Tour Walkthrough: Unlock Every Trader and Map

The tutorial chapter that holds your account hostage

You finish the tutorial raid, open the trader screen, and find most of them greyed out. Half the map list is missing too. This is the wall every new Escape from Tarkov account hits, and the way through it is a single story chapter called Tour.

Tour is the guided onboarding chapter the game adds to your quest log automatically. Unlike ordinary trader tasks, it is sequential: each step unlocks the next, and each step hands you either a trader, a map, or both. Until you finish it, Prapor, Skier, Peacekeeper and Mechanic stay locked, and you cannot queue directly for Customs, Factory, Woods, Shoreline, Reserve, Lighthouse or Streets of Tarkov. Everything else you want to do in your first weeks, from Gunsmith to the flea market grind, sits behind this chain.

This walkthrough covers all ten steps in order: what each one asks, what it unlocks, where players actually get stuck, and how to prepare so you never run a raid twice for the same hand-in. Everything here is checked against Patch 1.1.5.0, the September 8, 2026 build that shipped the Lighthouse rework, in the middle of Season 1 KORD BREACH. Requirement lists like this one tend to survive patches, but numbers and unlock conditions do drift, so treat any guide older than this review date with suspicion.

Two habits will save you more time than any route advice. First, read the Found in Raid section below before you loot anything, because half of the Tour's hand-ins only count if the item was looted in a raid you survived. Second, start hoarding the moment you finish step one: building materials, spare weapons and dogtags are all things you will be asked for later, and finding them deliberately is far slower than finding them incidentally.

At a glance: the ten steps

The whole chapter fits on one screen. Skim this table once, then read the step-by-step sections for the details that actually kill runs.

Notice the shape of the chain. Steps one and two are errands inside the starter zone. Steps three through six are a tour of the mid-tier maps, each one paying out a trader and the next map. Step seven is a story beat on Shoreline. Steps eight through ten are the expensive endgame gates: dogtags, twenty thousand dollars, and a Labs keycard run.

The unlock order matters for your economy. Mechanic arrives at step four and is your source for keycards and weapon modding. Prapor arrives at step five and becomes your cheap Soviet ammunition pipeline. Peacekeeper arrives at step six, and you will need his dollar shop at step nine, so do not ignore him once he opens.

Found in Raid: the rule that gates half the Tour

Three of the ten steps demand hand-ins marked found in raid, and this single rule causes more stuck Tour progress than any firefight in the game.

An item carries the found in raid mark only if you looted it inside a raid and then extracted with the Survived status. Two other sources also count: anything your hideout crafts, and anything handed to you as a quest reward. Everything else fails. Gear you brought into the raid from your own stash loses the mark the moment you load in, so you cannot cheese the weapon hand-in by carrying two rifles from home.

The extraction status is the part that bites. If the raid ends as killed in action, missing in action, left the action, or a run-through, nothing you picked up counts as found in raid. A run-through is what the game calls a raid where you barely participated, and you avoid it by either earning at least 200 experience before you leave or staying in the raid for seven minutes or longer. When you are carrying the fifth building material for Skier, do not sprint to the extract in ninety seconds; loot a few more containers or wait out the clock first.

Two exceptions are worth knowing once you unlock them. Items sent home through the BTR Driver's delivery service keep their mark, and items you carry through a map transit keep it too. For everything else, plan every Tour hand-in raid around one question: what is my Survived extract, and how do I reach it alive with this loot in my bag.

One consequence should be stated plainly because it frustrates so many players: flea market purchases do not work. Anything another player sells you arrives without the mark, and there is no way to restore it. The dogtags, the weapons and the building materials must come out of raids you personally survived, or out of your hideout's crafting stations.

Steps 1 and 2: Ground Zero and the quarter-million handshake

The opening pair of steps is a warm-up with a price tag: prove you can extract, then prove you can save money.

Step one is the tutorial raid on Ground Zero, the business district around the TerraGroup headquarters. Ground Zero is the designed starter map and it protects you with level-split matchmaking: players below level 21 fight in their own pool of nine to ten players, separate from the veterans. Take the raid seriously anyway, because dying here just queues you again. Learn the extraction panel, pick one of the always-available exits such as Emercom Checkpoint or the Nakatani basement stairs, and leave. The only objective is to walk out.

Step two sends you to Therapist, who is one of the two traders available from the very start, and asks for 250,000 rubles. That is a real sum on a fresh account, so treat your first raids as income runs: loot containers, take the paid car extract only when the alternative is dying with a full bag, and sell to whichever trader pays best for each category. Therapist herself buys many barter goods and all medical items, which makes her a natural place to liquidate early loot toward her own fee.

The hand-in unlocks Streets of Tarkov, the dense downtown map, though you have little reason to rush there immediately; its player count of twelve to sixteen is the highest in the standard map list and it punishes slow movers. The more important point is what step two teaches: this chapter will repeatedly ask you for money and goods, and the rubles you burn at Therapist are the first down payment. Start the habit of stacking cash and keeping a quest-item corner in your stash from day one.

Step 3: Ragman's Interchange errand

Your first cross-map assignment comes from Ragman, the clothing and gear trader who, like Therapist, is available from the start: survive an extraction on Interchange, or simply visit the map three times.

Interchange is the ULTRA shopping mall, a three-level retail maze holding eleven to fifteen players per raid with forty minutes on the clock. The alternative completion condition is the friendly part of this step: if a clean survival proves difficult, three separate visits also satisfy Ragman. Even so, play for the survive, because the extraction practice transfers directly to the four map-survival steps that follow.

Stay out of the mall's center on your first runs. Killa patrols the anchor stores and central shops, and Tagilla can appear in the underground parking below Goshan, and neither of them cares that you are on a tutorial quest. Skirt the outer corridors, learn where Emercom Checkpoint and Railway Exfil sit, and treat the famous KIBA arms store as a later problem since it needs power plus two keys.

Finishing the errand unlocks Skier as a trader and Customs as a map, and this is the hinge of the whole chapter. Skier deals in euros and western commercial gear, and his quest line later becomes mandatory because his Friend From the West task gates Peacekeeper's quests. One caveat to record honestly: the official Wiki's Interchange page does not carry the Tour-unlock note that the other standard maps show, so the map's exact pre-Tour entry condition is unverified as of Patch 1.1.5.0. In practice the quest sends you there, and the game lets you go; just do not assume older guides describing a locked Interchange reflect the current build.

Step 4: Skier's Customs shopping list

Skier opens with a two-part test: survive Customs, and hand over five building material or tool items that were found in raid. This is the first genuine wall for most players, and it unlocks Mechanic plus Factory.

Customs is the industrial heartland of early Tarkov: a customs terminal, fuel storage, dormitories and construction sites, ten to twelve players, thirty-five minute raids. It is also boss territory. Reshala can hold the dorms, the new gas station or the ZB-013 scav base, the Goons trio can appear at the scav base, and Partisan roams anywhere. For a quest raid where survival is the objective, plot a route that avoids those landmarks entirely and crosses the map along the quieter edges.

The five building materials are the real assignment, and they must be found in raid. Read the Found in Raid section again before you go, because this is where most players first donate a backpack of perfect loot to a run-through. Earn your 200 experience or your seven minutes, then leave through a reliable exit such as Crossroads or ZB-1011 rather than gambling on conditional extracts you have never used.

Start this collection two steps early. From your very first Ground Zero raid, treat construction loot as quest cargo and stash every qualifying material you survive with, so that when Skier asks, you are handing over a pile you already own instead of farming under pressure. Also note what the step pays: Mechanic is the modding and keycard trader whose Introduction quest later unlocks Jaeger, and Factory is the small, fast map you will need for the very next step.

Step 5: Mechanic's Factory exam

Mechanic wants proof you can handle yourself in Tarkov's most violent closet: survive Factory and hand him two weapons that were found in raid. The reward is Prapor and the Woods map.

Factory is a multi-level chemical plant built for close-range chaos, the smallest map in the game, with seven to eight players by day and five to six at night, on twenty to twenty-five minute raids. Tagilla roams the whole map with no fixed position, and cultists appear at night. The good news is that the survival objective does not care how you survive. Spawn, move deliberately toward an always-available exit like Gate 0 or Gate 3, fight only what blocks your path, and leave. Nobody awards style points in the Tour.

The two weapons must carry the found in raid mark, which means weapons looted off scavs, weapon crates or dead players in a raid you survived. The reliable loop is to treat every raid between steps as a weapons harvest: almost every AI scav carries a gun, and a scav's rifle in your bag at extract is a scav's rifle that counts. Do not bring two rifles from your stash to donate, because carried-in items lose the mark on the way in.

Hand them over and the chain pays out twice. Prapor unlocks, and he is your early-game lifeline for Soviet ammunition, magazines and grenades at ruble prices; several of his starter quests, including Debut, are immediately worth doing for experience and reputation. Woods unlocks alongside him, and Woods is where the next step happens, so you go straight from a five-minute factory fight to a thirty-five minute forest patrol.

Step 6: Three kills in the Woods

Skier returns with the chapter's first combat check: kill any three targets on Woods and extract alive. Completion unlocks Peacekeeper and Shoreline.

Woods is the Priozersk nature reserve: open forest, a central sawmill, ten to fourteen players, thirty-five minute raids. Any three targets satisfies the step, so hunt scavs rather than players. The density of AI scavs around landmarks means you do not need to chase gunfire across the map; pick a compound, work it methodically, and let the kills come to you.

Respect the map's owners. Shturman and his guards hold the sawmill, the Goons can appear near the northwest antenna or the scav bunker, and Partisan wanders the treeline. If you hear disciplined automatic fire from a position with overlapping angles, that is not three free quest kills, that is a boss camp, and the correct move is a wide detour. After your third kill, bank the progress at a safe extract like Outskirts instead of pushing deeper into the map.

Extracting alive flips two switches at once. Peacekeeper unlocks, the dollar-denominated trader for NATO weapons and western gear, and Shoreline joins your map list. Both matter immediately: Shoreline hosts the next two steps, and Peacekeeper is the man who will sell you the twenty thousand dollars you need at step nine. One warning for later: Peacekeeper's own quest line stays locked until you finish Skier's Friend From the West, a five-PMC-kill task, so expect to return to Skier's list soon.

Step 7: The radio at the Shoreline watchtower

The strangest step in the chapter involves no kills and no hand-ins: a radio conversation at a watchtower in the southeast corner of Shoreline, concerning the Terminal.

This is a story beat, not a combat trial, and it has two behavioral rules that the quest text and community documentation agree on: do not kill the guards near the tower, and do not hammer the intercom repeatedly. Approach, use the radio, listen, and leave. Players who treat the watchtower like a loot camp or mash the interaction out of impatience are the ones who report the step misbehaving.

Getting there alive is the actual challenge. Shoreline is a large coastal map, ten to fourteen players on forty-five minute raids, built around the Azure Coast health resort where Sanitar and his three guards work. The tower sits far from the resort, so route along the southern edge and give the resort, the pier and the weather station a wide berth; the Goons hold the weather station area and you are not equipped to argue with them during a story step.

The conversation is about Terminal, the militarized port south of Shoreline that you cannot enter yet. In the current build, Terminal is reached by transiting from Shoreline's harbor between 21:00 and 06:00 with an access item, and it functions as a one-way end map tied to the game's finale. Step seven is the chapter's way of planting that destination in your head. Nothing new unlocks from the radio call itself; the value is that the chain now advances to Prapor for the Shoreline survival and dogtag step.

Step 8: Five dogtags for Prapor

Prapor's turn on Shoreline pairs a survival requirement with the chapter's grindiest collection: five PMC dogtags, found in raid. Finishing unlocks Reserve.

Dogtags come from dead PMCs, yours or other players', which makes this the one Tour hand-in you cannot farm from containers. Every PMC you kill in any raid drops a tag, so the honest strategy is accumulation over time rather than dedicated hunts: take tags off every player corpse you encounter from the moment you start the chapter, stash them, and let the count build naturally while you play earlier steps.

Remember the mark. Tags looted in raids that ended in death or a run-through do not count, so a good fight followed by a greedy loot route into an ambush is worth zero. When you are carrying tags, recalculate your risk: you are no longer raiding for profit, you are escorting quest items to an extract. On the Shoreline survival leg itself, the same discipline as step seven applies, and Road to Customs or Tunnel are dependable exits.

If PvP is not your strength, pace this step with scav runs. Your scav character can loot tags off PMC corpses other players left behind, and scav raids on maps you have unlocked are zero-risk chances to pick over old fight sites. Reserve, your reward, is a nine to eleven player military base with forty minute raids and some of the richest loot rooms in the game behind its RB keys, so the grind is genuinely buying you something.

Step 9: Twenty thousand dollars for Mechanic

The penultimate step is pure economics: hand Mechanic 20,000 dollars and Lighthouse unlocks. It is the only Tour requirement denominated in foreign currency, and there is a legal shortcut.

Dollars flow through Peacekeeper. He sells dollar-denominated gear and, crucially for this step, he exchanges currency, so the 20,000 can simply be bought from him with rubles. That converts the wall into a money problem, and money problems in Tarkov are solved with loot routes and disciplined selling rather than luck. Check his exchange rate in-game, because prices shift with each economy pass.

If you unlocked Peacekeeper at step six and ignored him since, this is where that neglect gets expensive. His stock and services are the reason step six matters beyond Shoreline access. Build the habit of selling appropriate goods to him and keeping a dollar balance on hand, so the hand-in is a withdrawal rather than a scramble.

Lighthouse itself deserves respect before your first visit. Ten to twelve players, forty minute raids, a water treatment plant occupied by the Rogue faction, the Goons up north, and the lighthouse peninsula where Zryachiy guards a mined bridge that requires an encoded DSP radio transmitter to cross safely. None of that is required for the Tour, which ends its Lighthouse involvement the moment the map unlocks. Treat your early trips as reconnaissance: learn the southern road and northern checkpoint extracts before you chase the peninsula content.

Step 10: The Lab run and the Pathfinder achievement

The finale sends you into Tarkov's most punishing location: enter The Lab with a TerraGroup Labs access keycard via the Streets or Factory transit, search the manager's office and server room, find the drainage escape, and the chapter closes with The Lab permanently unlocked plus the Pathfinder achievement.

The access keycard is consumed on entry and is the real cost of the step. Mechanic sells keycards among his special stock, and the changelog records that new keycard offers were added to both Therapist and Mechanic; high-value in-raid spawns are the other route. Do not pay flea market prices for one without checking trader stock first, and never insure anything you bring, because insurance never returns from The Lab at all.

Inside, eight to ten players share thirty-minute raids with Scav Raiders instead of a normal scav population, and during season events the Raiders are swapped for Black Division operators. Every time anyone activates an extract, the map announces it over the PA and the activation can spawn additional Raiders, so other players' escapes are also combat events. The Sewage Conduit extract fits the quest's drainage theme and takes roughly eighty seconds of draining before it opens, which is a long time to stand still, so clear the area before you commit.

The three objectives, the manager's office, the server room and the escape route, are all on the quest's terms, so follow your task list rather than wandering into locked sector rooms you have no keycards for. Move between objectives during quiet windows after other teams have fought the Raiders, and remember that the run only has to succeed once. When you walk out, Tour is complete: every standard trader you need is unlocked, the full standard map pool is open, and your account has finished its tutorial.

What each unlocked trader actually gives you

The Tour unlocks four traders in sequence, and knowing what each one stocks tells you which quest lines to prioritize the moment they open.

Skier arrives first, at step three, dealing in euros and western commercial gear, and his quest line is the gate to Peacekeeper's. Mechanic arrives at step four and is the most consequential unlock in the chain: weapon modding through the Gunsmith series, keycards, and the Introduction quest that unlocks Jaeger. Prapor arrives at step five as your cheap Soviet ammunition and early-quest engine. Peacekeeper arrives at step six with dollar-priced NATO equipment and the currency exchange that step nine depends on.

Alongside the unlocks, two traders were with you from the start: Therapist for meds, post-raid healing and insurance, and Ragman for armor, rigs and backpacks. Fence is always available and his reputation is your scav karma, which quietly affects everything from vehicle extract prices to whether AI scavs help you.

What the Tour gates downstream

Finishing the chapter is not just about the ten rewards; several of Tarkov's biggest systems list Tour completion as an explicit prerequisite.

The headline example is Lightkeeper, the in-raid trader inside the Lighthouse tower. After the September 8, 2026 rework in Patch 1.1.5.0, his access conditions require completing the Tour mainline, reaching loyalty level 3 with every trader except Fence and Ref, holding Fence reputation of at least 2.0, and then asking Mechanic about working together. The reworked follow-up chain is called To the Light, but its individual task names and requirements are unverified as of this review because the Wiki's page for it did not exist when our research was compiled.

Jaeger, the survivalist trader, sits just past the Tour rather than inside it: Mechanic's Introduction quest, available from level 2, sends you to his camp on Woods and opens his store of hunting gear and the fastest, priciest insurance. Because Introduction needs Mechanic, and Mechanic needs Tour step four, every Jaeger quest line in the game is downstream of this chapter.

The endgame maps are also downstream. The Labyrinth needs a Labrys access keycard plus the Knossos LLC facility key and a transit from Shoreline, Terminal needs the night harbor transit, and Icebreaker needs the Boreas chapter and a marine repair kit. None of those journeys start until the Tour has handed you Shoreline, Lighthouse and the map knowledge to use them. If your long-term goal is the Collector quest and the Kappa container, which demands loyalty level 4 with seven traders, the Tour is the first item on that checklist whether the game says so or not.

Common failure points and how to unstick yourself

Most stuck Tour progress traces back to four repeating mistakes, and all four are avoidable once you can name them.

The run-through is mistake number one. You grab the last building material, sprint to extract in two minutes, and the raid summary says Run Through, which means no found in raid marks on anything you carried out. The fix is mechanical: earn 200 experience from kills and looting, or simply stay past seven minutes. When in doubt, check the raid timer before you touch the extract.

Mistake two is buying quest items. Flea market goods never carry the mark, so a dogtag or weapon you purchased is decoration, not progress. The only legal shortcuts in the entire chapter are the currencies: rubles for Therapist, and dollars bought from Peacekeeper for Mechanic. Everything physical must come out of a survived raid, a hideout craft, or a quest reward.

Mistake three is fighting the maps instead of routing them. Every survival step can be completed while avoiding bosses entirely, because every Tour map's boss holds predictable territory: Reshala at the dorms, Killa in the mall, Shturman at the sawmill, Sanitar in the resort, Tagilla and the Raiders where the loot is thickest. Skirt the landmarks, finish the step, and come back for bosses when a quest actually asks.

Mistake four is impatience at scripted moments. At the Shoreline watchtower, killing the guards or spamming the intercom is exactly how players break the mood and sometimes the step. When a story objective asks you to talk, holster the rifle, press the button once, and listen. If something genuinely seems bugged, re-read the quest text before assuming the game is wrong, because the Tour's objectives are precise about locations and conditions.

Expected outcome and what to do next

Finish the Tour and your account transforms: all four locked traders open, the full standard map pool from Customs to The Lab is available, and you hold the Pathfinder achievement.

Your immediate next moves write themselves. Run Mechanic's Introduction on Woods to unlock Jaeger, then work Skier's Friend From the West so Peacekeeper's quest line opens. With every trader available, start pushing loyalty levels, because trader stock in the current progression system scales with your character level and reputation rather than spending thresholds. Our /guides/trader-loyalty-guide walks through the post-1.1.0.0 requirements, and /guides/early-quest-order sequences the best low-level quests for experience on the way to the flea market at level 15.

If any Tour step cost you found in raid progress, /guides/found-in-raid-explained goes deeper on the mark's rules and exceptions. For the maps themselves, the reference pages carry full extraction tables and boss notes: /maps/customs, /maps/factory, /maps/woods, /maps/shoreline, /maps/reserve, /maps/lighthouse and /maps/the-lab. Trader-by-trader stock and unlock details live at pages like /traders/mechanic and /traders/peacekeeper.

Longer term, the Tour is your ticket to the endgame: /guides/the-lab-guide turns your new keycard access into repeatable Lab profits, /guides/lightkeeper-guide tracks the post-rework access chain that starts with this chapter, and /guides/story-chapters-and-endings maps where the story goes after the Tour credits roll. Check back after major patches, because unlock orders and hand-in lists are exactly the kind of thing Battlestate adjusts between seasons.