The Last of Us Factions Multiplayer: How It Works

Naughty Dog cancelled The Last of Us Online, the standalone multiplayer game it had spent four years building, in December 2023. Sony shut down the original PS3 servers back in September 2019. By every normal rule of live-service math, Factions — the actual multiplayer mode bolted onto the 2013 campaign — should be a memory. It isn't. It's still taking matches on PS4 and PS5 in 2026, Naughty Dog has never announced a shutdown date, and this vertical has covered it exactly zero times beyond "it exists." The versions guide tells you which release has it and what the platinum costs. The crafting and weapons guides both mention it only to say "different pool, not covered here." Nobody has actually explained how it plays. This is that guide.

Everything below describes Factions MP as it exists in The Last of Us Remastered on PS4 and PS5 — the only version currently online. The original 2013 PS3 game and The Last of Us Part I remake never had it running today; Part I shipped without the mode entirely.

What Factions actually is

Factions is built around a fiction the campaign never shows you directly: you lead a clan of survivors through a 12-week timeline as either the Fireflies or the Hunters. There's no mechanical difference between the two — Naughty Dog's own wiki-documented design confirms neither side gets unique abilities — so pick whichever you like. What matters is that every match you play counts as one day, and the clan's survival is the actual stake.

Each match opens by telling you the target amount of supplies your clan needs that day. Hit it and the clan holds steady. Collect more than the target and you attract new survivors; fall short and existing members start going hungry or getting sick, curable only by exceeding the target in a later match. Leave a match early and it hurts your clan's numbers directly. It's a genuinely unusual multiplayer structure for 2013 — you aren't just trying to win the round, you're trying to keep people alive across a season you can lose.

Naughty Dog designed the moment-to-moment combat to feel like the campaign, not a typical shooter. Lead Multiplayer Designer Erin Daly put it plainly in Naughty Dog's own July 2014 blog post announcing the Remastered version: "By making the game fairly lethal, but giving players a higher level of awareness of their enemies, we were able to create some very tactical combat, especially when combined with the variety of craftable items like molotovs, nail bombs, and smoke bombs." That's the whole design thesis in one sentence — slow, deadly, and scavenging-dependent, same as the story you already know.

Three modes: Supply Raid, Survivors, Interrogation

Factions has exactly three game modes, and they change what "winning" means more than they change the map you're standing on.

Interrogation is the odd one out mechanically: instead of killing for the win, you're capturing. Downing an enemy and holding the interrogation prompt works like an execution but takes a little longer; doing it with a shiv is faster. Land five of them and the map reveals a Lockbox holding bonus supplies, which your team then has to defend while the other side tries to take it back.

Supply Raid and Survivors both have a sudden death state once one team is down to its last life — in Survivors that's the moment a player has no more round lives left; in Supply Raid it's when a team can no longer respawn. Both sides get a burst of bonus parts to spend on ammo, armor or a weapon upgrade to keep the fight competitive, a lucky trip to a red supply box hands out a free Machete once, and both teams' positions get briefly revealed on the radar roughly every five seconds — no perk hides you from that ping, by design, so the match can't end in a camping stalemate.

Parts and supplies: the two currencies

Factions runs on two separate resources that are easy to conflate.

Parts are the in-match currency. You earn them for almost everything — downing an opponent, reviving a teammate, crafting an item, landing a special execution — and spend them mid-match on ammunition, armor or a purchasable weapon. Parts do not carry over between matches, but they do persist between deaths within the same match, which is why saving for armor is usually better than burning parts on ammo you don't need yet.

Supplies are the season-long currency — the number your clan's survival actually depends on. You build them by converting parts at a fixed rate of 50 parts = 1 supply, or by picking up blue bottled supply containers left on executed enemies' bodies. Supplies also gate your permanent unlocks: certain weapons and purchasable gear don't become available in your loadout until your clan has banked enough of them across matches, separate from what you spend inside any single game.

The starting arsenal and loadout points

Every class gets 8 loadout points (LP) to start, rising to a maximum of 13 as you level up, and every weapon or skill you equip eats into that budget. The 9mm Pistol and Revolver are free.

A silencer can be bolted onto most of these for an extra 2 LP, and it keeps you off the enemy radar while firing — the Revolver and Bow are the two exceptions, and the Bow doesn't need one since it's already silent.

That's only the base loadout. A second tier of purchasable weapons — bought mid-match with parts rather than pre-equipped — layers on top: El Diablo, the Assault Rifle, Shotgun, Military Sniper and Flamethrower, plus the melee-only Machete, are all unlockable with enough banked supplies and then bought per-match. Three more (Double Barrel, Specter, Launcher) came in as DLC. None of these can be upgraded or silenced the way your starting arsenal can, and their ammo gets more expensive each time you rebuy it mid-match.

Survival skills worth your loadout points

Skills — Factions' perk system — eat the same loadout points as weapons, so every point spent on a skill is a point not spent on gear. Naughty Dog put a cap of four equipped at once regardless of how many points you have. A handful are worth building around:

Two DLC-only skills are worth knowing even if you don't own them yet: Executioner doubles Parts from shiv kills and special executions at max rank, and Damage Marker marks any target you damage at all — stacked with Hawk-eyed, the wiki notes it can generate a large Parts lead against a team that stays grouped up.

Health itself has no regeneration in Factions — five bars, no passive recovery — so First-Aid Training and Reviver both do double duty: they get you back in the fight faster and they make your team's health economy less punishing than the campaign's, where a health kit is precious and a downed teammate usually means playing more carefully rather than sprinting to save them.

Listen Mode carries over too, but on a short leash. Where the campaign gives Joel or Ellie a generous meter, multiplayer limits it to a few seconds per use, and only Sharp Ears extends that window or speeds up its recharge.

Special Executions deserve a callout on their own. Downing an enemy isn't the kill — pressing Triangle on a downed opponent triggers a unique animated finisher tied to whatever weapon you're holding, and it pays out 75 bonus parts on top of whatever downing them already earned. If a teammate downed the enemy, you can still take the execution for the bonus, which is the game nudging you to hunt kills as a pair rather than solo.

17 maps across three expansions

Factions launched with seven maps in the base retail disc — Lakeside, Bill's Town, University, High School, Downtown, The Dam and Checkpoint — all of them built from locations Joel and Ellie actually pass through in the campaign. Three expansions added ten more over the following year:

That's 17 total, and Remastered changed how you access them. On PS3, map packs split the player base across separate playlists. Naughty Dog's Quentin Cobb explained the Remastered fix in the same July 2014 blog post: "All fifteen of our maps are in each playlist so the player pool will be consolidated. This means faster matchmaking and that you will have a greater variety of maps in each playlist!" (The two Treacherous Territories maps landed after that post, bringing the pooled total from 15 to 17.) Every map you own now shows up in the same rotation instead of fragmenting matchmaking by DLC ownership.

Is Factions still online in 2026?

Yes, with real caveats worth knowing before you commit money or time to it.

• PS4 and PS5 only, and PS5 is backward compatibility, not a native version. The Last of Us Remastered is the sole version running. An active PlayStation Plus subscription is required to play online.
• No shutdown has been announced. As of an April 2026 status report, Naughty Dog had made no official statement about ending server support, matchmaking was described as fast, and the mode was holding a stable population thirteen years after launch.
• PS3 is permanently gone. Those servers closed September 3, 2019, which is also why the original 23-trophy platinum's four Factions trophies became unearnable on that platform — the versions guide covers exactly what that costs a trophy hunter.
• Neither remake has it. Part I shipped without multiplayer in 2022, and Part II Remastered's No Return roguelike mode is single-player only — it replaced the idea of a sequel multiplayer mode rather than reviving Factions.
• PC has never had it, officially, and the closest unofficial attempt is dead. A modder working under the name Speclizer spent nine months building a free multiplayer mod modelled on Factions for The Last of Us Part II Remastered on PC, with over 25 minutes of working gameplay public and a release planned for September 2026. On September 13, 2026, Speclizer announced that Sony Interactive Entertainment had sent a letter requesting the mod not be released, and shelved the project rather than fight it. There is currently no official or unofficial way to play a Factions-style mode on PC.

Quick Action Checklist

• Pick Fireflies or Hunters for the fiction — there's no mechanical difference between them.
• Learn Interrogation's capture-and-defend loop separately; it plays nothing like Supply Raid or Survivors, and sudden death can't happen in it.
• Spend parts on armor before ammo when you're not sure you'll need the ammo — parts carry across your lives in a match, so hoarding is usually correct.
• Convert supplies math in your head: 50 parts banked equals 1 supply toward your clan and your long-term unlocks.
• Cap your loadout at 4 skills and budget loadout points like ammunition — Reviver, Crafter and First-Aid Training all pay for themselves in team fights.
• Always take a Special Execution over a plain kill when it's safe to do so; it's an extra 75 parts for one button press.
• If you're chasing the original PS3 platinum, buy Remastered instead — the PS3 servers, and that trophy path, closed in 2019.
• Confirm PlayStation Plus is active before queuing; it's required for Factions on both PS4 and PS5.
• Don't wait on a PC version of Factions — the one unofficial mod that got close was cancelled after Sony sent a cease-and-desist letter on September 13, 2026, and nothing has replaced it.