No Rest for the Wicked was released as an Early Access title back in April 2024 and has gained some attention as a new action RPG from Moon Studiosthe creators of the much-beloved Ori series.
Whether you’re a new player interested in checking out the game or a returning player—since you’ll have to start over with the latest Breach update—today we’ll be talking about tips and tricks to help you begin your wicked journey.
1 . Turn on The Enemy Poise Bar
First and foremost, No Rest for the Wicked’s combat system includes a poise mechanic similar to Souls-like games, where either you or the enemy will stagger when poise is depleted.
Enemy poise is hidden by default, but you can enable it in the gameplay settings. This will display a white bar over enemies, which helps significantly in gauging how many attacks are needed to stagger them.
2 . Gather All the Resources You Find Along the Way
As you begin playing, you’ll notice various items—like horseshoe crabs, mushrooms, and wood—that can be gathered alongside your gear. It’s important to collect these as early as possible.
If you don’t yet have all the necessary gathering tools (shovel, pickaxe, axe, and fishing rod), buy what you’re missing from the Blacksmith. These resources are crucial for crafting food—your main source of healing—and for upgrading your gear and the facilities in Sacrament.
3. Start the Construction Projects As Soon As You Reach Sacrament
After defeating the first boss and gaining access to the hub area, talk to the Mason “Maker Damage.” You can begin upgrading shops and unlocking new routes using your gathered materials.
Prioritize upgrading the Rookery staircase—it will save you a lot of time by shortening the distance between the Whisper and your free storage. After that, focus on upgrading the Smithy and Alchemist to enable weapon upgrades and potion crafting earlier.
4. Do the Bounties and Challenges
After reaching Sacrament for the first time, it is tempting to continue the storyline quest and proceed into the next area, which is a high-level area. This can quickly prove fatal as you will be underleveled, and the enemies can take you out in one or two hits. A good way to gain experience points and some loot is by finishing the daily quests.
As they will require you to backtrack to the low-level areas to finish them, you will also be able to acquire more food materials and resources for upgrading your gear and facilities. Also, these activities reward you with a considerable amount of coins that will help you with upgrading your gear or extracting and putting in Runes to your Weapons.
5. Enchanting Can Be a Double Edged Sword
After reaching Sacramentyou can visit Eleanor to enchant your gear for 1 silver. The enchantments are random:
- Blue rarity offers 3 positive affixes.
- Purple rarity offers 5 affixes, but always includes one negative curse.
Curses can be harsh—like draining health or making gear irreparable. While you can re-roll affixes using Fallethe curse will always be replaced by another curse. If you’re unsure about optimal affixes or still building your gear, it’s often safer to stick with blue.
6. Spells and Runes
You cast spells using Focus Pointswhich you build up by attacking enemies. Spells are tied to runes in your equipped weapon.
Only magical weapons like staves and wands come with built-in spellcasting by default. Common weapons come with a single rune, which can be extracted by Eleanor (destroying the weapon in the process). You can then insert these runes into weapons of your choice.
Note that not all runes are compatible with all weapon types. Runes from one-handed swordsfor instance, won’t work with two-handersand vice versa.
7. Healing Aura Spell
The game is very resource-heavy and combat is punishing. Even if you gather food consistently, you may run out of healing.
The Healing Aura spell (buyable from Eleanor) allows you to restore HP using Focus Points instead of food. As long as you hold the button—or until you run out of Focus—you’ll continue healing. It’s a useful tool for conserving food in tough areas.
8. Durability and Repair Spell
Gear utilizes a durability system that goes down every time you die, and since the game is very unforgiving, you are most likely to die a lot when starting, easily breaking your gear.
You can repair the gear at the Blacksmith by spending your hard-earned coins, but there is a spell that can help you save money. You can buy the Repair Spell rune from Eleanorand this spell will allow you to repair your equipment without spending any of your hard-earned coins.
But the downside is that this spell costs 150 points of focuswhich is a high amount since you start with only 100 points of focusso it is helpful to put some points into focus when you level up, which brings us to our next tip.
9. Be Careful With Your Stat Allotments When Leveling Up
You can eventually respec your stats at the Crucible using Fallen man, but this rare resource is also used to re-roll enchantments, so respecs are costly.
Avoid having to respec by carefully balancing your stats. Don’t just focus on Strength, Dexterity, or Intelligence—add points to Focus for spellcasting or to Health and Stamina for survivability.
Try to reach 21 points in your main weapon scaling stat by around level 11as better weapons start requiring it around then.
10. Choose Your Plague Ichor Upgrades Carefully
When you are starting, the inventory slots for different loot are limited, and you will notice equippable weapon and ring slots that are locked. You can unlock these by spending the Plague Ichor you’ve obtained from defeating bosses at the Watcher NPCs.
Although there is no wrong choice for the first upgrade you unlock, you do need to keep in mind that the Plague Ichor resource is rare to come by, and you may end up regretting the choice you’ve made early on, as there is no way to reverse the process.
But generally, I recommend upgrading the resource inventory slot first, as you will come across a lot of them on your adventure, and this will minimize the number of times you’ll need to return to the Sacrament to stash your resources and free up Space.
11. Prioritize Buying a House
After finishing the “Of Rats and Raiders” questline, you can buy a House in Sacrament. Do this as soon as you can afford it.
A house allows for additional storage and lets you place multiple crafting stations in one location—saving you trips to various vendors for refining and processing.
12. Visit the Crucible
Accessible beneath the Stonemason’s workshop, the Crucible is a rogue-lite arena. While it doesn’t grant XP, it does reward loot and resources if you reach level 5 in a run.
You’ll choose temporary buffs during runs, which help you experiment and improve your combat skills.
At level 5, you’ll unlock the altar to respec stats and access various Crucible-specific upgrades.
13. Do Not Miss the Alchemist!!
Sacrament is home to a variety of NPC vendors that can offer you essential services such as upgrading your gear , crafting items and refining resources but not everyone is there at the start. You can unlock more vendors by finishing their respective quests and one of them, the Alchemist is easy to miss. Markos the Alchemist can be found in the cave underneath the Obern glades area which can be accessed by going down the ladder near the campfire. After finishing the quest he gives, which can be done so before you fight the first boss, he will move to Sacrament and you will unlock his services , where you can buy potions and bombs. You can also craft these after upgrading his shop so ensuring you never run out of supplies to help you on your Journey.
14. You can create New Realms to farmExperience and Gear
No Rest for the Wicked has a system where your characters and the realms they play in are separate and are not locked into one another. As such you can create new realms that you can take existing characters to play in and vice versa. This allows for you to restart the journey using your favourite character, going through the beginning area again and repeatedly fight the first boss if you want to farm experience and more loot or if you are looking for a specific legendary loot that can drop from the first drop.
15. Be careful when switching to a new weapon
No Rest for the Wicked has a huge variety of weapons that you will be able to find and use on your adventure and you will want to switch out your weapons as you find new and better ones from the loot drop. It is important to remember that each weapon in No Rest for the Wicked has a unique attacking combo of its own, meaning that even if you are switching between the same weapon type ,for example, from one type of axe to another, they will have different movesets and attack speeds and this can catch you off guard when you are starting out. It is helpful to see how the attacks are different before using your new weapon to face off against enemies.
This wraps up my Beginner Guide for No Rest for the Wicked when you are starting out with the game. I hope you found these tips and tricks helpful and if you have any more tricks that can help when starting out or any questions, feel free to share them in the comments below.
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