The Witcher 3 Contracts Guide: Every Monster Hunt Worth Taking

The village elder of Fyresdal swears a dragon is eating his livestock. It is not a dragon, it is a forktail, and here is the beautiful part: if you correct him when you collect your pay, he docks you half the reward, because obviously he could have handled a mere "forkytail" himself. Lie to his face and you get the full 204 crowns. That one exchange tells you everything about how much thought CD Projekt Red put into the contract system, and why treating these quests as filler between story missions is leaving the best of the game on the table.

The base game ships 26 witcher contracts, with 3 more added through the free DLC drops from 2015. They are the job description made playable: read a notice, interview terrified peasants, follow the evidence, identify the thing, prep for it, kill it, argue about money. Some of them hide the best writing in the game. A few hide mechanical quirks that no loading-screen tip will ever explain. This guide covers how the system works and which hunts deserve your evening.

Fair warning: identifying the monster is the whole point of most contracts, so the sections below spoil several reveals. Nothing here touches the main story.

How a contract actually plays out

Nearly every contract runs the same loop. You grab the notice from a board or stumble into the problem directly, talk to the poster, optionally haggle over the fee, then start the investigation: questioning locals, following tracks and scent trails with Witcher Senses, and examining corpses that villagers politely left unburied for you. At a certain point in the investigation your bestiary updates with an entry for the culprit, usually alongside a 25 XP payout for the deduction.

That bestiary update is not flavor. The contracted monster always shares the weaknesses of its standard open-world cousin, so the entry tells you exactly which oil to brew and which sign to lead with before the fight starts. On Death March that thirty seconds of reading is often the difference between a clean kill and a corpse run. If your alchemy setup is a mess, fix that first with our Witcher 3 alchemy guide.

Two structural details worth knowing. First, many contracts can be started from either end: find the monster's lair or tracks in the wild and the quest activates without you ever reading the notice. Second, a handful of contracts sit behind cutoff quests and fail permanently if you push the story past them. Devil by the Well, the very first contract in White Orchard, dies quietly if you start the main quest On Thin Ice without finishing it. Clear a region's board before you leave.

Haggling is a real system with real numbers

Most players click through the negotiation without realizing it has rules. When a contract giver names a price, you can push back, and the tolerances are fairly consistent: the majority of contracts let you squeeze out up to around 300 crowns, while higher-level hunts stretch past 375. Opening with a bid just beyond the halfway point of the slider is generally safe, and some posters will simply accept it on the spot.

A few negotiations are rigged in ways worth knowing about. The merchant who posts Skellige's Most Wanted agrees to your maximum ask without blinking, which should probably have been your first clue that something about his story was off. And Contract: Swamp Thing has the single best payout trick in the game: haggle Leslav the peat digger to 300 crowns, and when you return to collect he will admit he does not have it and offer double if you give him a week. Meditate seven days, come back, and he pays 600 crowns like an honest man. That is one of the largest single contract payouts in the base game, from a level 12 foglet hunt in Crookback Bog.

Trophies, the buff everyone leaves on the ground

Kill a contract monster and it drops a trophy: a severed head you can strap to Roach's saddle. It looks like a grim cosmetic. It is actually an equipment slot. Each trophy carries a passive buff while mounted on your saddle, one at a time, and the effects are worth planning around:

• +5% bonus XP from monsters — chort, katakan, cave troll and ekimmara trophies, among others.
• +5% bonus XP from humans and nonhumans — the noonwraith trophy, which you can earn at level 2 in White Orchard.
• +10% chance to dismember — earth elemental, cockatrice and archgriffin trophies, for people who like their finishers cinematic.
• +5% bonus gold — doppler and ekhidna trophies.
• +5% chance to find additional herbs — the arachas trophy, quietly great for alchemy-heavy builds.

The XP trophies are the ones to keep mounted while leveling, and the noonwraith head from your first contract is arguably the best early-game item nobody equips. Trophies also sell — the earth elemental trophy has a base value of 1,000 crowns — but the buff is worth more than the coin for most of a playthrough.

The early hunts: White Orchard and Velen

Devil by the Well (level 2, White Orchard) is the tutorial contract and still a proper one: a diary, a bracelet at the bottom of a well, and a noonwraith who only becomes killable for good once you burn the remains she is bound to. Burn the skeleton and bracelet and she appears regardless of the time of day. Fight her inside Yrden — she splits into three lesser copies to heal, and the faster you drop them the less health she claws back. Take the 20 crowns or refuse and get an amethyst, then tell Tomira the herbalist for a small bonus.

Contract: The Merry Widow (level 10, Lindenvale) sends you after a grave hag named Mourntart who has been digging up the cemetery. The lure mechanic is wonderfully morbid: collect skulls from her hut and lay them out on the church pedestal at night to bait her in. She drops the Addan Deith relic silver sword, one of the better blades at that level.

Contract: Jenny o' the Woods (level 10, Midcopse) is the hunt that teaches players what the suggested level actually means. The wiki itself notes waiting until 15 is wiser, and it is right: this nightwraith hits like a truck, vanishes to summon three regular nightwraiths, and heals while they live. Yrden or you literally cannot hit her. The investigation — a torn scrap of fabric, an assassin's knife, a letter in a shallow grave — is a small tragedy about a murdered woman named Zula, and it ends with the Forgotten Vran Sword, 265 XP and 179 crowns.

Contract: Shrieker (level 8, Crow's Perch) flushes a cockatrice out of a cave with a bomb — samum, grapeshot or dancing star all work — and gives you one of the game's quiet moral moments at the end: the reward money belongs to an orphaned boy, and you can tell his guardian to keep it. Refusing the coin nets you 250 XP instead of 235 plus the crowns. The cockatrice trophy carries the +10% dismember buff.

Contract: Mysterious Tracks (level 20, Lindenvale) is the best pure detective contract in Velen. The tracks point to a fiend — there is even fiend dung to examine — but the carcass in the cave tells another story, and the real target is a chort called the Howler. You then craft a chort lure from fiend dung and crow's eye, paint it at four marked spots, and walk back into the cave for the fight. Relict oil, Quen against its bleed-inflicting charge, and the Azure Wrath relic sword plus 193 crowns at the end. This is the contract to show someone who thinks these quests are fetch work.

Contract: Swamp Thing (level 12, Crookback Bog) needs the Eye of Nehaleni from the main story before the notice even appears, because the foglet Ignis Fatuus hides its lair behind an illusion. Bring necrophage oil, let Yrden pop the summoned mini-foglets instantly, and grab the superior Ursine silver sword diagram from the alcove inside the cave while you are there. Then run the double-pay trick from the haggling section above.

The Novigrad file: a vampire, a phantom and a haunted house

Contract: The Apiarian Phantom (level 14, Gustfields) starts with dead bees. A halfling meadworks family blames a folk spirit for frost-covered hives — and frost is the tell, because the culprit turns out to be a lone hound of the Wild Hunt. By default it bolts and forces a mounted chase to the Dancing Windmill, but there is a clean skip: when the cellar door opens, take one or two small steps until its label focuses, then stun it with Axii before the run script triggers. 275 XP, 249 crowns, and a Wild Hunt hound trophy.

Contract: Doors Slamming Shut (level 24, Novigrad) is a haunted-house story where the house is genuinely shaking — because a powerful earth elemental named Therazane is trapped in elven ruins underneath it, behind a failing force field. The fight has a hidden objective the game barely telegraphs: the chamber holds two wooden supports, and if both get destroyed — by you or by the elemental's earth-ring attack — a man named Kurt dies after the quest. Keeping one support intact while an earth elemental rearranges the room is the real difficulty here. Northern Wind and dimeritium bombs help end it fast, and the trophy carries +10% dismember.

Contract: The Oxenfurt Drunk (level 26, Oxenfurt) is the fan favorite for a reason: the killer is a katakan with a taste for blood mixed with alcohol, so the only way to bait it is to become the bait. You must pay Stjepan at The Alchemy 50 crowns to get Geralt properly drunk — the game refuses to let you use the alcohol in your inventory — and then stagger through town at night singing while the vampire stalks you. Two real gotchas: the drunk walk is proximity-sensitive and fails if you wander off route, and if potion toxicity pushes you over your overdose threshold when the drinking starts, the quest fails instantly. Clear your toxicity or run Heightened Tolerance before the tavern. The payout includes the Deargdeith relic sword and a katakan trophy with the +5% monster XP buff.

Skellige and the free DLC contracts

Contract: Dragon (level 28, Fyresdal) is the forktail hunt from the intro of this guide. The investigation is textbook — claw and bite wounds but no burns on the victims — and the bait is a sheep named Mia that you herd to the nest. Then comes the punchline at payday: mock the elder's dragon theory and collect 204 crowns, or tell him the truth and watch him halve it to 102. The game pays you to be kind about people's illusions.

Contract: Missing Miners (level 27, Blandare, free DLC from May 2015) follows vanished silver miners to a cave and a rock troll named Wham-a-Wham, who killed them for hammering at the veins in his home after he asked them to stop. Beat his health down, run off, or hit him with Axii and he talks. Sparing him pays worse — 50 crowns and some silver ore against 203 crowns, the Caroline sword and a cave troll trophy for killing him — but it matters later, as you are about to see. This quest's XP also ignores the level-difference penalty entirely, a DLC oddity the wiki documents.

Contract: Skellige's Most Wanted (level 29, Fyresdal, free DLC from June 2015) is the best contract in the game, and the biggest spoiler in this article, so last chance to skip ahead. The nekker-attack story is fake. The boulder that nearly flattens Geralt is the first assassination attempt; the cave full of crude drawings planning his death is the reveal. The monsters have put a contract on the witcher. At the night meeting you face a godling, an ice troll, a doppler and a furious werewolf — and if you can cite two genuinely different examples of monsters you have spared, everyone but the werewolf stands down. Sparing Wham-a-Wham counts. So does sparing the trolls at Kaer Morhen, or the imp doppler in An Elusive Thief — though helping both Sarah and Johnny only counts once, since they are both godlings. The mercy route pays 200 XP and nekker hide boots; the kill-everything route pays 100 XP and no loot from the troll or doppler. A contract that audits your entire playthrough's ethics is a genuinely great piece of quest design.

Where the expansions fit

Everything above is base game or free DLC. Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine both add their own contract-style monster hunts on top — Toussaint's are tangled into some of the best questing in the series — but they deserve their own coverage, and they get it in our Hearts of Stone guide and Blood and Wine guide. If you only have the base game, the 26-plus-3 contracts here are still twenty-odd hours of the best monster-of-the-week television ever disguised as side content. And if you want the contracts that blur into full secondary quests, the two-for-one picks in our best side quests guide — Wild at Heart and In the Heart of the Woods — are where to go next.

Quick Action Checklist

• Clear a region's notice boards before advancing the main story; some contracts fail at cutoff quests, starting with Devil by the Well.
• Haggle every contract: open just past the slider's halfway point, expect ~300 crowns on most, 375+ on high-level hunts.
• On Swamp Thing, haggle to 300 and take the wait-a-week offer for 600 crowns.
• Equip a trophy on Roach's saddle at all times — the noonwraith trophy from your first contract gives +5% XP from humans and nonhumans.
• Read the bestiary entry the moment a contract identifies its monster; contracted beasts share weaknesses with their open-world versions.
• Detox before the Oxenfurt Drunk tavern scene; overdosing at that moment insta-fails the quest.
• Preserve at least one wooden support in Doors Slamming Shut if you want Kurt alive.
• Spare at least two different kinds of monsters across your playthrough before starting Skellige's Most Wanted.
• Lie to Vagn about the "dragon" unless you enjoy working for half pay.