The Blood of Dawnwalker Beginner Guide: What to Do First & Early-Game Tips

This post is also available in:

Here are some notes on what stood out to me after playing through the opening hours, along with a few things that seem worth keeping in mind.

First, Familiarize Yourself With the Time Progression System

The single most important thing is getting used to this game’s unique time progression system. Make sure you read the tutorials carefully.

The Prologue does more than introduce the story and setting. It also serves as an important tutorial, so use this opportunity to experiment and familiarize yourself with how the time system works.

I have summarized its mechanics in my guide to the 30-day time limit, so refer to it whenever necessary.

Use Multiple Save Slots and Save Frequently in Case of Bugs

The game may crash repeatedly at critical moments, such as during the Blood Mass.

To avoid getting stuck and being unable to progress, rotate between multiple save slots and save frequently.

What to Do First

As long as you follow the tutorial instructions, the game will introduce you to most of the essential mechanics.

One piece of advice, however, is to gather as many plants as possible whenever you find them growing on the ground.

They can be used as ingredients for health potions and other consumables.

In particular, buying all the ingredients needed for health potions from merchants is extremely expensive. It is therefore important to pick up whatever you find and stockpile ingredients.

As mentioned in the guide above, exploring the open world does not cause any in-game time to pass.

This means you never have to worry about running out of time because you spent too long gathering alchemy ingredients.

Progressing Through the Prologue

The prologue is designed to teach you several important mechanics while letting you experience actual story branches firsthand.

I’ve also put together a prologue walkthrough covering the overall flow and various smaller points to watch out for, so feel free to refer to it as needed.

Early Combat and Healing Tips

Money for healing is extremely scarce in the early game.

There do not appear to be any cheap inns where you can rest. During the day, your main options are eating food or drinking potions. At night, you can restore Health by feeding on animals or humans.

For daytime healing, I strongly recommend eating food.

Potions restore Health instantly and do not suffer reduced effectiveness during combat. However, they restore relatively little Health and are extremely expensive.

To illustrate the difference in cost-effectiveness:

• A single food item restores 1.5–2% of your maximum Health per second for 50 seconds. In other words, just one item can restore 75–100% of your maximum Health.
• A single health potion restores only 30% of your Health, yet the combined price of its crafting ingredients is twice the cost of one food item.

Even by a rough estimate, food is around six times as cost-effective for healing.

The trade-off is that food restores less Health during combat, whereas potions instantly restore their full amount without any reduction. Knowing when to use each one is therefore important.

Climb Scouting Towers and Survey the Surrounding Area

You can climb Scouting Towers using Shadowstep, but only at night while in vampire form.

Doing so reveals several previously undiscovered locations in the surrounding area on your map, making exploration much more efficient. Scouting the towers is also required for an achievement.

Use Focus Mode When You Can’t Find What You’re Looking For

In Focus Mode, lootable items are highlighted in white, while quest-related clues and investigation objects are highlighted in yellow.

This is especially useful during investigation quests, where important objects can blend into the background and be extremely difficult to spot without Focus Mode.

If you’re stuck, don’t overthink it—just turn on Focus Mode.

Focus Mode also highlights animals and enemies you can feed on in red.

So if you need to recover health at night, or want to heal up before heading into combat, use Focus Mode to scan the area for potential targets.

Leave Tough Enemies for Later or Try a Different Time of Day

In this game, some areas near the starting zones are populated by surprisingly powerful enemies.

There are also quests where you may have to deal with large groups of tough enemies at once.

When that happens, putting the encounter off until later can be very effective, as long as the quest does not have a time limit.

If there is no deadline, spend some time improving your character and come back once you are stronger.

If you still think, “The rewards are too good—I want to clear this now!”, another effective option is to come back at a different time of day.

Some enemies that can only be fought at night may be bypassed through negotiation during the day. Conversely, enemies that force you into combat during the day may sometimes be avoided with stealth at night.

Be Careful with Your Remaining Health When Doing NPC Rescue Quests at Night

If you talk to an NPC at night while your Health is low, Blood Hunger can force Coen to feed on them and kill them.

At night, you also cannot recover Health with medicine or food, which leaves you with very limited healing options: using the scarce Vials of Blood, repeatedly feeding on nearby animals or people, or restoring Health during combat with Voracious Bite.

In other words, during quests where you need to rescue an NPC being held deep inside enemy territory, taking too much damage on the way there can leave you unable to recover enough Health. You may then end up killing the very NPC you were trying to save by feeding on them.

That risk can come with advantages, however. In some rescue quests, progressing at night may reduce the time cost or allow you to obtain rare skill manuals.

Decide whether to attempt them at night based on how confident you are in your combat ability.

Recommended Early-Game Skills: Sustained Focus and Hastened Corruption

The game has three skill trees:

• Swordmastery, which can be used both during the day and at night
• Witchcraft, which can only be used during the day
• Vampirism, which can only be used at night

The Witchcraft and Vampirism skill trees are unlocked after completing Smoke and Ashes, a quest that becomes available shortly after the prologue.

As for recommended skills, I suggest starting with one rank in Sustained Focus from the Swordmastery tree, then taking one rank in Nourishing Blood as a prerequisite and one rank in Hastened Corruption from the Vampirism tree.

What Is “Sustained Focus” Good For?

Sustained Focus increases the maximum number of Activation Charges you can store.

Once you get past the prologue, fights tend to last a fair bit longer, and you will often generate Activation Charges faster than your Active Abilities come off cooldown.

Completing Smoke and Ashes also leaves you with two Active Abilities available during both the day and night.

Because of this, putting just one point into Sustained Focus greatly reduces the chance of sitting at the Activation Charge cap and wasting potential charge generation.

The starting Activation Charge cap is also too low to use Swordmastery skills that cost 2 charges, such as Artery Strike, a high-damage single-target attack, and Broad Swing, an area attack.

So if you want to use either of these skills, Sustained Focus is essential.

What is “Forager” Good For?

“Forager” in the Witchcraft skill tree gives you a chance to double the amount of materials obtained when gathering plants.

With just one point invested, you gain a 50% chance to receive twice the normal amount, meaning that your expected material yield increases by 50% overall.

Despite being part of the Witchcraft skill tree, this skill remains active at all times, even during the night.

If you unlock it around the time the Witchcraft skill tree becomes available after the prologue, it will continue providing value throughout the rest of the game.

Fast travel is also relatively inconvenient in the early game because many travel points are still locked. This gives Forager a double advantage: its effect remains useful throughout the game, and you will have plenty of opportunities to benefit from it while exploring on foot.

What is “Hastened Corruption” Good For?

“Hastened Corruption” increases the rate at which your Corruption Level rises through feeding by 30%.

As your Corruption Level increases, you gain access to higher-tier skills in the Vampirism skill tree, so this skill effectively works as a kind of progression booster.

Looking across the game’s entire skill system, there are very few skills that directly improve the speed of your character’s progression itself.

Even investing just one point in it early on can make your overall character progression significantly more efficient.

Like Forager, this is the kind of skill that becomes more valuable the earlier you unlock it.

In My Case

For reference, I picked up the first rank of Sustained Focus as early as possible…

…and honestly, I barely noticed any benefit during the prologue, where most fights can be won by more or less mashing buttons.

It only started to feel genuinely useful after I finished the prologue and began running into battles that lasted long enough for the extra Activation Charge capacity to matter.

Best Early Equipment

At the beginning of the game, you only have two realistic weapon options: the training sword that your father, Pieter, tells you to pick up as part of the story, and the greatsword found in the mine.

This will ultimately come down to personal preference, but I found the training sword easier to use because of its lower Stamina consumption.

When it comes to equipment, wearing medium or heavy armor can reduce incoming damage by around 40%, so if you’re struggling in combat, prioritizing defense can make fights much more manageable.

The game does display a warning that your “stats will be reduced,” but the penalty is subtle enough that it’s hard to tell exactly which stats are being affected. In practice, I haven’t noticed any particularly significant downside.

What Beginners Should Keep in Mind

The most important thing to understand is that the game appears to be deliberately designed so that you cannot experience every possible choice in a single playthrough.

Some NPCs will inevitably be sacrificed, and the more NPC casualties you try to prevent, the less time you will have to develop Coen’s skills.

So the only advice I can really give is this: choose the option you are least likely to regret.

The general rule rarely seems to change: choices and actions that consume more time tend to unlock more powerful skills or provide deeper and more personal interactions with characters.

What to Do If You Get Stuck

You are unlikely to become completely stuck because of the game itself. The greatest obstacle, however, is the crash that can occur during the Blood Mass.

I have written a separate article detailing the steps I took to work around the crash, so feel free to refer to it if you encounter the same issue.

Guides Based on Hands-On Play and Testing

At Kaburanai  Games, I write guides based on information I personally verify while actually playing the game and taking notes along the way.

When needed, I repeat tests under different conditions, dig into why something is actually “strong” beyond what the raw stats suggest, and sometimes even use statistical analysis. (I do happen to have a Level 2 Statistics Certification, which is a pretty niche qualification…)

For another game, Dungeon Antiqua 2, I tested every class and skill, then used real-world sample data to examine things like the relationship between individual skills and activation rates, as well as whether a skill could statistically be said to have a genuine effect.

So if you’re ever wondering, “Just how far does this site go when researching its guides?”—well, here’s one example of the kind of stuff I do.

I pushed Dungeon Antiqua2’s classes and skills to the absolute limit and turned the results into a full guide.

I’m pretty sure we’re the first site in the world to seriously analyze the relationship between Battlemind and Lethal activation rates using statistics.

I’m Kaburanai,…

— KaburanaiNamae（かぶらない）@IndieGame100 (@BnqGvq3785) August 23, 2026

The Blood of Dawnwalker Guides