Crimson Desert is a massive game filled with fiddly systems and underexplained mechanics, but once you’ve gotten a foothold in its gigantic open world, it’s hard to leave.
To hopefully make your experience just a little bit smoother, here are some of our best Crimson Desert tips we wish we knew when we started playing.
Ring Bell Towers for a map
One of the most stunning examples of Crimson Desert’s opacity is how poorly it communicates the concept of Bell Towers. It simply never tells you about them.
Perhaps I was playing on a pre-release build missing this tooltip, but in major settlements you can interact with Bell Towers, which show as a white bell on your mini-map, to dispel the fog of war from the surrounding area, making exploration, navigation and finding important Abyss Artifacts easier.
Now you know this, they should be your first port-of-call whenever you reach a new city.
Upgrade your health and stamina before attempting boss battles
Most of the combat in Crimson Desert prioritizes spectacle over tactics. It’s almost like a Dynasty Warriors game as you wade through swathes of bandits, swinging swords and slamming suplexes.
But all that changes when you face off against one of the game’s many proper bosses. They’re much faster, hit much harder and are much, much more resilient than regular enemies, and provide a much sterner test than you might be expecting given the level of everything else you’ve faced.
Also, given the complexity of the Skill tree, it can be tough to work out where to put your points first.
The first two proper bosses you’ll face are called The Hornsplitter and Excavatron. If your next quest step says to go and take them on, you’ll need at least an extra couple of points in Health and Stamina before you do so.
Spin to Win
While we’re on the knotted branches of Crimson Desert’s Skill tree, it’s worth knowing that loads of the combat Skills are extremely good (and very fun), but the most important ones are Turning Slash and Level 2 of Grappling.
Turning Slash is a whirling attack which can be used with most bladed weapons by pressing the light and heavy attack buttons at the same time. Crucially, it works as an AoE which is rare within Crimson Desert and makes it vital for larger fights.
The second level of Grappling however lets you chain the massively OP dashing kick, which is the best early move for closing distance, into a hilarious spinning grab which sends enemies flying.
Both come highly recommended.
You can learn Skills without spending points on them
As if the Skill tree needed to get any more complicated, there’s also an extra wrinkle.
Look for the eye icon when assessing the Skills and you’ll see that these are “Watch and Learn” abilities which can be unlocked during quests or by fighting regular enemies throughout the world. Unless you’re desperate to try them out and can spend a Faded Abyss Artifact later, think twice before you grab Skills you could get for free.
Refining weapons and armor is easy and useful
New weapons and equipment sets are relatively limited in Crimson Desert, particularly useful ones. But you can easily upgrade your base equipment, which looks cool too, to get you through the early game until you’re ready to move on.
In a lot of games, upgrading your equipment isn’t really worth the effort, requiring too many resources and not giving enough of a benefit. In Crimson Desert though, you only need a few plentiful ores and pieces of cloth to give your items some much-needed extra heft.
Visit the Blacksmith and choose “Refinement” rather than “Crafting” to upgrade your stuff.
Batch cook as much healing as possible at once
In lieu of something more fantasy coded like health potions, to restore his vitality Kliff must simply stuff a three-course meal into his face to seal up an arrow wound.
However, while you get ingredients relatively often, you don’t get many quality healing items from loot. This can leave you caught short when it really comes to the crunch.
Whenever you come across a cooking pot (there’s one at the butcher’s in Hernand), throw in all of your usable ingredients so you’re constantly stocked with healing food items for when you really need them.
Be a good samaritan, it helps you carry more
One of the more baffling things about Crimson Desert is how it treats loot and your inventory.
Why would you introduce so many different food items, alchemy ingredients, upgrade cores and the like, then give the player nowhere near enough space to carry them?
Despite giving you a house to decorate and a storage chest for lost items, there is no player-owned storage in Crimson Desert, so you need to fit everything you want to keep into your overstuffed inventory.
Luckily, you can get some inventory expansion by completing the requests you pluck from the bounty board in towns. You can also buy bags from merchants for a pittance. Spare a thought for me, who played Crimson Desert pre-release before this feature was introduced.