Bulk recycling is how most players clear out old gear in Where Winds Meet, and it is also how good weapons quietly disappear. The game includes a per-item lock that blocks selling, dismantling, and recycling, and it takes one click to turn on or off.
Quick answer: Open the main menu, go to Bag, select the item, and click the padlock icon in the top-right corner of its detail panel. A padlock on the item’s thumbnail means it is protected; no padlock means it can be scrapped.
What the item lock blocks in Where Winds Meet
The lock is a single toggle with a single job. Once an item is locked, the game refuses to let it be sold, dismantled, or recycled, so it survives any cleanup pass you make on your inventory. It does not change the item’s stats, durability, or whether you can equip it.
The status is always visible at a glance. Locked entries carry a small padlock in the top-right corner of their inventory thumbnail, so you can scan a full page of gear without opening each item.
| Item type | Where it lives | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Weapons and equipment | Bag → Gear | Dragonshadow Bow, Vanguard Sentinel, Gold Inlay Umbrella |
| Development materials | Bag → Develop | Small Tuning Stone: Glint, Attunement Stone: Falcon |
How to lock an item you want to keep
Note: The toggle works the same way on stacked materials as it does on a single weapon, so a locked stack of tuning stones stays out of any recycling batch.
How to unlock gear before selling or dismantling it
Unlocking uses the exact same control. If a weapon such as Vanguard Sentinel has outlived its usefulness and you want it gone, you clear the padlock first and then scrap it as normal.
Unlocking materials from the Recycle screen
Development materials follow the same rule, which trips people up when they try to clear out a pile of tuning stones. Locked entries such as Small Tuning Stone: Falcon or Small Tuning Stone: Fieryheart cannot be added to a recycling batch until the padlock is removed.
How to tell the lock worked
There are two reliable checks. The padlock icon on the thumbnail is the visual confirmation, and the recycling flow is the practical one: if you try to scrap something that is still protected, the game returns the message Cannot recycle locked items instead of processing it.
If an item refuses to recycle, the cause is almost always that single toggle. Reopen the item, look at the top-right of the detail panel, and clear the padlock before trying again.
Locking is worth doing early on anything you plan to keep, especially a main weapon or a set of upgrade stones you are saving for a future build. The toggle costs nothing to flip, and it removes the one mistake that inventory cleanups tend to produce.
