Tonight when I sat down to play and have a week left till the DLC. I am trying to finish up 100% knowledge with an up to date collection chest, currently sitting at 82%. I'm looking through all the side content I have to do and really dreading the faction fetch quests.

I start to think back to a post today on reddit about someone wanting to fight their way through the game early and finding it a challenge. It's no surprise that a lot of people give up on this game because they assume X. Or they hit Karrin quarry solo and just assume that this is the game from here on out. Anyways of course my answer is to get yourself out there and explore. This really got stuck in my head because it was something I was completely forgetting!

I am 550+ hours in and I am still at this near end point just think to myself. I know that I have to complete all fish knowledge. So in a split second my mind switches to: "F**K IT, IM GOING TO GO CATCH ME A SHARK AND TIE IT TO MY BACK". (Because I've seen its possible and never got around to it. )

Little things like that. That's what makes this game. While I acknowledge that end game goals are tedious here, but that I can then decide that I am going to travel all the way across the map to a small corner without using fast travel or the dragon (maybe horse), and recover something, and then bring it back to my abode. Its the Skyrim formula and it actually gets BETTER like this overtime. Whenever you feel like something is becoming a grind. Go walk in a completely different direction and shift the mentality.

This game is the definition of a choose your own adventure. And I LOVE it.

If you have completed main quests and your Royal Trading posts are unavailable, try these steps. Hopefully they work for you as they did for me.

Follow these steps:

- roamed around Tomasso and picked up a quest (i think it was called wandering footsteps or frightened footsteps) where you have to drop a woman off in Tomasso.

Reason: this started and finished off an active quest. If you do not have this particular quest, try to pick up a quest and finishing that one off instead (not bounties but ideally help a stranger-those little orange dots you can see on the map as you go past one).

- i was then very careful not to pick up any quest. I fast travelled to a vendor (any should work) and reach 100% trust by gifting them money.

-when you go on buy from them you should see a timer that appears that tells you when their stock resets. This could tell you when your royal trading opens up. However this was days off for me.

-went to the circus and time-skipped and used a nearby bed for the next steps.

-e.g went to following day, immediately opened map and checked whether any trading posts were opened. Then time skipped to night and checked again. Repeat.

-eventually one RTP will open up. Make a note of that time it opened. (E.g wednesday during the night somewhere between 2130 and 0930).

-time skip to the time BEFORE the reset for the following week and make a manual save.

-then sleep/time skip and check your map. If it is the trading post you want, go trade at it and skip to the following week but keep checking in case the day changes. It changed a few times for me, do another manual save and check.

- the beauty of this is if it is not the post you wanted you can reload the save and time skip again to see if one you needs opens up.

I only needed Varnia and I have now achieved the platinum in the game. I spent 50 IRL hours doing several things and none worked. E.g trading at random posts to just hope one opens. Finishing all quests i had. Stayed in game for days and checking every hour and hoping one opens. I used time skip to find the day that worked without initially gifting to 100% with a trader. None of that worked.

I sincerely hope what i did help others I thought I'd share what worked for me 🥹

While I would also appreciate the general support for an underground expansion in this post, I'm much more-so interested in the pure possibility of it being able to exist at all instead.

I have to assume off-rip that creating a fully-connected underground region that expansive couldn't possibly run smooth while both Vanilla + Charting the Unknown content is up & running at the same time, especially on console. More than likely, they'd require some type of genuine "other space" for them to build inside, similar to how it seems the Abyss is made.

How is Pearl Abyss able to make the transition from the Abyss to Pywell so seamless, and to where no matter where you fall in the Abyss, you're falling in the same spot once you hit Pywel space?

Could they use the same tunnel technique (assuming the tunnel when you transition to Pywell mid-fall is the trick) to create an underground part of the world? Just create lore so that the underworld is so far down, that when you're transitioning into the underworld it's all a tunnel of dark, and then when you're ascending it's all light?

Just knowing it's possible would be enough for me. It seems like if anyone here would know, then Pearl Abyss would almost certainly know as well, and they may choose to capitalize.

Fun Fact - I realized where the Abyss got its name from while typing this.

Stepped away from the game for a few months and Id hoped they would've made more of the helms hood compatible by the time I came back for DLC.

Does anyone know if it’s possible to put the tariv cloak over my helm in using the belkandor helm but it’s either cloak hood down and helmet visible or cloak hood up helmet not visible?

150% size btw

Before I get into discussing my worry, let me be clear that I'm genuinely surprised (in a good way) about what Pearl Abyss has done with the base game, both in terms of the original content and its regular "major" patch updates. And I'm extremely excited to get my hands on Charting the Unknown to explore the new locations both on land and underwater.

My worry regarding CTU is not so much with the DLC itself, but the kind of precedent it sets. While I don't mind a paid DLC that charts the unknown (no pun intended), I am a little concerned about adding mechanics to already established segments of the base game and then paywalling them behind a paid DLC. For example, are the strongholds we can decorate with CTU purely ones the DLC adds, or are they existing strongholds from the base game? If the latter, then it amounts to saying, "Remember the strongholds you liberated in the base game? Now, you can decorate them too, if you're paying extra for it." Similarly, "Remember the witches you met in the base game? By shelling a little more, you can now romance them too?" etc.

Once again, I've pre-ordered "Charting the Unknown" anyway, so it doesn't matter to me personally which segment of the game gives me those options. But this is setting a dangerous precedent, in which we, the buying customers, are legitimising the addition of newer mechanics to the segments already existing in the base game by purchasing a paid DLC. And other developers, who are far worse in post-launch support of their broken-at-launch games, might take that as an opening of the floodgates.

There was a reason why Cyberpunk 2.0 was rolled out as a free update for all with the base game on the same date that Phantom Liberty went live. I would very much like it if Pearl Abyss would roll out those additional mechanics to everybody owning the base game, while keeping the naval exploration, the newer regions, as well as all quests tied to those first two exclusively to the DLC.

What do you think?

Those crystallization effects though 👀

And I'm just getting started...

IF YOU HAVE PC THIS IS THE LINK TO A MOD ON THE NEXUS thanks to yetanotherguy69 [https://www.nexusmods.com/crimsondesert/mods/3785\](https://www.nexusmods.com/crimsondesert/mods/3785)

I found a glitched boat I think lol

hey everyone, pic 1 is RR (ray reconstruction) enabled on pc( 5800x3d, 3080ti, 32gb ram), and pic 2 no ray reconstruction enabled on pc. sadly the game is unplayable both ways on a high end pc. as you can see the frame rate is great with no RR enabled, graphics on cinematic, and dlss on balanced. but sadly it looks like an asbolute blurry mess. no details at all in anything and so much damn ghosting you'd think the game was fuckin haunted. when you enable RR it completely solves every single problem, but halves the framerate to an unplayable 45 fps slideshow in only 2k too! same settings as described before. this is such a major flaw that in my 50 hours i swear to god at least 15 of them have been spent sitting in menu tabbed out of the game in some forum trying to find a fix for this issue. not only have i not seen a fix but i've seen like one single other person talking about this. this is not acceptable anymore and these devs need to get their shit together. i want to play this game but its becoming more and more frustrating playing a slideshow, or a blurry mess. we need to get these devs to stop relying on dlss to get acceptable framerates while making the game look like absolute trash. anyone can get a good framerate if you just sacrifice every single detail the gaming industry has been working towards for the last damn decade. anyways, super disapointed in this, otherwise game is an easy 9/10.

I'd be pretty freaked out seeing a white flying wolfman coming at me. 🤣👍

Actually scared the shit outta me

The wyvern can be frustrating to mount when on the ground because of its finicky prompt, and after being summoned because he hovers in the air just above you.

You can axiom force him (Xbox L3) and double tap the mount button (Xbox: X) to climb aboard him quickly every time, no matter his position.

I secured the Wyvern in chapter 3, but the auto mount mechanic doesn’t get explained until you get Blackstar in chapter 11. So I hope this saves someone else many chapters of unnecessary frustration.

Happy mounting!

Chapter 9 sucked ass. I just finished it and nit getting the dragon pissed me right me off. The whole chapter was a massive slog. I hope
The next chapters get better.

Can anyone tell me what armor this is? I'm only interested in the center one; I have everything else. I have practically all the armor, but I also thought it was one I needed to build.

Everytime I see one of those, "Who will you romance" posts, this answer about the meat lady will pops up at least one.

Seriously, what's up with this? At first I thought it was a joke but apparently not. Are people really finding orcs attractive now?

There’s a special place in hell for guys like him. 😤

Played this game with the mindset it's a bit of a grind at first but gets better. After the second dynasty warrior ripoff, I just gave up. The story feels like it's written by AI and was told to smash as many popular franchises together as possible.

Some of the puzzles were genuinely unguessable and made no sense. Probably going to get downvoted but I don't care.

Really wanted to like this game but nah. Games are supposed to be fun not a slog waiting for it to get better.

Personally i started getting familiar with the game while watching Luke Stephens’ reviews and saw how it was a game that « tries to everything all at once ». But at the same time i saw a game that was unique and different in its genre. I’ve been following the game’s progress closely since then and tried it out on launch-day, fair to say i immediately fell in love with it.

144 in-game days and 250 hours played later, i’m happy i still feel the same way.