Borderlands 3: How To Look At Weapon Parts

A valuable tool for figuring out how weapons work is now easier to access.

Since the first Borderlands game, weapon affixes (the words making up the gun’s name) have been important. They determine all of the gun’s stats over a predetermined baseline and were somewhat predictable once you saw enough of them. For example, in Borderlands 2 with Dahl manufactured weapons, an “Onslaught” assault rifle has a higher magazine capacity than the baseline, while a “Feral” assault rifle has higher fire rate and accuracy. These affixes were sometimes, but not always mutually exclusive, and Legendary weapons, in particular, are defined by their unique affixes (an accessory part), which makes certain Legendary weapons incompatible with certain other weapon parts.

The annoying thing is, in previous games, you could not actually view these parts in detail in the game, you could only make educated guesses based on patterns from weapon stats, unless you used a third-party program like Willowtree, a save editor that could also be used to custom create guns in your save file.

Thankfully this is no longer the case in Borderlands 3; all weapon parts are viewable in-game. To do this, hover over a weapon and “Inspect” it (the F key on the keyboard, or clicking the right control stick on a controller). This brings up four tabs, the last of which is Weapon Parts, which breaks down every single part and what it does in-game.

This sounds like a small thing, but it lets you much more easily determine which guns are optimal for your build in endgame scenarios, particularly with Legendary weapons and other especially rare or unique drops. If you get a gun characterized by its high damage output with an affix that reduces its damage, don’t write off the weapon entirely just yet, see if you can find one with a more optimal setup.

For many players this information may not be usable, but it’s great that Gearbox decided to implement a feature that is the primary reason people turned to a third party program they otherwise had no intention of using in the past, cutting out the middle man for people that didn’t actually want to mod save files.