RuneScape: Dragonwilds Walkthrough

The most useful thing to say about a Dragonwilds walkthrough is that the game does not have one. It is an open-world survival RPG, and the structure that reads like a story order is actually a chain of progression gates: a quest that will not start until another finishes, a region that will not open until you have spoken to the right person, an altar that stays dark until its puzzle is solved. Two players can complete the same amount of the game having visited the regions in a different sequence, and neither of them did it wrong.

So this page is a route map rather than a to-do list. It records the gates that official posts and the community wiki actually document, shows where the sources describe a gate differently instead of smoothing the difference over, and hands you off to the page that covers each chapter properly. If a step is a community claim rather than an official one, it is labelled as such where it appears.

Route shape

Progression gates rather than a numbered chapter list

Main spine

Dragon Slayer, started from the Wise Old Man

Where the spine points

General Velgar, at the end of the trail Dragon Slayer sets up

Chapter covered here

Fellhollow, added in update 0.10 with the Withering Heights storyline

Party size

Single-player or up to four in a standard world

Evidence base

One official news post, two wiki articles and one launch-day press guide

The opening objectives do the work of a tutorial without announcing it. They push you through gathering timber, making basic tools and putting a roof over your head, and they eventually route you towards Bramblemead, where the Wise Old Man is waiting. Speaking to him starts Dragon Slayer, which the launch-day Mobalytics guide describes as the game’s main guiding quest: it teaches you to build a shelter, hunt, craft equipment and prepare for a fight you are not ready for yet. In that reading it is less a quest you choose and more the game’s way of staging its own systems in a sensible order.

The trail Dragon Slayer sets up ends at General Velgar. That is the arc this page follows: opening objectives, then Dragon Slayer, then the encounter the main quest is pointing at, and finally north into Fellhollow to continue past it.

Mobalytics treats the village you start near as the recommended place to build your first shelter, and its checklist is short. A bed, storage, your workstations, and a building that is genuinely closed up — walls, a roof and a door rather than three walls and hope. Claiming the bed matters more than it sounds, because it becomes your respawn point, which is what turns a death from a walk back into a short walk back. The base locations guide compares the alternatives if you would rather not settle where the tutorial leaves you, and the linked chests guide covers what happens once one chest is no longer enough.

Bed

Craft one and claim it; it becomes your respawn point

Storage

Somewhere to put materials before they fill every inventory slot

Workstations

Four stations cover the early game: Blacksmith’s Bench, Fletching Bench, Armour Bench and Mystic Forge

Shelter

Enclosed walls with a roof and a door, not a lean-to

On skills, the same guide pushes early attention towards Woodcutting, Mining, Artisan, Cooking, Attack, Ranged, Magic and Agility, and names the early materials worth picking up as ash logs, stone, flax, rune essence, animal bones and animal hide. It also points at the three Skill Spells that make gathering materially faster: Axtral Projection, Rocksplosion and Windstep. The skills and spells guide lists every spell and its level, the builds guide covers how to spend your levels once combat starts to bite, and the weapons guide covers what you should be swinging while it does.

Two more early systems are worth understanding before your first hard fight. Death leaves a gravestone you have to recover, and Mobalytics notes an additional penalty on Hard difficulty, which is the difference between a setback and a real loss. In the other direction, Sanguine Urns raise your maximum health and are the closest thing the early game has to a permanent survivability upgrade. Fast travel runs through lodestones, and the map and locations guide covers where they sit and what placing a new one costs.

Fellhollow sits north of Ghornfell, and the official 0.10 post states the condition plainly: speak to the Wise Old Man after completing “Dragon Slayer” to enter the region. The community wiki adds a second condition on top of it — that Withering Heights must also be at least partly started — which is why the two are described together below rather than as a single gate.

Region

Fellhollow, the chapter this walkthrough covers in detail

Where it is

North of Ghornfell

Official gate

Speak to the Wise Old Man after completing Dragon Slayer

Wiki gate

Dragon Slayer finished and Withering Heights at least partly started

Added in

Update 0.10

Power level

5, which places it after the Ghornfell tier of gear

General Velgar is the other end of the same thread. Dragon Slayer is what sets the encounter up, and the General Velgar page is where the preparation and encounter context live. One detail from the armour data is worth carrying across even at this level of the route: the wiki’s description of parrying notes that staggered enemies stay staggered only if they are not immune, and names Velgar as the example, so a strategy built on stunlocking is not available here.

For the wider order of the world, the map and locations guide tracks which region arrived with which update: Fellhollow with 0.10, Dowdun Reach with 0.11, Umbral Sands with 0.12 and Scorned Wilderness with the 1.0 launch on 15 September 2026. That is the order the content was built in, and it lines up with the weapon and material tiers, but it is not the same thing as the order you are expected to play them in. The gate on Fellhollow is a quest, not a level.

This is the part of the route where a checklist genuinely helps, because the entry sequence asks you to do several things in order and one of them is on a timer. The sequence below is the wiki’s account of entering the region.

1. Speak to the Wise Old Man near Ashien’s Watch

   With Dragon Slayer finished, he is the one who gives you the way in.

2. Give the pass phrase to open the way

   The gate answers to the phrase rather than to a level or an item, which is why the quest is the gate.

3. Cross the Forgotten Temple

   There is already a lodestone here. You are not spending a vault core and Law Runes of your own to get a return point on the far side.

4. Meet Death

   Death appears in person, along with a shop that takes soul fragments and sells items that are not available anywhere else.

5. Find Postie Pete

   He is the next landmark on the way through, and the point the route turns towards the water.

6. Swim the wither water

   The river builds Wither on you as you cross, and accumulated Wither tears at your soul. Treat the crossing as a timer rather than a swim.

7. Take the spectral door once the water is nearly full

   The soul rift state you build up in the river is what lets you through the door. The wiki describes the door as the exit, not an obstacle to solve beforehand.

8. Arrive in Bleakfields Valley

   This is a sub-region of Fellhollow, and it is where the entry sequence puts you down.

9. Find a fountain and cleanse before you do anything else

   Fountains show as blue markers on the compass. The longer you stay Withering the stronger the tormented souls you will meet, so the fountain is the first stop, not a later convenience. Clearing spectral tangles is part of purifying the area.

Two things make the crossing worth doing deliberately rather than drifting into it. The first is what Fellhollow raises: the official post lists eleven new enemies, a new vault, tier 5 materials, the Castle Kit for tier 3 building, new crops in pumpkin, watermelon, wheat and tomatoes, mounts, and a Farming cap lifted to 65. The second is Wither itself, which is effectively the region’s weather — it is the reason cleansing pools and fountains exist, and the reason the first thing to look for after the water is not a chest but a cure. The Fellhollow guide covers the region as a whole, the materials guide covers where tier 5 materials come from, the farming guide covers what the new crops need and the mounts guide covers what you can ride once you have one.

Withering Heights is the through-line of the region. It starts with Cathan, found at the cliff edge beside three stone markers, and its goal is to collect three curse fragments — grief, rage and despair — which together open Imaru’s Tower in the middle of Hope’s Fall. The Withering Heights page takes that apart step by step; what follows is the shape of it.

The grief fragment carries the most work, because unlocking it means bringing down a divine barrier by activating the shrines tied to four pillars. The wiki describes all four, they can be activated in any order, and none of them is a straightforward interaction.

• Guthix altar — in the druid circle to the west. A green dragon guards the approach, and the wiki advises killing it from at least 150 metres away with a ranged safespot rather than fighting it at close range.
• Saradomin altar — on a lone rock in the small lake to the north-east. It will not respond until you find the Saradomin symbol below it and repair the altar first, so the visible target is the second half of the task.
• Armadyl altar — on an island in the river east of the green dragon. Three ghosts are involved, and activating it means working out what they want.
• Zamorak altar — inside a nearby temple. You enter through the roof and drop in to reach the altar, and a lever nearby opens the temple gate so you can walk out again rather than climbing back.

Activating the shrines opens the way into Emberwood Village, and that is the point where the fragment chain starts producing the items the tower needs. The end of the line is Imaru, the boss waiting in the tower — the wiki is inconsistent about the title, using the Soul-Eater and soul-devourer in different places, which is worth knowing before you search for it.

Withering Heights is not the only thing to do there. The wiki lists the region’s quests by name: The Wild Hunt, Even More Restless Ghosts, Seeking Salvation, Things That Go Boom In The Night, Doric’s Quest, Letters for the Dead, Mirror, Mirror, What Remains is Written and X Marks the Spot, alongside Withering Heights itself. Only some of those are covered by the pages in this batch, and the two that sit closest to the main route are handled in the next section.

Neither of the quests below is required to finish the main line, and both are easy to arrive at unprepared. The requirements are the useful part: each one asks for something you may not be carrying.

Seeking Salvation asks you to find four dragonkin statues and activate them to open a magically sealed vault door, which is why the steel pickaxe and the light source are on the list rather than being optional comfort. Its combat side is heavier than the main route’s early sections, with Vault archon, Vault guardian hulk and Vault overlord among the enemies. The storyline is simple — Doric wants help recovering relics worth more than the ones he has — and the Seeking Salvation page covers the flow and the completion steps.

Heartstrings is the gentler of the two and the easier one to walk into by accident, because its starting point is a memorial stone on a hilltop in Fractured Plains rather than a person who flags you down. The wiki recommends bringing Antipoison potions and air runes for Windstep, which tells you what the fights are like before you read the enemy list. The story behind it is the reason it is worth the detour: the memorial stones belong to an elf mourning a human partner named Meya, and the stones are scattered rather than gathered. The Heartstrings page covers the clue steps themselves.

From here the route splits into the pages that cover each chapter in detail: Withering Heights for the main quest, Seeking Salvation and Heartstrings for the secondary pair, General Velgar for the encounter Dragon Slayer points at, and Fellhollow for the region as a whole. This page deliberately stops at the region boundary rather than repeating them.