A true vampire, like the player character in V Rising, has underlings to do menial chores for them. Minions serve an important role in the game because they free you from spending valuable time farming for the resources necessary to keep your vampiric strongholds running. But getting your first servant won’t be an easy task.
Getting servants and putting them to work in V Rising
You need to progress through a decent amount of the game to complete the steps required to command underlings in V Rising. This means doing the quests displayed on the upper left-hand corner of the screen.
- Build a Stone Coffin
- Build a Servant Coffin
- Dominate a human
- Convert them into a servant
- Build a Castle Throne
- Send the servants out to hunt
Building Servant Coffins
The first step will be building and binding yourself to a Stone Coffin, which can be done once you’ve progressed far enough in V Rising to get the “Lord of the Manor” quest. The reward will be the ability to make Servant Coffins, though crafting them might take a little time. You’ll need 12 Planks, 8 Copper Ingots, and 1 Greater Blood Essence. This last item requires 4 Unsullied Hearts to make, and while those occasionally drop from random mobs, they’re more reliably found on elites or V Bloods in V Rising.
Blood Quality in servants
Once you’ve built a nice red coffin or two and lined them up in your castle, it’s time to go minion hunting to complete the next quest, “Army of Darkness.” You can grab anybody, but humans with high Blood Quality are the best choice.
In V Rising, Blood Quality impacts the Expertise level of the servant once they’ve been converted into a vampire, and Expertise determines their maximum health, damage output, success rate on hunts, and the amount of loot they’ll bring back. So take your time to find the right prey, look for people with a dark red glow indicating they have an exceptionally high Blood Quality, but don’t fret if you can’t find somebody amazing right away. You can always discard your servants (i.e. kill them) and find another.
Dominating a human
To dominate a human in V Rising, you’ll need to whack at them until you get the prompt to Feed. Quickly open your radial menu to select Dominate Human, then hit the hotkey for Subdue Human (C by default). This will cause your chosen victim to stop fighting and begin to follow you. While you’ve got a person leashed like this, you won’t be able to use spells, teleport, or shapeshift. You’re going to have to trek all the way back to your castle, on foot or horseback, and this can be precarious because your pet human can still take damage and die.
Converting a human into a vampire
Safely back at the castle, interact with the Servant Coffin to place your new hire inside. The conversion process will take 40 minutes, and once the human is undead, you’ll want to equip them with the best gear you can. Servants don’t benefit from armor set bonuses, but their gear level directly impacts how successful they’ll be on missions.
Sit on your throne and command your servants
Now you’ve got an underling or two traipsing mindlessly around the castle; it’s time to set them to work. You’re going to need to build yourself a throne. You’ll have gotten the blueprint after completing “Army of Darkness,” and you need 24 Stone Bricks, 4 Reinforced Planks, and 4 Greater Blood Essence.
Once it’s built, sit on the Castle Throne to send your vampiric servants out to fetch resources. You’ll probably have noticed that each minion has different perks, making them more suited for completing tasks in certain areas. If you select a location that shows a low chance of success, try picking a new area or assigning a different underling.
For best results, you’ll want to choose the longest hunt duration, 23 hours of real time. The wait might be long, but the payoff will be worth it and the servant will have a higher likelihood of survival. Dead underlings can be revived, but it’ll take 10 minutes and cost 50 Blood Essence.
You’ve now set up the beginnings of what can become a somewhat lucrative operation. By default, you can have two castles in V Rising with nine servants each. Command them to do all the tedious resource gathering while you go about dominating the world of Vardoran.
