u/ayyxact

With all the experience we have gained after 8 weeks now post release and the GENEROUS amount of patches and fixes - let's come together and collect ALL THE THINGS we wish we knew in our first playthrough in this massive scale game.
This post is probably more aimed for those who already have like 300 hours and are thinking of maybe starting fresh a second playthrough because of "Completionist" urges or having some regrets in their current run caused by earlier mistakes due to being new to the game back in the first week of playing...

EXPLORATION

• do NOT ring the bells at the top of a town's central tower - that reveals the fog of war on the map of that WHOLE region. This fog of war is super useful to track where you have actually been in person.
• do NOT fly far high above bee-lining to destinations. This also reveals fog of war of course and then it looks like you had explored that area, but instead you just flew 100 meters above that ground
• CONTRARY to what we kept hearing in the first weeks of release and reviews - do NOT go freely exploring too far. Do the main story quests to get introduced to a major region (like Hernand, Demeniss etc) - then keep doing all the Faction side quests there - after that explore on foot (or on hooves/paws) the parts of the region you have not uncovered yet. This will lead to you exploring the whole world without going back to places or discovering empty spots that will become relevant later in a side quest. So you can experience everything the game has to offer in the order that makes sense. Basically, almost ALL interesting places have a quest leading up to them at some point !
• for example, do not get baited into flying far to the SouthEast end of the map to get 6x Electrical Components to craft 3x Enhanced Kuku Coolers to unlock 1000 slots in our fridge... that is SUCH A BAIT. in hindsight, I should have just crafted a bunch of basic 40 slot Kuku Coolers and left Delesyia untouched until I got there naturally. (3x basic coolers = 130 slots are plenty for food ingredients until mid/lategame or can just craft more basic coolers !)

INVENTORY

• ALWAYS be cautious every time you open your inventory. Get used to LOCK items holding the spacebar. (only very special quest items can be automatically recovered if you lose them - but most will disappear forever! Even a fully upgraded weapon with 5 UNIQUE Abyss Gears)
• ALWAYS be extra cautious when you sell or discard items (dropping them) !!! Some items need to be USED (press spacebar) to activate their effect - like the supply contracts you get from shopkeepers with +100 Trust
• do NOT sell/discard unique furniture - like a Trophy from winning various tournaments - I won all the fist fights on my first day of playing and I discarded that "Trophy - Unarmed Duel" from the Goldenfist Arena because on release-day March 19th we had so limited inventory space and it was bundled with a bunch of misc icon stuff
• do NOT sell/discard paintings that you grab off the walls. Because once you take a "???" painting, it reveals the name of it - which is also super useful to track which painting you have and have yet to discover (the ingame Knowledge UI helps also)

CHALLENGES

• before all these patches and fixes, a lot of Challenges in the game could be missed or become a lot harder later - because to start doing a Challenge you need to have picked up the corresponding purple Sealed Abyss Artifact placed on small shrines at crossroads throughout the whole map of Pywel + and if you ignore that Challenge for too long, some could have been locked out later. So I recommend to do each Challenge as soon as you pick up its Sealed Abyss Artifact.
• Below some notable posts that people collected so far - but many issues seem to have been already FIXED ! (Especially since we got that Re-Blockade Strongholds feature)
• https://www.reddit.com/r/CrimsonDesert/comments/1sepl16/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/CrimsonDesert/comments/1snh5r5/

ONLINE RESOURCES

• do NOT use "HOW TO GET OP FAST" guides - these basically just spoil=shorten your gametime (and many even make you fly to far lategame regions...) - gotta enjoy your $70 purchase. Tips and Tricks videos are very useful though because of the sheer size, complexity and scale of this game - i recommend: https://www.youtube.com/@NickG100 (well rounded spoiler-free explanations) + https://www.youtube.com/@menaceft (advanced combat guides)
• feel free to youtube puzzles and secrets if you are stuck for too long - some can be a bit finicky
• you can use https://mapgenie.io/crimson-desert/maps/pywel to help with your "Completionist" needs. Please feel free to contribute if you find anything interesting that wasn't submitted there yet.

QUICK STARTER TIPS

• do the Greymanes Faction Quests as soon as they are available. You will unlock a whole settlement that gives you most fundamental features and respawning resources.
• cook Food. we have instant unlimited high-HP food-healing infight. this alone makes the whole game dramatically easier - plus this game's cooking system is so well crafted and just.. cute.. very Korean.. 🫰
• to add to this, rebind the "Equipment Quick Slot" to 3 and "Food Quick Slot" to 4 - then you can spam tap the 4 key to instant heal (default keybinds for this are horrible)
• no need to worry about money in this game - but if you want to have infinite gold sooner than later, here's the best way to use the Bank to generate gold bars passively from the first day of a new game: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrimsonDesert/comments/1smw2gz/
• use your first Abyss Artifacts on Keen Senses Lv2 (green talent bottom left, press K to open talents) -> ONLY THEN you get the invincible dodge-roll we all know from Dark Souls games like Elden Ring
• then next on Blinding Flash Finisher (blue talent on the far right side) -> these 2 talents alone would be enough to win all fights in the game...
• keep holding down left-click or right-click to let your character do the full weapon combo. No need to spam the buttons.
• find that sheep "Wooly" for the child "William" BEFORE you talk to a fat drunk fake-Greymane (very very early quest - can bug out William if not done in this order. still an issue in patch 1.07)

Because of a holiday in Germany this week, I have a long weekend for myself - and I thought I'd use this time to make our second playthroughs as enjoyable (and complete) as possible.

Please comment ANYTHING you may have felt you wish you had done differently in your playthrough so far - I will read all the comments and add anything useful here - will keep editing the post. (And yes of course I'm pretty much writing all this up for myself mainly because I have decided to start a fresh run after 300 hours 😅)

SO LET'S DO THIS.