Moving on up in V Rising

The old castle in V Rising was becoming a bit problematic. Everything was crammed up against each other like a disorganized workspace area at a FedEx Kinkos, and quite honestly, I was running out of room.  Team Spode made the decision early on to try and keep our castles close to each other in a communal vampire coven, but the only problem with that is . . . I'm freaking addicted to this game.

The old castle is a bit crowded

I've been spending far FAR too much time in this game. I've soloed all the bosses up through Frostmaw (as of this post), and the rest of Team Spode has been involved in other things. (Gratz Tipa on reaching the final boss of Elden Ring.)

Kind of disappointing, Frostmaw bugged and ended up being easy to kill

Luckily you can have a couple of castles at once in V Rising, so I hiked up North, found a really great location to make a new castle and went to work. Team, the new castle is looking LEGIT! I've got rooms separated out with differing floor tiles and workstations that get bonuses from being located on those tiles. I've got a jail. I've got a throne room. I've got a secret garden in back with two gigantic copper resource nodes. I've got servant quarters . . . and look, I'm not even DONE DECORATING!  It's going to be epic.

The Forge is separated from the Library and Alchemist's Lab!

The best part of the new castle, however, is that it's located in the heart of Dunley with easy access to a slew of bosses and resources.  It was pretty natural to move my bass of operations from South to North.

One of my latest conquests was killing Tristan the Vampire Slayer. Man that felt good.  Whenever you'd see Tristan in your lower levels you'd run like you were an expendable low rank hacker in the Matrix and Agent Smith was after you. As a bonus for killing him, I got three things. 1- His cool vampire hunter pilgrim hat. 2- A recipe that allows you to transmute your boxes and boxes full of blood essence into that delicious Greater Essence. 3- A cool skill that lets you easily see the types of blood and purity of blood of your enemies.

Ready for thanksgiving . . . and murder . . .

That last skill is pretty epic. Rolling your mouse over an enemy to see that information was cumbersome. Launching a skill to see blood type and quality is epic. Why?  Lemme see if I can explain that a bit.

A 15, a flock of 19s, and a 22 . . . 

So basically, there are several types of blood in the game right? Brute, Rogue, Warrior, Worker, Scholar, Beast . . . think those are the main ones. In addition, each living enemy you encounter has one of those blood types and a percentage of blood purity. When you drink an enemies blood, you switch to their blood type and percentage.

In a way you can think of it as your sub-class because each of these blood types give you different bonuses base on its purity.  If you want to go kill a bunch of enemies, switch to a battle type.  If you want to do a lot of spell damage, switch to Scholar.  If you want to spend a chunk of time crafting, switch to Worker.

Worker blood . . . Gotta love that increased resource yield!

Also, just to note, blood percentages don't stack. So let's say you're rocking a 54% Warrior blood and you drink the blood of a 9% warrior, you're going to drop down to a 9% warrior blood type. You don't want that because there's bonuses for getting higher quality blood.

This blood also naturally decays over time, and using vampire skills also drains it a bit. The big blood hog happens when you regen life through a vampire skill . . . that drains it big time. The ultimate drain of course is when you die. If you die, you lose your blood type completely and your blood type says "frailed." If you eat heart or a rat, your blood will fill, but it'll replace your blood type with frailed, so only use those in an emergency. (You should really only be using rats and hearts for other crafting related things anyway.)

Eventually you'll be able to craft jail cells and charm your enemies with a vampire skill. Those 100 percent blood enemies are EXTREMELY valuable and you'll want to put them in a jail cell because eventually you put them on tap . . . and then 100 percent blood will be available to you all the time . . . as long as you don't completely drain your jailed purebloods, which is actually surprisingly easy to do.  That's where fishing comes back in to play.  If you feed your prisoners good fish, they are less miserable and less likely to die from blood draining.

100 percent warrior blood . . . melikey!

YOU GUYS THIS GAME! It's so good. I don't know . . . I know a few of my friends have struggled with the controls, but I kind of took to it like a fish in water. Good times.

Happy Dueling!