How to Get Greater Blood Essences | Gamer Guides: Your ul... (2024)

This page covers everything related to Greater Blood Essence in V Rising, including where to find them, how to unlock the refinement recipes for them by killing Tristan the Vampire Hunter and Jade the Vampire Hunter, and what they’re used for in crafting for your castle.

Where to Find Greater Blood Essence¶

Refine Unsullied Hearts in the Blood Press¶

The Greater Blood Essence is one of the most important items that you’ll need to acquire as you build and expand your castle. It’s used for multiple castle upgrades and in crafting some of the most important Production recipes, such as those which allow you to capture and control human servants. You’ll also need Greater Blood Essence to craft jewellery, keys, and some of the higher level weapons. You won’t be finding many Greater Blood Essences in the beginning of the game, but as you expand your castle by constructing the Blood Press, you’ll see that they can be refined from 4 Unsullied Hearts (or 3 Unsullied Hearts if the Blood Press is placed in a room with matching Alchemy Lab Flooring). This is the first method that you’ll encounter to acquire Greater Blood Essence, but it’s not the most efficient, since Unsullied Hearts are incredibly rare drops from most enemies, though they are frequently dropped by bosses.

Icon	Name	Description	Uses
	Greater Blood Essence	An energy source distilled from blood. Vampires use it to control material, to unlock sealed knowledge and to convert humans into obedient servants.	Used in mid tier production and gear recipes, required to upgrade the Castle Heart

Kill Tristan the Vampire Hunter for the Greater Blood Essence Recipe¶

As you advance through the world of Vardoran, killing more and more bosses and expanding your castle, you’ll eventually be able to view Tristan the Vampire Hunter from the Blood Altar. Tristan is a fairly powerful level 46 boss, but he’s well worth killing as soon as possible. If you’re in a group, you can do this before you reach Gear Level 46+, so long as you’re careful and determined. You’ll notice that once you kill Tristan, you gain the Greater Blood Essence recipe as one of the rewards. This is a game changer in terms of producing Greater Blood Essences much more efficiently, since you no longer have to rely on Unsullied Hearts dropping from random enemies, or acquiring them from bosses, which can take a considerable amount of time to kill, and even longer to wait for the respawns. With the Greater Blood Essence recipe, you can refine 150 regular Blood Essence into 1 Greater Blood Essence, assuming you have the Blood Press placed on matching Alchemy Lab Flooring. Given the prevalence of regular Blood Essence, which can be acquired in multiple stacks by killing any living thing, it won’t be long before you’re stacking Greater Blood Essences in storage chests.

What Greater Blood Essences Are Used For¶

Upgrade Your Castle Heart¶

Once you reach level 2 with your Castle Heart (by upgrading it from level 1 with 12 Copper and 12 Leather), you will need 4 Greater Blood Essence to upgrade the Castle Heart to level 3, alongside 24 Iron and 24 Glass. At this stage you’ll probably have plenty of Greater Blood Essences before you acquire enough Iron and Glass to upgrade the Castle Heart, so long as you’ve killed Tristan the Vampire Hunter, or killed enough bosses to loot plenty of Unsullied Hearts.

Upgrade Jewellery and Weapons¶

The next thing that you’ll probably find yourself using Greater Blood Essences for is crafting jewellery and weapons. Not every piece of jewellery or weapon requires these essences, but you’ll find that more and more of them do as they increase in Gear Level. Make sure you have a sufficient stack stashed away, ready to be used in crafting.

Craft Servant Coffins, Capture Servants, and Construct a Castle Throne¶

There will come a point as you’re expanding your castle that it begins to feel a bit empty. Thankfully, you can have up to 5 human servants who will roam the castle, protecting its grounds, and who you can eventually send off on small quests to bring back resources. To do this, you’ll need Greater Blood Essences. At first, you’ll need one to construct each Servant Coffin, which can be found in the Dominance tab of the Production build menu. After constructing a Servant Coffin, you can interact with it to acquire the Dominating Presence vampire power, accessed from the powers wheel using the left key. You’ll then need to go out into the world and use Dominating Presence on any human, which will bind them to your will and force them to follow you. Bring them back to your castle and interact with the coffin, choosing to convert them.

At this point you’ll need to wait a period of time, usually at least 1h 30m, before the conversion process is completed. Once the servant emerges, they will defend your castle and you can equip them with any armor, jewellery and weapons to make them more powerful by increasing their Gear Level. The fun doesn’t end here, however, since you can also use Greater Blood Essences (4 to be exact, alongside 24 Stone Brick and 16 Iron Ingots) to construct a Castle Throne. Interacting with it will allow you to send your servants out to “hunt for treasure, knowledge and blood”. The higher the Gear Level, the greater the chances of success for your servants, so it’s worth investing a few more Greater Blood Essences in their gear to bring them up to your level.

Refine Greater Blood Essence into Primal Blood Essence¶

Now that you have a method of acquiring an abundance of Greater Blood Essences, you can begin to think about refining them into Primal Blood Essences. This can only be done once you’ve defeated Jade the Vampire Hunter, a level 62 boss, who provides the Primal Blood Essence recipe as one of the rewards for defeating her. You can now visit the Blood Press and refine 9 Greater Blood Essence for 1 Primal Blood Essence, assuming you have matching Alchemy Lab Flooring in the same room as the Blood Press.