It was time to get some serious work done on the castle. This ended up coming about after a horrible defeat on my end. Along the way, I find some upgrades.
Sometimes ambition gets the best of you. I attempted to take on a powerful blood carrier that I had no business being around. It did not end well for me. So much so, it would take time to recover from my failed attempt.
This would, in a way, serve as a reminder to me that while I have goals of conquering this realm. I am far from it. Despite being a vampire, I am still quite low on the food totem pole. I just happen to be mostly in an area where very few things can put me back into my wooden coffin. This just happened to be one of those cases.
This also became the point I stopped being so lazy about my encampment defenses. While it took a lot longer than I'd have liked. I ended up clearing out the large section of the hill I've been building on. I also went on quite the deforesting adventure just north of my location. It was in a spot I don’t need to worry about traveling along to get back from my base if an adventure takes too long, and I'm trying not to get murdered by the sun.
I also ended up finishing off some extra crafting and refining machines. A big one ended up being the grinder. The resources to make that alone were more challenging than I was expecting.
It’s also somewhat funny. Once you opt for some material, you struggle just to scrape enough together to craft what you need. You end up unlocking the ability to just craft tons of it. I’d soon be able to have as many grinders as I wanted. I, however stuck with a more modest number of usually just two till much later on.
All of this paled into comparison to my real goals for the land I was on. It was about time I built some sort of castle. Well, more like just getting some walls up. As it would turn out. I’d need a lot of crafting materials from the sawmill and the stone grinder to be able to build a real castle.
The short-term goal now was to get a couple of tiles wide structure up and running. You see, it took forever for my refining stations to do their job. If I could just build something for them to be indoors. They would perform a lot better than being left out in the world and dewy nights, followed by the scorching death ray of the sun's daylight.
I also knew once I got some kind of castle going. I could always expand on it. It was quite easy being a vampire and all to move stuff around and knock walls over. Along with ensuring I got my crafting materials back. So, there was no loss in building some temporary shelter to put some material refiners in. I only had something to gain out of it.
While out clearing some of the locals and helping myself to what little in life they could amass for their short time in this realm. I lucked out and found myself a book on crafting marauder boots. While I had been saving any copper coins I could to one day buy this book from those shandy vendors I found. I had yet to do so. This would end up saving me a bit of coin and speeding up my progress toward getting better armor. If only I could have found the other three books I needed.
Funny enough, boots or gloves would usually end up being my bottleneck in being able to craft future sets. Even once I had enough copper coins to start buying stuff from the shady vendors. It ended up being a boot book that they usually did not have. I ended up lucking out like I did in just having it drop.
After a while, I realized it was just taking too long to get enough crafting supplies to fully build out the little area I wanted for a castle. So instead, I settled for a much smaller room to start with.
That tiny four by four was now officially my castle. While I did not have the special kind of flooring that helps with some kind of unknown magic, to my understanding, it reduces crafting costs. These two refiners, the sawmill and grinder, were now indoors and giving a 25% boost in production speed.
Before long, I'd start building in that other section and even expanding it out as well. While my castle, for quite some time, would always feel rather cramped. As it seems, I just always have way too many things I need for crafting and refining materials. It was nice not to worry about the daylight anymore when I just wanted to get some basic stuff done around the place.
Before long, I'd start investing materials into having multiples of each type of refiner. At least at first. As it would turn out, many of these base materials would be needed in decent quantities for quite some time. Once I got more advanced refiners, I often only built one of them. As I built to meet my demands for materials. Things also got progressively more costly and time-consuming to acquire everything to have just a single one of those machines in the first place.
Things then really started to take off when I was able to start expanding my outdoor area. Once filed with random stuff anywhere I could fit it for crafting. It was now starting to turn into a little bit of a courtyard. After all, I now have a castle, so it’s just no longer an encampment.
I had traveled around my local area enough to find a few way gates to teleport around. I was rather pleased when I could build my own. This would end up saving me a lot of time on traveling. I slowly needed to adventure further out to keep finding what I needed.
While I've not always been big on spending a lot of time on building out homes in games and decorating them. I’ll admit I just love how things look in V Rising. There has also only been one issue I ran into, much later on, when it came to using stairs. Otherwise, the entire process, other than getting the resources and waiting for things to refine, has been rather painless.
I also can’t help but enjoy it when I find recipes for things like carpets, lighting, and furniture. Sure, I would not end up using them for quite some time. I was always struggling with having enough space. There would end up being a time where I finally stopped trying to kill every boss I could run towards and got to enjoy the fruits of looting all the decorative recipes, I had been on this crazy vampire adventure I found myself on. For now, however, it would just be basic layouts with me trying to jam in everything I could before being forced to expand the castle yet again.
Screenshots were taken, and content was written by @Enjar about V Rising (Tracking link that takes you to the game's Steam page. I receive no commissions on sales. It’s simply a request to be used by the game publisher).
Disclosure: A review copy of the game was received for free.
