Permanent Pickups, shortened to PP items, are equipable consumables in Mortal Shell 2 that recharge on their own rather than running out for good. You can start collecting them from the opening hours, and each one carries an effect that helps you push through tougher stretches of the world. The game’s tutorial glosses over the finer rules, which is where confusion usually starts.
Quick answer: Equip one PP item in the Active slot and one in the Passive slot from the Equipment menu. Every time you rest at a Beacon, all PP items refill and become usable again, the same way your Mether’s Pulse healing flask does.
How Active and Passive slots work
Every Permanent Pickup has two distinct effects, and you choose how it contributes based on which slot you place it in. You can hold one item in each slot at the same time, and you can swap either one at any point from the Equipment menu.
| Effect type | How it triggers |
|---|---|
| Active | You fire it manually with a button press (D-Pad Down or 1). It has limited uses that refresh when you rest at a Beacon. |
| Passive | Always running in the background. Most are flat damage mitigation boosts, though some items break that pattern. |
Note: Active uses are shared across all PP items. If you spend every active charge and then swap to a different item, you do not get a fresh set of uses. Passive effects have no such restriction, so switching Passive items is always safe.
Familiarity: the PP upgrade system
Familiarity is how a Permanent Pickup gets stronger. Instead of spending currency, you upgrade an item simply by collecting more copies of that same item. Each Familiarity tier makes the effect more potent, and there are three tiers for every PP item in the game.
| Familiarity tier | Requirement |
|---|---|
| Tier 1 | Collect 1 copy of the item. |
| Tier 2 | Collect 10 copies of the same item. |
| Tier 3 | Collect 50 copies of the same item. |
The Weltcap is a clear example of how the tiers scale. It handles passive healing and on-command health regeneration, and its effects grow across each tier as follows.
| Weltcap tier | Active | Passive |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 | Restores 20% Health over 30s, once per rest. | Slowly refills Health to 20%. |
| Tier 2 | Adds 1 extra use per rest. | Slowly refills Health to 35%. |
| Tier 3 | Restores 50% Health over 30s. | Slowly refills Health to a maximum that scales with how many Weltcaps you have found. |
Tier 3 scaling and NG+ carryover
The Tier 3 passive bonus usually has no cap. Once you cross the 50-copy threshold, the effect keeps climbing for every additional copy you pick up. With the Weltcap, the passive “Slowly refills Health to a maximum proportional to Weltcaps found” starts at 50 and grows the more you gather.
Familiarity progress carries into New Game Plus, so you can keep raising these passives across several playthroughs. The gains have diminishing returns, though, and can never hit 100% effectiveness. Each extra copy adds a little less than the one before it, and this holds true for other items as well.
Rare items that skip the 1-10-50 path
A few Permanent Pickups do not follow the standard 1 to 10 to 50 upgrade curve. Items such as the Grisha Remnant, Mango, and Seedbearer’s Scripture are extremely rare and only appear a handful of times per playthrough, so their Familiarity thresholds work differently. Treat these as one-off pickups rather than something you can farm to Tier 3.
Because these effects reset in full at every Beacon, the smart move is to treat PP items as a renewable toolkit rather than something to hoard. Match your Active slot to the fight ahead, lean on a Passive that covers your weakest defense, and keep collecting duplicates so your most-used items climb the Familiarity tiers over time.
