Nightingale Essence Dust: How to get it

Nightingale Essence Dust guide - the sun is setting behind some distant hills as you look out from trees near the edge of a lake — (Image credit: Inflexion Games)

Essence Dust is a resource found in Nightingale, used for buying schematics, and more importantly, repairing your gear. Nightingale is pretty good at directing new players with helpful quests, but you still need to put in the legwork to complete them, and it's not always obvious where to get the things you need.

Essence Dust isn't hard to come by once you know how to find it, but you'll need quite a bit of the stuff early on. If you've just crafted a set of new clothes to increase your gear score, you don't want them breaking on you, and after completing a Site of Power, that's a very real possibility. You should always have some Essence Dust handy for emergency repairs. With that in mind, here's how to get this resource.

Nightingale Essence Dust location

As with any survival game, you'll be gathering a lot of resources for crafting gear, and you'll likely wear down the durability of one or more of your tools in your material harvesting frenzy. Thankfully, in doing so, you're also unknowingly gathering the means to get Essence Dust early on.

Essence Dust is acquired by breaking down items in your inventory, or by picking up Essence Bundles from Sites of Power or Vaults. You won't be able to rely on the latter option until you've progressed a little further into the game, so to start with, your best bet is to extract it from old gear or common materials like sticks or plant fibre. Both of these are relatively plentiful and can be grabbed with little fuss as you explore your realm.

To extract the Essence Dust, simply right-click the item in your inventory and select the option from the menu. If you want to keep track of how much dust you have, you can find it stored under the Essences tab in your inventory.

As well as repairing your gear, you also need Essence Dust to buy the schematics for crafting stations from an Essence Vendor, so it pays to have plenty of resources to convert. An early quest will send you to the vendor location, so don't worry about searching for them if you're just starting out.

Sarah started as a freelance writer in 2018, writing for PCGamesN, TechRadar, GamingBible, Red Bull Gaming and more. In 2021, she was offered a full-time position on the PC Gamer team where she takes every possible opportunity to talk about World of Warcraft and Elden Ring. When not writing guides, most of her spare time is spent in Azeroth—though she's quite partial to JRPGs too. One of her fondest hopes is to one day play through the ending of Final Fantasy X without breaking down into a sobbing heap. She probably has more wolves in Valheim than you.