Mechanics

The Witcher 3 looks like it has one resource, health, and forty systems attached to it. It actually has about seven resources, and every system in the game draws on exactly one of them. Once you know which meter a mechanic charges, you know when to use it, what competes with it, and whether running out is an emergency or an inconvenience. That is how this page is organised: not by menu tab, but by what each system takes from you.

Stamina, which pays for everything defensive

Stamina is the bar you drain by acting rather than by waiting. Attacking, blocking and countering all cost it, and every sign you cast comes out of the same pool, which is why a sign build and a defensive build are quietly in competition with each other.

The five signs are the obvious spender, and the thing most players never notice is that each one has a second form. Our alternate signs page covers all five, and the reason they matter to this section is that most of them raise combat stamina regeneration as they rank up, so investing in them partly pays for itself: Aard Sweep hits everything in a radius, Puppet turns an enemy into an ally, Firestream trades a cone of fire for a lower stamina cost at rank two, Active Shield reworks Quen, and Magic Trap turns Yrden into a mine.

The defensive half of the same meter is parrying and countering, and it is the mechanic that separates a Death March playthrough from a corpse. Blocking is generally better than rolling, a counter can end a small enemy in one swipe, and the page draws the line between what can be caught on the sword and what has to be dodged. Fistfights are the same skill with the sword and the signs removed, which is why they reward blocking and cornering rather than punch spam, though casting Quen before the bell is entirely legal.

Underwater combat swaps stamina for a Breath Remaining bar and takes away everything except the crossbow, which in exchange does enormous damage down there and never runs out of bolts. Cast Quen before you dive off a sinking boat and drink a Killer Whale if you plan to stay.

Adrenaline, the only bar that fills by fighting

Adrenaline works backwards to everything else. It accumulates for staying in a fight and it is the only meter you want to be full. Each point in the bar raises your damage by ten percent on its own, before you spend anything.

Spending it buys the special attacks Rend and Whirl from the Combat tree, or upgrades a sign cast on the spot. A cluster of combat abilities available from around level five add five percent to the rate you gain it, and Attack is the Best Defense in the General tree fills the bar by parrying rather than by attacking, which is the single best synergy in the game for a defensive player. Flood of Anger, paired with Adrenaline Burst, is the point where a sign build stops being fragile.

Toxicity, the price of every potion you drink

Toxicity is the meter that punishes greed, and it is the reason alchemy is a build rather than a convenience. Potions and decoctions both fill it, decoctions much harder, and Geralt's face darkens as it rises. White Honey and its superior version wipe the bar clean, at the cost of cancelling every effect you were running.

That trade-off is what healing is built around. Food is free and slow, Swallow is the standing regeneration potion and its superior version keeps working through damage, and White Raffard's Decoction is the panic button that refills you from nothing. Decoctions are single use and you have to meditate to clear the toxicity before another, but a Troll decoction becomes the answer on higher difficulties where automatic health regeneration is switched off entirely.

Mutagens hang off the same tree without costing toxicity, and their rule is worth memorising because it doubles your build's output for free: a mutagen placed in the slot beside abilities of its own colour makes those abilities twice as effective. Green, red and blue drop from monsters and convert upward through the alchemy screen. Poison gas is toxicity's environmental cousin, cleared with Igni from a safe distance or pushed away with Aard in the open, and survived outright with a Golden Oriole or the Thyssen armour, which two main quests, Wandering in the Dark and later Through Time and Space, both expect you to know already.

Crowns, which is to say every craftsman in the game

Money is the meter with the most systems attached, and almost all of them run through a smith or an armourer. Crafting needs a diagram, the components and a craftsman of sufficient grade; weapons go to a blacksmith and armour to an armourer, and the two are not interchangeable. Upgrading armour and upgrading swords are the same transaction one tier up, and each is gated by four things at once rather than one.

Which makes gold farming the page that funds the rest of the bucket. Sell to the Quartermaster at Crow's Perch rather than the nearest merchant, open seashells for pearls, read books before selling them, take every contract off the notice boards, and treat the Hanse bases in Toussaint as a late-game income stream rather than a fight.

Skill points, and the twelve slots that are the real limit

Levelling hands out ability points steadily, so points are not actually the scarce thing. Slots are. The base game gives you twelve places to put an ability and no more, and an ability you have unlocked but not slotted does nothing at all, which is the single most misunderstood rule in the game.

More slots exist, but only through the Mutations system, which means the Turn and Face the Strange quest, Professor Moreau's laboratory and the portal puzzle under the water in Toussaint. Until then, twelve is the budget your build has to fit inside, and the answer to a bad build is a Potion of Clearance rather than a new save.

Three pages exist to help you spend those points well. Best skills early game argues for the two General abilities that need nothing invested first, Gourmet and Strong Back, the latter carrying sixty extra units of loot. Best builds lays out the Euphoria, signs, combat, Wolf School, alchemy, hybrid and New Game Plus configurations end to end. Death March builds narrows the same ground to what survives on the hardest setting, and it is worth reading even at normal difficulty because it is honest about which abilities are filler.

The Gourmet perk gets its own page for a reason that belongs in the next section, not this one: it costs one point and it pays out in real-world minutes.

Time, both kinds

A surprising number of systems charge you in days rather than in anything you carry. Meditation is the mechanism for all of them, so the cost is usually trivial once you know it exists. Corvo Bianco's renovations take three in-game days per stage. Hand the Magic Acorn to the villagers instead of eating it and the payout arrives a month later on the in-game calendar, a wait you can simply meditate through. Innkeepers restock Cherry Cordial on the same clock, and monsters respawn at farming spots after a few hours of it.

Gourmet is the exception that proves the rule, and it is genuinely strange. Any food you eat regenerates health for twenty minutes of real time rather than game time, which makes a single loaf of bread worth more than a stack of Swallow on a long session. It costs one ability point and needs nothing invested in the General tree before it, which is why nearly every recommendation in the folder puts it first.

Choices, which cannot be refunded at any price

The most expensive currency in The Witcher 3 has no bar on the screen. Major choices collects around twenty decisions across the three acts, from the Bloody Baron's men at the inn through the Whispering Hillock's spirit, Whoreson Junior, Menge and Triss, the Skellige succession, and whether Ciri visits her father. Several are not presented as choices at all at the time.

The romance guide is the other page in this category, because picking Yennefer or Triss is the one decision the ending is actually built on and trying to keep both is the one that ends with Geralt tied to a bed. The Witcher 2 save simulation pushes five of these choices in front of you before the story has even started, deciding Aryan's fate, whether you stood with Roche or Iorveth at Flotsam, whether you saved Anais or Triss, what became of Síle, and whether Letho lives.

The systems that cost nothing at all

The last group is the one worth reading before a first playthrough, because these are switches and habits rather than expenditures, and several of them change the whole shape of the game for free.

• Death March is a menu setting that hands every enemy vastly more damage, cuts the experience you earn, disables passive healing and lets guards empty your purse if you are knocked out. It costs nothing but changes the value of every other entry on this page.
• Enemy upscaling is the other free toggle, raising under-levelled enemies to meet you so that old content still pays experience. It never lowers anything above your level.
• Levelling has no hard cap, though the game stops paying out at around level 100. Monster nests, contracts and Gwent are the efficient routes; a monster experience trophy on Roach compounds all of them.
• Fast travel runs on a network of 228 signposts across a world of roughly 88 square miles, plus harbours for sailing, and it is free in every sense. Map pins can be revealed in bulk through notice boards and merchant maps.
• Horse upgrades cost crowns at a vendor but mostly arrive as race prizes, and they govern four things: Roach's fear, her stamina, your carry weight, and the passive from whichever trophy is hanging off her saddle.
• Armour dyes are pure cosmetics and reversible with a remover, and Lornruk Castle is the folder's best example of a reward locked behind knowledge rather than money: an underwater cave gets you in, the drawbridge comes down from the inside, and a Griffin silver sword diagram is waiting at the top with a wyvern you can decline to fight.

Gwent, which runs on a currency of its own

Gwent deserves separating out because it spends cards rather than anything on Geralt's character sheet. It opens with a coin toss, plays across three rows for close combat, ranged and siege units, and gives every deck a Leader card with a once-per-match ability. Four factions plus neutrals, and beyond the early opponents you cannot win on skill with a weak deck, which makes card collection the actual mechanic.

The Skellige deck arrives with Blood and Wine and comes with its own tournament in Beauclair worth a thousand crowns and a trophy for the villa, plus an achievement for completing the faction. Buy A Miraculous Guide to Gwent for three crowns from the merchant near St Gregory's Bridge and it will point you at whatever you are missing.

What to switch on, and when

Two systems are effectively new games rather than mechanics. Blood and Wine begins with A Poet Under Pressure, then a Mulbrydale notice board and the Envoys, Wineboys quest, and expects level 34; the menu also offers a standalone start with a pre-made level 35 Geralt. New Game Plus scales the world up hard, so the checklist before you press it is real: fetch Aerondight, spend your last visit with the Runewright, break unique mutagens down in the Corvo Bianco cellar behind the Aard-breakable wall, and get well past level 50 first.

On PC there are two more pages that sit outside every meter in this article. Console commands covers enabling the debug console and the character, inventory, map and Gwent commands it accepts, and item spawn codes is the full list of things you can conjure with it. Both are the only way to undo a genuinely unrecoverable mistake, which given how much of the section on choices above is permanent is not nothing.

For where these meters get spent in practice, the bosses guide shows which fight demands which potion, the items guide covers what the crowns are actually buying, and the quests guide covers the deadlines that decide whether you get to spend them at all.