How to get Forgotten Souls in Diablo 4

Diablo 4 has tons of new items and crafting materials that can be used to create a wide variety of weapons, armor, and more. Forgotten Soul is one of these salvaged materials that can be used to upgrade powerful items and make your gear even stronger.

Forgotten Soul is a crafting item that you likely won’t need until you hit the late-game content in Diablo 4. After we progressed through the main campaign and began to collect Legendary items, we very quickly realized Forgotten Soul is arguably one of the most necessary resources if you want to upgrade your most powerful gear.

Considering the high value of Forgotten Soul, it can be extremely difficult to obtain. If you are looking to acquire Forgotten Souls in Diablo 4, this is what you need to do.

What are Forgotten Souls used for in Diablo 4?

Forgotten Souls is an end-game crafting item that most prominently allows you to upgrade Legendary gear. With Forgotten Souls, you can also re-roll gear stats. During my first run-through of Diablo 4, I basically never encountered Forgotten Souls as I rarely upgraded gear, but this item became essential during later game content.

If you don’t have any Legendary gear on you right now, you can get it by starting and completing dungeons, world events, Helltide events, and Whispers of the Dead end-game activities.

Once you have acquired Forgotten Souls, venture to the nearest town’s blacksmith and select your Legendary item of choice to upgrade. Before you upgrade, you will be able to see your weapon’s prospective stat increases. Remember, Forgotten Souls are extremely rare and valuable, so do your research before you click the Upgrade button and choose the item that you want to upgrade.

How to farm Forgotten Souls in Diablo 4

Farming Forgotten Souls in Diablo 4 can be tricky given it only drops from Helltide events. Helltide events are special world events that randomly spawn in each of the five major zones every 75 minutes and last for 60 minutes. The best way to farm Forgotten Souls during Helltide events is to do what you’ve probably been doing all game: killing demons. Unfortunately, the drop rate of Forgotten Souls is quite low and 60 minutes might go by without you getting a single Forgotten Soul.

You can also get Forgotten Souls by opening Mystery Chests, the most expensive and most coveted of the Helltide chests. They cost 175 Aberrant Cinders, but they can definitely be worth it.

Helltide events last for one hour with a 75-minute break between demonic invasions, so you can jump between Helltide events fairly quickly. Whenever you’re in the fray, look to take down mini-bosses, loot Helltide chests, and find Screaming Hell Vein ore deposits. Do this and your Diablo 4 weaponry will soon be upgraded beyond belief.

Best Diablo 4 Forgotten Soul locations: Helltide World events

The only way to get Forgotten Souls is to complete Helltide activities in Diablo 4. Helltide events become available once you have access to unlocked World Tier three by completing the main storyline and the first capstone dungeon.

Once you unlock World Tier Three, you will begin to notice randomized world events occurring around the map. Helltide events are marked by Lilith’s army overtaking an entire region of the map across Sanctuary. These events will be hard to miss, given that a fifth of the map will be completely infested with demons.

During Helltide events, there are three main methods of acquiring Forgotten Souls. First, you can locate ore deposits dubbed Screaming Hell Veins during this event. Break open these ore chunks and you will have a chance to gain Forgotten Souls. Second, you can get Forgotten Souls from opening and looting Helltide Chests. Lastly, you can also obtain some as random drops from higher-tier enemies such as Elites.

Related: Can you play Diablo 4 solo?

Best Forgotten Souls group farming method

Helltide farming is far more efficient in a group since it lets you kill more things and more quickly. This leads to more Forgotten Souls dropping from Elites and also lets you open more chests, speeding up your farming in general.

If you have a group of friends who want to specifically focus on finding Forgotten Souls, though, you can look for special resource nodes called Screaming Hell Veins. These appear sporadically throughout the Helltide and drop Forgotten Souls, but a trick popularized by streamer imexile lets your party open multiple nodes quickly, as spotted on Wowhead.

Normally, interacting with Screaming Hell Veins while in a group will consume the node for everyone nearby. If one of your teammates isn’t in the same area, though, their node won’t be consumed when a party member interacts with it. This means you can effectively trick the game into letting you crack open a node multiple times and farm multiple Forgotten Souls, so long as you travel to town before one player opens the node. This method may also work for farming Fiend Rose, based on our testing, since we duplicated the node’s resource drops.

If you find a Screaming Hell Vein while you’re on a group, keep only one player by the resource node and have the rest teleport to the nearest hub. The first player can interact with the Screaming Hell Vein to collect some Forgotten Souls. The second player can teleport back to the area, which will let them interact with the resource node again and drop more Forgotten Souls for player one. The rest of the team can repeat the process to drop even more resources.

This process is extremely simple, and the hardest parts may be finding more players to run this with and tracking down the Forgotten Souls. Since the first player to interact with the Screaming Hell Veins gets the most Forgotten Souls, we recommend swapping out positions and inverting the order after each node so everyone gets a fair share of Forgotten Souls.

Traveling to the nearest hub through your portal (T or down on your D-Pad) will let you make a quick stop to sell off whatever loot you’ve gotten before returning to the Helltide. If you weren’t close to a node, traveling to the nearest hub will also let you teleport to your party members if they’re close to a Screaming Hell Vein, allowing you to make the most out of your Forgotten Soul farming.

Take it from us, Helltide events can be some of the most difficult activities in Diablo 4, especially if you’re underleveled. Not only will you need to fight off swarms of demons, but you’ll also face off against powerful bosses. Personally, I’ve died countless times when I was trying to farm Forgotten Souls. You should also note the drop percentage across Helltide Chests and Screaming Hell Vein ore are both quite low, so do not expect to be swimming in Legendary upgrades after just one event.