Minecraft but with Vampires!
V Rising is a 2022 crafting survival game developed and published by Stunlock Studios. Set in a world inspired by Gothic Horror, it features third-person exploration and base-building mechanics alongside crafting and a Diablo-esque combat system.
The twist? Your character is a vampire; one of many who once ruled these lands but was overthrown in the distant past. Now, after centuries of hibernation, you reemerge into the land of Vardoran and must reclaim your former glory. Not only that, but other vampires are waking from their ancient slumber too - and they all want their "fair share" of the realm as well. Will you team up with them and rule together, or fight over who gets to be the true Ruler of the land? It's all up to you.
V Rising was released on Steam's Early Access program in mid May 2022, will be officially released on May 8, 2024 for its 1.0 update, and will be ported to PlayStation 5 at a later date.
In April 2024 a month before the release of 1.0, it was announced that V Rising would be receiving a crossover with Castlevania at the game's launch, featuring multiple outfits and castle decorations taking after the series, as well as a special boss fight with the legendary vampire hunter Simon Belmont.
You sense your tropes in the distance:
- All There in the Manual: The Dev Blog
contains a lot of detail on the setting. - Amazing Technicolor Population: Vampire players can come in all skin colors across the color spectrum. Human NPCs converted into thralls/servants take on a dark blue-purple skin tone as well.
- Amplifier Artifact:
- Jewelry serves this purpose, particularly once you get into the higher gear scores. Effects such as increased spell crit chance, ability cooldown reductions, and so on are common, and there will be a small selection of items at the same gear level to let you choose how you specialize.
- The Secrets of Gloomrot expansion has added a new variety of jewels which can be used to apply augments to all spells except for ultimates.
- And Then John Was a Zombie: Vampires can do this to any human that is not a V blood carrier by mentally dominating them and then stuffing them into a coffin to convert them into a vampire servant.
- Anti-Frustration Features: The Gloomrot update added a lot of these to smooth out the gameplay experience with a special emphasis on cutting back on the amount of repetitive travel required.
- Several static waygates have been moved closer to points of interest so they're more accessible.
- Wolf Form gained an additional 15% movement speed boost and a spectral leap allowing it to phase through low obstacles and fences, making non-horse travel much faster and easier.
- There's now an item, the Dusk Caller, that transports a prisoner into a prison cell without having to run them back. No more losing a 100% blood quality mook to a crack-shot Rifleman or Militia Longbow on the way back to the castle.
- Merchants no longer wander around but appear in specific locations so you can find them when you need them. Additionally the merchants in Farbane don't require Human Form to interact with anymore.
- Gaining the 'Dominate Mount' ability lets you convert a horse into a special horse that doesn't require water, can be summoned when needed, and can be resurrected if killed, solving a lot of the problems people had with horses in Silverlight Hills. Like the wolf, a vampire horse also gains a spectral leap.
- Player-built waygates are now unlocked through progression rather than by killing a V Blood Carrier and can also be placed indoors. Intra-castle teleporters can also be unlocked to allow quicker navigation of large castles.
- The Blood Altar has been replaced with a menu so players no longer need to go back to a castle to find their next target.
- Wooden Coffins can now be placed indoors, eliminating an annoying period of the game where players could build castles but not put their coffins inside them.
- When building storage chests and the Devourer there is now an arrow clearly indicating which direction is the front.
- The Mist Brazier, an important early-game building that was easily missed by newer players, is now required by progression so it can't be overlooked.
- The Paper Press now unlocks from Nicholaus the Fallen instead of being a random drop in Dunley Farmlands, making it much easier to fill out the Research Desk.
- The Putrid Rat no longer requires a specific fish to summon, instead being summonable with more readily-available materials.
- Servant hunts now operate off system time instead of the ingame clock, allowing for solo players and servers that aren't perpetually online to make use of them.
- Destroying a large resource node in Bear Form now gives you the resources.
- Armor Is Useless: With the exception of the starting bone outfit, the equip-able armor is all increasingly fancy clothes, which are none the less perfectly functional for a vampire.
- Badass Cape: One of your key item slots is your cloak. They're extremely useful, as they're your primary way of increasing your resistance to various threats like garlic and sunlight.
- Bad Moon Rising: Inverted for players, played straight for everyone else. Every so often a night cycle will feature the rise of a Blood Moon, which boosts vampires' blood attributes by a whopping 30%, making these nights perfect for engaging challenging V Blood carriers.
- Beef Gate: Regions with more advanced materials and crafting recipes are defended by more powerful enemies. Vampiric abilities and spells, as well as other useful recipes, are also learned by defeating specific named heroes who are significantly tougher than common mooks. You can try to sneak past these border patrols, but any rewards in the area tend to be stronger than your equipment (such as trying to mine iron with copper tools) or defended by anti-vampire measures (such as garlic or holy magic).
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: The Cursed Forest is home to all sorts of nasty wildlife, most prominent among them an assortment of giant spiders and their queen.
- Big Fancy Castle: A vampire that is of sufficiently high level can build one of these as their home base, with basebuilding being loosely reminiscent of older titles like Dungeon Keeper.
- Black-and-Gray Morality: Strongly implied. The vampires are certainly a Villain Protagonist but the Church of Luminance is sliding into Light Is Not Good. Quincey the Bandit King was by all accounts a Humble Hero to the people of Dunley until the Church exiled him because he didn't respect them enough, Azariel the Sunbringer is depicted as a Manipulative Bastard who flattered, charmed, and threatened his way to becoming the equivalent of Pope, and Solarus the Immaculate has gone from being The Paragon who defeated the Greater-Scope Villain in ages past to a Jaded Washout Glory Seeker yearning for an evil strong enough to challenge him again.
- Blood Magic: Featured in several ways:
- Vampire abilities can be augmented depending on the kind and quality of blood they drink. Blood from animals allows you to run faster, while blood from warriors makes you better in close combat, and so on.
- Vampire homes are powered by a Castle Heart that must be provided with a large supply of refined Blood Essence in order to activate features such as crafting. Homes whose hearts have run dry of all blood essence will immediately begin decaying until they disappear entirely.
- Vampires can use blood essences in crafting to make powerful magic items and in building to expand their territory.
- Burn the Undead: Some enemies and heroes employ fire-based attacks which do significant damage to vampires - and anyone else caught in the area of effect.
- Cannot Cross Running Water: Downplayed. Vampires can cross very narrow and shallow streams, and use bridges just fine, but any body of water that rises above one's ankles is completely impassable and must be circumnavigated.
- Cool Gate: Ancient Vampire Waygates are scattered around the land, apparently somehow having survived the ages. They serve as a fast-travel system and can also be used as respawn points. After you defeat Polora you can build your own waygates too. Unfortunately default settings mean that a lot of items cannot be carried through waygates, severely limiting their utility.
- Cool vs. Awesome: Vampires versus bandits, skeletons and ghouls and banshees, vampire hunters, an order of priests and paladins and their army, mythical creatures, and of course, other vampires. Also applies when many of these different groups fight with each other.
- Secrets of Gloomrot adds even more options to the list by including mutants, steampunk-style engineers, and Frankenstein-esque golems.
- Crapsack World: The lands of Vardoran are not a nice place for the average person. The wilderness is crawling with bandits, wolves, bears, skeletons, and even man-eating plants. Even staying inside of a settlement isn't safe because those places can, and will, be attacked by vampires and werewolves.
- Creepy Cemetery: Several are scattered across the map and are populated with skeletons and other undead. A few of them are also home to some of the "heroes" in vampires' list of targets.
- Crossover: Near its official release date, the game collaborates with Castlevania, where your vampire will have a chance to fight the legendary vampire hunter Simon Belmont (though he is a heroic guy).
- De-power: The 'frailed' blood type, gained either after resurrecting or consuming a rat/heart, has no associated perks and is always 0% power. It doesn't prevent ability use so it'll do in a pinch, but you'd best seek out a proper blood source - even a weak one - as soon as possible, for those juicy bonuses.
- Difficult, but Awesome: Obtaining all three soul shards on a server is a steep challenge, of which slaying the three endgame bosses is only the start. Holding a shard prevents shapeshifting, horse riding, teleporting, and the use of cave passages, and applies a debuff to your move speed, while also lowering your combat scores. Each shard's location is also viewable on the world map for any player who has used the Eye of Twilight to reveal them, so any other players online who are watching can easily ambush you at any point on the way back to your home base... or simply attack the base itself to steal them later. That said, the buffs provided by soul shards effectively trivialize all forms of elemental damage and can even boost your gathering rate, and last for two hours, greatly reducing the stress of exploring and gathering in dangerous areas.
- Difficulty Levels: The game's difficulty settings are highly customizable, allowing for a very hardcore experience or a much more relaxed one. Several presets are included for quick setup.
- Divided We Fall: There are many factions opposing you, but they will not hesitate to fight amongst themselves either. The wild undead fight the Vardoran militia, the Vardoran militia fights the bandits of the Farbane Woods, the bandits fight the animals, animals hunt each other, and certain entities like Stone Golems will fight everything.
- Door to Before: Many lairs and strongholds of V Blood carriers are designed with a convenient ledge you can jump down from after defeating the boss.
- Elemental Powers: Vampires have spell trees based around a non-standard set of powers: Blood, Unholy, Illusion, Chaos, and Frost. NPC characters can also make use of most of these, as well as Fire and Holy abilities.
- Secrets of Gloomrot adds the new Storm spell school to the list, adds status conditions to each spell based on which school it resides in, and rearranges several pre-existing spells to better align them with their school's specialty.
- Equipment-Based Progression: Vampires level up by acquiring and equipping higher quality gear, and by drinking the blood of more powerful enemies. You can only track V Blood targets once your gear level is high enough.
- Evil Takes a Nap: The surviving vampires were either sealed away or put themselves into hibernation in special crypts far away from civilization. One of the very first steps of the tutorial is emerging from your coffin and getting to see a very intricate Geometric Magic style design light up briefly.
- Evil vs. Evil: While all players play as vampires, much of the game is spent fighting other undead, bandits, evil creatures, other vampire players in PvP, and so forth.
- Expy: The enemies Jade the Vampire Hunter and Polora the Feywalker are very clearly named after and have their movesets taken from Battlerite's Jade and Poloma, a previous title from the same studio.
- Fishing Minigame: One of the earlier Carriers unlocks a woodworking table, which also allows you to craft a fishing rod. You can then equip it and fish at special hotspots throughout the game world, and occasionally get useful things. While the spots are fairly uncommon and the rewards can vary, fish are a better food for your prisoners than rats as they can decrease Misery, and the fish oil is important for higher-end crafting.
- Flunky Boss: Several bosses (and a few minor enemies) can summon additional mooks to assist them in battle. Thankfully summoned minions will die when their summoner is defeated, or when bosses go into their 'downed' state.
- Glowing Eyelights of Undeath: Every vampire has glowing eyes, as do vampire servants.
- Gratuitous Latin: The Stone Coffin has "temporalis requies aeternae inmortuae" on the plaque at the base, which roughly translates to "temporary rest [from/for] the eternal undead".
- Healing Factor: Vampires slowly regenerate lost health over time, but if they take too much damage in a short period of time then their maximum health is reduced until they use consumables or abilities to recover it out of combat. Most consumables and abilities effectively boost the Healing Factor and allow it to restore max health outside of combat, but can be interrupted by taking damage and do not restore max health when in combat.
- Hellish Horse: Vampires can now learn the Dominate Horse ability, which allows them to convert a captured horse into one of these. Doing so comes with several benefits:
- Horses no longer need to be supplied with water and will sustain themselves indefinitely.
- The dominated horse can be magically summoned by the vampire at any time, anywhere.
- Dominated horses that are killed in combat can be revived by simply resummoning them.
- Vampires can decorate their dominated horses with different saddles and bridles.
- Holy Burns Evil: Holy spells and consecrated areas will do heavy damage to vampires. Fortunately these effects can be resisted with the right potions.
- Horror Hunger: Vampires' blood will drain continuously over time and so must be replenished regularly. If their stored blood drops to zero, they will start to lose health.
- Human Resources: Aside from straight up converting enchanted mortals to be your thralls who carry out your bidding, you can also build prison cells to throw them in. Imprisoned mortals can be converted or killed, or you can just keep them around as an extra blood reserve. You do need to put a little extra work in to keep them from dying after repeated harvests as their Misery increases, but it can be very handy to have that backup source on hand.
- Infinity -1 Sword: The recipe for the General's Soul Reaper is acquired shortly after leaving Farbane by following Meredith through the Haunted Iron Mines and grabbing it from Kriig the Undead Commander that she'll usually kill (or just killing the Undead Commander yourself with friends). It doesn't need anything too unusual or hard-to-get to craft and it's a Merciless Iron Reaper that gives a hefty additional bonus to spell power and critical strike, the only weapon to do so, making it more powerful than Dark Silver weapons and useful up until the end of the game.
- Secrets of Gloomrot removes the General's Soul Reaper and adds new unique weapons which use Merciless Iron or Sanguine weapons as templates. They come with extra stat bonuses selected at random, enabling a wide variety of specializations.
- An Interior Designer Is You: One of the primary aspects of progression in the game is reflected by the size and quality of the lair each vampire is able to build for themself as they gain power and access to new areas of the map. There are practical benefits to proper interior design beyond showing off your aesthetic sensibilities, as many production structures gain speed and/or efficiency bonuses from being indoors and in a room with the correct floor type.
- And Your Reward Is Interior Decorating: Many of your rewards for defeating bosses are also fancier decorations for your lair. Some of these are also practical, but a lot are just things like curtains or wallpaper or paintings.
- Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Downplayed. While weapon and spell usage are always going to intermingle and understanding both is important, spells become stronger and more important than weapons starting in Dunley as enemies and bosses become more dangerous to stay close to and have more powerful abilities that are easier to dodge when you're not right next to them. At higher levels spell selection is everything and weapons are chosen more for their evasion abilities than their attacks.
- Let's You and Him Fight: Almost every faction is hostile to one another, meaning that they'll fight if they meet. While they still prefer to attack vampires they don't care about crossfire and will attack each other if the vampire isn't an attractive target. It's even possible in some places to cause wandering V Blood Carriers to fight each other if their patrol routes intersect, with the center of the Farbane being especially likely to see this. Meredith the Bright Archer deserves special mention as she is placed to encourage vampires to exploit this; she's a very high level for the time she's first encountered, has a dangerous escort, and limits access to a vital resource... but she patrols an area that is completely hostile to her, and tends to be quite worn down by the end of her patrol route. "The Secrets of Gloomrot" expansion changed her main opponent (a formerly nameless Undead General) into a named V Blood Carrier that is far stronger, making it possible for either her or Kriig the Undead General to be subjected to this.
- Looks Like Orlok: One face option on the character creation screen is very clearly a nod to Nosferatu.
- The Lost Woods: The Secrets of Gloomrot expansion has made the Cursed Forest into this. Vampires lacking a specific item will find themselves overwhelmed by the cursed mist, which obscures vision down to almost zero and wipes out the map completely, leaving them helpless to find their way.
- Magic Knight: Vampires wield both conventional weapons and various magical abilities in combat.
- The Magnificent: The vast majority of V Blood Carrier names follow this format. Tristan the Vampire Hunter. Quincey the Bandit King. Vincent the Frostbringer. And so on.
- Mounted Combat: Starting in the Farmlands, you can steal horses to ride. These are apparently magical horses powered solely by water, but they give you a great way to get around quickly and you can use basic weapon attacks while mounted so you can hack down any impudent bandits who try to get in your way. You can even fire ranged weapons from horseback, with a roughly 270-degree firing arc, though hitting anything can be tricky.
- Mundane Utility:
- Aside from acting as respawn points, sleeping in coffins also drastically reduces blood consumption rate. Have nothing to do and want to just get through the day, but you're worried about losing a chunk of your blood? Just take a nap until sunset! In a similar vein the bear form has increased resistance to all elements, allowing players to use it to shed stacks of Garlic Exposure more quickly than normal.
- Every weapon is clearly made for combat first, from swords and reapers, to dual-wielded axes, to maces as big as an adult human. These same properties also make them useful tools for resource harvesting since they're magically reinforced and wielded with a vampire's Super-Strength, it's more likely your weapons will have felled far more trees and boulders than foes.
- Blood Rage is one of the earliest abilities you get from the first tier of V Blood carriers, it gives lifesteal and a non-dismissible amount of attack speed up. The healing and swinging faster is useful enough for enemies... but in the early game, before you have good weapons for harvesting resources, attacking faster makes gathering lumber and stone appreciably quicker.
- Ontological Inertia: A key feature of the game is that each vampires' buildings are persistent and can be interacted with by all players on a server.
- Optional Boss: Only 8* of the game's 37 V Blood Carriers are strictly required for progression through the equipment tiers and a ninth* is needed to gain access to every boss. All the others are varying degrees of optional depending on how much a player needs what they unlock.
- Our Vampires Are Different: V Rising's vampires are supernatural creatures that power themselves by consuming the blood of humans or animals. A vampire gains certain status bonuses depending on the type and quality of blood they absorb. Other vampire tropes/myths are hinted at as well; the feature to transfer all items of the same type from your inventory to a container (for quickly unloading after an expedition) is named "Compulsively Count". Thankfully it's instant.
- Player Vs Player: Takes an interesting form in this game due to the building system. Not only can players engage each other directly, it is also possible for one player to lay siege to another player's home base and either destroy it or claim the territory as their own. To further increase the stakes on dedicated PVP servers, only a single instance of each 'Soul Shard' can exist, which will ultimately lead to vampire clans clashing for possession of such powerful artefacts. This is all entirely optional though; you can play on servers that have all PVP elements disabled if you so wish, or just play solo, and on pure-PVE servers multiple instances of each Soul Shard can exist.
- Power Copying: Implied to be the mechanism by which vampires acquire new spells and abilities, since the new spells that are learned are usually demonstrated by the heroes they must defeat to learn them. Sometimes you'll get an Evil Counterpart of the ability instead, such as gaining the Purgatory Unholy ability from Christina since Vampires can't use Holy powers.
- Red and Black and Evil All Over: The Founder's Pack and Dracula's Relics Pack allow you to embrace this look, with black and red 'stygian' alternate wolf and bear forms for the former, and a series of red and black castle decorations and outfit items for the latter.
- The Renfield: Played with. Vampires are able to acquire human servants as they progress through the game, but it's made very clear that these people are being dominated against their will.
- Scenery Porn: The environs are all beautifully rendered.
- Set Bonus: The upgraded set of each armour tier has stacking set bonuses for wearing half and all four pieces of the set, as well as offering increased gear score and Max HP over the standard tier.
- Silver Has Mystic Powers: Silver coins are one of the currencies in the game and can be used to trade with merchants who can be found on the map, but carrying any quantity of silver will reduce vampiric regeneration and can cause continuous damage in sufficient quantities, and prevents shapeshifting. Vampires can equip certain gear or use potions to resist this effect for a time. Increasing your silver resistance also reduces the damage you take from silver weapons.
- Sinister Scythe: Reapers are a hybrid of this and a battleaxe, with Iron-tier reapers favoring the scythe and Dark Silver-tier reapers favoring the battleaxe. The Undead Commander Kriig wields an especially nasty scythe, the General's Soul Reaper, whose recipe you can learn. They specialize in AoE damage-dealing and do extra damage to Undead, and the General's Soul Reaper boosts spell power.
- Slasher Smile: One of the more cartoonish character customization options gives your vampire an impressively wide (and sharp) grin.
- Status Effects: Several standard effects are used in combat:
- Vampires are vulnerable to the classical weapons of folklore - garlic, silver, holy symbols, fire, and sunlight - and suffer various status ailments while under their effects unless they prepare countermeasures. Garlic increases damage taken and reduces damage dealt (and increases detection range from enemies), while silver reduces regeneration in small amounts (or actively causes damage if you hold too much) and prevents shapeshifting. Holy effects cause severe speed reductions, fire causes nasty damage over time, and sunlight will quickly reduce a vampire to ash if they're caught out in it too long.
- Certain attacks can stun or slow their recipients for a brief period of time, while other abilities can cause enemies to become stunned if they attack the user.
- Many abilities have a knockback effect on their targets.
- Taking too much damage during combat without recovering health causes Maximum HP Reduction.
- Secrets of Gloomrot adds a specific status effect to each spell a vampire casts based on which type of spell is used. Augment jewels can add even more effects to specific spells.
- The Straight and Arrow Path: You can pick up crossbows fairly early on, which, while slow thanks to the warmup/cocking animation, do give you a useful ranged option. At higher tiers, they gain the ability to fire a tightly-clustered Rain of Arrows and a 'quick shot' that doesn't have the warmup time and interrupts ability casting in targets.
- Swamps Are Evil: The Cursed Forest is a dark, marshy wood filled with dangerous monsters.
- Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: Using the right weapon for the job is important. Swords deal increased damage to vegetation and plant type enemies, maces deal extra damage to minerals, spears deal extra damage to animals, scythes deal extra damage to undead, and so on.
- Technicolor Fire: Chaos Fire is reddish-pinkish-purple, and Unholy Fire is green.
- Tracking Spell: The Blood Altar formerly allowed you to track V Blood Carriers by indicating their direction relative to you with wispy reddish-black mist every so often. This is often necessary to locate targets quickly since many of these carriers wander across wide areas of the map. It can also be used defensively in order to help players avoid the roaming Vampire Hunters. This was later changed to not require a building in your base to activate, and to give a rough estimate of their distance to the player as well.
- Turns Red: Many V Blood Carriers start using extra attacks or new abilities when their health is reduced below certain thresholds. Enemies which seem easy to begin with can very quickly turn the tables on you if you're unprepared for these new maneuvers.
- Utility Weapon: Slashers are a downplayed example. While just fine as weapons they're more valued for their abilities, which can be used to bypass or avoid otherwise-troublesome boss mechanics or travel relatively safely through areas the vampire shouldn't be able to survive yet.
- Vampires Hate Garlic: Farmers and some townsfolk hang wreaths of garlic to repel vampires, which will apply a stacking, long-lasting debuff to a vampire's damage output, damage resistance, and stealth rating (because it stinks).
- Vampire Hunter: A few heroes are explicitly hunters of vampires. They often make for especially dangerous opponents, and very early on are more than a match for an unprepared vampire.
- Vestigial Empire: The game's lore indicates that vampires once ruled humans across the region, but were overthrown at some point in the distant past. The ruins of many old castles can be found across the map. The goal of every vampire in the game is to avert this trope by re-establishing themselves as a major power over the region.
- Villain Protagonist: No Friendly Neighborhood Vampire here, the player character is unambiguously monstrous. From aspirations of conquest and reducing mankind to cattle, to forcefully converting villagers into vampire thralls and shoving captives into tiny little boxes while you drain from them like oversized juice boxes, your path to power will inarguably be paved in the blood and bodies of criminals and innocents alike.
- Voluntary Shape Shifting: Vampires can acquire various transformations which grant unique abilities, such as wolves, bats, and even humans. As a bonus, wild wolves will ignore you when you're in your wolf form.
- Wake-Up Call Boss: The Ferocious Bear is the first boss the average player isn't likely to beat without putting serious thought into their skill choices, blood type, and blood quality before heading into it. It's not a particularly complicated boss, having only three attack patterns, but it's extremely fast, hits very hard, and many of its attacks inflict Slow making it difficult to get away from if you make a mistake.
- Walking Armory: A vampire can carry and switch between as many items as their inventory allows, each with its own roles.
- Swords are superior at harvesting foliage, and give out quick, fairly hard-hitting attacks. Copper and up swords can perform a Spin Attack, while iron and up adds a Ground Wave Sword Beam which can launch a target into the air, with the option of a Flash Step followup while they're in the air.
- Axes are wielded in pairs, though uncharacteristically that makes them slightly slower and slightly harder hitting than swords. They are efficient at chopping down trees. Copper axes add a short dash strike which increases your attack speed on a hit, while iron axes can be thrown in a circular arc.
- Maces are the slowest and hardest hitting weapon, which is efficient at breaking apart rocks, including the kind that is alive and trying to kill you. Copper maces add a leaping Ground Pound, while iron ones add a quick swing that can stun targets.
- Spears are quick and deal good damage, having better reach than other weapons but without the wide arc that can hit multiple foes. They deal extra damage to creature type enemies. Copper spears can perform a rapid-fire flurry of strikes, while iron and up can be thrown to harpoon a distant enemy closer.
- Reapers are giant scythes that perform similarly to maces, but deal extra damage to undead. They can only be crafted from the iron tier and up, and they offer a quick Spin Attack which deals heavy damage and knocks back nearby enemies, or be thrown to spin in place, damaging enemies who don't move away. A unique enemy type, the Undead Commander, has one as his preferred weapon, which can crafted if he drops the recipe, being a unique reaper which increases the damage of your spells.
- Slashers are short, dual-wielded blades which offer the quickest but lightest strikes, and deal extra damage to foliage. They can only be crafted from the iron tier up, and their abilities are a quick dash forward and back, damaging enemies both ways, and the ability to disappear and perform a strong, stunning sneak attack.
- Crossbows are slow but deal a lot of damage and have a long range, making them the go-to weapon for fighting at a distance. Copper crossbows can fire a Rain of Arrows to hobble pursuers or batter groups, with iron and up crossbows gaining a quick shot that interrupts casting and likewise slows pursuit.
- Greatswords are, like crossbows, slow to swing but very hard-hitting. Only available at iron and higher, these weapons offer a quick charge forward that knocks enemies into the air and a leaping ground slam that deals damage in a forward line.
- Pistols offer a second ranged option, being faster and more mobile than the crossbow but with weaker shots and a shorter range. The last of the weapons to appear, they offer a quick burst of damage from many shots fired rapidly in a forward cone and an Unnecessary Combat Roll followed up with a single shot that causes its target to explode after a short delay, dealing damage in an area around them.
- Weakened by the Light: Exposure to sunlight is a surefire path to a quick death, so avoiding this while going about your activities is a major aspect of the game. You can also increase your Sun Resistance, which gives you a little more time before it starts burning you into ash.
- You Dirty Rat!: Rats are a basic resource and an emergency source of blood for desperate vampires. They can also be used to feed prisoners.
- Zero-Effort Boss: The vast majority of V Blood Carriers are at least moderately dangerous. Not so for Beatrice the Tailor, an old woman who does nothing but flee from you. She could be considered a Flunky Boss though, since she's pretty tough for an old lady and her running around will likely lead you towards Vardoran Militia and town guards.
