V Rising blood essence is what makes your vampiric world go around. You use it to keep your castle from decaying, you can replenish your health from it, and it’s an essential resource for crafting new gear and buildings. However, it’s not always clear in the early access vampire game how to efficiently get hold of it and what you should be doing with it once you’ve built up a vast blood bank.
For starters, you can’t get V Rising blood essence from every enemy type in the game – it might surprise you to learn that those undead skeletons are pretty dry. When you do find enemy types whose veins are coursing with crimson, you gain different traits by slurping the sanguine of different enemy types. Eventually – when you get beyond the first few hours of V Rising – you’ll come across craftables and new buildings that require ‘greater blood essence’, which is even harder to get hold of.
To help you unclot the whole thing, we’ve prepared a quick guide to V Rising blood essence, showing you how to get it, what it’s used for, and how to get the rarer ‘greater blood essence’ variant.
How to get V Rising blood essence
Blood essence can be gathered just like lumber or stone, except you’ll find it in living creatures. This means that some enemies, like the aforementioned skeletons and stone golems, don’t drop any when you defeat them, and they also can’t be fed upon.
However, plenty of other creatures and humanoids are full of the stuff, and you can gather it by simply attacking away at them until they’re nearly dead. When their health drops below a certain point, you’ll see a prompt to ‘feed’ from them – make sure there are no other enemies around before starting to feed as you’ll still take damage while doing so. You can still drain small amounts by just killing them instead of feeding, but it’s nowhere near as effective.
How to get V Rising greater blood essence
The rarer form can’t be harvested straight from an enemy’s neck. Instead, you’ll need to build a blood press in your V Rising castle. Once you’ve got one, head out and look for high-level enemies, especially bosses and the mobs that spawn during boss fights.
These all have a higher chance of dropping ‘unsullied hearts’, and you can convert four of these into a stack of greater blood essence using the blood press.
There’s also a recipe, which you’ll get from slaying Tristan the Vampire Hunter, that lets you convert 150 blood essence into one greater blood essence at a blood press.
How to use V Rising blood essence
Once you’ve done some feeding, you will see a red orb in your inventory – this is a stack of blood essence. Its main use is to fuel your castle heart, which stops your castle and everything in it from decaying over time.
To do this, simply interact with it and drag the blood essence from your inventory into the slots in your castle heart. Blood essence also powers machinery like your sawmill, so make sure you’re always farming creatures for more in addition to any lumber, stone, or metals you gather.
All V Rising blood types
As we mentioned earlier, there are a few different blood types in the game and you’ll change between them depending on what living creature you feed from. You can also pick up rats and feed on them for a small blood boost, but it will reset your blood type to the default one.
Here are all the different blood types in V Rising:
- Frailed – your default blood type, comes with no bonuses
- Creature – drawn from animals, helps with mobility
- Rogue – comes from certain humans, helps with critical hits and mobility
- Warrior – also from humans, buffs melee but slows movement
- Brute – also from humans, aids damage and survivability
- Scholar – also from humans, grants bonuses to spells
- Worker – found in non-combat humans, boosts gathering efficiency
Each blood type has its own ability tree, so this is something you’ll want to look at carefully when you’re looking to craft the perfect V Rising build.
How to farm Blood Essence from prisoners
There are a couple of elements to this. The first is that you’ll need to be able to build a prison cell. To do this, you need to kill Vincent the Frostbringer, who can be found patrolling the Dunley Farmlands. Once you’ve done that and contrstructed a few prison cells in your V Rising base, you need to go get some prisoners. Refer to our V Rising servants guide to learn how to get some prisoners for those cells. Just make sure you’ve got a mount and a decent V Rising weapon.
Once you’ve got that you can stick the prisoner in a cell, interact with the cell, and then manage their health and happiness while occassionally draining their blood. You can choose to simply draw some blood essence from them, or you can decant some crimson into a glass vial so you can change blood type out in the field.
And there you have it, a comprehensive breakdown of blood essence in this vampiric survival game. We’ve also got guides on how to get V Rising leather and your very own V Rising horse, so head there for more V Rising tips and tricks.