Game Freak’s action RPG Beast of Reincarnation hands you a survival puzzle wrapped inside its ruined, half-flooded world: find the shrines, carry more healing, live longer. These so-called dragon vein shrines are the key to expanding your stimpack pouch, and the game hides them in the kind of easily-missed corners that punish anyone sprinting through the story.
Stimpacks are your primary health recovery item, and the payoff for shrine-hunting is steep: track down enough of them and your maximum carry count climbs to eight. The game contains at least 40 shrine locations, with each stimpack upgrade — officially a “dragon’s favor” — unlocking at milestones of the first shrine, then 10, 20, 30 and 40 total. That’s five extra stimpacks over the course of the game.
The mechanics are worth understanding before you go exploring. Getting near a shrine drops a marker on your map, but proximity alone doesn’t count — you have to physically interact with it to bank the progress. Handily, the marker sticks around even if you wander off, so you can note a tricky one and circle back. Every shrine you touch also coughs up a life fruit, a crafting ingredient used for Koo’s items.
The distribution is uneven, and that’s where things get interesting:
- Ogouchi Buffer Zone — the opening map appears to contain none, so don’t waste time scouring it.
- Ancient Civilization Zone — three shrines, and your first “dragon’s favor” likely lands here. Watch for the third, which strays well off the main road.
- The Great Wall Terraces — the densest hunting ground, packed with shrines and littered with traps for the careless. One only materializes if you bother to explore the riverbed.
- Pilgrim’s Zone — a handful of shrines, with the first and third sitting well away from the critical path.
- Matsukawa Zone — clustered in two spots: the northern crater and valley, and a giant square building to the southwest, where several shrines ring a large rotating cylinder.
That cylinder in the Matsukawa Colony is the standout set piece. Rather than descending with the story, you climb the rotating structure ledge by ledge, picking up shrines and campfires — Hall of Silence, Matsukawa Colony (Top Level) and finally the Mausoleum — as you ascend to the northeast summit.
A lot of these are built to be overlooked: shrines tucked below ground near the Reservoir interior, perched on high ledges above main roads, hidden behind candle-lit cave openings, or waiting at the foot of towering statues. If a route feels like it’s steering you one way, the shrine is often the other way entirely.
Fair warning: full shrine maps for the game are still being pieced together, so treat any count as a floor rather than a ceiling. But even the known clusters are enough to reshape how survivable your run feels.