How to 100% complete Pikmin 3 Deluxe

The Pikmin series is experiencing something of a resurgence right now, and with that in mind, we wanted to share a 100 percent completion guide for Pikmin 3 Deluxe. All four main titles are out on Switch, but this one has been available since the very beginning. If you’re just now getting into this game and want to go for full completion, we’ve compiled a big list of tips and requirements to help you get there. Get ready for a challenging adventure.

Required Tasks

This title is one of the more involved games in the franchise, featuring several hours of side content in addition to the main story mode. For full 100 completion in Pikmin 3 Deluxe, you’ll have to earn every badge, earn platinum medals on every mission, and clear every single difficulty of the game’s Story Mode. Here’s a more involved explanation of each one:

• Clear Story Mode with all 66 fruit. In Pikmin 3 Deluxe, 100 percent completion isn’t tied to a single save file. Instead, there are 50 different badges available to players that persist between saves. That said, if you’re an absolute perfectionist, you’ll want to keep a 100% clear file on Normal mode the whole way through. This entails gathering all 66 fruit and obtaining all four suit upgrades.
• Clear every Mission Mode mission with a platinum medal. Story Mode is rather easy, but Mission Mode gets tough – especially when it comes to earning platinum medals. The easiest way to accomplish this goal is by following along with a YouTube guide. Start the mission, pause your game, and watch a few seconds of gameplay from the video. Unpause, copy the player’s actions, and repeat.
• Clear every Side Story mission with a platinum medal. Generally speaking, these are much easier than the missions in Mission Mode, but some of the later challenges do get kind of tricky. The same trick as above applies here – following along with a video guide goes a long way.
• Obtain all 50 Badges. This is a super time-consuming task. So much so, in fact, that we’ve dedicated an entire second section to it. You’ll obtain a good chunk of the available badges just by clearing Story Mode, but there are a few other tough ones to tackle too.

As you can tell, Pikmin 3 Deluxe has lots more content than the two games that came before it. All in all, you can expect to spend somewhere around 35 hours exploring all of the content this game has to offer. Keep that time estimate in mind before you officially take on the challenge of 100 percent completion in Pikmin 3 Deluxe.

Badge Requirements

For this section, we’ll list all 50 badges in order and the unlock criteria for each one. We’ve listed them in the same order as they appear in-game, so if you’re missing one you should be able to reference this list to figure out which ones you still need. As mentioned earlier, a good chunk of these badges automatically unlocks as you clear Story Mode. For the sake of reading time, we’ve grouped these badges together.

• New Horizons, Bearing Fruit, Fruitful Endeavor, Fruit Force, and Fruit Ballad all unlock automatically as long as you clear Story mode with all 66 fruits. That’s required for 100 percent completion in Pikmin 3 Deluxe anyway, so it should be no problem.
• Efficiency Expert requires a stockpile of 30 days’ worth of juice. As long as you’re time-efficient, this should be easy.
• Animal Annotator unlocks after you register 10 entries in the Piklopedia. For some enemies, all you need to do to register them in the Piklopedia is defeat them. For most, however, you’ll need to defeat them and then bring them back to the Onion.
• Shutterbug unlocks when you use the in-game camera feature to snap a photo for the first time.
• Intelligent Life? unlocks when you collect 15 of Olimar’s data files. This shouldn’t take you long at all.
• Flaw in the Armor, Achieving Enlightenment, Duel in the Dunes, Decomposer, Earth Mover, and Safe and Sound all unlock as you defeat specific bosses in Story mode. In other words, there’s no way you can complete the game without earning these badges.
• Power Surge unlocks when you use your first dose of Ultra-Spicy Spray on your squad of Pikmin.
• Evasive Action unlocks when you retrieve the Dodge Whistle from the Distant Tundra.
• Strong on the Inside unlocks when you acquire the Metal Suit Z, the Anti-Electrifier, or the Scorch Guard.
• Pikmin Challenger unlocks when you clear Story Mode on Normal difficulty or higher. In Pikmin 3 Deluxe, the “Normal” difficulty is actually a new campaign that’s even easier than the Wii U version’s standard campaign.
• Pikmin Professional unlocks when you clear Story Mode on Hard difficulty on higher. This campaign is identical to the Wii U version’s standard mode, which still isn’t all that difficult.
• Pikmin Master unlocks when you clear Story Mode on Ultra-Spicy difficulty. Okay, this one’s kind of difficult. Your Pikmin count is capped at 60 instead of 100, and time flows slightly faster. We’d recommend finishing this task last; by the time you take on this challenge, your Dandori skills will likely be honed enough to beat this campaign with only a little bit of trouble.
• Clocking In unlocks when you earn a bronze medal or medal in a Side Story. Easy!
• Dreams of Adventure unlocks when you play any mission in Mission Mode. Also easy!
• Archaeology Hobbyist is tricky, because it requires that you take pictures of five hidden murals. None of these are even visible to the player unless you’re using camera mode, so a guide is certainly required here.
• Adventure into the Unknown unlocks when you earn a bronze medal or better in each stage of Olimar’s assignment.
• Working Overtime requires that you earn a bronze medal or better in each stage of Olimar’s Comeback.
• President’s Favor unlocks when you earn at least five platinum medals in Side Stories.
• Greenhorn requires that you earn a bronze medal or better in Mission Mode at least once. 
• Getting Closer unlocks when you earn your first silver medal in Mission Mode.
• Good as Gold unlocks when you earn a gold medal or better in Mission Mode.
• Dedicated Adventure unlocks when you earn platinum medals in 10 stages in Mission Mode.
• Blast Radius unlocks when you defeat three or more enemies with a single Bomb Rock. There are plenty of groups of sleeping enemies throughout the game, so keep an eye out.
• Hocotatian Hound unlocks when you retrieve all of the game’s data files. Some of these are buried underground, so keep that in mind. Here’s a full list of data files for your reference.
• Xenobiologist unlocks when you complete the Piklopedia. The Pikmin Wiki has a full list of creatures available in-game here, so you might want to bookmark that for later. After defeating the Quaggled Mireclops, two exclusive butterfly enemies spawn on its corpse – they’re both required for Piklopedia completion, and they’re very easy to miss. Make sure to bring Yellow Pikmin.
• Legendary Archaeologist unlocks when you photograph all 15 of the hidden murals we discussed earlier. If you make use of the online resources at your disposal, this should be no problem.
• Game Hunter unlocks when you clear all Battle enemies! missions with at least a bronze medal. These are noticeably easier than the treasure-collecting missions, so you might find you don’t need a YouTube guide for these.
• Treasure Hunter unlocks when you clear all Collect treasure! missions with at least a bronze medal. These are among the trickiest challenges in the game, but getting a bronze should be perfectly doable.
• Big Game Hunter unlocks when you clear all of the Defeat bosses! missions with at least a bronze medal. You’ll need to have cleared Story Mode to access these, which means you’re probably experienced in defeating these bosses. Even obtaining platinum medals shouldn’t prove too difficult, because the bosses here are identical to their Story Mode counterparts.
• Gadget Master is the beginning of the grind. You’ll need to use 10 different kinds of items in Bingo Battle. If you don’t have a second player, you can always play with a single Joy-Con while you leave your second player idle. This applies to all of the Bingo Battle missions.
• Game Changer unlocks when you play Bingo Battle with the Victory Macaroon rule. For all future missions, you’ll actually want to play with the Victory Macaroon rule enabled – it allows you to clear Bingo Battle games much faster if your second player is idle.
• Line ‘Em Up unlocks after you play your first Bingo Battle match. The match does need to end for this badge to unlock, though.
• Bingo Buff unlocks when you’ve played Bingo Battle 10 times.
• Bingo Fiend unlocks when you’ve played every stage in Bingo Battle. That Victory Macaroon rule will help your matches end much faster.
• Pincer Attack unlocks when you’re one slot away from victory in two separate directions. Super easy if you use the idle controller method we described.
• Buddy System unlocks when you play Story Mode with a second player. At the beginning of the day, switch to co-op and then back to single player. Finish the day as normal, and you’ll earn the badge.
• Mission Partner is the same, but for Mission Mode. You can fail the mission on purpose or just clear it to the best of your ability.
• Sidekick unlocks when you play a Side Story mission with two players.
• Bare-Knuckled unlocks when you defeat an enemy solely by punching it with a captain. You can actually do this at the beginning of Story Mode in Alph’s Red Pikmin section. Punch a Dwarf Bulborb and you’ll earn this achievement.
• Flower Grinder might take a while, but you’ll no doubt unlock it before you clear all three difficulties of Story Mode. For this one, you’ll need to give 500 Pikmin flowers by feeding them nectar.
• Gardener unlocks when you propagate at least 1,000 Pikmin in Story Mode. Please note that Candypop Buds don’t count toward this total.

That’s the full list of badges, then. There are quite a few of them, but they’re more time-consuming than they are difficult. Clearing Mission Mode with platinum medals is probably the most challenging task here, but even that is made much easier if you reference video materials along the way. If you’d like to 100 percent complete even more Pikmin games, stay tuned – we’ve got a guide for Pikmin 4 completion coming up soon.