In The Blood of Dawnwalker, the night cycle brings a forced vampiric state upon Coen for him to manage. While it certainly has its advantages in the form of map traversal and combat mechanics, it can also potentially lead to a feral state in certain situations, one that cannot be controlled by the player.
This guide for The Blood of Dawnwalker is an explainer on vampire Blood Hunger penalties and how to manage or even avoid them entirely.
Blood Hunger
At night, Coen’s durability is based on blood health segments, and consuming blood is the only way to satiate this Blood Hunger. Interacting with NPCs while having one or less blood segments left over can lead to a Feral Hunger state. This mechanic takes over the dialogue tree completely, compelling Coen to slaughter the NPC and any others around, potentially cutting you off from related quests and trades for the remainder of the storyline. There may be further consequences on a wider social scale with NPCs as well.
Controlling Blood Hunger
Ideally, you will feed regularly and pre-emptively of your own accord, by finding prey to drain ahead of time, whether wildlife or human. But, also always have a stash of blood vials at your disposal for when time is of the essence, and wandering the wilds looking for victims is not an option.
Always try to heal immediately after combat concludes, doubly so if you have taken critical damage in your vampire form: some NPC conversations trigger automatically at the end of fights, thus leading to an inadvertent Feral Hunger slaughter if Coen’s health was drained during battle.
Use Voracious Bite in focus mode on blissfully unaware isolated enemies in order to stealth feed and avoid possibly losing more blood than you would gain.
Endless Hunger Perk
You can also mitigate the state of Feral Hunger by simply having more blood health segments in the first place. As a Vampirism perk, Endless Hunger raises the number of these segments by one, with each of its three upgrade levels.
Save Scumming
With the added burden of the ticking timebomb that is the 30-day narrative limit of saving Coen’s family, you would be advised to maintain multiple manual saves. This way you can reload your game state to a point before you accidentally feed upon a critical quest or merchant NPC, and won’t have to rollback too much of your gameplay effort in order to do so.
That is everything there is to know about the Blood Hunger mechanics in The Blood of Dawnwalker and how to mitigate any problems.
