part of the machine that stores the elemental energy type it uses.

The example the game uses is the shock tank on the back of a Scrapper, but it also works with fire on Blaze tanks, acid on acid sacs, and so on.

Target this machine part with the same type of element as is stored there and it will create an explosive chain-reaction that inflicts that status on the targeted machine and anything unlucky enough to be caught in the blast.

Horizon Forbidden West Machine Weakness List

For more on the dangers facing Aloy, check out our Horizon Forbidden West guide.