How to Unlock Every New Buddy (Walker, Horse, Quiet, Dog)

In The Phantom Pain there are a number of buddies which you can unlock throughout the game. These buddies can accompany Big Boss on missions, providing support from their unique skills and abilities.

In this tutorial I'll show you exactly how to unlock each of the buddies, detailing which missions you should venture into and exactly where to look for the buddy unlocks.

Apart from D Horse the other support buddies can easily be missed so pay attention to the guide below.

D-Horse

This support buddy is a guaranteed unlock for every player. The horse is a convenient transport buddy that helps you transcend the terrain quickly and stealthily.

The horse can lean to one of the sides by using the crouch button (X or A), or switching sides using R3. This allows Snake to hide from enemies as he gallops past them in the field. Players can also develop equipment for the horse which includes armour and riot gear style face cover. These not only change the horse's appearance but also boost stats such as speed and resistance.

Much like Roach from The Witcher 3, players can call D Horse by whistling which summons the buddy to appear at your current location.

Something cool is that if players whistle while sprinting, the horse will ride besides Snake allowing him to jump on the horse in one fluid motion. The horse can also be used to carry one additional NPC such as prisoners and the alike.

D-Dog

YouTube guide to unlock

Players find this small and adorable creature in Afghanistan at the start of the game. He starts out as a puppy which you will find during "Mission 4 - C2W" but he is very easy to miss! When you start this mission there is only one drop off zone for the helicopter. As soon as it touches ground and you hop out, look in the undergrowth to your right for D-Dog. He'll be yelping and sniffing around - just make sure you don't run straight past him!

Using the fulton, players need to send the puppy back to Mother Base in order to unlock this buddy. Players can then watch the puppy grow with each completed misson and you can even watch Oswald training the puppy, which provides great humour.

Once D-Dog has grown and been trained, he can follow you into missions where he provides a variety of useful abilities such as biting enemies on command, distracting guards and also the ability sniff out herbs, items and enemy locations. Any enemies which are detected by the dog are highlighted in red.

As the dog develops and the bond grows you can equip the dog with a sneaking suit that comes with a combat knife. With this weapon the dog can kill off enemies by jumping and slitting throats.

One of the last and most important abilities from D-Dog is that he'll increase moral among your Mother Base recruits.

Quiet

YouTube guide to unlock

The scantily clad sniper babe is one of the most disciplined and effective support buddies out in the field. However she isn't liked by other soldiers and will actually negatively effect staff moral.

To recruit Quiet you need to complete a certain sequence of events and this requires a bit of convincing. It's possible to encounter her once and then never see her again.

Quiet is a boss fight that's not actually one of the main missions but rather a Side Op, encountered almost by accident. What's cool is that before you find her you'll hear recruits talk about how she took down a helicopter with thin air. Other radio transmissions show how much blood she has left behind.

The actual Quiet boss fight is one of the best fights in the game, even comparable to the most epic sniper battle since MGS 3's The End battle.

The boss fight requires some good planning and strategy in order to capture Quiet and send her back to base. Even after she's captured she isn't immediately available as she first resides in a prison cell. At times she can be seen sunbathing topless whilst listening to music.

Once she becomes a support buddy she's one of the hardest companions to master but at the same time she offers the most strategic options thanks to her ability to become invisible, jump great heights, scout ahead, mark enemies and eliminate targets on command.

D-Walker

YouTube guide to unlock

The bionic walker is a two legged mini-mech that comes with an amazing arsenal. It's the most versatile companion in The Phantom Pain and can even navigate automatically thus allowing players to focus on aiming and shooting.

Although D-Walker is a support buddy it doesn't start out that way. Players can hijack the common walker gear during the latter missions in Afghanistan and there's even cutscenes to go along with it. However, it isn't until a specific mission is completed that you actually unlock D-Walker for youself.

This will be the last Buddy you’ll unlock in The Phantom Pain but don’t worry there’s still plenty of missions left by the time you unlock it. Simply complete Mission 13 "Pitch Dark", the first one in Africa and the D-Walker unlocks from the mission report screen. From here on, you can select the buddy for deployment in the loadout screen and also drop him into the field using the Buddy Drop option from iDroid.

This buddy starts with some very basic features that include a stun pistol and deployable wheels that turn the mech into a roller skater. This mode is very fast but hard to control especially considering the number of obstacles like rocks and barbed wire scattered around.

You can customise and unlock the Walkers tech tree by using the mech more often. It's an armoured and weaponised vehicle that has its own extensive tech tree with all kind of unlockable skills and weapons.

Some examples of tech unlocks for the Walker include:

High voltage stun guns
Head mounted tranquillizer gun
Machine guns
Rocket launchers
Robo CQC
Flamethrower

D-Walker is great for traversing large distances and assessing the area. The mech can carry other people and even fold its legs - revealing wheels that turn the mini-mech into a military tank. In this mode the Walker can travel at high speed and it also makes less noise.

Players should note that D-Walker can still be destroyed by rocket launchers, some machine guns and other metal gear. If the enemy finds D-Walker in the field it can take them a considerable while to destroy it - meaning that it takes longer to go back from a Combat or Alert status.