Tom Clancy’s The Division Guide: Item and Enemy Colour Codes and What They Mean

Like many games with a loot element, The Division uses a colour code to quickly key you in on whether an item is worth keeping or not, a code which also applies to enemies for your convenience. Just so you don’t have to squint at the screen to read which is the best, we’ve got a brief rundown of what each colour means.

The item quality color codes in Tom Clancy’s The Division

Any item you can find in The Division will be coloured in your inventory, and when we say any we really mean it. Weapons, gear, modifications, and crafting resources all follow the same system: white, green, blue, purple, and yellow, getting progressively higher in quality. There are also turquoise drops, but these are for purely cosmetic clothes, which don’t really matter unless you’re super keen for your agent to have a beanie hat.

White items in Tom Clancy’s The Division

White items are classed as ‘worn’. They’re the most common and therefore least good items, and when you first start as an agent your equipment is all worn. Worn items don’t have bonuses to your abilities attached to them.

Green items in Tom Clancy’s The Division

This is ‘standard’ quality, which will start accounting for most of your drops right around the time you open up your Base of Operations. By the time you’re about level five or six most of your loot should be standard quality, and they’ll start having buffs to your attributes attached.

Blue items in Tom Clancy’s The Division

Blue items are ‘specialised’, and will start turning up around about levels 10 – 12, although you can get them earlier if you’re lucky, or venture into the first couple of areas of the Dark Zone, where there are better loot drops. Specialised items are more likely to have talents or buffs attached to them.

Purple items in Tom Clancy’s The Division

Purple means ‘superior’ quality. Superior items have a higher chance of carrying abilities with them, and can have more than one. They’re incredibly rare in the early parts of the game, and you’re more likely to get them in the Dark Zone.

Yellow items in Tom Clancy’s The Division

Yellow items are ‘high-end’, and basically only dropped by bosses. They’re like the highest quality bits of kit ever. Worth selling your entire family. That kind of thing.

Enemy colours in Tom Clancy’s The Division

The difficulty of the enemies you’ll face scales with the different areas of the city. Not only do they have levels, just like you do, but you can also apply broadly the same colour coding detailed above to enemies. Regular guys have red health bars, as is normal. Once you start getting further into the game you’ll find enemies with blue health bars, who’ll have a shield you need to wear down before you can kill them. Then there are enemies with purple health bars, who are harder again, and finally those with yellow health bars.

These guys are elites, the hardest in the game, with very strong, bullet soaking shields. Bosses and heads of factions will be elite enemies, and luckily there are some items and abilities that will buff your damage against elites. The final wave of enemies in a mission will usually have higher level enemies, and the boss at the end of a story mission will be an elite. Enemies in the Dark Zone are usually at least purple or higher, so prepare for a tough fight.