Dawnwalker Infamy and Edicts: All 9 Levels Explained

Infamy in The Blood of Dawnwalker looks like a wanted meter and behaves like nothing of the sort. There is no cooling-off period, no lying low until the heat drops, no laundering your reputation with a change of clothes. Infamy does not decay. Every level you gain is permanent, and each one hands Brencis a new edict that reshapes Vale Sangora for the rest of your run.

That single property changes the whole decision. The question is never "should I let my infamy rise" — it rises because you are doing the things the game wants you to do. The question is what you finish before each level locks in, because once level nine arrives and the Svartrau gates close, the window for a whole category of business has shut behind you.

What Infamy Actually Is

Infamy is a one-way world-state track, not a policing system. It measures how visibly Coen is undermining Brencis's rule, and the regime answers each escalation with a decree. Nine levels, nine edicts, no reversals.

Two mechanics are worth internalising before you plan around it:

• New levels do not take effect immediately. After you cross a threshold, roughly one in-game day passes before Brencis announces the new edict in a cutscene. Until that announcement lands, the old rules still apply.
• Nothing you do lowers it. Avoiding patrols, skipping regions, or waiting out days does not walk the number back.

That one-day delay is the only slack the system gives you, and it is genuinely useful — it is a short grace period, not a reprieve.

The Court menu, which unlocks after the prologue, is where you track your standing against Brencis's three lieutenants: Ambrus, Bakir, and Xanthe. It is the cleanest read you get on where your progress against the regime actually sits.

How Infamy Rises

Infamy climbs from acts that visibly damage the regime rather than from generic crime:

• Court Activities — disrupting a lieutenant's operations in their own territory. This is the main driver, and our Court Activities guide covers how to find them, since the game does not mark them.
• Clearing soldier camps — camp sweeps count toward infamy progress, which makes them a rare overlap of loot, skill manuals, and world-state advancement.
• Defeating one of the three lieutenants — each lieutenant kill grants a full infamy level immediately, not a partial nudge.

Note the implication of that last one. You do not need to exhaust a lieutenant's Court Activity list; you only need enough to unlock the confrontation. But the confrontation itself is a guaranteed one-level jump, so a lieutenant fight is the moment to check your prep list rather than a routine encounter.

The Nine Edicts in Full

Level	Edict effect
1	Additional patrols appear in settlements
2	Military checkpoints are established across Vale Sangora
3	Merchant prices rise throughout the valley
4	More soldier patrols on the roads; patrol captains begin to recognise Coen
5	Roads empty out between dusk and dawn, and merchants are affected too
6	More military checkpoints; merchant prices rise a second time
7	Headhunters — elite bounty hunters with special abilities — appear, and every soldier can now recognise Coen
8	All soldiers become stronger and harder to fight
9	The gates of Svartrau are closed

Level nine is the one people remember, and it is not a total lockout: alternative routes remain, and you can still get over the walls at night. But casual daytime access to the city ends there.

The Prep Checklist, Working Backwards From Each Level

This is the part worth planning around. The edict table is not just a list of penalties — read in order, it tells you exactly what to finish and when. Everything below follows from the nine edicts themselves.

Before level 3 — do your big shopping. Prices rise at 3 and again at 6, so every major purchase gets more expensive twice. If you are buying skill manuals from Witchcraft merchants, stockpiling consumables, or saving for expensive gear, the cheapest window in the game is the one you are in right now. Sell high-value loot early too, while your buyers are still paying pre-edict rates.

Before level 4 — finish anything involving patrol captains. From level 4, patrol captains recognise Coen on sight. Any objective that depends on moving past a commanded patrol without a fight gets meaningfully harder afterwards.

Before level 5 — front-load night travel and night merchants. From level 5 the roads empty out between dusk and dawn and merchants are affected as well. Night is already your strongest window as a vampire, so anything that relies on people being out there after dark is better handled early.

Before level 7 — clear everything that needs freedom of movement. This is the real behavioural cliff. At 7, every soldier recognises you, and Headhunters with special abilities start hunting you. Quests where you want to walk through populated areas rather than fight your way through them belong on the other side of this line.

Before level 8 — pick your fights while soldiers are still soft. Level 8 strengthens every soldier in the valley. Soldier camps are an infamy source and a manual source, so there is a genuine tension here: clearing camps pushes you toward the level that makes the remaining camps tougher. Sweep the camps you care about before you push the number.

Before level 9 — empty your entire Svartrau list. Merchants inside the city, the cathedral, city-bound quests, city towers, anything at all inside the walls. Once the gates close, every one of these becomes an infiltration instead of a visit.

The practical shape of all this: defeat lieutenants deliberately, not opportunistically. Each one is a guaranteed full level, so treat every lieutenant fight as the moment you commit to the next tier of world state. If your city list is still long, do the city first and the lieutenant second.

Level IV Is a Gate, Not Just a Penalty

Reaching Notorious — infamy Level IV — is the requirement to join the Manumits, the resistance movement. That single fact undermines the instinct to keep your infamy as low as possible for as long as possible.

If the Manumits line is something you want, and it feeds into abilities and vendors elsewhere in the game, then infamy is not a cost you are minimising. It is a prerequisite you are meeting.

Why High Infamy Is Not Purely Bad

The edicts are inconveniences, but the number itself is the game's record of Coen dismantling Brencis's grip on the valley. It rises because you are winning. Mechanically that shows up as access (Level IV opens the Manumits), progression (lieutenant kills feed both infamy and the path to the final confrontation, covered in our Brencis final boss guide), and density (more soldiers and patrols means more encounters, and more of what encounters drop).

Treating infamy as pure punishment leads to the worst version of the run: a cautious Coen who never unlocks the resistance and still gets all nine edicts anyway, just later.

Should You Deliberately Suppress Infamy Early?

Yes, with a specific goal in mind. Checkpoints, doubled prices, and elite enemies all arrive sooner if you race up the track, so keeping the number low while you learn the combat system is sound.

What makes it a strategy rather than stalling is having a trigger. Suppress infamy while you clear your low-level shopping and travel checklist, then push to Level IV on purpose when you want the Manumits. Suppression without a plan just delays your own access.

Infamy Is Not Blood Hunger, and Neither Is Corruption

Three separate systems get conflated constantly, so here is the split:

System	What it tracks	How it moves
Infamy	How the regime sees you. External and political.	Rises from Court Activities, clearing soldier camps, and beating lieutenants. Never falls.
Blood Hunger	Coen's craving at night. A pressure you manage.	Rises after dark, falls when you feed. Let it hit critical and dialogue options are replaced by a forced feed.
Corruption	Progression gate on the Vampirism tree.	Rises when Coen drinks blood. Community guides report it as the fanged icon beside your health bar at night, filled with Voracious Bite; each time the meter fills, your Corruption level goes up one.

The practical consequence: raising Corruption and raising Infamy are unrelated actions. Feeding on wildlife builds your vampire tree without the regime noticing anything, which makes it one of the few forms of progress that costs you nothing politically. See our vampire abilities guide for the night side of the ledger.

Infamy and Edicts FAQ

Can I lower my infamy? No. It does not decay under any known condition.

How long until a new edict activates? About one in-game day after you reach the level, when Brencis announces it in a cutscene.

Do I have to reach level 9? Defeating lieutenants grants full levels, and the lieutenants are the path to the endgame, so expect the track to climb across a full run.

Are there infamy rewards beyond the Manumits gate at Level IV? TBC — not officially confirmed yet.

Does infamy change the ending? TBC — not officially confirmed yet.

Plan your lieutenant fights around this table rather than the other way round. Our boss index lays out the five major encounters and which of them you can avoid entirely, and the walkthrough tracks quest order from the prologue on.