Fighting the Ravenous Bear is an early combat challenge in Blood of Dawnwalker‘s prologue, but mainly because you don’t have many skills or decent equipment yet, which turns the fight into a slog. After you do defeat it, you’ll also have to track down a treasure as part of the Into the Den quest. I’ll run through how to do both below.

How to beat the Ravenous Bear in Blood of Dawnwalker

The Ravenous Bear is the most challenging early boss you can encounter near Laslea. Here are some tips to beat it, plus a video of me fighting the bear above so you can see the strategy in action:

1. Get a better sword: The fight will be over faster if you get a decent weapon. I recommend heading across to the other side of the lake, looking for the big tree with the wolves, and completing the Deep Down quest. This will get you the Undead Warrior’s Sword, which is a nice upgrade over what you had.
2. Parry its regular attacks, but dodge to the side of its red unblockable ones: Parrying is better in this fight because you’re less likely to run out stamina (which dodging consumes), so you can keep attacking. When the bear attacks with a red skull, dodge to the side, rather than away. This will give you a window to deal more damage, too.
3. Time your Perfect Parries when the shield turns orange: This tripped me up quite a bit at first since I was trying to time parries based on the directional attack indicator, but it’s much better to time your parries based on when the shield turns from yellow to orange. This is far more consistent.
4. Watch your stamina: If you start to run low on stamina, back off, and try to Perfect Parry any jumping attacks the bear makes at you while your stamina recovers a bit.

With all that, you should be able to defeat the bear, and then check the mangled corpse behind it to start the Into the Den quest.

How to complete Into the Den in Blood of Dawnwalker

Reading the Tattered Letter you find on the corpse will begin Into the Den, giving you a search area to the northwest where you need to look for the stash mentioned in the note. Specifically, you’re looking for a “flat stone marked with an X”.

You can find this inside in the ramshackle hut with the door on the west side of the search area—it’s the only structure with a door, so it’s hard to miss. If still confused, follow the nearby shrine west along the road and you’ll spot the hut to your left as you pass.

Loot the treasure (which will take one time cycle) to get the very snazzy-looking Artisan’s Tunic, the extremely good Rebel’s Falchion shortsword, plus a handy note about where to sell any silver you might find later in the game, a substance strictly prohibited by the vamps for obvious reasons.