How to find Wild Hearts' tsukumo quickly and easily

I'm nothing without my little tsukumo companion in Wild Hearts. I may be the big bad hunter, but my tsukumo keeps me alive, distracts the monsters I'm fighting at key moments, and refills my supply of the celestial thread I use to build Wild Hearts' big contraptions. But to do all that my tsukumo needs to be leveled up with old cogs from other little robo-guardians hiding around each of Azuma's hunting grounds. There are 50 tsukumo in each region in Wild Hearts, tempting you to explore every nook and cranny, building top and rocky outcropping. 

Once you stumble upon a tsukumo, all you have to do is press a button to befriend them, and you'll be rewarded with a cog part used to upgrade your own companion. It's easy—no worries about them running away or being hurt by a monster. And you're going to want a load of cogs, because your tsukumo has the following four stats to upgrade:

• Attack form - How much damage it deals to the kemono when attacking
• Defense form - How much of a wallop it can take before being temporarily knocked out
• Assist form - How effectively it can heal you, and how quickly it revives
• Threader form - How quickly it can supply you with more celestial thread

To upgrade your tsukumo, sit by a fire and use the "Enhance tsukumo" menu. Each time you upgrade one stat, it'll cost a couple more cogs for the next tier. Upgrading your tsukumo also increases your thread capacity, allowing you to build more karakuri during battle. That alone is a big reason to track down as many tsukumo as possible.

You'll find the locations of quite a few tsukumo just by naturally exploring, but you could waste hours trying to hunt down the stragglers. Thankfully there's a better way. Here's the fast, easy way to track down the hundreds of tsukumo locations in Wild Hearts.

How to find all of Wild Hearts' tsukumo

As you're running around the environment, keep your ear attuned for the mechanical clattering sound of the tsukumo. They're audible from a decent distance—if you hear one, stop moving for a moment and listen until you can triangulate which direction the sound is coming from. Odds are good the nearby tsukumo will be hidden away in a little alcove or up on top of a building or rock or tree branch. They're generally not hard to find with the help of that auditory clue.

But that's only going to take you so far. Once you've found 20-30 of the 50 tsukumo in each region, you're much less likely to run into them while wandering around. The solution to finding every tsukumo in Wild Hearts lies in the karakuri tech tree.

Karakuri are the contraptions you build in Wild Hearts, including combat items like the crate and spring, as well as "dragon karakuri" like the tent, forge, and fire you use to make camp. One of the first dragon karakuri you get is the Hunting Tower, which scans for kemono and shows you where they are on the map. An upgrade for the Hunting Tower in the tech tree will make the scan also reveal where tsukumo are on the map.

Here's where to find the tsukumo scanning ability on the tech tree.

It's quite a few upgrades deep in the tree, but if you largely stick to the left side of the tree you'll get to the Deep Probe upgrade before long. You earn orbs to spend on the tech tree simply by fighting and slaying kemono, so the more you hunt, the closer you'll get to this upgrade.

As you may notice in the upgrade description, this hunting tower enhancement also identifies documents on each map, which contain bits of added story detail. But there are many more tsukumo on each map than documents, so you'll mostly find what you're looking for.

Once you have this upgrade, make sure to place at least three hunting towers in each zone so that your scan covers the entire area (there's also an upgrade earlier in the tree to expand the scan range, which is helpful). Once upgraded to the Deep Probe, use your hunting tower and you'll see a bunch of question mark icons appear on your map. Head to each question mark to find a tsukumo (or the rare document).