Mortal Shell 2's weapon list has a peculiar trait: the roster is complete, but the data is almost entirely missing.
All thirteen weapons and sidearms appear in the retail Steam achievement list, and the table is sorted by global unlock rate — the closest published proxy for the order players actually find them. The problem is that damage values, movesets, and drop coordinates have been published by nobody.
This Mortal Shell 2 weapons guide takes the opposite approach: it leaves those blanks as blanks, rather than filling them with speculation.
The 13 Weapons Sorted by unlock rate, highest to lowest:
Axe and Dagger (64.7%) — the highest unlock rate, and the only one that also existed as an Open Beta objective.
Forgotten Crossbow (63.9%) — a ranged name, but neither patch mentions it, so there's no published confirmation that it fires.
Veteran's Battle Axe (59.3%) — unlocked by roughly six in ten players, making it an early or hard-to-miss pickup.
Great Martyr's Blade (55.5%) — the most-buffed weapon. Balance Patch 1 announced Attack Damage +20%, but the Week 1 notes admit that buff "didn't actually make it in the last patch" — so the +20% never shipped.
Salvaged Trebuchaxe (47.5%) — a new name. Its ability component, the Tarred Fragment, was rebuilt a week after launch because it was "simultaneously overpowered and broken." That means guides written in the first nine days describe a version that no longer exists.
Axatana (43.6%) — a returning weapon from the first game, and the one with the most confirmed mechanics. Its weapon ability grants invulnerability frames and inflicts Fragile stacks — the only weapon ability whose effect the developer states outright.
Triarch Repeater (39%) — Balance Patch 1 removed its minimum resolve requirement "to fire," the strongest published hint that it's a sidearm.
Black Needle (38.1%) — often mistaken for a Shell, but Balance Patch 1 lists it under "Weapons" and confirms it as melee via light-attack tracking improvements.
Clockwork Scythe (35.8%) — a new name, also confirmed as melee through a light-attack patch line.
Caged Hystrix (35.7%) — named like a creature, but the patch confirms it fires.
Obsidian Hammer (33.9%) — Week 1 gave it a full balance pass and says it "now hits substantially harder" — the strongest buff language used for any weapon.
Cursed Child (32.4%) — the strangest name on the list, categorised only by the article pattern its achievement follows.
Ballistazooka (31.9%) — the rarest, making it the best candidate for a late or well-hidden pickup.
What the Patches Confirmed In the nine days after launch, Cold Symmetry released two balance patches, both naming weapons individually. 8 of 13 rows now have official mechanical facts rather than just a name.
These facts come from developer posts, not player impressions. They also settle two things along the way:
Black Needle is a weapon, not a Shell — confirmed by Cold Symmetry.
And gloom was reduced by 75% after Balance Patch 1.
The five rows without patch mentions — Axe and Dagger, Forgotten Crossbow, Veteran's Battle Axe, Cursed Child, and Ballistazooka — have only their names and unlock rates. No stats, no abilities.
Why No Row Says "Weapon" or "Sidearm" The game has separate achievements for "Unlock all Weapons" and "Unlock all Sidearms," proving the two categories exist and are tracked separately.
But Valve never publishes which of the thirteen belongs to which category, so every row is labelled "Weapon or Sidearm" rather than guessed.
The patches narrow it in two places without settling it: the two that fire (Caged Hystrix and Triarch Repeater) are the likeliest sidearms; the three with light attacks (Axatana, Black Needle, Clockwork Scythe) are melee. Five of thirteen are placed on mechanical evidence rather than on their names.
A Live Disagreement: The Upgrade Cap The achievement guide decodes "Over 9000" as upgrading any weapon to +16 — the figure most guides still cite.
But at least four players report going higher — as high as +25 — after finding a forge upgrade item in a late-game chest. Four independent reports, consistent numbers, but nobody answers whether that item removes the cap entirely or just raises it, and Cold Symmetry has never published a maximum.
So the defensible position is: +16 is the cap before that item, unknown after it. This is a live disagreement, not a settled fact.
Four Weapons With No Achievement The thirteen names above are the ones Valve tracks with unlock achievements, but they are not the full list. Four more names appear in the corpus — three named in official patches — with no unlock achievement at all:
Iconoclast — a sword. Players associate it with Harros from the first game, but that's speculation.
Naylshotte — a prologue/starter firearm, consistent with a weapon you begin with rather than find.
Troubador's Lute — the only weapon in Balance Patch 1 given an exact number: Attack Damage +100%, the largest single buff in the patch. Officially confirmed to exist, yet it has no unlock achievement.
Weltcap — named in the Week 1 Update as "stronger in both its active and passive forms," so it has an active ability.
The Troubador's Lute is the remarkable one: the developer gave it the largest buff in the patch, yet it has no achievement. That means the thirteen-weapon count from Valve's achievement list is incomplete, and "Lord of War" (unlock all Weapons) doesn't in fact mean all weapons.
Reading the Unlock Rates Axe and Dagger (64.7%) and the Forgotten Crossbow (63.9%) are effectively tied, and both sit well above the 17.3% who finished the game — meaning they're found long before the end and are hard to miss.
The Ballistazooka at 31.9% is the rarest, but note that the floor across all thirteen is fairly high — nothing here is at collectible-hunt rarity. That's consistent with "Lord of War" (26.1%) and "Guns. Lots of Guns" (23.8%) — roughly a quarter of players completed each set.
Percentages are a snapshot from September 1, 2026, twelve days after release. Ordering by rate is an inference about where players find things, not a published route.
To browse all 13 weapons with their official confirmations, patch records, and evidence boundaries, start with this weapons guide page. It won't give you a damage table, but it will tell you what's confirmed and what isn't.
1.Mortal Shell 2 Shell Abilities Guide: Memories, Bonding, and a Reliable Way to Test Them
2.Mortal Shell 2 Shells Guide: All 8 Shell Names, and Which One to Treat With Caution
3.Why an "Unstable" Reaction Time May Be More Telling Than a Slow One