Faction Quest Tracker

1. What Faction Quests Are

Faction quests are the game's side quests, each attached to a faction — a noble house, a guild, a village, a tribe, a religious order, or the Greymanes themselves — and listed under that faction's name. Whether any can be missed is not yet settled, but none is known to be, and a quest can be picked up again in a later chapter; once done, a quest, like a boss or a cutscene, cannot be replayed. The list gives each quest's reward and a map screenshot of where it begins; the screenshot carries no text, so the cards in section 5 give faction, region and reward, and say nothing about the starting point.

How you get one

There are two doors. Factions keep a notice board where residents post what they need, and NPCs raise problems in conversation — the on-screen text "Find the person in need of your help" is the cue that someone nearby has one. Residents only hand quests to someone their faction is at least neutral towards, and hostile factions offer none. Factions fall into Core, Other, Hostile and Religious, and the hostile ones — bandits and criminals, mostly — attack on sight. For the quests attached to occupied places there is a shortcut: hover over a red location on the map and the game names the main or faction quests that unlock its liberation, with two factions at the foot of the panel — the one that wants the place back and the one holding it — and the first is the faction whose quest giver you are looking for.

Two kinds: questlines and requests

The list mixes long questlines with one-conversation errands. The 45 rows named "…'s Request" are the errands: 26 Greymane Commissions, 16 Hernand Commissions and three filed under Grounds of the Sunrise. All but two of them (Kamu's and Ben's, with no reward listed) pay a Medium Bag, and that inventory expansion is the reason to do them at all. They also pay Trust +50 with the person who asked, and Contribution EXP for the region or the Greymanes; finishing a request raises that NPC's trust, and a pop-up shows by how much. Across the whole list, 54 rows carry a Medium Bag and 16 an Abyss Artifact.

Contribution and Trust, not reputation

None of the sources read for this page describes a faction-wide standing that rises and falls with your actions. What they describe are two other counters. Contribution is kept per region, and per the Greymanes: quest rewards list Hernand Contribution EXP, Greymane Contribution EXP and Demenissian Contribution EXP quest by quest, and there are eight contribution levels with the Hernandian faction (on the Chapter 4 page). What it buys: each region has a Contribution Shop; its tokens hire extra workers for Mission Dispatch, four per worker and refunded when the job ends; a region's Crown from that shop unlocks Prestige stock at vendors; and Contribution Points can protect a liberated location from being retaken. A region's points spend only in that region, while Greymane points spend anywhere. The man behind the Hernand counter is Haldwin, who runs the Contribution Shop in Hernand Castle and records what people have done for Hernand. The hiring of Contribution workers is on the Characters & Comrades page.

Trust is kept per person, not per faction. A greeting is worth +5, as is petting an animal; a completed quest +50, gifts +5 to +25 depending on the item's category and the NPC's race, and the ceiling is 100, where the NPC hands over a gift and keeps doing so on later visits. The gauge shows red for disliked actions and green for liked ones, and filling it brings lower vendor prices, new quests and, for animals, a pet — the Brown Dog from The Greymanes' New Fangs, for one. Dyers selling dyes at 100 Trust are on the Equipment page.

2. The Six Groups

The 33 factions fall into six regions, and the tracker below keeps that order. Three rows belong to Greymane factions but carry the Hernand icon — Luke's Request, Expanding the Camp and Strength Held in the Fingertips — and they stay in the Hernand group, with their faction named on the card. Counts are of rows on the list as read.

3. Which to Do First

Three groups are the usual picks, and two specific quests are worth doing early.

• Hernand Commissions. Every one you clear pays an inventory expansion tool, which is extremely valuable.
• Greymane quests. They unlock comrades to send on Mission Dispatch, so camp resources arrive while you do other things. Assign missions before starting any quest, because one can take 8 to 16 in-game hours.
• House Roberts at Karin Quarry. The quest is called Stolen Quarry, and its reward, the Knuckledrill, mines ore with less effort and raises ore drops by 10%; on the list those rewards sit under Estate in Dismay.
• The Witch of Wisdom, before Chapter 5. The main story's Black and White runs through it (Chapter 5), so it is the one row here with a deadline of sorts.
• Liberations. The reasons: EXP, loot to sell, Contribution for the region, and safer roads.

4. Liberations and Blockades

Friendly factions give quests, hostile ones seize strongholds, and a stronghold can be liberated and handed back to its owner for equipment and camp resources.

The green bar

Occupied places show red on the map. Enter one and a green bar appears on the left of the screen at 100%, draining as you defeat the occupants; at zero the place is free and friendly NPCs move in. A big area adds sub-objectives and an area boss. No bar means the place is locked for now: hover over it on the map to see which main or faction quests open it. Early on, in Hernand, the first locations belong to the Bleed Bandits; later, in Demeniss, many belong to Bastier's Inquisitors and need a prerequisite first.

Sub-objectives and who you are fighting

Blinding Flash marks the sub-objectives with a spinning red square. Destroying the Infirmary stops wounded enemies rejoining the fight; the Barracks lowers enemy attack by 5; Storage Facilities cut enemy maximum health by 10%; and a large territory only falls once its area boss is beaten — the Excavatron at Karin Quarry, for one. Turning Slash on walls and load-bearing beams brings the buildings down. Occupants fight differently: Bleed Bandits mix melee and archers behind light armour; Bastier's Inquisitors move in shield walls with almost no ranged support, so a longsword or spear is needed to break through; the Wolf Trackers of Pailune carry rifles, which a large shield answers. Explosive barrels are the ones marked with a white X, not painted red.

Sending the Greymanes instead

Once the camp has comrades, a Recapture mission through Ross at Howling Hill, or from the map's Missions tab, sends them to wear an occupied place down while you are elsewhere; it costs arms, food and money, and comrades with higher combat scores do more. Going yourself is faster; you can fight beside them and call Damiane and Oongka too, but the area boss has to be beaten without their support.

Re-blockade

Since update 1.05, expanded in 1.08 to bandit camps and ruins and in 1.10, liberated places can be attacked again. There are three settings under Settings → Gameplay: Stable (never retaken), Conflict (now and then, the 1.05 default) and War (often). An attack has a Battle phase you can join to hold the place; if it falls, you liberate it again, and a Reconstruct phase of a couple of days follows during which camp workers cannot be sent there. Liberating pays Contribution, Provisions and Trade Goods, and for major strongholds Contribution Points can buy Protection, which suppresses re-blockades there, from each region's contribution assessor (the patch notes' new name, since 1.10.00, for the manager of the Contribution Shop).

5. Faction Quest Tracker

One card per row of the list, in its six groups, each group's factions in the order they first appear on the list and each faction's quests in the list's order. Every card names the quest as the list spells it, its faction, and the reward listed; a few carry more about that quest. The list is Game8's; Fextralife's cuts the game finer, naming steps such as Stolen Quarry, Piercing Spear, The Weight of Legacy, Peculiar Structure and Sanctum of Absolution as quests of their own, and adds three Greymane quests — Words Left by the Riverside, A Rumor in Ivynook and Hope from Ashes — that are not on Game8's list or in this tracker. Ticks are saved in this browser and, if you are signed in, in your account with the rest of the Crimson Desert guide.