Dragonwilds Vaults: Your Base Is Built Out of Vault Cores

Count the things in Dragonwilds that cost a Vault Core:

Blacksmith's Bench. Armour Bench. Fletching Bench. Jeweler's Bench. Mystic Forge. Stonecutter. Storage Ledger. Well. Lightning Rod. Blast Furnace. Personal Chest. Lodestone.

That is most of a base. Add the items: Granite Maul, Anti-Dragon Shield, Dragonfire Shield, Dragonblight Shield, Dragoncurse Shield, Imaru's Talon, Crystal Bow, Staff of Light.

Now the supply: Vault Cores sit on pedestals inside Dragonkin vaults and nowhere else. You cannot buy them, craft them or farm them off a mob. If you have been treating the vaults as optional side dungeons, that is why your base has a crafting table and a campfire twenty hours in.

The Core economy, which is better than it looks

Three to a vault, roughly, sitting on pedestals near progression points. You get them by interacting with scenery, not from chests and not from kills, so clearing a vault's monsters without walking its full route leaves Cores behind.

The part nobody mentions: they respawn every three in-game days. Cores are renewable. You are not spending a finite resource, you are running a route on a timer, and the stack cap is 25 (raised from 10 back in 0.8.0).

That changes the planning entirely. The question is not "can I afford a Blast Furnace" but "which three vaults are closest to my base," because those are the ones you will re-run.

A Personal Chest costing three Cores is a whole vault's yield for one storage box, which is the single most surprising price in the game.

Vault Shards are the other half and they behave normally: they drop from vault monsters and out of vault chests, and they go into gear rather than structures. Amulets run 6 shards each at the Jeweler's Bench, the Anti-Dragon Shield wants 8, the Abyssal Whip 4, and various Dragonkin, Fallen Hoplite, Gilded Paladin, Necromancer and Splitbark pieces run anywhere from 1 to 12.

The twelve vaults

Ten of them are documented end to end. The two in the Umbral Sands arrived in the 0.12.0 update and are power level 7, which puts them well beyond the rest of the list.

Each one has to be discovered on foot before it shows on your map, and that applies per player. A friend finding Crasorak Kara does not put it on your map. In a four-person world that is four separate walks, which is worth knowing before someone volunteers to "go scout the vaults for everyone".

The three level 2 vaults are all in Brynmoor, so the opening region hands you roughly nine Cores on a three-day timer. That is a Blacksmith's Bench, a Fletching Bench and a Lodestone from the starting zone alone.

What is actually in them

Traps first: fire, spike and spear traps, poison rocks, exploding plants and electric traps. Levers to pull, hidden routes to find. Die inside and your gravestone appears at the outside entrance, which is merciful by survival-game standards and means a bad run costs you the walk, not the loot.

The recipes are the reason to pick a specific vault rather than the nearest one. They are learned by interacting with a dragonkin effigy, not looted:

Crasorak and Thishepen teach nothing, which makes them pure Core farms and, being level 2 and close to spawn, the best ones to put on a rotation.

Note what Vertentis Kara is holding. The anti-dragon shield recipe sits in a level 2 vault in the Whispering Swamp, in the starting region, in a game whose entire campaign is dragons. Go and get it early.

One more: Blurite ore appears only in Takla Kara, so that vault is a resource node as well as a recipe.

The bosses, sorted by what kills them

Vault bosses repeat across vaults at different levels, so learn them as a damage-type table rather than a list of names.

A dagger and a mace between them cover four of the eight. The three Water weaknesses are the same answer that works on every chromatic dragon in the game, so a Water option earns its inventory slot twice over.

Vekchenven Kara is the outlier worth flagging: it has rotridden rats, dragon wolves, skeletal warriors, a Rotsworn necromancer, a soulstone sentinel and a Zogre, which at 4,200 to 6,000 health is more durable than the world boss Velgar. It is a level 5 vault that fights like a region.

A route that works

1. Crasorak, Thishepen, Vertentis in Brynmoor, all level 2. Nine Cores, the anti-dragon shield recipe, and enough to build the benches that unlock the rest of crafting.
2. Takla Kara at level 3 for the Paladin set and Blurite.
3. Kletterbuja and Chaktan for the Wild Archer and Dragonkin Mage sets, which is where ranged and magic builds get their first real armour.
4. Skeklac for the Granite Maul, then the quest that fully unlocks it.
5. Kalistrakthen, Skekven, Vekchenven at level 5 for the Fallen Hoplite pieces, Vekchenven last.
6. Put a Lodestone near whichever three you intend to re-run. One Core, 32 Stone, 20 Rune Essence, and 80 Construction.

The beginner's guide covers the first day, and the boss order guide covers the campaign the vaults are meant to be funding.

Sources: vault levels, regions, named monsters, recipes and resources from the Dragonkin vault page; the Core and Shard cost tables and the three-day respawn from the Vault Core and Vault Shard pages. The two Umbral Sands vaults are listed in the wiki's progression table at power level 7 but are not yet documented in the same detail as the other ten.