I’ll cover the ARPG in another post, this one is focused on the concept of your base of operations within the context of a survival game. The genre tends to focus a simple concept – you need a place to live, and in order to build that place, you need to collect material. As you improve said abode, you need to travel through more obstacles to collect different things.

Where the genre splits from this point is in the definition of the obstacles. Early games in the genre really pushed the PvP portion where people fought over a limited amount of resources. The next generation was focused heavily on survival – think thirst + hunger mechanics. The current generation instead seems to focus on environmental obstacles – substantial AI enemies or physical obstacles preventing progress.

V Rising straddles all of this, to different degrees. There is optional PvP (and the game is certainly balanced in this space). There are minor survival mechanics, you need blood to live and sun kills you. And the PvE construct puts bosses and other enemies as gating mechanics to collect more advanced material.

Your castle lair start off rather neat to start. Floors + walls = automatic roof which protects from the sun. It’s honestly super simple to get set up, and serves as an initial foray into base building. As you progress in the game, you unlock more options for the castle, which adds a decent amount of choice. Now, most games in this genre focus on the practical – you will build a box house, put stuff in the box, and move on. The customization/decoration part comes much later. This makes sense as those games allow you to have multiple bases, so that each future one looks different than a prior. V Rising only lets you have 1 castle, so the tools to customize come quite early – moving a castle is possible, and should be done once you access Dunley Farmlands.

And interesting bit of castle construction is multi-floor options, lockable doors (for PvP or servants), and truly having double the space you actually need to build something practical. The end result is that the majority of a castle can be constructed for pleasure rather than practical. You may not have freeform tools like Valheim, but it’s also not mud brick walls.

An interesting bit is the ability to optimize production buildings. Naturally, you will have a roof, which increases production speed. If you have the proper floor down (and 4 walls and no core), then the resource costs are reduced by 25%. That is not much at the start, but I can assure you that late game resources are a pain to collect, so any reduction is absolutely required. You can create multiple crafting stations if you like, though I haven’t found much use as I can’t manage to feed them enough to merit.

You can also build gardens, with plant seeds and tree saplings. The trees have some smaller use, though not much comparatively. The garden however, that’s something you want. Plants are needed for potions and some mid-tier item crafting – so anything you can do to reduce the need to farm material is a good thing. Ghost Shrooms in particular are a bottleneck at late game.

One piece I haven’t really tackled is the map, or more specifically where these resources are located. You start down south, move to the middle of the map and then reach out to various zones in a sort of hub/spoke model. Assuming you build a castle smack in the middle of the map, you’ll spend the majority of your late game farming runs heading west (silver, grapes, gold), north (tech, grease, batteries), and north east (crystals, shrooms), and finally, east (rifts for stygian shards). Getting to these locations isn’t terribly hard, what with teleport gates around. Getting BACK with your stuff is a right pain in the butt if you haven’t set your server to allow teleporting all material (please do this).

You will need to farm a decent amount in this game. Onyx Tears are the best example, as a final tier item needed to craft weapons – normally 3 per item. Each of these requires 9 different farmable materials, in differing amounts. Charged Batteries alone are a pain to collect (depleted ones first, which are drops, then charging stations to fill). The net effect is that when you reach ~80 gear level, you will spend your time farming material while waiting for rifts to spawn. It’s a cycle at that point, which is a different structure than almost everything up to that point. I suppose this is why PvP exists, because the farming of material to craft 1 item taking hours is not super incentivizing. To the stronger point, I would absolutely recommend using console commands (if solo) to spawn the top 3 items that are a major pain to craft that also do not drop (Shadow Weave, Bat Leather, and Onyx Tears). If only because crafting 1 of those items alone is about 30 minutes of farming, and you need much more than 1.

Now, the absolute great news in all this is that during the entire experience up until this farming cycle, your base will continually expand, you’ll be given a TON of customization options, and the feeling of being a gothic vampire with a damn cool castle/lair is fulfilled. I didn’t actually realize how much fun this part could be until I stepped into the shadows.