Guide to the Mechanics of BLACKTAIL

During my first playthrough of this game, I noticed that there were many times that I had to google something because it simply wasn't explained in-game. This is a collection of everything I've learned from my first (good) and second (evil) playthroughs. If you have trouble viewing on mobile, it's formatted correctly on PC. Last updated: 1/5/23

Good or Evil?

The first thing to do before you begin is decide if you want your morality to be good or evil. This will influence dialogue, quests, your allies and enemies, as well as your abilities and playstyle. Here are the key differences between them.

Hocus
Both sides gain access to a 'hocus' aka magical attack. Good's hocus is a short range aoe damage and slow, which is particularly useful for clearing small mobs and as a panic button to stop from being overwhelmed. The damage isn't great (before damage upgrade) and its short range puts you in danger, so in combat it's best used defensively or only when necessary. Out of combat however both hocuses be used to interact with many things you could use arrows for, but without consuming ammo. The good hocus struggles quite a bit with this, it's basically just as effective as the deflect hex that both sides get.
The evil hocus however is a medium-long range lifesteal beam that auto targets and locks onto whatever you're aiming at. The healing is good but not great (until you get the hare hex which doubles it) and it's only single target rather than aoe. However it still has comparable stun to the good hex, as both of them will stagger enemies when their duration ends. Evil also has access to other aoe options to make up for this (namely their aoe damage broom), just has good has access to another heal option (also their broom).

Passives
Each side also has an increasingly strong passive. Good's passive is that they harvest additional resources from the environment compared to evil. This bonus is significant - as evil I needed to farm sticks and honey for almost every upgrade, whereas that wasn't something I had to consciously do once during my good run. This is supposed to be balanced by evil acquiring more resources from destroying the environment (sticks+feathers from bird nests, feathers from birds, sticks from stickbugs, honey from beehives) but in practice it just results in evil needing to spend much more time farming for resources than good does. This is made even worse by the fact that you need to wait 5 full seconds for each beehive and 3 full seconds for each bird nest to get the max benefit from them.
Evil's passive is that they have a chance to get a healing blood orb whenever they kill an enemy. This starts out fairly low but gets to near 100% once you're in tier 3. At least so far in my evil run I haven't even needed to use these orbs to heal as my hocus with damage upgrade and hare hex provides plenty of healing, but they are still incredibly useful. To be quite honest I mostly like them because they show exactly where each enemy died, so you can easily collect all the items they dropped. Compare this to good, whose only sources of healing are from deploying brooms, drinking potions, and eating berries. This is enough most of the time (if you have both the inventory upgrades), but it requires that you completely fill your inventory for every significant fight which isn't much different from evil's extra time spent gathering. Without having beaten the game with evil yet I feel that good is much stronger early on while evil surpasses it once it gets a chance to get going. Evil is able to take a lot of damage and gain all of that health back while doing damage, while good is more focused on crowd control to avoid taking damage with limited options to heal it back.

Brooms
Both sides have access to a 'broom' (magic artifact) that you can deploy at any time to draw all enemies towards it until it's destroyed. The base broom and broom upgrades are the same for both sides, but once you reach tier 2 morality you unlock an additonal effect. Good's effect as previously mentioned is that the broom will heal you an increasing amount when you use it. In my experience this was primarily a few heart burst heal on deploy and very little healing if any afterwards, despite it saying ingame it restores your vitality over time. The main problem with this heal opposed to evil's options is that it requires resources for every use. This starts off at just 4 wood, but later includes and eyeball and a crystal after you get the two broom upgrades. This doesn't sound too bad, until you consider that you need wood for arrows and eyeballs+crystals for potions and crystal arrows, requiring you to choose whether to heal or dish out more damage. Meanwhile evil can do both effortlessly as all damage heals and the hocus heals even more, all at no cost.
Evil's effect is that the broom does increasing continuous aoe damage to enemies around it. The main problem with good's broom is that many enemies will pile up on it leading to it getting destroyed quickly unless you constantly clear the enemies on it. This doesn't sound too bad, until you use the evil broom, which is almost entirely self sufficient and lasts much longer than the good broom on average. If good's effect truly is a heal over time, you get minimal benefit from it lategame because the more powerful enemies destroy it faster and faster. Meanwhile evil gets access to a second damage source that also takes enemy aggro and damage for them.

Resource and Morality Sources
As previously mentioned good's primary way of acquiring resources is harvesting the enviroment, while evil's is destroying it. This ties in logically to the ways you gain good or evil morality. There is very little stopping you from gathering resources in an evil way as good or vice versa, but for two exceptions - red roses and stickbugs.
If you are good and approach a stickbug, Yaga will comment about how cruel someone would have to be to kill it to use as a stick. Even if you try to press e to do that, you will get the same line and nothing will happen. If you're evil however, you can snap that thing no problem. The same is true for red roses - as good you can sheathe your bow and approach them to pick their eyeball out, but as evil Yaga will only comment about how the rose stole the eye and is torturing it so she should just let it be.
Beyond these two examples, the only penalty for not gathering resources thematically is a morality ding, but you only need morality for so long - as soon as you reach 'pure good' or 'pure evil' (see next section) you will permanently unlock all benefits and losing morality progress has no effect. Once you reach tier 3, grand mushrooms will offer you a haste orb if you're good, and cursed mushrooms will offer you a healing orb if you're evil. Below is the maximum resources and morality you can gain from each source for each side. Birds, beehives, and boboks are affected by the favourite/specialist titles in the next section.

Totem - good or evil: pray to your respective god (+regeneration)
Red Rose - good: kill it (+nothing) or sheathe bow and press e on eye (+eyeball)
evil: none
Trapped Bird - good: press e on the trap to free it (+nothing)
evil: kill it (+feathers)
Bird Nest - good: none, but can press e on the nest (+feathers)
evil: destroy the nest (+feathers and sticks) NOTE: Takes around 3 seconds for the nest to break.
Bird - good: none
evil: kill it (+feathers)
Beehive - good: offer a red herb to the bees (+some honey)
evil: destroy the beehive (+more honey) or offer a red herb to the bees then destroy the beehive (+most honey) NOTE: Takes around 5 seconds for first honey to appear.
Stickbug - good: none
evil: kill it (+sticks)
Anthill - good: destroy it with magic (+nothing)
evil: none
Hedgehog - good: knock down the apple (+nothing)
evil: kill it (+nothing)
Fox - good: none
evil: kill it (+nothing)
Mr. Larva - good: help him (+occasional rewards)
evil: deny his request or lie to him
Ant Queen - good: deny her request or lie to her
evil: help her (+occasional rewards)

Titles and Pure Good/Evil

Titles
The titles system allows you to obtain 6 lost pages as well as 3 unique effects depending on your morality. Each title will have a progress bar and a checklist of activities to unlock it. Some of these activities contradict not only the morality system but the title system itself (specifically the Specialist title) but essentially what Specialist does is take an activity which previously gave you opposing morality and make it grant your morality instead. Once you've done enough of that activity it will be crossed off, and the title will be obtained when all activities are crossed off.

Favourite title (both) - complete 2 faction quests and kill 2 the of the enemy faction's members
Queen title (good) - give flowers to bees, help mr. larva, collect eyeballs from red roses, pray at totems, shoot apples for hedgehogs
Queen title (evil) - give flowers to bees then destroy the hive after the honey spawns, collect stickbugs, help ant queen, pray at totems, kill foxes
Specialist title (good) - kill birds and destroy bird nests
Specialist title (evil) - give flowers to bees

Once you complete the above tasks, you will obtain the titles and rewards below
Favourite - causes shooting boboks to give you good or evil morality
Solar queen (good) - will o’ wisps will be passive towards you
Lunar queen (evil) - spiders and hungry plants will get out of your way
Grand Ornithologist (good specialist) - killing birds and destroying bird nests gives you good morality (previously gave evil)
Cursed beekeeper (evil specialist) - giving flowers to bees gives you evil morality (previously gave good)

Where are those damn foxes?
You may have difficulty locating some of the title objectives, particularly the foxes and hedgehogs. If you need to know where to find beehives, red roses, or bird nests, check out the resources section further down. Not sure if they have any actual correlation, but as it happens hedgehogs 2 and 3 close to foxes 1 and 3 if you wanted to get both. All locations will respawn after some time so you can farm the same ones until you get the title.

Left - fox 1 (summer), runs from the white flowers near the rock towards the poison mushroom.
Right - fox 2 (summer), runs from the road sign towards the twin idol.

Left - fox 3 (summer), runs from the closest blink idol to the furthest bush from the ramp up.
Right - hedgehog 1 (autumn)

Left - hedgehog 2 (summer)
Right - hedgehog 3 (summer)

Pure Good/Evil
The primary purpose of the extra morality gained from the Favourite and Specialist titles above is to reach Pure Good or Pure Evil faster. Once you reach the very end of your morality meter, you will be given another list of tasks to complete. Upon doing so, you will become either Pure Good or Pure Evil and gain a temporary buff. The next time you take fatal damage, you will survive on one health and the buff will go away, requiring you to complete the same list of tasks to acquire it again. Off the top of my head the tasks for evil are to kill a stickbug, bird, and spider, and I'm unsure of the good tasks but they should be fairly easy.

The Hut (Where Toads Belong)

The hut is the hub area of the game that you’re directed to after the tutorial area. It’s located at the center of the map with 4 paths leading to the 4 different seasons and the 5th path leading back to the tutorial area. It starts as just the place you go to buy skills, but the more you progress the more useful it becomes, especially if you’re evil.

The Cauldron
This is where you get your skill upgrades, but you’ll need to unlock them first by finding lost pages. In spring they are practically everywhere, but in the later seasons they only come from quest completes, main story quests, and very well hidden chests. Once you have a page you can unlock the recipe for no cost other than the page, but then you’ll need resources to craft each upgrade. These are the previously mentioned ones (sticks, feathers, honey, eyeballs, crystals) as well as red herbs, bobok shells, and teeth (by far the most common chest reward). The cauldron will only pull resources from your inventory and not from your toadbag so you may need to refill to craft multiple upgrades. Some chests and quests (particularly mushroom bosses) can also give you heart pieces which you can use to make vitality potions (for no cost other than the heart) to increase your max hp.

The Cat
The Black Cat serves to teleport you to and from the hut. You will encounter him throughout every season, always next to either a campfire or a shrine (or both). It’s a good habit to always reveal his location if you see him appear on your map, so you never walk more than you need to for a trip back. He will periodically teleport to his spawning location closest to you, but sometimes this is delayed a bit. In the garden there is a mouth next to the cat which you can feed fish bones to (acquired from fishing) to receive a significant heal. There’s no limit on how many fish bones you can carry so this is a more convenient option than hunting for meat, especially since you don’t have to play the cooking game. Speaking of minigames, attacking the cat will put you into a minigame where you need to escape mazes as a mouse (supposedly, I haven’t tried it myself). If you complete them the cat will give you a piece of lore about himself.

The Toads
These babies are the crème de la crème, and it only took me a playthrough and a half to figure it out. You might think they’re just another collectible, but it turns out each one of them has their own useful effect that you can trigger with a moderate cooldown (based on the power of the effect). Here are the toads and their effects, I’ll leave it to you to find them.
Imp Toad - grants 2 sticks, feathers, red herbs, honey, eyeballs, and crystals.
Stone Toad - cleanses all status effects, good or bad. Shortest cooldown of the bunch.
Rushman Toad - grants haste
Rose Toad - marks collectibles on the map, but can occasionally mark collected toads
Vodnik Toad - refills your crystal arrows
Will-O’-Wisp Toad - refills your honey arrows
Dragon Toad - refills your health and grants focused
There’s also an apple in a basket that appears at some point and heals a small amount, it’s either after the dragon toad or after you get 3 toads, not sure.

Everything Else
The dolls, ambers, found & lost, and spider web will either show you previous cutscenes, show you new cutscenes, or give you lore. I’m unsure if gathering all of any one of these provides any benefit.

Resources, and Where to Find Them

By now you already know what the resources are (sticks, feathers, red herbs, honey, eyeballs, crystals, bobok shells, teeth) but you may not know where to find each of them. both pots and gold imps can provide all resources except bobok shells and teeth, but individual sources are listed below. All mobs and resource nodes will respawn relatively quickly so you can farm the same location(s) as many times as you need.

Sticks
These things are everywhere, and can be acquired through multiple means, the primary one being from the stick bushes that you'll find in all vegetated areas (most abundantly surrounding boss arenas and mushrooms spare borvy & jack). You can also get them from destroying bird nests that you find in forests or elevated areas. If you're evil you can harvest stickbugs, which are most abundant in rocky areas and on mountainsides + cliffsides. You'll need them for all arrows, brooms, and most skill upgrades.

Feathers
As you know from the tutorial, these are primarily found scattered on the ground in piles wherever birds may fly. It's no shock then that you can get them from killing birds (trapped or flying) as well as from their nests. They're needed for all arrows and most upgrades. If you need a lot of them, you can find a large cluster of trapped birds in Spring here:


Red Herbs
You might be wondering why these are called herbs when they're clearly flowers, and honestly I couldn't tell you. It's most likely because of red roses, but you almost exclusively get herbs from gathering red flowers (not the stoned ones). They can be found in all vegetated areas, and will commonly be paired with a poisonous mushroom. Because of this it's highly beneficial to have the Grandma's Syrup upgrade, which makes your antidotes significantly more useful (each grants poison IMMUNITY for a minute+) and results in less wasted crystals and herbs which you're trying to farm for. They're needed to save your game, offer to bees, and to craft hunter potions and antidotes. You can find many of them surrounding this area in spring here:


Honey
This is a resource which you may or may not need a lot of, depending on how many honey arrows you like to use. By far the most abundant source will be from using the Raven hex, but if you're not into honey arrows or haven't unlocked Raven yet, you can also get it from beehives and will-o'-wisps (primarily the larger ones). You'll find beehives in forest areas (specifically in spring and summer) and wisps scattered about, but mostly gathered around their nests. Honey is needed for sticky arrows, hunter potions, and quite a few upgrades. If you haven't killed the queen wisp yet, she is a fantastic way to mass farm honey as she constantly spawns swarms of large wisps until she is killed. If you have, your best bet is the great fields. They can be found in Summer here:

If you have yet to reach Summer or hate fighting wisps, you can also find honeycombs and sticky arrows in any honey-themed boss arenas or villages. The combs will primarily be spiked on stalagmites or piled up near wisp dens, honeypots, or fake beehives.

Basics

From this point on currently the rest of the guide is a rough bulleted list, as I continue to flesh out the guide I will remove it but feel free to read it if you like

-The game will autosave at times but it is incredibly inconsistent and should never be relied upon.
-You move significantly faster when your bow is sheathed, which is required to make some jumps.
-The Toadbag will fill with any materials that you pick up past your max carry capacity. They will remain in the bag until you interact with it while having space in your inventory. When you craft at the cauldron, it will only access the materials in your inventory. Capacity of all your materials are at the bottom of the screen when you press i.
-If the game is denying you access to a place, it means you don't have the relevant quest for it (specifically the gnoll guard door in Summer)
-Some quests cannot be completed without obtaining a specific upgrade/ability first.
-After unlocking the fishing rod, you can fish at any fishing spot to receive either a trinket, fish, or random item. This puts a short cooldown on that fishing spot until you can use it again. If you get a trinket it will be added to the back wall of the hut and unlock a page of lore. If you get a fish you get healed and get a fish bone you can feed to the black cat at the hut for an additional heal later (seemingly no cap on held fish bones, which can be collected by fishing at full health). There's later also an apple in the garden which you can use to heal.
-Boruta (the red demon guy) does not influence morality at all. He will offer you a buff which comes with a downside, and give a riddle that hints to both before you decide. After you get each buff the first time its riddle and effect are added to your almanac.
-when you use a red herb on a shrine, it will remain there for some time so you can reuse the shrine without needing another herb

Combat

-you can hold q and right click an arrow to craft the max amount rather than left clicking one at a time.
-you can craft and use all consumables as many times as you want during a fight as long as you have the materials.
-charging your bow until you get the yellow glow makes it do double damage, which can also be achieved by having the 'focused' buff (shiny arrow). However many enemies do not require more than one uncharged arrow (specifically rushmen and spiders). If you encounter a new enemy shoot it with an uncharged arrow first so you know not to waste time charging for them.
-crystal arrows can break any blue barriers including those created by bosses and enemies
-you can use any hocus on any projectile to deflect/destroy it, and any hocus on magic projectiles to clear them.
-you can dash while using a hocus and while charging an arrow. You cannot charge an arrow while using a hocus but you can use a hocus while charging an arrow. If you charge an arrow then begin using a hocus, you are still able to dash.
-Boboks, hungry plants, red roses, and spiders can all be hit by both physical and magic attacks (however spiders are only stunned by deflect hocus). You can also use magic to clear cobwebs and purple bugs. The game tells you to use magic against bats, but really all you need to do is shoot an arrow at them but know that they will try to dodge it and flick right or left accordingly.
-Hunter potions will cleanse slowdown and confusion, hold down 5 to use them (pressing 5 doesn't work)
-Special treats do not have any added effects for different arrow types, but they can be used indefinitely as long as you have mana. Ripping claws does the same damage as a normal arrow but in a cone. Rushmen are immune to the poison damage from toxic veil.
-For the evil hocus, you can heal off of vodniks and spiders, but cannot heal off of hungry plants, boboks, or unbroken crystal enemies.
-imps can steal items from you, just kill them to get them back
-crystal enemies have a blue health bar which indicates how much more they need to be hit by crystal explosions before they can be damaged
-you can aim before you draw back your arrow, particularly useful for crystal arrows
-your hocus and toxic veil go through shields
-your hocus can damage and reveal imps in bushes (only if they have aggro on you already)

Collectibles/Upgrades

-The vast majority of red roses will be gazing at a chest or object which you can reveal by hitting it with magic (if it disappears, just walk away and come back). If the red rose appears to have its eye completely shut, come back to it later.
-The vast majority of chests will contain teeth, with lost pages being limited to very hard group fights (denoted by the larger 'chest beast', though not all have pages), quests (mostly main quests but some side quests), and very well hidden chests.
-If you open a chest and then either die or close the game, the chest will close again and be filled with a random trash item, making it difficult to know which chests you've already opened.
-The upgrade to auto pickup wood and feathers stops working when your bag is full.

Conclusion

My second playthrough (evil) is currently still in progress so I will continue to update this the more I learn. Let me know if there's anything you think should be added or adjusted, and if you have any questions I'll be happy to answer them. If you've read to this point then a rating would be appreciated :)

[Baron Friedrich von Glower]

Great guide, thanks for putting this together!

Maybe this was mentioned and I missed it, but another useful tip:
If you open your weapon wheel during combat, there are icons on the perimeter of the screen indicating where the enemies are located.

[mdsirois]

Excellent guide, thanks a lot!

[pepijn.m]

Maybe not fully related. But the Artifact you get after doing the Maneater quest can flip your morality. Does anyone know how much times you can use it?

[fenril]

OK, nvm. Not sure, why, but I couldn't shoot to some roses - arrow didn't left bow. However right now I've managed to shoot one in forest. I've got maxed :) Thanks for whole tips and that guide. Awesome work.

[fenril]

It is, as it's written in game istelf with birds and bees.
"Massively kill birds and their nests, but stay in light".

You need to kill birds (the best option would be to do that in one place, where there are many of birds), then do five good things - like feed bees, hedgehog, save bird from birdtrap ect. so you will "remain in light".
After getting that title (ornitologist) - you will get good / light points for killing birds and their nests.

Apart of that, I cannot understand, how can I maximize light side. I have still not completed part with rose. What should I do with it? I cannot rip it's eye, because it generate evil. Anyone could point me to right direction?
Thanks in advance

[rhastie82]

Wish you could send this in pdf thru email! great help

[Zazz]

This is a big help thank you

[pil-grimm]

Great guide, thanks! I'd like to add just one thing that doesn't seem to be covered correctly here: if a red rose's eye is shut, all you need to do is sheathe your bow - the eye will pop open in a couple of seconds. They're kinda afraid of arrows :)

[Sagara]

" as soon as you reach 'pure good' or 'pure evil' (see next section) you will permanently unlock all benefits and losing morality progress has no effect."

So you saying one can go max out good/evil benefits then go work to opposite side and unlock the other as well?

[Adamjack]

Reach pure good or pure evil faster*