Horizon Forbidden West Guide | How To Spawn Apex Machines

Here’s how you can consistently spawn Apex Machines in Horizon Forbidden West.

Game Guide by Joyramen on Feb 12, 2025

To gather valuable resources like Apex Hearts and Volatile Sludge, you’ll need to take on Apex Machines, but the problem is that these machines can be pretty challenging to find as they don’t always spawn in the open world. Here’s how you can increase their spawn rates.

Unlocking Apex Machine Spawns

Apex Machines won’t appear unless you’ve completed the Dying Lands main quest. Your chances of these Apex variants spawning increase the more times you defeat a specific machine. For the larger machines, you can reach the maximum spawn rate after defeating them for the fourth or fifth time. The same can be said for the smaller ones, as you’ll need to kill them 10 to 30 times before maxing out the maximum spawn rate.

Best Time to Find Apex Machines

The time of day plays a role in Apex Machine spawns, as they’re more likely to spawn at night. So you’ll want to find a shelter that is far from the largest machine site and rest until nightfall, and if a regular machine is already present and a player is too close, it will not change into an Apex machine when arriving at the site, so do keep that in mind.

What to do When an Apex Machine Disappears?

If you die after defeating an Apex Machine before completing the encounter, the game sometimes does this thing, replacing it with a regular variant when you spawn in again. This is to reduce the difficulty so that you don’t get overwhelmed in tougher battles.

To get around this, you’ll want to travel fast to a different machine site to spawn in an Apex machine there or travel far enough before returning to the original location to reset the spawn.

Fixing Stuck RNG for Apex Spawns

In very rare instances, the game’s RNG may get stuck, and this might prevent Apex machines from spawning. If you feel like you’ve been waiting a while with no success, restarting your game can prevent this issue.

Using these methods will make farming Apex Machines much easier.

Also, check out our Horizon Forbidden West Review, and other guides below: