How to Get Tier 3 Essences in Nightingale: Efficient Farming Guide

Introduction

With the recent Nightingale patch 0.5, called Realm Rebuild, many changes were introduced, including significant updates to essences and how we use them now. If you’ve read my Nightingale progression post, you’ll know that you currently need over 8,000 Tier 3 essences just to unlock the Tier 3 progress tree. This is far beyond what you can gather while playing in Tier 3 realms, meaning that once you reach Tier 4 Ascended Realms, you’ll have to backtrack to farm more essences. I’ve submitted a feature change request, where you can vote for improvements, but in the meantime, I’ve created a guide to help you farm Tier 3 essences effectively in Nightingale.

Where to Farm Tier 3 Essences

Tier 3 essences drop from various activities I’ve covered in my general essences guide. To farm them, you’ll need to open portals to Gloom, Herbarium, Hunt, or Provisioner realms. While you can also use storyline realms, I recommend sticking to these four as they are procedurally generated, meaning you won’t get bored as quickly.

How Many Essences Can You Get at Max-Level Difficulty?

In Nightingale Tier 3 realms max out at level 140, and each encounter has internal difficulty tiers. You can easily determine the difficulty by the number of nodes or enemy spawners. For instance, in the Intelligence encounter, you need to tap crystals in the correct order: 3 for easy, 5 for medium, and 7 for hard.

Here’s a list of all encounters and the number of Tier 3 essences you can gain per difficulty:

• Infestation (combat): 25 / 50 / 100
• Agility: 25 / 50 / 100
• Intelligence: 25 / 50 / 100
• Insight: 25 (I haven’t found 5 or 7 symbol puzzles)
• Aid: 100
• Defense: 50 / 100

Additionally, there is a bunker that yields a total of 250 essences—50 per challenge and a 150-essence bonus at the end.

Equipment Needed

Regardless of your farming style, having equipment that helps you traverse quickly is crucial, as travel time will take up most of your effort. Recommended equipment:

• Mystical Umbrella
• Mystical Climbing Picks
• A solid amount of stamina or stamina-boosting food
• Charm of the Wanderer

For combat style add these:

• Charm of Essence
• Any AoE damage option, like a Quake spell, grenade, or slingshot with explosive marbles
• Crude Remote Realmic Transmuter with a Blood Moon Eminent Card

Non-Combat Style Essences Farming

• Pick a Major Realm card from Herbarium, Hunt, or Provisioner*, and set the portal difficulty to Nightmare (Level 140), even if your gear is much lower. The key here is to avoid combat altogether — focus on running away or dodging any combat encounters. That’s why I’ve listed good traversal equipment, as it’s essential for quickly escaping.
• Once you land, complete all encounters except Infestations, as killing clearing them at level 140 will waste a lot of time, and they only drop 1-2 essences.
• After you’re done, you can reset the realm and start over or go to sleep, change the difficulty to Explorer (Level 60), and complete the Bunker.

Once you become confident with combat avoidance, you can also mix a combat encounters, as to unlock the essences you need to kill only Bound’s Portal, which can be done with a single swarm cast.

Do not pick Gloom Card for this method as it have more Combat encounters, which leads us to…

Combat Style Essences Farming

In this method, you’ll rely more on drops from enemies, so killing speed and spawn rates are key. The Charm of Essence plays a crucial role here. With frequent kills, the charm gives an extra essence orb for every third kill.

1. Pick Major Realm Gloom card and set the difficulty to Explorer (Level 37) or Normal (Level 60), depending on your gear.
2. Once you land, place a Remote Realmic Transmuter and install a Blood Moon Eminent Card. This will set the internal night, causing enemy blobs to spawn randomly. AoE damage is essential here—Quake can take out entire groups before they react. Each spawn can net you 7-15 essences in a matter of seconds.
3. Target Whisps, boars, wolves, and bugs, and complete all challenges along the way—except Hard Intelligence, Insight, and Aim challenges, as they will slow you down. Don’t forget to skin the animals, as this can yield essences too.

Once your gear reaches level 130+, you can try to increase the difficulty to 100 or 140, but from my experience, you’ll gain fewer essences overall due to the longer battles, which don’t offset the extra essence drops from non-combat encounters.

Final Notes

I found that both methods—non-combat and combat—are roughly equal in terms of essences per hour, with slight variations depending on your gear, build, and realm layout. My general recommendation is to alternate between the two methods to avoid burnout. You can expect to get around 1,500 essences per hour with either method.

Once you’re done farming Tier 3, you may want to check out my Tier 4 Essences Guide, which includes a few changes to the process.