V Rising Blood Essence Guide: How to get Greater Blood Essence
Blood Essence is what keeps your castle ticking along.
In V Rising, early resources keep everything functioning as they should, and this includes Blood Essence. However, later on in the game, there comes a need for Greater Blood Essence and Primal Blood Essence; as an improvement, so to speak, over standard Blood Essence. This resource can enable you to craft new items and gear of a much better quality.
To craft Greater or Primal Blood Essence and keep your castle heart happy, or craft better armor, you'll need to get your hands on the recipes for each essence and collect plenty of it, which isn't the easiest feat.
V Rising does a good job of telling you how to go about the early game, but as you approach the mid-game and further, finding the materials required for various missions or crafting projects - including Unsullied Hearts and Greater or Primal Blood Essence - isn't always so obvious.
How to get Blood Essence in V Rising
If, for whatever reason, you're still not entirely sure how to get your hands on Blood Essence, it's fortunately super easy.
Blood Essence is collected whenever you kill enemies or animals that have blood inside them. This means that if you're killing the likes of the undead, such as skeletons, you won't get any Blood Essence upon their death.
What you need to do is attack the creature of your choosing until they're at super low HP. When their health is low enough, you'll be able to feed on them by pressing 'F', and viola, Blood Essence is all yours. Just 150 or so enemies to go and one major boss fight and you'll be able to craft Greater Blood Essence!
How to use Blood Essence in V Rising
Blood Essence is the bread and butter behind vampire lifestyle. You'll use it to power your castle heart and thus, power your structures and prevent your castle from decaying, making it privy to predators looking to steal your stuff.
It can also be used to restore your health, and is required to craft other resources and gear in V Rising.
How to get Greater Blood Essence in V Rising
To get Greater Blood Essence in V Rising, you'll need to craft it at the Blood Press in your castle using four Unsullied Hearts. Unsullied Hearts are dropped at random by enemies and bosses in V Rising.
As you make your way through the mid-game, you can acquire a recipe for Greater Blood Essence that - using the Blood Press machine - requires that you have 150 standard Blood Essences. Considering how easy Blood Essence is to gather, this might be the more viable option for players later on in the game.
However, to get your hands on the recipe, you have to defeat V boss, Tristan the Vampire Hunter first. He's a Level 46 boss that can be found in Farbane Woods, so if you've only just started V Rising, you might have to grind for a little longer to be able to face him. Once you do, though, you'll no longer need to worry about Unsullied Hearts and the disappointing drop rate of them.
How to use Greater Blood Essence in V Rising
Greater Blood Essence, because of it having a higher potency than standard Blood Essence, can be used to give you access to higher-level structures and research in your castle. This includes Servant Coffins, which will give those converted, obedient humans around your castle a place to rest.
Do note that Greater Blood Essence will not prevent your castle from decay like standard Blood Essence does, however.
Greater Blood Essence is also used to turn humans into Servants, too.
How to get Primal Blood Essence in V Rising
Of the varying types of Blood Essence, Primal Blood Essence is the hardest to get your hands on. Like Greater Blood Essence, however, once you have the recipe for it, you'll be able to craft Primal Blood Essence using the Blood Press in your castle.
The recipe for Primal Blood Essence has two options. You can either craft it at an Advanced Blood Press using four Exquisite Hearts, which can be quite troublesome to collect a lot of, or you can craft it using 12 Greater Blood Essence. The choice is yours, but using Greater Blood Essence is definitely the more viable recipe, and will utilise a resource less valuable that Exquisite Hearts.
So, how do you get the recipe? Well, it's going to be an even tougher time that what you may have experienced when fighting Tristan the Vampire Hunter. This time, you'll need to go head to head with and defeat Level 57 V boss, Jade the Vampire Hunter. She can be found in the forest of Dunley Farmlands, and you will be rewarded with the Primal Blood Essence recipe upon beating her.
How to use Primal Blood Essence in V Rising
Primal Blood Essence can be used to craft a multitude of Legendary items. This mainly includes weapons, but you can also use it to craft Golden Castle Keys (used when infilitrating an enemy castle), and Blood Keys (an amulet that provides a buff to the wearer).
While you go about hunting Blood Essence and doing what needs to be done to get your hands on recipes for Greater Blood Essence and Primal Blood Essence, we have some further crafting guides for you! We talk all about how to get your hands on stone bricks, dust, and whetstone, or how to acquire cotton and yarn.