This War Of Mine Trophy Guide

A Trophy Walkthrough for This War of Mine

I've spent way too many nights in that game, trying to clear out every achievement and trophy without losing my mind. The base set has fifteen or so, depending on your platform, and then there's the Children at War DLC which adds more on top. The hardest ones aren't the ones you'd expect. They're the ones that punish you for getting too comfortable or for following a single strategy. The "Survive the Winter" trophy is straightforward but cruel in practice. You need to get three different characters to survive a full winter cycle with their morale above zero. Most people just loop the same characters every night and call it a day. That works until random events stack up and you realize one character is functionally dead due to illness or despair. I once lost all three survivors to a single bad sickness run because I hadn't stockpiled enough medicine in week two. The workaround was restarting the save file when the first symptom appeared rather than pushing through, since medicine scarcity in late winter is brutal.

This War Of Mine Trophy Guide

Here's the breakdown of what you're actually chasing. The standard trophies cover surviving a full shelter season, completing the game through any ending, finding the secret "Underground" ending, and finishing each of the four challenge scenarios. The DLC adds its own set, with the hardest being a challenge scenario where you control children navigating a city. The secret ending is the one people talk about most and misunderstand most. You need to find and talk to the stranger who appears randomly at your shelter, then escort him to the radio station without him being detected or injured. If he dies or escapes, you have to restart. This doesn't happen every playthrough. I went through about four full weeks before he finally showed up, and on the fifth attempt, a patrol spotted him on the way to the station. That single failure cost me another week of game time.

Challenge Scenarios and What Makes Them Different

Each challenge scenario has its own trophy. The Greenhoof Industries one, "Children at War," controls a group of kids with limited crafting. The "The Little Rose" scenario has you managing a makeshift hospital under siege conditions. These are not harder versions of the main game. They're fundamentally different games that share the same engine. Approaching them like the base game is how people stall on these trophies for months. In "Children at War," you can't craft the same way. The crafting tree is severely restricted. I learned this the hard way after three failed attempts where I kept trying to build basic traps. The workaround was treating every child as a solo operator rather than a team. Send one kid to gather while others hide. Do not send two kids to the same location. The AI pathfinding for children is worse than adults, and they get caught more often. The "The Last Broadcast" trophy requires surviving with all characters at minimum health and hunger for three in-game days after completing the main story. This seems easy until you realize that characters regenerate health slowly, and if anyone dies during the process, the trophy does not progress. I ended up pausing between scavenging runs just to let characters eat and rest rather than pushing forward. It added maybe six hours to an otherwise simple requirement.

The Anti-Achievement Trap

There are trophies that specifically require you to fail in certain ways. "No Way Out" demands that you lose the game three times through different causes. People miss this because they don't track it. I started keeping a simple notes file after my second accidental loss and logged each one. The trophy won't trigger unless each death is from a distinct cause—starvation, disease, and combat each count separately. Two starvation deaths don't count as two progress markers. I learned this after a conversation on a community forum where someone had died six times to starvation and still hadn't unlocked it. Similarly, "Warm Heart" requires giving food to a beggar seventeen times without rejecting them once. You might think this is trivial until you encounter the event that gives you only one piece of food and the beggar appears the same night. You can't split rations. The event happens randomly and sometimes stacks with other resource-depleting events. I finished one run with two food left and then got hit by a raid and a sick character simultaneously. Started fresh on that one and finished in about forty minutes.

DLC Trophy Considerations

The Children at War DLC adds a separate trophy set. The chapter-based structure means you complete one chapter and earn one trophy per chapter completion. The final chapter, "Gone but Not Forgotten," requires completing the story without any character dying. This is harder than it reads because the chapter introduces mechanics that actively work against you—limited light sources, reduced movement speed, and enemy patrol patterns that don't respect your planned routes. I found that completing chapters in sequence without skipping back to earlier ones is the safest approach for trophy purposes. Going back to reroute or farm resources can sometimes break the trophy condition if the game registers it as a new playthrough rather than a continuation. Save scumming between encounters within a chapter is fine. Starting a new chapter after completing one is also fine. The boundary is between chapters, not within them.

Platform Differences to Watch

If you're on PlayStation, some trophies are difficulty-locked or have secondary requirements like "No damage taken." Xbox and Steam versions are generally more straightforward. The PS4 version of "Hard Times" requires completing the game on the hardest difficulty setting, which significantly changes enemy behavior and resource scarcity. I recommend clearing the easier trophies first on whatever platform you're using before committing to a high-difficulty run. The PC version tracks trophies through Steam Achievements, which are transparent and sync automatically. If a trophy doesn't unlock after completing a condition, verify your Steam client is online and the game is running the latest patch. I once spent an evening convinced a trophy was bugged before realizing I'd been playing an offline save file that didn't register achievement progress.

What This Guide Won't Help You With

I'm going to be blunt about the limitations. There is no reliable way to force specific random events. The stranger for the secret ending appears on a probability basis, not a timer basis. Challenge scenarios cannot be completed out of order if you want the trophies to register. DLC trophies require the base game to be completed first on some platforms. If you're speedrunning for trophies, expect the total time to be anywhere from forty to sixty hours depending on your familiarity with the game's systems. The hardest single trophy for most people is the one tied to the "Underground" secret ending because it requires a specific sequence of events that can't be queued up. You'll know you're close when you hear the specific dialogue trigger, but there's no quest marker pointing to it. Check the community wiki if you get stuck on that one, since the conditions are obscure enough that even experienced players overlook them.