Killing Edie

I had my five Cores of Metamorphic Stone, a stack of roasted meat and fifteen Strong Wheat Beers. What was I waiting for? Probably some kind of self-knowledge or at least a generalised awareness that when things sound too good to be true, they probably are. But when has that ever stopped me?

Let's backtrack a little. Two questions: how did I know where to summon Edie and what was all that beer for? To get drunk after the kill?

Nope. The beer was because while I was doing my research I'd read the Dawnlands wiki page on Edie and it said "Strong wheat gives 60% blunt resistance and renders Edie only capable of dealing 1 damage to your character. So you can just brute force your way to kill Edie with the cheapest weapon available". 

Now that sounded like my kind of strat! Brute force tank&spank with me taking no damage worth talking about. And I had much better weapons than the cheapest so it was bound to be over in no time at all. Which, to be fair, it was, just not in the way I was imagining.

As for where to go to summon the golem, Dawnlands has a rather elegant improvement on the way Valheim hands out that kind of information. In the viking after-life you have to find a runestone and read it to mark the location of the boss on your map. They're fairly common as I recall but you can be unlucky and not bump into one for a while.

Dawnlands also requires you to explore the biome but removes the random factor by tying a number of revelations to a progression mechanic called "Intelligence Collection". This accrues naturally from the sort of things you'll be doing anyway, like sanctifying corruption and clearing the fog from the map to reveal points of interest.

When you hit certain percentages, various useful locations are marked on your map, one of them being where to find the boss. As in Valheim, there can be multiple Sealing locations for each biome and you can just find the spot by chance while exploring. (As a side-note, I no longer believe Dawnlands maps are procedurally generated. The maps and locations I'm seeing in other peoples' videos look very much like my own. It's a hypothesis I still need to test, though, so don't take it as confirmation, yet.)

I hadn't happened across Edie's lair while out riding for the very good reason that it turned out to be on an island. When it appeared on my map it seemed like a great time to build that ship I'd been thinking about.

Once again, following in Valheim's footsteps, Dawnlands lets you build various kinds of ship and sail them. In the tradition of Dawnlands, it's a lot easier to do. I'm not sure how many craft you can make. So far, I only have recipes for a raft and a small sailboat but there are a few more locked recipes in the same category (Misc.) that I can't see, although they won't necessarily be for ships. I can confirm that the materials make ocean-going craft are easier to collect in Dawnlands than in Valheim and vessels are much easier to control when on the water.

For one thing, there's no wind to contend with. You can unfurl a sail and it just makes the ship go faster whatever the weather. Rafts, which can be made ad hoc from the basic crafting UI without need of a workbench, are much more stable and effective than their Valheim conterparts so as yet I can't entirely see the need for the ship, especially since it's not guaranteed to be there when you come back for it.

I've seen some complaints about that. It's possible it may be a bug but it did sometimes happen in Valheim, too. Monsters attack ships if left unattended in both games so it may be that when I came back to find my ship gone it had been sunk by goblins. They're always killing poor old Sparky, the bastards.

Of course the ship'll be here when we come back, Karrid. Don't be such a worry-wart!

While I had my ship, though, I was able to sail to the island where the map marker suggested I'd find Edie. Having found the spot and scouted the area, I teleported back to get on with making the Cores, which brings us back to where we started at the top of the post.

Annoyingly, there was no handy free teleportation point on Edie's island. The nearest beacon was on the shoreline of the mainland across a fairly narrow strait. The portal was in the water, actually. I had to swim to shore before I could make a raft, which seemed kind of ironic.

As usual, I had a plan. Before I found out about the wheat beer trick, I'd watched several videos of people fighting Edie. All of them had slightly different strategies, mostly involving a lot of dodging, kiting and scuttling about. It looked exhausting so I was happy to rely on beered-up invulnerablity to let me bull my way through.

I didn't expect to get it done first try so in the absence of a nearby teleport I decided to build a shelter and put a bed in it so I could respawn and run back in a few seconds after my inevitable death. I'd noticed that in all the videos I'd watched, when people died fighting Edie (As they often did.) the golem didn't respawn or regain health so they were able to carry on from where they left off.

I'd also watched a positively baroque strategy by the ever-inventive Kazeyo, which once again involved a lot of ground-raising and fortification. It looked like a lot of work and it didn't even seem to be all that effective but it did give me the idea of digging a hole to hide my bed. I figured if Edie couldn't see me he'd probably leave me alone. I imagine you can guess how that went. 

Once I'd dug in, made a bed, lit a fire, put a roof over the hole and placed a chest so I could clear my inventory ( A very similar strategy, you'll note, to the one that served me so very badly when I fought Guya.) I trotted off to insert my five cores and set the whole thing rolling. Although the surprisingly well-designed and informative official Facebook page recommends using a bow, most players seemed to favor blunt weapons. 

You can just see the edge of my excavation on the left.

Edie is weak to blunt damage while, being made of rock, taking very little damage from arrows, so that seemed to make sense. Also, for some reason, I had about half a dozen massive bronze two-handed hammers that I'd found in various chests or been given as rewards. It was nice to find a good use for them at last. I drank a strong wheat beer, picked up my hammer, inserted my five Cores and prepared to do battle.

About five seconds later I was dead. Actually, five seconds is being generous. 

I never got to find out how well the wheat beer softened the impact of the golem's massive fists because he never hit me once. He just looked at me hard with his one, glowing eye and that was that. In my hubris and believing myself all but indestructible, I'd forgotten about his laser attack.

I woke up in my bed and clambered out of my hole to see if Edie was still there. He was. He zapped me a second time as I ran in to grab my fallen belongings and I died again. Next time I poked my head out of my hole he was almost on top of me. He'd followed me and now he was spawn-camping my bed. Once again, I'd placed it far too close to the sealing spot. Will I ever learn? (That's a rhetorical question, by the way.)

There may have been a couple more deaths before I managed to get clear of the kill zone. It's all a bit of a blur. Eventually, I somehow managed to avoid Edie's attentions long enough to open my map and port the hell out of there, thinking to myself "Well, that went well..." 

Another very significant way in which Dawnlands is more forgiving than Valheim is that when you die, although you drop a backpack, it only contains some of what you were carrying. Everything equipped stays on you when you respawn and most of your inventory comes with you, too, although I haven't exactly figured out the criteria involved. I do know that, if you've been out mining, say, and your bags were full of ore, then yes, you will want to go back and recover it but if you've been fighting a boss, you can probably leave the pack where it fell for now.

Okay, he's gone. Now what?

Except in this case I had to go back anyway to find out if Edie had despawned. More importantly, if he had gone back to where he came from, did I still have the Cores to summon him again? They weren't in my inventory but maybe they were in the backpack I dropped when I died or even still in the summoning circle where I'd slotted them.

They weren't in either of those places or anywhere else. When I got back, using a valuable teleport potion to save having to build another raft, Edie had left and it looked like he'd taken my Cores with him. Bugger. Now I was going to have to go through the whole rigmarole all over again.

So that's what I did. It took me a while. Couple of days. And, surprisingly, it was fun the second time, too. That's another difference between Valheim and Dawnlands for me. Where I dreaded failing in Valheim because the consequences could be so dire, in Dawnlands messing up stings just enough to make me want to do better but not so much I don't even want to try.

By the time I was ready to go again I'd discovered a second Seal where I could summon Edie and this one was a lot more convenient. It had a free teleport close by for a start. I'd done yet more research and I felt I was better prepared. Yes, the wheat beer would help when I closed with Edie but I wouldn't be doing that until I'd seen him use his laser, which I'd learned could only be blocked by hiding behind the large, partially-shattered stone glyph that looked a bit like a giant ammonite.

It seemed I wouldn't be able to avoid a bit of dodging and kiting but I hoped to keep it to a minimum, doing all my damage with the hammer inbetween lasers. I'd seen someone estimate it as being a six-round fight, which didn't seem too bad.

Unsurprisngly, I didn't take any pictures of the fight. How about some scenery instead?

At least I didn't go down in Round One this time. It was more like Round Two. I managed to get behind the rock for the first laser and back in to whack him with the hammer. He tried to nail me with his rock ball and missed and I smashed it, which stuns him for a while, so I could take a few free shots at his rock-hard skull. Edie hit me a few times but the beer did its job and his pounding barely tickled. 

It looked good for a while until I was too slow getting behind the rock and Edie caught me with his laser. I respawned at the teleport beacon and ran back. He was still there, still damaged, so I went at him again but this time, when I tried to dodge I got stuck on one of the spikes that stick out of the ground nearby and he got me again.

This went on for a while. I had him at about 75% and in theory I guess I could just have kept going but I was making a real hash of getting behind the rock and every time I died I had to chug another beer, like some kind of macabre drinking game. It looked odds on I'd run out of beer before he went down and that would be the end of it.

I decided to teleport away, mostly to see if Edie would still be there when I came back. I'd watched Kazeyo do that repeatedly in one of the videos and it seemed to work. It was a risk because the whole thing might reset again but I didn't feel like there was much of an option.

Obviously, Kazeyo knows something I don't. Plenty, probably. I ported out, ported back and Edie was gone. Remembering what had happened with Guya, where I lost the Crimson Eyes the first time I failed to kill her but not the second, I searched optimistically through my bags for the Cores. Nothing.

In one of those "Have you learned nothing?" moments, I even checked the summoning circle to see if somehow the cores were still in place. They were not. And then, for no good reason I can think of, I pressed the "Start Challenge" button anyway.

The ground shook. Purple tendrils began to spread. Edie was coming!

Didn't even need those cores this time! Although you could have told me that sooner...

Feeling marginally ecstatic if completely confused, I ran the hell away so I could watch what was happening. Edie appeared and stood there, obviously wondering who'd challenged him. I stood there looking at him, wondering what to do next.

Well, I wasn't just going leave him there! I wasn't fully prepared, not having expected to see him again so soon, but I had some beers left and plenty of hammers. I thought I might as well give it another go, if only for practice. 

I ran in and engaged Edie, then dodged behind the stone circle to avoid the laser. So far so good. I ran back and clobbered him a few times then ran away again. It was going down much the same as last time and inevitably after a while he got me with his laser beam. Only this time something fortuitous happened. 

As I ran back to pick up the fight, I could see Edie jittering from side to side behind the shattered ammonite. He'd somehow gotten himself caught on it. This time, it was his turn to get hung up on geometry.

I'd seen a couple of people saying they'd been able to beat Edie when he got stuck on a rock. One person even had a strat for making it happen. It's the sort of thing that some people think of as an exploit but I'm not one of them. Edie was quite happy to pound on me when I got stuck. Turnabout is fair play.

Being stuck wouldn't stop him from blasting me with his laser or thumping me with his fists but I didn't plan on getting close enough to let him do either. One thing I'd discovered when killing all those Edith Eyes, which as I mentioned are basically the same laser weapon Edie uses, is that my bow has a greater range. 

He's at 20% Not even going to need all seventy-five arrows!

For all those complicated strats on how to kill the Eyes I'd read, no-one pointed out the obvious, which is that all you have to do is find the limit of the laser's range then stand a meter or two beyond it and use your bow. If you get it exactly right, the Eye won't even respond at all because the bow has a greater range than the Eye's aggro radius, too.

It seemed like that strategy ought to work on Edie now he was stuck. It would probably work on him even if he wasn't, which may be why the official advice is to use a bow. The problem there would be that, unlike the Eyes, Edie moves around. You'd have to kite him and it would be hard to keep him in that sweet spot, where he can't see you but you can still plink him. Get it wrong and once he sees you he'll charge like a bull rhino.

With the golem immobile, though, it worked like a dream. There were only two problems: arrows really don't do a lot of damage to rock and I hadn't expected to be using my bow so I hadn't brought that many arrows anyway. 

I did have some. I had all the special arrows I'd filched out of chests - lighning, fire, cold.... I also had about eighty copper arrows I'd found lying around in all those ruins where I'd been hunting Eyes. They're sometimes stacked agains the walls in quivers, presumably left there by adventurers who didn't make it.

I also had some of my regular wood arrows but not a lot. It didn't seem like it would be enough but I was too paranoid about making Edie despawn if I tried to port somewhere for more ammo. I thought I might as well see how it went so I started pinging arrows into him from a safe distance. 

It was like chipping away at a boulder with one of those little cocktail hammers bartenders use to break up ice. I could see tiny slivers of his health flaking away but it was obvious it was going to take a lot of arrows before he fell apart altogether. 

Job done! Oops! Spoiler!

The fancy arrows did a little more damage but I soon ran out of those. The copper arrows were effective but they were all gone in no time, too. I was very glad I'd taken the trouble to upgrade and reinforce my Brass Bow to the max. At least I could be sure that was going to go the distance.

I was getting through my wood arrows, which were all I had left. Edie was at half health or close enough. It was starting to feel like I was going to just have to risk it and go looking for some trees to chop down. Luckily, you can make basic arrows from just wood via the UI. At least I wouldn't have to make a workbench, too. 

Then I had a lightbulb moment. I'd been looking though all the cash shop tabs a while back, just to see what was there, and I'd been puzzled to find you could buy basic mats like wood and stone for in-game gold. Wood and stone are everywhere for free and gold is comparatively hard to come by, so why would anyone ever want to do that?

Well, maybe if someone found themselves standing on a barren plain with a boss stuck on a rock a hundred yards away, about to run out of arrows and with no wood and trees in sight, paranoid the boss might unstick himself if they moved even an inch away from where they were? I guess if someone ever found themselves in a situation like that, they might be pretty damn happy to be able to throw a little gold at the problem.

So I bought some wood from the store and made myself some arrows. The wood was cheap enough and I had plenty of gold. I figured I could keep doing it until Edie died. In the end, though, once was enough. I still had a few arrows left when he went down.

And that was that. Third boss over and done with, Sealing Progress to Level IV. I jogged down to pick up the drops, then ported back home to take a look at all my exciting new recipes. Next stop the Swamps!

Swampland, here we come!

I have to say I found the whole thing extremely enjoyable and satisfying. More so, probably, than Valheim, although it's so long since I played that game seriously it's hard to be sure. Much though I loved Valheim, it was not infrequently terrifying. The level of threat and challenge in Dawnlands is better suited to my preferences, which generally tend towards calm, meditative relaxation rather than adrenaline-soaked tension.

Whether I'll rack up anything like the three hundred and eighty-five hours I've spent in Valheim is another matter. Most of that was during the first, harshest pandemic lockdown, when I didn't have a lot else to do. Also, the entire survival genre was fresh to me plus I didn't have a dog to walk. 

On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised to find at least half of those hours were spent building and I haven't even begun to build in Dawnlands. The building options there look more sophisticated than Valheim's were back in 2020 and possibly than they still are, even now. Four hundred hours in Dawnlands may not be such an impossibility to imagine.

It's also instructive to remember that even those hundreds of hours I spent in Valheim would barely twitch the dial compared to the time we all spend playing MMORPGs. If I'd played EverQuest II or Guild Wars 2 through their Steam clients, my hours played wouldn't just be in the thousands, they'd be in five figures by now. 

Probably best not to think about it. For the time being, I'm excited to play Dawnlands. I'll ride that pony until I don't feel that way any longer and then I'll put it back in the stable and find another. Until then, you'll excuse me, I'm sure. I have iron to mine and wolves to kill. Two new complete sets of armor aren't going to craft themselves.