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Recruitment is how Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave grows a roster outside the story. Powerful warriors you meet in Dagsion can be added to your ranks, and Nintendo puts the method plainly: even if they turn you away at first, try giving them gifts or invite them to share a meal, and that might be enough to win them over.

Requirements

Gifts and meals are the visible half of it. Behind a successful recruitment sit two bars. The first is a support level between the character and the Hero whose route you are playing, raised through gifts, shared meals and, once the theater opens, invitations to Stage Shows. The second is a Renown level, a value that rises as you clear main missions, subquests and paralogues and hold audiences with the gods. Individual characters set their own minimums, and many add an extra condition on top: a fee, a few items, a short quest or a question to answer. The standing level itself is covered on its own page at Renown. The recruitment segment used Ninae as its worked example, needing support level 3 before an attempt will land.

Recorded Thresholds

The pairs below were first read off recruitment screens in a pre-launch build. A recruitment guide written from the retail game has since listed every character's requirements route by route, and each pre-launch pair matches one of its routes, which the Notes column now names.

The spread is the point. A Renown level of 3 is reachable early, while a level of 10 sits well into a run, so the roster opens gradually rather than all at once, and because the numbers change from one route to the next, so does the order it opens in.

Requirements are not fixed across the game. They shift with the Hero you are playing and with the route you are on, so a character who joins cheaply on one path can cost more standing on another. Sofia is one example, with a different Renown requirement depending on the path. Io is another: Renown 3 and an 800 gold fee on Dietrich's route, but Renown 10 and 4,000 gold on Cai's and Theodora's.

Meals happen at an inn and seat three, and previews report that they fully restore the health and magic charges of everyone at the table. A character can be invited to a meal only after you have given them at least one gift. The recruit screen itself is described as offering gifts, the recruitment attempt, and a look at the character's information, with fast travel able to take you straight to a specific person to check their stats or hand something over.

The Scale of It

Some reviews of the finished game count more than eighty fully voiced characters, most of whom can be brought onto the team. A recruitment guide written from the retail game lists about 62 characters besides Eshmel who can either be recruited or join the army later, so the counts differ, and this wiki does not state a definitive total as of September 2026. Either way the roster is far larger than the named cast on its own suggests, and it is the reason the requirements below are worth reading as a schedule rather than as a checklist: there are more people to win over than any single run has standing for.

The requirements are not something you have to work out by trial. The Base Map screen lists each character against the support level and the Renown level they ask for, along with any extra condition attached, and marks each requirement as met or unmet. It doubles as a readout of who is currently within reach and what is holding up everyone else.

Route closes doors as well as opening them. Some characters cannot be recruited at all on particular paths, rather than simply costing more standing there, so no single route assembles the full roster. Seteth cannot be recruited on Dietrich's route, Ursula and Peppe cannot be recruited on Leda's, and Gaitz can only be recruited on Dietrich's. The four Heroes themselves never join another Hero's route in Part I, and a few companions, such as Tialla and Buccar, can only be won over on other routes after their own Hero's paralogue has been cleared.

Requirements by Route

The table below lists every character a retail-build recruitment guide gives Part I requirements for, apart from the four Heroes. S is the support level needed with that route's Hero and R is the Renown level; extra conditions follow. Support levels are global across the save file and never go down, even if a chapter is restarted, so support raised with Leda on Cai's route counts when you later recruit on Leda's.

Notes on Specific Requirements

Quest requirements are usually small: a simple skirmish, a search, or a conversation with someone in another city, after which you return to the character who set it. The later in Part I a character is recruited, the higher their level and the better their starting equipment, and Part II has a way to bring lagging units up to the level of the main team, so leaving some recruits on the bench until later costs little.

Automatic Joins

Each route opens with its own companions, and each hands the player one extra character through the recruitment tutorial.

Characters Who Join After Part I

Some characters cannot be recruited in Part I at all and join in the later Parts instead, several of them only if something was done or someone survived earlier.

In Part III, characters recruited earlier can be found around Dagsion as long as Part II was completed for the route they were recruited on. A character recruited on several routes can be brought in as any one of those versions, or the versions can be merged by spending Karma Shards, which keeps the higher of each stat rather than adding them together; Boons of Salvation covers the shards and the merge.

Recruitable Without Being Announced

Some characters give away their own recruitability through a line in their published profile rather than through a story beat. Orchel, the masked priest who serves at Credna's temple in Dagsion, is described in her companion-app profile as very strong but barred from some soldier classes. A class restriction only means anything for a unit the player can eventually field, so before launch the line read as a sign that she would become a playable unit. She appears in the story as a rival clan leader and a boss.

The retail game settles it from a different direction. Orchel cannot be recruited in Part I on any route; she joins automatically at the start of Part III, along with Talimun and Anatolia, as the table above sets out. That fits the wider pattern on this page, where rival-clan members are fought on one route and fight alongside you later. Classes covers the tier ladder her class restriction sits on.

Why It Matters

Recruitment carries more weight here than roster depth alone. The story turns on a protagonist sent back to the time of the Heroic Games to change the fates of the four Heroes, and Nintendo states that those who join you there strengthen the might of your assembled forces. Every warrior won over during a Hero's route is a unit that counts toward the fight against Balor.

List of Characters covers the full cast, and Factions groups them by the company they keep.

Theodora has a second channel of her own. On her route she can enlist soldiers in towns out on the world map to form Battalions, which is a separate matter from adding a named character to the roster.

Related Pages

For the weekly caps on gifts and shared meals, and the rest of the routine they sit inside, see Between-Match Preparation. Ninae is the worked example the recruitment segment used, and Routes explains why the same character can cost more standing on a different path.