V Rising beginner’s guide, tips, and tricks

Image: Stunlock Studios

V Rising is a survival game where you play as a vampire awoken from their slumber. You explore Vardoran while hunting beasts, expanding your domain, and conquering humankind. Like other survival games, learning the lay of the land can be very confusing for a new player. Before you feed on the blood of your enemies, we’ve put together a beginner’s guide to make your experience better.

Gather everything and use specialized tools

V Rising is a survival game at heart, and with that comes an extensive crafting and gathering system. You’ll need a lot of materials to build a castle, craft gear, and progress in the quests. You should gather and hold on to as many resources as possible, as every resource has a purpose.

Each resource has a tool that’ll speed up the harvesting process: swords for vegetation, axes for lumber, maces for minerals, and spears for creatures. However, any weapon can harvest any resource of that weapon level. For example, copper axes can harvest sulphur, though maces do a better job. If you don’t have enough materials to make each tool type, craft your favorite tool or the tool corresponding to the resource you need the most. Look out for units with the worker blood type as it will increase resource yield and speed up the gathering process.

Image: Stunlock Studios via Johnny Yu for Polygon

If you are struggling to find a specific resource, use your map to ease the process. Hover your mouse over each opaque zone to see what resources are available in the respective zone.

Choose your blood type carefully

Blood is what makes the world go round in V Rising. Blood passively regenerates your health, keeps your castle standing, and buffs your vampire. Your vampire regains health from your blood pool. If your blood pool runs out, you’ll start taking damage over time until you have one health remaining. To refill your blood pool, you’ll need to feed on low-health humans or creatures, or eat rats and hearts. After feeding, you’ll gain a blood type depending on the enemy, but you’ll lose your currently equipped blood type.

Each enemy comes with its respective blood type, blood quality, and buffs.

• Creature blood: Increases movement speed, sun resistance, damage reduction, and health regeneration
• Rogue blood: Increases critical strike chance and movement speed and reduces cooldown on Travel Skill
• Warrior blood: Increases physical power and reduces damage taken and cooldown on weapon skills
• Brute blood: Increases health recovery, primary attack speed, and primary damage
• Worker blood: Increases resource yield, damage against resources, and mount gallop speed
• Scholar blood: Increases spell power and spell life leech and reduces cooldowns on spells

The higher the blood quality, the better buffs you’ll receive. Each blood type should be used depending on the situation. When gathering, you’ll want worker blood, but when you’re in combat, worker blood won’t provide you any benefits.

Blood mend is a great way to heal yourself; however, blood mend drains your pool at a fast rate, so it should only be used in dire situations. You’ll want to keep your blood pool high to keep your buffs for as long as possible.

Make use of sunlight

You’ll quickly find out in V Rising how much of a hindrance the sun can be, but don’t let the sun deter you from progressing. The sun is out for a third of the day, and that time shouldn’t be wasted. The daytime is the perfect time to work on your castle, or to craft and gather.

Image: Stunlock Studios via Johnny Yu for Polygon

Make use of the shade from your castle’s walls, roofs, and mist braziers to expand your borders, craft gear, and produce materials. Resources can easily be gathered in the sunlight by standing in its own shadow. You can harvest the resources just before they’re about to break to leave some shade and dash from node to node. Be careful of harvesting all of the trees within the borders of your castle, as they won’t grow back and you’ll have no shade to hide in.

Finding a place to call home

Early on in V Rising, you’ll have to build a castle. Take your time to find a safe area that is close to many resources. If you’re playing on a PvP server, avoid building your castle close to the beginning or populated areas. Many players will pass by your castle in a congested area, which will increase the likelihood of your base getting raided. Building on elevated land is a great way to make your castle more defensive. The slopes act as natural choke points for enemy units and vampires. Enemies will funnel through your slopes, where you can use AOE spells and attacks.

More stations lead to faster progression

As you progress in V Rising, you’ll notice that crafting takes longer and longer. Speed up the process by creating multiple production stations. Rather than placing all of your lumber in one sawmill, split your lumber between multiple sawmills. The same works with every crafting and refinement station. You’ll craft multiple materials at once, and you’ll progress through quests and create gear much faster.

Image: Stunlock Studios via Johnny Yu for Polygon

Follow the quest line and blood trails

In V Rising, progression is locked behind quests and V Bloods, enemy bosses that grant special abilities. If you can’t craft any gear that will increase your level, there is most likely a quest or V Blood that you haven’t completed yet. Quests and V Bloods can unlock recipes or blueprints that allow you to craft the next tier of gear.

If you’re playing with others in the same clan, you can progress together. Quests can be completed together by interacting with the quest objective. For example, if you and a clan member are on the Castle Heart quest, only one of you needs to construct the Castle Heart. The other clan member only needs to interact with the Castle Heart to complete the quest. V Bloods can also be harvested by multiple people at once. After taking down the V Blood, you can all feed on them to progress.

 

Source: Polygon