Dawnwalker: All Endings and the One Save You Need

The Blood of Dawnwalker has seven endings you can reach from a single late-game save, plus one secret ending that only exists during the prologue — eight in total, but never eight from one file. That single sentence resolves the count you have seen argued about, and it also tells you the practical thing: the game has no New Game Plus, so the way to see them all is one manual save in one specific place.

Spoiler note: this page names the endings and the broad conditions that trigger them, because that is the question you came here to have answered. It does not describe what happens in any of them.

Why the ending count is reported as 7 and 8

Three guides count three different ways, and none of them is wrong — they are counting different things.

Source	Count	What it is counting
PowerPyx	7	Endings reachable from a post-prologue save
Fextralife (community wiki)	7	The same seven, with one ending under a different name
Game8	8	Those seven plus the prologue-only secret ending

Game8’s extra entry is the whole discrepancy. Defeating Brencis during the prologue quest “Bad Blood” produces a distinct secret ending, and no save made after the prologue can ever reach it. Guides written around “here is how to collect every ending on one playthrough” leave it out, because from that framing it does not exist. Guides written around “here is every ending the game contains” include it. Both descriptions are accurate.

This one has a history, incidentally. Before launch, Rebel Wolves told Newsweek that a playtester once beat the prologue duel that was intended to be unwinnable — “That did happen once. As a result, the credits rolled.” The shipped game keeps it as a real, listed ending rather than an accident.

The naming difference is smaller but worth knowing if you are cross-referencing guides: PowerPyx calls the escape-the-valley outcome A Hero They Deserve, Fextralife calls it The Coward’s Path, and they are the same ending. Game8 also uses Family Failure where PowerPyx uses Time Runs Out.

And why some counts are lower still

There is a fourth number floating around, and it comes from the trophy list rather than from an endings guide. PowerPyx’s trophy guide describes the gold trophy “In the Nick of Time” as completing the story and rescuing your family inside the 30-day limit with any of the four main endings. So the trophy requirement draws a line between four main endings and the rest.

No source enumerates which four. One exclusion is documented rather than inferred: PowerPyx notes you cannot earn “In the Nick of Time” on a file where the clock ran out, so Time Runs Out is not one of them. Beyond that, treat any specific list of “the four” as inference, not established fact — including mine. The honest summary is that the game contains eight endings, seven are reachable per playthrough, and four of them are what the trophy requirement singles out as the main endings. Every count you have seen is one of those three numbers wearing a different label.

Every ending and what triggers it

Conditions below are from PowerPyx’s endings guide and Game8’s, which agree except where noted.

Ending	What triggers it
The Folk Hero	Fight Brencis alone, with no allies
The Patricide	Complete Lacra’s full questline and start the ending through her final quest
The Knyazmaker	Complete Crake’s full questline and start the ending through his
The Turncoat	Take the dialogue option to betray your allies and deal with Brencis, then complete the Manumit questline
A Hero They Deserve (Fextralife: The Coward’s Path)	Use Planeshift/Shadowstep to escape the valley at night — Game8 places this at the broken bridge in Briar Sloughs
Together Forever	During “Home Sweet Home,” ignore the well and loop to stay in the dream with your family
Time Runs Out (Game8: Family Failure)	Exceed 30 in-game days
Prologue secret ending	Defeat Brencis in the prologue duel during “Bad Blood”

One live conflict inside that table: the guides disagree on how many times you have to loop the dream for Together Forever. PowerPyx says loop it 4 times; Game8 says complete “Home Sweet Home” 5 times. Nobody has reconciled that, so budget for five and stop when the ending fires.

What actually determines the ending: who stands with you

The lever is which allies join you against Brencis — Lacra, Crake, a spared Xanthe, or nobody — and that is set by questline completion.

That makes ending routing a mid-game problem rather than an endgame one. Lacra’s questline is what unlocks The Patricide and Crake’s is what unlocks The Knyazmaker, and both of those are also romance questlines. You can romance all three options in one run without a jealousy system getting in the way; the constraint is the 30-day clock, because three full companion questlines eat a large share of your time budget.

Xanthe is the other ally variable, and it is the one people misread. Sparing her makes her side with you and clears the specters out of Greifberg Castle on the path to Brencis, which locks out draining her. Screen Rant’s read of the same choice is that killing her instead makes her an opponent in the final battle and slightly harder work, while a spared Xanthe offers unique help beforehand — that outlet recommends sparing. If you were holding back because you wanted Blood Surge, don’t: the Phial of Xanthe’s Blood in the Cathedral Complex Treasury in Svartrau grants it whether you spared her or not.

The save: exactly where to make it

Here is the part most ending guides skip. The Blood of Dawnwalker has no New Game Plus. Game8’s dedicated page, updated September 6, is unambiguous: finishing the story and watching the credits unlocks no option to carry anything into a fresh playthrough, and a new game is a clean save with no level, stats or Corruption retained. Fextralife’s NG+ page is still live and still claims you keep your perks, equipment and character level — that page is wrong for the shipped game.

There is also no post-game free roam. Reaching an ending returns you to the title screen, and loading a post-epilogue save simply replays the wrap-around and rolls credits again.

So the manual save is not a convenience. It is the mechanism.

• Make it immediately after you have dealt with all three members of the Vrakhiri Court — Ambrus, Bakir and Xanthe. That is Fextralife’s advice and it is the more precise of the two: from that one file you can reach all seven.
• PowerPyx’s version is to keep a manual save before the final quest and reload it after each ending. Same idea, slightly later.
• You have 54 manual save slots, and the game carries Steam’s Save Anytime category, so there is no reason to be stingy. Use a dedicated slot per branch.
• Autosave does not run during free roam. Quicksave before combat as a general habit; it is not just an endings concern.

Do this and one playthrough is enough for the platinum, because you reload the pre-final-quest save to collect the ending trophies rather than replaying 50 hours. TheGamer flags the same structural point from the length side: the ending-related achievements are mutually exclusive, which forces either reloads or full replays, and that is a real chunk of why completion-time estimates for this game vary so wildly.

Two more things the save protects you from. Uphill Battle, a gold trophy, requires completing an ending on Duelist difficulty start to finish without touching any difficulty setting — changing one flips the preset to Custom and voids it, so that run needs its own clean file rather than a mid-run adjustment. And Time Runs Out has a consolation: blowing the 30 days sacrifices your family and gives you that ending, but it shifts the goal rather than ending the game, and PowerPyx notes you can still free-roam afterward. You cannot earn “In the Nick of Time” on that file, though — that one also needs your mother Esme kept alive back in the prologue, which is decided at a cauldron hours earlier.

If you have not made the Court save yet and you are already deep into the final stretch, stop and make one now, before the point of no return. There is no mode in this game that gives you a second pass at it.