Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is famous for its sprawling cavalry charges and grueling siege warfare, but beneath its grand strategic conquest lies a sandbox littered with developer pranks, secret scene geometry, hidden town loot, and clever historical nods. While most commanders spend hundreds of hours glued to the world map issuing troop orders, TaleWorlds tucked bizarre environmental quirks and deep lore callbacks into the backstreets of its cities and the corners of its battle scenes. If you only ever play Bannerlord from the saddle, you are bypassing some of the strangest and most rewarding details Calradia has to offer.
Finding these secrets requires stepping off your warhorse, entering scenes on foot, and exploiting both the physical game engine and the built-in developer console. Much like scouring every nook in Everspace 2 for hidden rewards or taking on dedicated secret hunting in classic RPGs, tracking down Bannerlord's oddities demands sharp eyes and a willingness to explore outside the quest log. From forgotten chests tucked away behind city ramparts to tongue-in-cheek cinematic homages, here are the best secret locations and hidden Easter eggs you completely missed in Bannerlord.
The Hidden Chests Tucked Inside Calradia’s Major Cities
Veterans of Mount & Blade: Warband fondly remember sprinting through Rivacheg, Tihr, and Jelkala to open hidden scene chests containing the legendary Strange Armor set. When TaleWorlds launched Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord on Steam, they maintained this legacy by populating town walk-around scenes with physical loot containers, environmental easter eggs, and inaccessible backrooms designed to reward curious explorers.
Take a walk through the imperial city of Epicrotea. If you bypass the market stalls and follow the river canal toward the eastern aqueduct foundations, you can scramble up the wooden framework and roof ledges to discover hidden caches and out-of-place props. In several Battanian settlements like Marunath and Car Banseth, exploring the dense, vertical wooden scaffolding behind the smithy reveals abandoned campfires, hidden weapon racks, and small storage crates tucked far beyond standard NPC pathfinding zones.
While regular gameplay encourages you to click through town menus to trade and recruit, physically exploring scenes grants you access to unique layout advantages during urban gang warfare. When clearing street thugs to take over alleyways, knowing these hidden elevated walkways, dead ends, and secret rooftops lets your bow-wielding companions turn what should be an open brawl into an absolute turkey shoot.
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View on Steammoz Store →Legacy Weapons, Dev Blades, and Hidden Smithing Templates
Bannerlord's modular weapon crafting engine is legendary for its flexibility, but deep within the game code lie pre-built blades, test weapons, and unique relic items that cannot simply be purchased from the local weaponsmith. Much like analyzing weapon tiers in Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon, knowing how these hidden stats match up against crafted gear changes how you arm your warlord.
By default, high-tier weapons like the Reaper (a devastating two-handed Battanian falx blade) or the Avalanche (a brutal Vlandian executioner axe) are awarded only through marriage alliances, ruler gifts, or rare royal inheritances. However, hidden within the developer asset registry are debug weapon templates like the legendary Test Javelin and leftover Warband assets that carry impossible handling values, absurd reach, and broken swing speeds.
| Weapon / Relic Name | Base Damage Type | Swing / Thrust Damage | Handling & Speed | How to Acquire |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Reaper | Cut (Two-Handed) | 134 Cut | 92 Handling / 98 Speed | Battanian Royal Marriage / High-tier Clan Reward |
| Avalanche | Cut (Two-Handed Axe) | 127 Cut | 79 Handling / 88 Speed | Vlandian Ruler Clan Defeat / Execution Cache |
| Early Access "Nuke" Javelin | Pierce / Blunt | 210+ Pierce | 99 Handling / 110 Speed | Tier 5 Harpoon Head Crafting (Legacy Patch Exploit) |
| Strange Greatsword (Warband Asset) | Cut / Pierce | 105 Cut / 42 Pierce | 94 Handling / 91 Speed | Developer Console Asset: campaign.give_item_to_main_party |
| Mountain Blade | Cut (One-Handed) | 88 Cut | 95 Handling / 96 Speed | Hidden Bandit Hero Loot Table Drops |
If you want to legitimately outclass these secret relics, diving into high-level Smithing with the right perks (such as Artisan Smith and Curator) allows you to forge custom masterworks that match or exceed developer weapons. But tracking down these rare, pre-assembled museum pieces gives your character an aura of authenticity that forged weapons just cannot match.
Developer Test Chambers and the Unmapped Battle Arenas
TaleWorlds left dozens of white-box testing levels, diagnostic arenas, and empty scene templates inside the game package. These environments were used throughout Bannerlord’s extensive early access lifecycle to calibrate physics, test ragdoll trajectories, and optimize combat collision meshes. While regular campaign travel will never direct you to them, you can force the engine to load these unmapped playgrounds using scene debug modes.
By enabling cheat mode in your configuration files and launching the developer console, you can transport your character directly into unused test scenes, labeled in the engine as test_battle_terrain or unrendered arena grids. Some of these chambers feature perfectly flat, checkerboard floors stretching into an endless void, dotted with wooden siege towers, isolated crenellations, and rows of stationary training dummies.
These test chambers are an absolute goldmine for theorycrafters. Instead of risking an entire 300-man elite army on the campaign map to test unit formations, jumping into test scenes lets you spawn opposing troop blocks, measure missile drop-off distances without wind interference, and calculate exact swing speeds against stationary heavy armor. It is the closest thing Bannerlord has to a cleanroom laboratory.
Pop-Culture Nods and Monty Python Dialogue References
The writing team at TaleWorlds has always had an unapologetic love for classic medieval satire, and Bannerlord continues that legacy. If you exhaust the dialogue options with various minor faction leaders, looters, and eccentric lords, you will bump directly into sly nods to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, historical medieval literature, and classic fantasy tropes.
When demanding surrender from low-level looters or cornering rogue Vlandian mercenaries in taverns, you will occasionally trigger defensive dialogue that playfully echoes the famous French Taunter. Lines referencing suspicious lineages, insults questioning your courage, and dismissive remarks about parentage are peppered across the lower-tier rogue dialogue pools. Similarly, conversations with certain Battanian forest wanderers feature bizarre superstitions regarding killer rodents, lake spirits, and strange women distributing blades as valid bases for government.
Beyond cinematic humor, the companion wanderer pool itself features hand-crafted backstories paying homage to historical and legendary figures. You might run into "the Falcon," an elite scout whose background mirrors historical mercenary commanders from the Italian Renaissance, or "the Golden," a wandering cataphract inspired directly by the Varangian Guard of ancient Byzantium. These wanderers are not just stat sticks for your caravans; their personal narratives are stuffed with historical inside jokes that reward history buffs.
Geographic Callbacks: Tracing the Ruins of Warband Across Calradia
Bannerlord is set in 1084, roughly 200 years prior to the events of Mount & Blade: Warband (which takes place in 1257). Because of this timeline shift, the entire continent of Calradia serves as one colossal historical Easter egg. The crumbling ruins and growing kingdoms you manage in Bannerlord are the direct ancestors of the nations and strongholds that players conquered a decade ago.
If you cross-reference geographic landmarks between the two games, you can visit the exact spots where iconic cities will eventually be constructed. The Vlandian capital of Pravend is the clear predecessor to Swadia's coastal stronghold of Praven. Travel east into the Sturgian tundra, and settlements like Varcheg reflect the early Norse-inspired settlements that would later splinter into the Kingdom of the Vaegirs and the Kingdom of the Nords.
| Bannerlord Settlement / Region | Warband Historical Equivalent | Geographic / Lore Connection | Hidden Architectural Clue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pravend & Ocs Hall | Praven & Suno (Swadia) | Heartland of Western feudal cavalry dominance | Identical coastal cliff topography and bay curvature |
| Varcheg & Balgard | Wercheg & Rivacheg (Nords / Vaegirs) | Frozen northern coastal ports vulnerable to raiders | Longship dock remains and timber-framed hill walls |
| Dunglanys & Marunath | Uxkhal & Suno Borderlands | The dense Battanian forests clear-cut by Swadians | Overgrown stone circles visible on high mountain ridges |
| Ortysia & Garontor Castle | Jelkala & Veluca Gateway (Rhodoks) | Chokepoint mountain passes framing the southern sea | Imperial aqueduct ruins matching Rhodok bridge layouts |
| Askar & Sanala | Shariz & Durquba (Sarranid Sultanate) | Aserai desert oases with lucrative trade lanes | Ancient mud-brick palace foundations beneath city keeps |
Exploring the Battanian wilderness on foot is particularly poignant. The ancient stone circles and moss-covered megaliths hidden throughout the Battanian highlands mark the twilight of an indigenous Celtic-style culture that completely vanishes by the time Warband begins. By comparing Calradia's borders, you are literally witnessing the cultural extinction that Warband's lore only hinted at in dusty dialogue logs.
How to Activate Debug Tools to Uncover Calradia’s Best Secrets
If you want to track down every piece of hidden geometry, out-of-bounds prop placement, and test scene on your own, you must unlock Bannerlord's native developer tools. TaleWorlds built extensive scene manipulation tools directly into the engine, and accessing them takes only a couple of file edits.
Just like tweaking configuration files to stabilize performance in demanding PC titles or optimizing your setup for titles like Far Cry 6, modifying Bannerlord's engine settings gives you total diagnostic freedom. Here is how to unlock full freecam and debug console privileges:
- Navigate to your PC's documents folder:
Documents\Mount and Blade II Bannerlord\Configs. - Open
engine_config.txtusing any basic text editor like Notepad. - Locate the line reading
cheat_mode = 0and change the value tocheat_mode = 1. - Save the file, boot up Bannerlord, and press Alt + ~ (Tilde) on your keyboard while in-game to toggle the command console.
- Enter any settlement or battlefield, pause the action, and press Ctrl + F5 or enter photo mode to detach the camera from your character's spine.
With the camera unlocked, you can fly beneath city water canals, inspect the interiors of locked palace towers, and examine props positioned outside the normal combat boundaries. In several Imperial town scenes, flying through cliff faces reveals ancient subterranean chambers and developer lighting rigs that never get exposed during ordinary playthroughs.
If you find yourself short on resources while testing these mechanics, or if you are tired of standard trade route loops, you can read our deep dive on efficient leveling and resource farming to pick up fundamental resource-management habits that translate directly into Bannerlord's early-game clan snowballing, or explore similar strategies in our grinding and fast leveling breakdown.
The Subtle Details That Make Calradia Come Alive
Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is far more than a kingdom management spreadsheet tied to a combat engine. TaleWorlds poured incredible environmental storytelling into Calradia's geography, honoring its Warband roots while leaving a digital trail of breadcrumbs for players patient enough to explore on foot.
Next time your faction calls for a temporary peace treaty, do not just speed up campaign time at 3x speed waiting for the next war declaration. Stash your heavy lance, recruit a couple of loyal companions, step inside the gates of an ancient city on foot, and start poking around the back alleys. Between the hidden loot chests, developer testing relics, and historical ruins of kingdoms yet to come, Calradia still holds plenty of secrets waiting to be unearthed by an observant warlord.