The Last of Us Cheats, Features & Secret Locations Guide

The Last of Us doesn’t have traditional cheat codes you punch in at a menu screen — but the remake (Part 1) packs a surprising number of exploitable mechanics, post-game unlocks, and hidden features that fundamentally change how you play. Complete the game once and you unlock 18 character skins plus 17 visual filters usable mid-gameplay. There’s a working infinite shiv exploit tied to a weapon swap in Bill’s Town, a difficulty-switching trick for stress-free resource farming, and a permadeath mode with three granularity settings so you control exactly how brutal the run gets. Five toolboxes — all missable — gate your weapon upgrades; miss even one and you can’t fully upgrade every gun. This guide covers all of it.

Everything below has been verified against The Last of Us Part 1 on PS5, current as of December 2024.

Top 5 Exploits That Actually Break Combat and Stealth

These aren’t just “tips” — each one meaningfully changes the calculus of an encounter. Used together, they trivialise sections that otherwise eat through your supplies.

1. Infinite Shiv Exploit (Bill’s Town) — Before entering Bill’s Town, grab the upgraded melee weapon on the roof of a short building in the area. Once you have it, locate another melee weapon lying nearby and swap yours for it. Then swap back. Every time you perform this exchange, the shiv materials tied to the weapon reset. The result: unlimited blade materials without ever scavenging for rag-and-blade combinations mid-run. This matters most at shiv-locked doors, where burning a crafted shiv normally forces you to weigh opportunity cost against inventory space. With the exploit active, that calculus disappears entirely.

Why it holds up: the reset is tied to the pickup trigger, not a timer, so it works consistently across difficulty levels including Survivor.

2. Difficulty Switching for Resource Farming — The game lets you swap difficulty at any point mid-playthrough through the pause menu. Drop to Easy before combing through a building for ammo and supplies — enemies become passive, patrol routes widen, and loot density increases. Flip back to Hard or Survivor for the actual combat encounter. It’s a self-imposed system, but it’s legitimate: the game offers it, you’re just using it surgically. Particularly effective in the Pittsburgh hotel section, where resource pockets are dense but enemy density on Hard makes looting feel punishing.

3. Slow-Mo Aiming Toggle — Found under Accessibility settings, the Aim Assistance option includes a slow-motion aim mode that dramatically reduces time pressure during combat. Toggle it before entering a high-density encounter like the Pittsburgh gate sequence or the university basement — then disable it once you’ve cleared the room. The game doesn’t flag this as a cheat, but the mechanical advantage is comparable to bullet-time in other titles. Useful for players who find controller aim imprecise at longer ranges with the shotgun or hunting rifle.

4. Mirror World for Disorientation-Based Advantages — Mirror World flips the entire render horizontally. Enemy AI patrol logic doesn’t account for this. Specifically, guards who would normally funnel toward the left side of a room now appear on the right — but their movement scripts remain identical. Players familiar with patrol patterns can exploit the visual inversion to position Joel in spots that feel “wrong” to first-time playthrough muscle memory, effectively giving a second-playthrough advantage on any encounter they’ve memorized. Toggle available on death or from the Extras menu.

5. Optional Conversations as Stealth Timers — Less an exploit, more an advanced technique. Every optional conversation between Joel and Ellie runs for a fixed duration. Enemies on patrol complete their cycles in roughly the same time. Trigger a conversation when an enemy turns away, let it play out, and Joel frequently ends up in an ideal flanking position when the dialogue closes. Not scripted that way — just a byproduct of how the patrol loops and conversation lengths were tuned. Consistent in the Pittsburgh hotel corridor and the Suburban neighbourhood sections.

All 5 Toolbox Locations for Maximum Weapon Upgrades

Every weapon in The Last of Us can be upgraded at a workbench using parts — but pushing any gun to its final upgrade tier requires a toolbox to be present in your inventory first. There are exactly five toolboxes in the game, one per major upgrade threshold, and all five are missable. Pass the point of no return without grabbing one and that weapon tier is locked out for the rest of the run.

A practical note: toolbox 3 (sewers) and toolbox 5 (bus depot) have the highest miss rate because both areas push players toward story momentum. The sewers section is tense enough that most players move fast; the bus depot feels cinematic and light on interactable objects. Slow down deliberately in both.

Once you have all five, every weapon — including the flamethrower and bow — can reach maximum upgrade. The difference in stopping power between a stock rifle and a fully upgraded one on Survivor difficulty is not marginal. It changes fight outcomes.

18 Post-Game Skins and What They’re Referencing

Finish the game once and the Extras menu opens up a full skin wardrobe for both Joel and Ellie across all chapters. There are 18 total, and they range from continuity-respecting alternate outfits to full fan-service costumes that completely break immersion in the best way possible.

Several skins reference Naughty Dog’s own back catalogue — Nathan Drake’s get-up appears, predictably, as does a Jak and Daxter nod. Others pull from the wider cultural universe: there’s a clear reference to a certain post-apocalyptic TV property (airing well before the HBO adaptation, which makes it a bit of a time capsule), and a couple of costumes that seem to exist purely because someone at Naughty Dog wanted to see Joel in them.

Worth noting: the skins don’t adjust dynamically to weather or environmental context. Joel can wear a summer outfit through the winter sections and Ellie’s alternate skins don’t swap out automatically between chapters the way the base game handles clothing transitions. Whether that’s charming or jarring depends entirely on how seriously you’re taking your second playthrough.

The skins carry over into Photo Mode, which matters a lot if you’re using that feature seriously. A Nathan Drake Joel crouching behind a clicker in a snow-covered building hits differently than the default look.

Visual Customization: 17 Filters and What Photo Mode Actually Does

Pre-completion, filters only appear in Photo Mode — they’re a compositing tool, not a live gameplay layer. Post-completion, those same 17 filters get promoted to full-session options that affect everything you see from the moment you start a new run. That’s a meaningful distinction.

The filter range is broad. High-contrast black-and-white. Sepia tones that lean into the game’s already-warm colour grading. Washed-out desaturated looks that give the whole thing a different texture — more clinical, more hopeless-feeling. There’s at least one filter that leans into deep shadows and crushes highlights, which makes the clicker encounters genuinely more atmospheric and harder to read. That one’s particularly interesting on a second playthrough where you know every patrol but want the tension back.

Photo Mode itself deserves more credit than it usually gets as a functional feature. Beyond the obvious screenshot use, it’s actually useful for studying encounter geometry — pausing mid-combat, pulling the camera to check patrol positions, studying where enemies are positioned relative to cover. Technically not “cheating” in any formal sense. But pulling the photo mode camera 15 metres above a room to scout guard positions before re-entering gameplay is about as close to a tactical exploit as the game allows.

Depth of field controls, focal length, and exposure are all adjustable in photo mode. The character expression options — Joel and Ellie can hold various facial expressions independently — are mostly for screenshot composition, but they’re surprisingly granular.

Permadeath Mode: Three Settings, Very Different Experiences

Permadeath in The Last of Us Part 1 isn’t binary. When you activate it, you choose between three reset points upon death: the start of the game, the start of the current act, or the start of the current chapter. This is worth understanding clearly before committing to a run.

Game-level permadeath is the mode streamers run. One death, back to the title screen. The psychological weight it places on every encounter is considerable — resource management decisions made four hours ago suddenly feel consequential in ways they don’t in standard play. This mode pairs best with Survivor difficulty, where ammo scarcity is genuine and enemies don’t absorb many shots.

Act-level permadeath is arguably the most interesting design choice of the three. Acts in The Last of Us run roughly 60-90 minutes each. A death sends you back to the act start but preserves overall progression between acts. It creates natural tension arcs — the pressure builds as you get deeper into an act, and the relief when you reach the next act marker is real. This is the recommended entry point for permadeath first-timers.

Chapter-level permadeath is essentially a checkpoint-style run with a psychological frame. Dying sends you back perhaps 10-20 minutes. For players who find normal checkpoint systems too forgiving but aren’t ready for act or game resets, this works as a middle layer. It does reduce the mechanical impact significantly — a 15-minute loss on a 12-hour game is barely punishing.

All three permadeath settings can be combined with any difficulty level. Permadeath on Easy with act-level resets is a legitimate way to engage with the mode while minimising frustration. The game doesn’t judge the combination.

Secret Features That Reward a Second Playthrough

Mirror World is the standout. It reverses the game’s horizontal rendering — playable character on the right, world mirrored completely. It’s togglable from the death screen or from Extras, meaning you don’t need to commit to a full mirrored run. The disorientation wears off after about 30 minutes for most players; what’s left is a game that feels measurably different in its spatial logic even though every asset is identical.

The optional conversations are probably the most consistently underused feature in repeat playthroughs. These aren’t cutscenes — they’re triggered by proximity and player choice, and many run for 60-90 seconds of character dialogue that doesn’t appear elsewhere in the game. The Pittsburgh hotel section has at least three that most first-time players miss by moving too quickly. The Suburban chapter has one between Joel and Ellie near a collapsed fence that changes the texture of the chapter’s emotional arc considerably. These don’t show up in any completion percentage counter, which means most players never know they’ve missed them.

The combination of Mirror World plus a high-contrast filter plus permadeath at act level is — genuinely — a completely different psychological experience of the same game. Not a different game. But the accumulated pressure of the permadeath mode, the visual disorientation of the mirror, and the harsh aesthetics of a bleached-out filter turn a familiar run into something that sits differently in memory.

Accessibility Features That Work Like Cheats

The slow-motion aiming option was mentioned above in the context of exploits, but it’s worth addressing the full accessibility suite on its own terms. These settings exist to make the game playable for more people — and several of them provide mechanical advantages that players on standard settings simply don’t have.

High-contrast display mode assigns distinct colours to characters, enemies, and interactive objects. Playable characters appear in one colour, enemies in another, items in a third. In dense environments like the university or the Pittsburgh tunnels, this effectively turns item-hunting into a trivial task and enemy-spotting into something closer to a radar. No scavenging skill required. No careful corner-checking. The colour coding handles it.

Navigation assistance provides directional indicators toward objectives. On a first playthrough where you’d rather not get lost, this removes the spatial puzzle element from several chapters where Naughty Dog’s environmental design is deliberately ambiguous. The Pittsburgh hotel’s interior and the university’s science building both have routing decisions that accessibility navigation resolves immediately.

Audio description mode triggers spoken descriptions of environmental elements and narrative context. This is primarily a vision accessibility feature, but it also functions as a lore delivery system — the descriptions occasionally surface contextual details about environments that aren’t communicated through the main dialogue track.

None of these are “cheating” in any meaningful sense. The game ships with them; they’re fair use. But if your goal is making a run easier while preserving the combat experience, the high-contrast display plus slow-mo aiming combination is about as close to a legitimate god-mode as The Last of Us offers outside of the difficulty system itself.

Quick Reference: Everything in One Place

Two things separate a 100% run from a first playthrough: knowing where the toolboxes are before you need them, and knowing that the post-game unlocks reward a second pass more than almost any other Naughty Dog title. The combination of filters, mirror mode, and permadeath means the second time through The Last of Us isn’t nostalgia — it’s a different kind of pressure entirely.