Most crafting materials and cooking ingredients follow a similar harvesting format in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, but there are outliers. Blaze Fruit is a potentially lethal outlier, but one that is well worth harvesting.
We’ll walk you through how to find and safely harvest the high-risk, high-reward ingredient known as Blaze Fruit. Strap in—it’s a wild ride.
Where to find Blaze Fruit in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
To find Blaze Fruit in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, you need to be searching for the Whip Leaf plant—but you won’t find these in abundance on the forest floor. You’ll need to take to the skies.
One of the things that makes harvesting Blaze Fruit tricky in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is the fact it isn’t a stand-alone ingredient. 90 percent of the time, something that you’re searching for can be found using Na’vi Senses, and the name of the ingredient will pop up on your screen when it is inspected. Blaze Fruit is unique in that it doesn’t come from a Blaze Fruit Plant or anything like that, rather it comes from the Whip Leaf plant.
This means that when you are trying to harvest Blaze Fruit, you cannot simply keep an eye out for the fruit itself—you need to be searching for the dangerous Whip Leaf plant to find Blaze Fruit. What makes Whip Leaf dangerous? Two things: first, it is usually only found in high-up, precarious places. Second, it can only be accessed via Ikran, and as you approach a Whip Leaf, it will attempt to strike you off of your Ikran. If it succeeds, you will almost certainly fall to your death.
Whip Leaves do not have a specific Biome or region of the map in which rare variations spawn, however, there is a way to increase the likelihood of finding Exquisite Blaze Fruit: height. The higher up you are, the greater the likelihood that you will find a rare Whip Leaf.
This means that any floating mountains are a great place to go searching for Blaze Fruit. Whip Leaves will always be on the side of a floating mountain or a cliff, never on the top. Basically, they will almost be in places that can only be approached from the back of your Ikran.
When you are searching for Whip Leaves and Blaze Fruit, you must use your Hunter’s Guide to pin the Whip Leaf plant. Because there is no guaranteed limited region to find these plants, the search can feel completely random and aimless. By pinning the Whip Leaf, you are making sure that they will always be highlighted when you activate Na’vi Senses. Trying to find a Whip Leaf without Na’vi Senses can take you a way longer time than necessary, and it’s totally possible that you’ll just fly right past them. Use your Hunter’s Guide!
How to get Blaze Fruit from the Whip Leaf plant
Once you have located a Whip Leaf, harvesting a Blaze Fruit from it is actually fairly simple, but there are some important steps that you need to make sure you are following.
- Make sure your weapon is holstered.
- This is an easy mistake to make, especially because Ikran riding takes place in first person.
- If you have a weapon drawn, you cannot harvest Blaze Fruit from the back of your Ikran.
- Utilize the Reduce Speed feature.
- This is done by reversing the flight direction. You can’t fly backward, so you will just gradually come to a stop.
- You need to fly as slow as possible when you approach a Whip Leaf, or else you will almost certainly be struck and dismounted.
- Make sure you see the blue harvesting HUD icon before approaching.
- If you don’t see the blue dot, you may have your weapon out or you may have already harvested this Whip Leaf recently.
- Whatever the reason, if you don’t see a blue dot, you cannot get Blaze Fruit.
With your weapon holstered, approach a Whip Leaf head on as slowly as possible. The Blaze Fruit is located at the very end of the plant’s whip, so it will be closest to you when you are approaching the plant (this is where the blue dot will be located). All you need to do is spam the harvest button (E, X, or Square) as you slowly approach the Fruit.
When done correctly, you are actually able to snag the Blaze Fruit from the end of the Whip Leaf without the plant ever taking a swipe at you. You will be given two Blaze Fruit from a single harvest, and there is no mini-game that needs to be completed (unless of course you count risking your life).
How to get rare Blaze Fruit
Blaze Fruit has frustrated me more than any other ingredient because there isn’t a set location where rare variations spawn. Theoretically, they can be anywhere. I have scoured the floating mountains near the Ikran Rookery for nearly an hour without coming across a single Exquisite or even Superior Whip Leaf, and other times they seem to fall right into my lap.
The only rule is that the higher up you are, the more likely a rare Whip Leaf will spawn—although there does also seem to be a cutoff point where they will stop spawning altogether. I recommend looking on and around the broken arches in the northeast section of the Upper Plains—this is where I was able to most consistently find rare Blaze Fruit.
The ideal harvesting condition for Blaze Fruit is Rain, and so long as you successfully harvest the fruit without being struck, you will also get the Pristine bonus. Because Exquisite Whip Leaves are so rare and troublesome to find, I suggest making sure you meet both harvest bonus conditions. If you encounter an Exquisite Blaze Fruit when it isn’t raining, you should create a custom marker at the location and then fast-travel to the nearest Na’vi encampment, where you can Pass Time by resting at a fireplace. Continue passing time until it begins raining, and then return to the custom map marker you created for the Exquisite Blaze Fruit. It will still be there when you return.