V Rising beginner’s guide

We prepped up a V Rising beginner’s guide for newcomers to the popular and promising new vampiric action RPG.

There’s no surprise that V Rising is a big deal. Every single day I see more and more of my friends trying the game out, and I’m getting more and more questions about V Rising. So today I’m going to take a moment to tell you everything I’ve learned that can help you get ahead and make that late-game grind that much easier, without spoiling too much of the fun.

V Rising is a Survival Crafting game with a Vampire twist, think Rust, Ark, and Valheim. If you’ve played any of the above you’ll already have a good idea as to what is going on in V Rising, but not everything is so cut and dry. When you first start out in V Rising you’ll be spawned inside a Crypt and given the option of spawning on the east or west side of the map, a choice that literally doesn’t matter.

The main gameplay loop of V Rising is as follows: Build a Castle, Craft Items to get better gear, Use said gear to gather resources, and Hunt down bosses to unlock more crafting stations and specific skills to aid you in your quest so that you can go upgrade your castle and unlock even better gear. The cycle goes on and on. If you find yourself stuck and you’re unsure what you need to do to continue, press the O key and take a look at the bosses available one of those might just hold the key to further yourself in your journey.

Without further ado, here’s our V Rising Beginner’s Guide:

V Rising Beginner’s Guide

Table of contents

Game Modes

Movement, Combat, Weapons, and Magic

The Blood Pool and Feeding

Mind the sun – but don’t stop playing after sunrise

Locations and Zones

Choosing a Base Location

Traversing the Map

Horses

Bones and Grave Dust

Game Modes

PvE (Player versus Environment) – Servers where player vampires fighting alongside each other to reclaim the realm of Vadoran. Form clans or fight on your own and conquer the world.

PvP (Player versus Player) – Servers where player vampires actively compete and fight against one another to reclaim the realm of Vadoran. Vampires can also siege each other’s castles to raid them for loot.

Full Loot PvP – Servers where player vampires actively compete and fight against one another to reclaim the realm of Vadoran. You also lose all of your loot upon death, and your castle can be destroyed completely if sieged properly.

Duo PvP – Servers where player vampires actively compete and fight against one another to reclaim the realm of Vadoran in pairs of 2 on 2.

Movement, Combat, Weapons, and Magic

Movement and basic combat – V Rising plays generally like a top-down MMORPG in terms of mechanics where you move with WASD keys and use your mouse cursor to aim and move your camera. As you explore, your default attack is your left click and pending your weapon type, your attacks will vary.

Weapon Types – In total there are seven weapon types currently: swords, axes, maces, spears, crossbows, reapers, and slashers, each with their own unique attacks and with tier 2 or 3 weapons, the second and third level weapon technique attacks.

Magic Abilities – After beating V Blood bosses, you’ll unlock various magic spells that can be assigned to your action bar. Each spell has a unique ability or effect, and has a corresponding cooldown. In total there are five spell types: blood, unholy, illusion, chaos, and frost.

Vampire Powers – There are ten unique vampire powers that you can use, three of which you start out with: Expose Vein, Blood Mend, and Dominating Presence. The other seven mostly focus on taking the shape of other creatures: Rat Form, Wolf Form, Bear Form, Human Form, Bat Form, Toad Form, and Blood Hunger.

The Blood Pool and Feeding

V Rising has you play as a vampire, so you must feed off living creatures or humans to maintain your internals with a constant supply of blood. Each living creature in Vadoran has a different blood type, i.e. Brute, Warrior, or Rogue, and each blood type will give you different perks after feeding. Furthermore, the quality of a blood source is indicated by a percentage with 1% being the worst and 100% being the best – the quality of the blood will give you minimal or maxed out blood perks, as there are five tiers of blood perks. Blood perks/percentages do not stack, and whenever you feed again it will change your blood type. Dying and respawning or eating blood consumables like mice or hearts will give you the “Frailed” blood type, which gives no perks.

Mind the sun – but don’t stop playing after sunrise

V Rising lets you become a powerful vampire, however you’re still gravely affected by direct sunlight. While it’s not advisable to explore during daytime until you get more comfortable and ultimately powerful, you can absolutely still progress and even fight in daylight – you just have to make clever use of the shadows. When moving through direct sunlight, you’re given a few seconds before your vampire catches on fire, causing extreme damage and eventually – death. The sun also moves through the sky just like it does in real life, so one safe spot under a tree won’t be safe later in the day. You can eventually get gear to help shield you a bit from the sun so you won’t catch fire as fast, as well as potions that block sun damage for a bit, and even a wolf form that lets you delay sun damage a tiny bit more. Daylight runs from 10 AM through 6 PM and Moonlight runs from 7 PM through 9 AM.

Locations and Zones

V Rising’s map is split into different regions, with each region having its own difficulty, bosses, mobs, and items to gather. Those zones are as follows:

Farbane Woods: Farbane Woods is the beginner zone, enemies are more sparse and the loot you find is catered more around the lower-tier items you’ll need to craft.

Dunley Farmlands: North of the Farbane Woods are the Dunley Farmlands, which is where you will spend most of your time in V Rising. Here you will find some smaller towns, militia camps, horses, and farmlands. Due to the more built-up nature of this region, there are a lot more patrols on the road and enemies are tougher.

Hallowed Mountains: East of Farbane Woods is this mountainous snowy terrain which serves very little purpose other than a key boss and plenty of wolves, it does however connect to both the Dunley Farmlands and the Farbane Woods and has a decent land size for your main base that should mostly be left uninterrupted due to the fact that players have little to no reason to come here.

The Cursed Forest: This region is to the northeast of the Dunley Farmlands, it’s a dark abysmal swamp full of spiders, ghosts, frogs, and dark spirits. A lot of late-game items can be gathered here but with risk comes reward and the enemies here bite. there’s plenty of shade to hide from the sun, but I wouldn’t suggest starting out here as you’ll spend a ton of time traveling to and from and dodging high-end nasties.

Silverlight Hills: The far west of the map is a dry hilly region that houses the largest human kingdom and the silver mines, a crucial late-game item you will need. This region is the most dangerous with sparse shade, dangerous harpies, and heavily armed militias patrolling the roads. You will need to spend a lot of time bouncing between Silverlight Hills and the Cursed Forest if you want to get anywhere in the late game.

Choosing a Base Location

One of the biggest decisions in V Rising will be choosing a location for your Castle. Early on you may be tempted to choose a central location, somewhere safe but also close to where most of the bosses are or near one of the mines for quick in and out gathering. That would be a big mistake. If you play your cards right, and read this guide you’ll quickly understand why, but long story short: traveling is very simple. The biggest bottleneck for bases is their size, and if you’re on a PVP server – other players.

Once you get out of the early game the crafting stations you’ll be placing inside of your castle get larger and larger, and you’ll be able to make those items work more efficiently by placing them in the correct room, with the correct floor. So you will need lots of room to expand and create designated crafting areas for your maximum efficiency. Another handy tip- once you unlock “grass” as a terrain placement, if you’re on a PVP server cut down all of the trees and replace them with grass tiles to make sure they don’t grow back. This will make it harder for your enemies to raid you during the day unless they spend a bunch of time crafting sun resistance potions.

Traversing the Map

The map in V Rising is huge, with never-ending corridors constantly twisting and turning leading you to wherever you need to be, but it doesn’t have to take long or be difficult. Don’t be scared by the sun either, V Rising is designed to allow careful traversal during the day with plenty of shade placed in just the right places. Early on in the game after defeating Polora the Feywalker (located in the east of Farbane Woods just south of the Silverlight hills) you will unlock the ability to place a Vampire Waygate in your castle giving you the ability to teleport to any of the Vampire Waygates you’ve discovered on the map. One key thing to note about teleporting though is that you cannot carry resources when you teleport- but you can still carry weapons and potions.

The other key thing that most people in V Rising have trouble with is caves. There are eight caves scattered around the world map, Two in the cursed forest, One in the Silverlight Hills, Two in the Dunley Farmlands, and Three in the Farbane Woods. These caves are one-directional meaning you can only enter and exit them one way and they all move you south, and the good news is you can travel through caves with a full inventory and while riding a horse. I’ve spent 1000 hours in MS paint to bring you this helpful image.

Horses

Horses in V Rising can be found in the human settlements and farms as well as in some of the bandit and militia camps. It doesn’t take a genius to know this will help you travel around the map faster. Horses require water to stay alive, so you’ll have to craft up some water bags if you’re partial to your trusty steed. But not all horses are created equal, they have different speeds. You can check a horse’s speed once you have mounted it the first time by walking up to it and pressing TAB. Anything over a 10.0 is pretty rare and fast which is the type of horse you’ll want to stick around. You can also craft potions to increase your riding speed mid-late game. In order to maximize efficiency, I tend to plan my gathering trips around locations with horses towards the end, that way I can teleport, run my route and ride back to base as quickly as possible, using caves when needed.

If you make use of Horses, Caves, and Teleporters you’ll find that every location in V Rising is just one or two minutes away. The other important thing that will slow you down late game is utilizing the wrong resources early game, there are a few key items that a lot of players take for granted early on or waste on unnecessary items and end up regretting it, so pay attention to this next part.

Bones and Grave Dust

Bones in V Rising are one of the more common resources in the game practically every living creature be it animals or humans drops bones, and early on they can be used to fuel an item called a “Mist Brazier” which absorbs sunlight during the day. Don’t waste your time and your bones in a Mist Brazier. The sun isn’t as dangerous as it looks and 90% of your castle time will be spent under a roof very quickly. Instead, gather and save your bones as often as you can. You see, Bones can be put in the grinder and turned into “Grave Dust” an item that is less common and used to make a lot of items from the mid-late game, including Scourgestones which are a massive pain in the butt to gather. So don’t waste your bones and don’t toss them out, I promise you, it’ll save you hours upon hours of grinding later on.