Vale Sangora hands you a huge map and a 30-day clock, and it does almost nothing to tell you which activities are worth your hours. The answer is narrower than the map suggests. Most of what you can do out there is optional filler you can return to at any point, while a small set of activities is the only thing that actually pushes the story forward and opens up Brencis’s officers.
Quick answer: Finish the prologue, climb the 11 Towers to reveal the map’s activity markers, then focus on Court Activities for one officer at a time until their boss quest appears in your journal. Everything else can wait.
Time is spent, not counted down
The 30 days and 30 nights before Brencis’s coronation are not a real-time timer. Nothing ticks while you stand around. Time moves only when you spend it, and you spend it by completing quests, finishing activities, learning new skills, and picking certain dialogue options. That makes prioritisation a budgeting problem rather than a speed problem.
The budget is more generous than the premise implies. The main story can be cleared in roughly 7 to 10 in-game days, which leaves about 20 days of slack for side content. Running past day 30 does not end your game either. There is no failure state, the game continues, and side content stays available — what changes is the ending you get.
The one hard rule to remember: side content you have never started cannot expire. It sits there until you touch it. Once you start something, though, individual objectives inside it can be timed, and the journal flags those with an hourglass icon. So the risk is not exploring too slowly, it is opening five timed threads at once and letting them rot.
Activity priority order for a first playthrough
Work through the list below in order. Each step makes the next one cheaper in time, which is the whole point of sequencing it this way instead of wandering.
| Order | What to do | Why it earns the time |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Finish the prologue | Opens the sandbox. Get the correct medicine for Esme so your mother survives. |
| 2 | Climb the 11 Towers | Marks the map’s “?” activity icons so you stop searching blind. |
| 3 | Unlock Shrines as you pass them | Fast travel points that double as places to spend Skill Points and advance time. |
| 4 | Run Court Activities | The only activities that anger an officer and trigger their boss quest. |
| 5 | Beat the three officers | Ambrus, Bakir and Xanthe each gate a chunk of the story. |
| 6 | Save manually, then clean up | Reload that save to see the other endings and mop up side content. |
Gear matters more than level in the back half. The valley is non-linear enough that you can walk at Brencis early, but swamps, forests and caverns hide unique weapons and armor sets that make the late encounters survivable. Picking those up on the way to a Court Activity costs you almost nothing extra.
Court Activities are the ones that change the story
If an activity moves your standing with a character or a faction, do it. If it does not, it is scenery. Court Activities are the clearest version of this rule. They are tracked from the Court menu, they can be done in any order, and they are what draws the three officers out of hiding.
The mechanic is simple. Each of Brencis’s officers has an anger level. Completing enough Court Activities tied to one of them pushes that anger high enough that their boss quest is handed to you. Then you repeat the process for the next officer. Ambrus leads into The Gilded Gauntlet, Bakir into The Lunar Game, and Xanthe into The Cycle of Love.
Concentrate on one officer at a time rather than spreading activities evenly across all three. Splitting your effort three ways means three half-filled anger meters and no boss quest to show for the days you spent.
Infamy and Edicts: the price of being noticed
Raising an officer’s anger means raising your Infamy, and Infamy has a permanent cost. As it climbs, Brencis’s court issues Edicts. There are nine of them, they stack penalties like military checkpoints and higher shop prices onto the world, and once issued they cannot be lifted.
This is a trade you have to accept, not avoid. Infamy is the mechanism that unlocks the boss quests, so playing quietly for 30 days leaves you with no bosses to fight. Buy what you need from vendors before your prices go up, and treat every Edict as a fixed tax on the rest of the run.
What a Court Activity chain pays out: Bakir, the Mad Khan
Bakir is the clearest example of the reward loop. Push his anger far enough and you get The Lunar Game, which leads into the fight itself. He is an aggressive, physical duellist who leans on red-glowing heavy attacks, and those cannot be blocked out of. You have to dodge them manually regardless of which combat setting you chose, then punish the recovery with sword strikes.
His damage output climbs as his health drops, so the last quarter of the bar is where runs end. Keep an active ability ready to interrupt him mid-swing, and keep healing consumables stocked — during daylight hours, hexes cost you health rather than restoring it, and the vampiric life-steal abilities are locked until night.
What to leave alone until you have spare days
Everything that does not shift reputation is deferrable. Bandit camps, monster lairs, ancient circles, soldier camps, will-o’-the-wisps, curious houses, banner flags and the long tail of small side quests all stay available after the coronation deadline. None of them fail from time passing as long as you have not started them.
That does not make them worthless. They are where the manuals, hexes, legendary equipment and Skill Point income live. It just means they belong in the back half of the run, once the officers are down and time pressure stops mattering. Clearing three bandit camps in your first week buys you loot you could have had for free later.
Day-locked and night-locked activities
Some activities and vendors only exist in one half of the cycle, and the map tells you which. Check the icon before you burn time travelling.
| Icon | Availability | What Coen has |
|---|---|---|
| Sun | Daytime only | Human form: swordmastery, witchcraft and hexes that cost health |
| Half-moon | Nighttime only | Vampire form: claws, fangs, feeding, and abilities fuelled by Corruption |
Tip: batch your errands by icon. Line up the day-locked vendors and activities in one stretch, then flip to the night list, instead of paying time at a Shrine to skip forward every time you misjudge it.
How to confirm your activities are counting
Open the Court menu. Court Activities are tracked there, so if the ones you have finished are registering against the right officer, you are spending your days correctly. The definitive confirmation is the boss quest itself appearing in your journal once that officer’s anger is high enough.
If no boss quest has shown up, the usual reasons are that you have simply not completed enough Court Activities for that officer yet, or that you have been splitting them across several officers instead of committing to one. Ordinary side quests and open-world markers do not feed the anger meters at all.
Mistakes that cost you content
- Killing non-hostile NPCs, vendors or quest givers. Killing hostile enemies is fine; killing anyone else can lock you out of content permanently.
- Starting several timed threads at once. Once begun, hourglass-marked objectives run on a clock. Finish one before opening the next.
- Relying on a single save slot. Keep plenty of manual saves, and make one before the ending so you can reload for the other outcomes.
- Skipping the medicine choice for Esme in the prologue. Getting the correct one is what keeps her alive.
One thing you can stop worrying about: your dialogue choices during the story do not determine which ending you get. That is decided by the larger path you take through the Court and the officers, so you can answer how Coen would answer without treating every conversation as a puzzle.
The short version: of all of this is that Vale Sangora rewards commitment over curiosity, at least for the first stretch. Pick an officer, work their Court Activities until the boss quest lands, take the Edicts on the chin, and leave the bandit camps and monster lairs for the days after the coronation deadline has come and gone. The valley will still be there.
