Higgs Guitar From Death Stranding 2

I (Mudkicker) have always been a huge fan of Hideo Kojima’s work, so I obviously loved Death Stranding. When the first trailer for DS2 came out, around December 2024, I was totally hiped.
I was so glad that Kojima brought back Higgs as the villain. Troy Baker has done an incredible job of playing this (and practically every other) character.

When I saw that Higgs’ main weapon was a guitar, I simply needed to build it.
I’d made guitars before, but never from scratch.
So I started my journey with roughly 30 seconds of trailer-footage, and started measuring my ass off.
Fun fact: Fun fact: to get the most accurate measurements possible, I mainly used the length of Troy Baker’s fingers as a reference.

I started with the rough shapes and then focused on the neck.

The hardware wasn’t easy to find. I needed a headles neck in combination with a mid-corpus bridge. Usually neckless guitars feature and edge-corpus bridge.
Fortunately I found a Boden-copy that was exactly what I needed and that I could take apart to use for spare parts.

Progress on the 3D model was slow. The progress in March 2025:

I wasn’t sure if 3D printed PLA would be strong enough to counter the tension of the string. So I had to build a first prototype.

My test were successful and the print could withstand the tension without any issues. I could now continue to add all details to the 3D design and start printing.

However, with the final print I found out that I did one “tiny” mistake. The hole for the pickup was too small. I’m not sure if I took the wrong measurements, or if I made a mistake in the CAD software. In any case – reprinting was not an option. So I needed to build my own new pickup (Humbucker).