The Blood of Dawnwalker: best quests to finish before the Mass deadline

The opening stretch of The Blood of Dawnwalker gives you a single day to explore the village of Laslea before Mass, and the pressure is on: there are far more quests available than you have time to complete. With the main quest consuming one of your eight time segments, you are left with roughly seven "hours" to spend on side activities, and each quest eats up a different amount of that precious resource.

How the time limit works

The game presents you with a clear structure for the prologue. You have a set number of time segments before the Mass event triggers, and the main storyline will automatically take one of those away. That leaves you with seven segments to allocate as you see fit. Some quests take longer than others, and you cannot finish everything on offer. There are 13 quests that can be started before Mass, but the time constraint means you will have to pick and choose which ones to pursue.

The good news is that your choices in the prologue do not lock you out of content later in the game. You are free to pick any quest you like, and while each decision may produce small differences in how events unfold, nothing game-breaking will result. The rewards you earn early on, whether experience or equipment, will quickly become obsolete as you move into the wider map, so the real value of these quests lies in the lore, the mechanics they teach, and the moral choices they force you to make.

Quests worth prioritising

One of the standout quests is "Blasphemy," which asks you to find out who stole a missing banner from Gremla's house. This quest stands out because it presents one of your first genuinely difficult moral decisions in the entire game, and it also teaches you how to use core mechanics like Focus. As you investigate, you will start to question your own motives and begin shaping the kind of character you want your version of Coen to be. The decisions you make here have a significant effect on the events that follow in the prologue, even if you decide not to complete the quest itself.

Another strong pick is "Deep Down," a quest in which you search for Lazar, a missing person from Laslea. This is one of the first demonstrations of a time-sensitive quest in the game, as the quest itself changes depending on what time of day you undertake it. It also gives you a good sense of how the game's clock can alter your approach to objectives.

For players looking for a lighter set of priorities, there is a more straightforward combination of activities that will fill the day without leaving anything half-finished. Fishing with your siblings introduces a key element of the game's mythology, the Uriashi, a faction you would not otherwise encounter until much later. Chasing down Vasil, a local lout who hurls an insult at you, is a surprise quest that can teach you unarmed combat mechanics depending on the choices you make during the chase. Helping Iorgu find his lost pig is a smaller task that grants a modest amount of money and meat at the end, which you can hold onto for later use.

These three activities together use up the available time neatly and give you a solid mix of background lore and tutorials for mechanics that might otherwise go unexplained. The order in which you do them does not matter, so you can approach them in any sequence you like.

What really matters in the prologue

In the end, the exact way you spend your time before Mass has limited lasting impact. The tutorial section does not carry a huge amount of weight in the broader game, and even the rewards you get from characters like Gremla and Iorgu are not particularly significant. What the prologue does offer is a chance to learn the game's systems, meet its characters, and make choices that shape your version of Coen. The quests that force difficult decisions, like "Blasphemy," are the ones that will resonate most as you continue, while the simpler activities are best treated as a way to round out your knowledge of the world and its mechanics before the day is done.