Crafting in The Blood of Dawnwalker is smaller than it looks and more structured than it feels. It is a closed loop: 44 recipe scrolls, 45 ingredients, and one craftable consumable behind each scroll. There are no professions and no gear crafting — this is alchemy, and the whole system fits on a single page.
How the system is put together
Everything hangs off the recipe scroll. A recipe is an ordinary collectible item with a price, a weight and an icon; when you learn it, one consumable becomes craftable using the ingredients that recipe names. The catalogue is exact:
- 44 recipes, each mapping to exactly one craftable consumable — 44 recipes, 44 consumables, no orphans in either direction.
- 45 ingredients, 42 of which name the preparations they feed directly in their own description text.
- 105 trade goods — the “worth a good coin” junk tier that exists to be sold, not crafted with.
The twelve compounds, in three tiers
Most of the system is one set of twelve compound names repeated at three power levels, which is what the Minor and Potent prefixes mean:
| Compound | Minor | Base | Potent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aetheric Attunement | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Balm of Fortitude | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Fortitude Paste | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Keen Eye Potion | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Mending Ointment | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Powder of Sharp Mind | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Razor Claw Vial | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Regenerative Salve | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Revitalising Tonic | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vigour Infusion | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vitality Balm | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vrakhiri Attunement | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
That is 36 of the 44 recipes. The effects are stated flatly on each compound — damage against animals, damage from Witchcraft abilities, a larger Blood Reserve — so the tier ladder is the progression, not a difference in what a compound does.
The recipes outside the ladder
Eight recipes are not part of the three-tier set:
- Three bane brews — Beast’s Bane Brew, Mortal’s Bane Brew, Supernatural’s Bane Brew
- Three blood infusions — Animal, Mortal’s and Supernatural’s Blood Infusion
- Venom Claws Ampoule — stops wounded enemies regenerating health
- Recipe for Razkovniche Elixir — the one progression craft: the elixir permanently increases Health and grants a Skill Point. Its inputs are quirkier than its price suggests (the recipe itself carries no buy or sell value, and Razkovniche Plant, Strong Ancient Reagent and Tatzelwurm Gland all appear in its ingredient list).
What a recipe costs
Recipe prices are the clearest signal of tier, and they are also where the money goes in the early game:
| Recipe group | Count | Price range (Denarii) | Median |
|---|---|---|---|
| Minor tier | 12 | 86 – 484 | 246 |
| Base + un-tiered | 19 | 234 – 1,394 | 483 |
| Potent tier | 12 | 470 – 3,281 | 1,387 |
The overlap is real, not a typo: Recipe for Potent Revitalising Tonic sits at 470 while the most expensive base-tier scroll, Recipe for Keen Eye Potion, is 1,394. The finished compounds are far cheaper than the scrolls that teach them — consumable prices run from 18 to 966 — which says plainly that the scroll is the purchase and the craft is the repeat.
Where the recipes come from
Specialist vendors carry them, and their stock lists show what each one is for:
- Anca (Herbalist, Crossroads Inn) — 14 items: four recipes and ten finished compounds, all basic-tier healing and vitality
- Vera (Swamp herbalist) — four recipes, including Venom Claws Ampoule and Beast’s Bane Brew
- Bakr-Erga (Clan Bakr matriarch) — four recipes, including two Potent ones and Fortitude Paste
- Mevasser (Rabbi) — general books and notes, plus A Blood Soup Recipe
Ingredients, honestly
Ingredient prices span two orders of magnitude, from 12 Denarii (Boar Fat, Common Yarrow) to 600 for Dried Herbs — and Dried Herbs is the outlier the data itself flags, since its own text calls it a quest item rather than a reagent. The most expensive true reagent is Tatzelwurm Gland at 278, which is also one of the Razkovniche Elixir inputs.
Three ingredients have no preparation list at all — Dried Herbs, Small Vial of Vrakhiri Blood and Vial of Human Blood — and the last two are blood restoratives in their own right rather than crafting fodder. If you are building a night-heavy character, that overlap matters more than any compound: the blood items sit on both sides of the fence at once.