Mortal Shell 2 Tarstones: Building Around 10 Slots

Tarstones are Mortal Shell II’s socketable gems, and the whole system runs on a hard cap: 73 obtainable stones competing for just 10 equip slots. That gap is the actual build system in this game — not the Shell you’re wearing, not the weapon in your hand. This guide covers exactly how the ten slots split up, where the stones worth fighting for come from, and how to stop a loadout from turning into a pile of half-committed ideas.

Tarstones are equippable items you find, loot, or buy across the open world, and they change how the Harbinger fights rather than just padding a stat sheet. Tarstones in Mortal Shell 2 are items that can be infused into equipment that grants passive effects or modifies an action, changing the movements and attacks of the Harbinger or the equipped shell, and their effects can increase damage, modify attacks, improve critical chance, and other interactions that require the Resolve resource. They come in four types, and each one occupies a different, fixed pool of slots.

The slot math is the part most players get wrong on their first pass. You can equip a total of 10 Tarstones: 4 shell-compatible, and 2 each for Combat, Infusion, and Ability. The catch is where those last six live: your loadout has four Support Slots holding passive buffs, and on top of that both your weapon and your sidearm each carry three additional slots of their own, split between one Ability Tarstone, one Combat Tarstone, and one Infusion Tarstone per weapon or sidearm.

That last stat matters because stones aren’t static once equipped. Equipped Tarstones passively earn Exp when you defeat enemies, and this experience can then be used to upgrade these Tarstones at a Tarforge. That upgrade grind and the specific forge mechanics get their own breakdown elsewhere; this guide is about which ten you should actually be feeding.

Sources vary a lot more than a typical soulslike ring or talisman pool. Some stones are tied directly to the story critical path, others sit in optional chests, some drop from minibosses tucked into side dungeons, and a handful are just for sale. The most likely first Tarstone you’ll find is the Arbiter’s Prize or the Shattering Stone — the Arbiter’s Prize comes from defeating the boss Great Arbiter of Flesh, while the Shattering Stone is chest loot in a village just past that fight. Deeper into the map you’ll find things like the Curseblood Stone, obtained by progressing through the Gate of Infinity area and defeating the miniboss Gloombound Wraith after retrieving a specific item to unlock the boss door. Vendors are also in play: the Hand of Rock can be purchased from a Tavern Keeper for 1500 coin under the “Order Drink” option, and separately the Infused Stone is sold by a vendor called The Collector who only appears once the in-game time shifts to night, also for 1500 coin. None of this is missable long-term — none of the Tarstones are missable, and you can find them all after the final boss in free-roam before choosing to enter New Game+. If you’re still early and want a route through that first stretch of map, the Mortal Shell II first hours guide covers the opening beacons that unlock most of this loot.

There’s no single fastest way to fill ten slots, because the sources above don’t compete with each other so much as fill different gaps.

With 10 Tarstone slots, builds can get pretty nutty by the time you’ve upgraded them, but that phrase cuts both ways — nutty in a good way if you commit, messy if you don’t. The math is blunt: 73 stones, 10 slots, meaning any finished build is running roughly one in seven of what exists. That’s not a suggestion to grab whatever’s shiny, it’s a forcing function to decide early what your build is actually doing and then leave the rest on the ground. A reviewer running the game described using one stone that increased attack speed each time it hit a foe, another that increased damage reduction, and another that boosted melee damage when health dropped — three Support picks, one clear defensive-aggressive identity, not a grab-bag.

There’s no official number from Cold Symmetry on how long this takes, but based on how spread out the named stones are across bosses, side dungeons, and vendors, budget somewhere around eight to twelve hours of focused play to gather and level a full ten-stone set built around one working combo. That’s the honest cost of a real build here, not a rough guess — expect more if you’re chasing max level on all ten instead of just the two or three that carry the build.

The four Support slots behave like a soulslike ring: equip once, and the buff applies no matter what Shell or weapon you’re currently using. Combat, Infusion, and Ability slots do not work that way. Combat in Mortal Shell 2 revolves around five interconnected systems: the Shells you inhabit, the Weapons and Sidearms you wield, the Seals that shape your defensive options, and the Tarstones that let you customise all of the above, and the weapon-bound stones only apply while that specific weapon or sidearm is equipped. Switch weapons and you don’t carry that Combat or Infusion pick with you unless the new item is compatible. Combat, Infusion, and Ability Tarstones can only be equipped on certain weapons or sidearms — you aren’t able to use any Tarstone with any weapon or sidearm. Some are even built around one specific item: a stone like Hand of Rock is specifically for the Troubadour’s Lute sidearm, and most projectile abilities are wasted on other sidearms. One review of the full game put it plainly too: some Tarstones work on anything, but most are specific about which items they can affect. Practically, this means a weapon Tarstone can hit harder per slot than a Support one, because it’s tuned to exactly what that weapon already does — but only if you check compatibility before committing resources to it. The Resolve costs tied to Ability stones connect directly into how Resolve and Seals work as a system, which is covered in the combat and Resolve guide.

No. Tarstone progress is tied to the stone itself, not to whichever Shell you happen to be wearing when you equip it. That means swapping your Shell at a beacon doesn’t wipe out the XP or level you’ve already put into a Tarstone — you can try a different Shell class entirely and bring your leveled stones straight into the new loadout. This is the part that removes the biggest hesitation around experimenting: you’re not gambling progress every time you want to test whether a defensive Shell suits your Combat and Ability picks better than an aggressive one. Shell selection itself — which class fits which playstyle — is worth its own read rather than a rehash here, but the short version for Tarstones is that the stone slots stay yours no matter what you’re wearing them on.

Spreading picks across multiple weapons

Because Combat, Infusion, and Ability slots are weapon-bound, switching weapons mid-run scatters your build across gear that isn’t upgraded to match. The usual advice for beginners is to pick one weapon and commit to its upgrade path early, because spreading resources thin across multiple weapons leaves you underpowered across the board. The same logic applies to Tarstones sitting on that weapon.

Treating four Support slots as filler

You have 10 slots in total, some of which are designated exclusively for certain types, and Support is the biggest single bucket at four. Players who dump generic damage stones in there without checking for survivability or Resolve-related passives end up with a build that hits hard for exactly one encounter before it falls apart.

Trying to sample everything at once

A full review of the game noted you have a lot of Tarstone slots and a lot of stones you will eventually unlock, and it can be a bit much early on. The mistake isn’t having options, it’s refusing to cut any of them. Ten slots means picking one Infusion type, one Ability pairing, and committing rather than rotating a new stone in every time something shiny drops.