Crimson Desert Knowledge and Research Guide: Bells, Institutes and the 1.18 Rewrite

The game has been taking notes on you since Hernand

There is a menu in Crimson Desert called Knowledge, and it is a running log of what Kliff has seen: the people he has spoken to, the territories he has stood in, the animals he has met, the manuals he has read. It reads like a lore codex. It functions closer to a ledger, because a separate system — Research — converts what you have observed into permanent stat ceilings, blueprints and quality-of-life unlocks.

Patch 1.18.00 went live today, August 15, 2026 at 03:43 UTC, and it is almost entirely about this layer. It adds a whole new Knowledge category and retroactively fills it in for quests you already finished, changes what currency research bills you in, lets you gain animal knowledge without killing anything, and reworks the map fog so you can tell the difference between "revealed" and "actually explored."

That last distinction changes how a completionist route gets planned, so it gets its own section below. First, the system it hangs off.

What Knowledge actually is

Knowledge is a collection log split into categories, each tracking one kind of thing in Pywel. Game8's compendium lists eleven of them:

As of today there are twelve. More on the new one in a moment.

Two of those rows overlap with systems this blog has already dug into. Memory Fragments are the boss-rematch anchors — interactable objects sitting where each fight originally happened, filed in the Knowledge menu under Bosses — which makes that row the same set of fights the bosses guide covers. Knowledge is not a parallel game — it is a second scoreboard laid over the one you are already playing.

How entries get added

You do not go hunting for Knowledge. You accumulate it as a side effect of playing carefully rather than efficiently. Per Game8, entries come from interacting with NPCs and objects, and from picking up materials in the open world — which is a good argument for looting every node you walk past instead of only the ones you need.

Patch 1.18.00 adds a specific and welcome case: knowledge of certain animals can now be gained by picking them up, rather than only by killing them. If you have been putting arrows into wildlife purely to fill a log entry, stop. Walk over and grab it.

Patch 1.18.00 added a twelfth category, and backdated it

The headline change is a Knowledge category called Quests, with eight sub-categories:

• Main Quests
• Faction Quests
• Investigation Quests
• Research Quests
• Daily Life Quests
• Guide
• Archive Records
• Constellations

The important part is in the official notes: players who completed relevant quests before the update receive the corresponding knowledge entries retroactively. You do not have to replay anything. Log in after patching and a category you have never seen will already be partly filled.

Two of those sub-categories are worth flagging. Research Quests gives the institute work below a Knowledge strand of its own. And Constellations lines up with the constellation and stele research the Crimson Desert wiki attributes to the Scholastone Institute — meaning that strand of Hernand content now has a visible completion track attached to it.

1.18.00 also carried two fixes that touch the 1.16.00 trading overhaul: high-value trade goods could be stacked and loaded in quantities of up to 100, which is now blocked, and merchants who failed to appear at trading stalls now show up. If your 1.16 trade routes have been behaving oddly, patch before you troubleshoot.

Bell towers: eight rings that delete the fog

Knowledge tracks what you have seen. Bell towers decide how much of the map you can find in the first place.

There are eight bell towers in Pywel. Climb one, ring the bell, and a large portion of the surrounding region is permanently revealed on your world map. KeenGamer and Method.gg describe the same beat: a child — a Shai, in KeenGamer's telling — appears, exchanges a short line of dialogue, and removes the fog.

KeenGamer's read is that most of them sit close enough to the main story route that you will pass near them anyway — but you still have to climb the tower and ring the bell. The fog does not lift on its own.

All eight bells and where they hang

Three of the eight sit in Hernand, so the starting region is also the one whose map you can clear first. The two desert bells sit at opposite ends of that region, and KeenGamer flags Varnia in the far north as hard to reach on foot without a dragon or a reliable mount.

The four that need more than a ladder

Half of them are a straightforward climb. The other four have a wrinkle.

• Demeniss will not show you the bell just for climbing the tower. Find the platform with gears and the two banners hanging above it, grab a banner and hang from it — your weight drags the banner down and raises the bell into reach.
• Varnia hides its bell inside a domed building until you push the lever bar left and rotate it counter-clockwise in a full circle, which blooms a glass flower and lowers the bell.
• Delesyia keeps the bell behind an open archway at the very top of the clocktower; you rotate yourself sideways to get through it.
• Pailune has enemies on site, and KeenGamer notes the Shai child will not appear until none of them are left near the structure. Clear the area before you start climbing — stamina spent on the ascent is stamina you do not have for the fight.

KeenGamer adds three timing notes, and they are not all the same kind of restriction. Pailune is a hard gate: the bell is only reachable after Chapter 7, once the city has been liberated through the main quest. Demeniss is softer — most guards there stay hostile until Chapter 8, so you can go early and fight for it or wait and walk in. And Calphade is best rung before Chapter 6 rather than during it, because mid-chapter the Shani cutscene does not trigger correctly.

The new fog filter is a completionist tool

Before today, map fog was binary: seen or unseen. Ringing a bell wiped the fog off a region, which was great for navigation and terrible for tracking, because a bell-revealed area looked identical to one you had walked across on foot.

1.18.00 splits it. The official note is that the map now distinguishes areas revealed by ringing the bell from directly explored regions. VULKK's read of the change is more specific: darker fog marks regions where you have not used the bell, and light fog marks places you have not manually explored after ringing it.

That is a genuinely useful piece of UI for anyone chasing Knowledge entries, because the two states now imply different actions. Dark fog means go find the bell. Light fog means the bell is done and there are still Gatherables, Territories and People entries sitting out there uncollected. Before today, telling those two apart meant keeping the list in your head.

Research is where Knowledge turns into stats

Research is the payoff system, and it lives at four institutes scattered across Pywel. The loop, per Game8, is that you complete Requests for researchers at an institute to gain research knowledge, and that knowledge is what lets you invest in the research tree.

The gating is per-NPC, and NoobFeed's guide puts it bluntly: you do not get the research tree straight away, and every researcher requires you to finish a specific Request first. Those Requests are mostly observation jobs — travel to a marked point, look at a thing, come back — and they are filed under the Faction Quest section of your Journal, not the main quest log.

Progression through the tree is row-by-row. NoobFeed's description is that you have to finish every Level Two research task in a row before the last one opens. And research is not instant: VGC's guide reports that the first Abyssal Environment project at Scholastone takes 14 in-game hours, and — the part that is easy to miss — you have to physically return to the institute once it completes to turn it in and collect. Sleeping at a camp to skip time is the standard way to shorten the wait.

The four institutes and how to open each one

Scholastone is the one you reach through the story. The Crimson Desert wiki places it in Chapter 4's Forbidden Knowledge main-quest chain, entered via the Scholastone main quest and the Scholastone Uniform you need to move around inside. Game8 describes research access as opening after Chapter 4, The Price of Knowledge; VGC says Chapter 5 onward. Either way it lands in the same mid-game stretch as Abyss Cores, not something you can rush.

What the research tree actually pays out

This is the part that justifies the errands. Game8 lists the intangible rewards as bonuses that increase the chances of harvesting more materials, reveal the locations of resources, and raise stats past their limits — on top of recipes, blueprints and craftable items.

VGC's walkthrough names specific nodes, and they are more interesting than "+2% gathering":

Two of those are not upgrades so much as rule changes. Infinite arrows removes ammunition as a constraint on the ranged half of the weapons kit entirely. And a stamina cap increase compounds with everything else you do, because stamina in this game pays for sprinting, climbing, swimming and gliding as well as dodging and heavy attacks — the exploration guide's point about traversal being a stamina budget applies here in reverse.

Research now bills camp funds, not silver

Here is the change that dates a chunk of the guide writing published before today.

Pre-1.18, research projects were paid for in silver — the Crimson Desert wiki describes Scholastone's projects as requiring time, silver and completed observations, and VGC's node list quotes silver prices, with Abyssal Energy Research at 130 silver, Enhanced Cloudcart Altitude at 100, and the bigger nodes at 500. Patch 1.18.00's note is one line long: research now uses camp funds instead of silver.

If you read a research guide written before August 15 and it tells you to save silver for the tree, that advice is now a step out of date. The number is not the problem — the wallet is.

The design logic is easy to read. Camp funds are the Greymanes' communal money, not Kliff's, so the change unhooks research from your personal purse and hooks it onto the comrade and camp economy instead. The two wallets are not sealed off from each other — donating silver at camp still converts one into the other, as below — but research is now billed against the camp rather than against Kliff.

Two ways to fill the camp coffers

Game Rant's camp funds guide gives two concrete methods, both at Howling Hill:

1. Donate silver directly. Talk to Carl, the provisions NPC, choose Manage Provisions and then Camp Provisions. The Donate Funds prompt sits in the bottom-right — F on keyboard and mouse, Y or Triangle on a controller. Pick an amount, confirm.
2. Run shield-icon dispatch missions. Talk to Ross, the Dispatch Coordinator, choose Manage Comrades and then Mission Dispatch, and look for missions marked with a shield icon. Assign the required number of Greymanes and confirm. These are repeatable, so a deep comrade roster generates camp funds in the background while you play.

Route two is the reason to care about your comrade count beyond wagon-building. Dispatch was already a resource tap; as of today it is also how you buy permanent stat caps.

The failure modes

• Blockades stall research. Game8 warns specifically about Urdavah: research in the region may halt if certain strongholds are blockaded, and you have to clear them to resume. If a project seems stuck, check the map before you check your funds.
• Finished research does not collect itself. VGC's 14-hour Abyssal Environment project only pays out when you walk back to the institute. Queue a project before a long trip and collect on the way through.
• Each researcher gates separately. Opening one institute does not open the next, and within an institute an unfinished Request keeps its branch shut.
• Nothing prompts you to ring a bell. You will walk past most of them on the story route, but a region whose bell you skip simply stays under fog.
• Stop shooting wildlife for the log. Since 1.18.00 certain animals register their Knowledge entry when you pick them up, so killing them is no longer the requirement it was.

Quick Action Checklist

1. Patch to 1.18.00 and open Knowledge. The new Quests category will already have retroactive entries in it.
2. Check the map for dark fog first — that is a region whose bell you have not rung. Light fog means the bell is done and the ground is not.
3. Ring the three Hernand bells early: Hernand Town, Scholastone, and Calphade in Thalwynd.
4. Pailune is locked until after Chapter 7; Demeniss is only awkward until Chapter 8. Clear the enemies at Pailune before you climb, or the Shai child will not appear.
5. Remember the two mechanisms: hang from a banner at Demeniss, rotate the lever counter-clockwise at Varnia.
6. Open Scholastone research with The Secret to Concentration from Grunvar, then Pororin via Lumiel's Herbs of Vitality.
7. Check your Journal's Faction Quest section for researcher Requests — that is where the observation jobs live.
8. Stop paying for research out of silver directly. It bills camp funds now.
9. Park comrades on shield-icon dispatch missions at Ross to farm camp funds passively.
10. Prioritise Red Seaweed Research at Urdavah and Getting Closer to Nature at Pororin — a stamina cap raise and infinite arrows are rule changes, not percentages.
11. Queue a research project before you ride out, and route back through the institute to collect it.
12. Pick animals up instead of killing them when you only want the Knowledge entry.