Did we miss anything in this section? Is there something we didn't discover? Let us know!

Background

Yaren Bolt (#1) will give you this quest after you've completed his earlier quest Flowers and Gold. If you shared the profits with him in that earlier quest, then you'll need to ask Yaren about "witcher work" despite the dialogue option being gray. If you kept all of the money for yourself, then you'll need to wait a day before talking to Yaren again, but at that point he'll introduce the quest himself.


Walkthrough

Yaren will tell you that the lumberjacks are having problems with wandering monsters and the vodyanoi. To complete the quest, you'll need to deal with both problems.

Wandering Monsters

This is the easy part of the quest. To defeat the monsters, you'll just need to clear the path between the Lumberjacks' Camp (#1) and the Clay Pits (#5). You'll come under attack three times along the way -- once by bloedzuigers (#2), once by drowners (#3), and once by echinopsae (#4) -- but these battles should not be overly tough. Your quest log will update each time you defeat an attack, but after the third it will still mention that you should "eliminate any creatures that threaten the lumberjacks," even though you've already defeated them.

The Vodyanoi

A vodyanoi warrior will show up at the vodyanoi altar next to the Clay Pits (#5) every night around midnight. The easiest way to deal with him is to draw your weapon and kill him. He won't put up much of a fight. When you return to Yaren after doing this, he'll give you 400 orens, and all told you'll earn about 3000 experience points for completing the quest.

You can also attempt to negotiate with the vodyanoi. Vaska (#6) will give you the information for this. She'll tell you that the lumberjacks should offer up their weapons as a sign of peace. If you relay this bit of advice to Yaren (#1), he'll think that you're "daft," but he'll still give you his axe, which will then automatically replace your other secondary weapon, if you have one.

Nothing will happen when you place Yaren Bolt's Axe on the vodyanoi altar, but that night, when the vodyanoi warrior arrives at midnight, he'll replace the axe with a Vodyanoi Amulet. In the original release of the game, you'd mysteriously lose 300 orens when you picked up the amulet, but this was fixed in the Enhanced Edition. Finally, when you return to Yaren and give him the amulet, he'll reward you with orens, and, all told, you'll receive about 3500 experience points for completing the quest.

Note: If you leave the Swamp Forest at any time during the quest, then you'll automatically fail it, but you won't learn this fact until you return to Yaren and he accuses you of "sightseeing." However, even with this bad result you'll still earn 2000 experience points at the end of the quest.


1 - Yaren Bolt / Lumberjacks' Camp


2 - Bloedzuiger Attack


3 - Drowner Attack


4 - Echinops Attack


5 - Clay Pits / Vodyanoi Altar


6 - Vaska / Brickmakers' Village