Being a fifth-year at Hogwarts is tough. You have a catch-up on classes, save hippogriffs from poachers, discover the secret of ancient magic, and stop an evil goblin uprising all before dinner. Welcome to Culture of Gaming, and today I’m going to teach you how to avoid all of the mistakes I made in Hogwarts Legacy.
I definitely made some mistakes during my first dozen or so hours with the game, but hopefully, now you know better than I did, and you won’t fall into those same pitfalls.
Hogwarts Legacy is a traditional open-world game in the sense that there is so much to see and do and it’s all just thrown at you. In this article, we’re going to focus on the early to mid-part of the game and help you unlock the world so that you can take advantage of everything Hogwarts Legacy offers. It’s not necessarily about rushing to beat the game, just being smart about your progression.
Once the open world is unlocked, it’s incredibly easy to get sucked into exploring every nook and cranny of Hogwarts castle. But there’s a great big wizarding world out there to explore. At this point, you can focus on whatever you want, whether it’s side quests, collectibles, or something else entirely. When exploring the open world, hop on your broomstick and use Revealio to reveal your area’s points of interest. This will help you locate hidden points of interest and potion ingredients. Take the time to unlock various flu points around the world as it will make fast travel easier.
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Unlock all your spells as soon as possible and focus on professor assignments that reward a spell. Never buy plants or potions outright; buy the recipe or seeds needed to complete quests. Complete Merlin Trials to expand your inventory by a few slots, and don’t forget to brew Wiggenweld Potions constantly. Clear bandit camps to receive traits as a reward. When selecting talents, be strategic and pick talents that match the way you want to play.
Questing
I want to briefly talk about questing. One of the easiest things to do is to get distracted by quests that don’t necessarily reward anything meaningful. Don’t get me wrong, conjuring little knickknacks for your room of requirement is awesome, but not quite as awesome as unlocking a new spell. I recommend focusing all of your early efforts on unlocking all of your spells as soon as possible. I can’t stress how much more fun Hogwarts Legacy is once you have spells at your disposal. Keep a watchful eye on your quest log. As soon as a professor’s quest comes in, one that rewards a spell, focus your efforts there. You can always come back and tackle all of the side content you’ve skipped at any point later on in the game, but now you have full access to an arsenal of spells to help you accomplish those tasks. There’s one small hang-up with focusing on professor assignments. Oftentimes, they require you to brew, grow, or purchase something to complete the quest.
Money-making Tips
This is where Culture of Gaming’s early money-making tips come in handy. First off, never buy plants or potions outright. They are such a galleon sink and, quite frankly, you don’t have the coin to spare. A better option is to buy the recipe or seeds needed to complete the quest. My advice here is to wait until you actually receive the quest to purchase the recipe or seeds. That’s just the most efficient way to go about it. In order to fund this endeavor, you really only have a few options.
You can use the disillusionment charm to hunt down these I chests for some quick coin. There are a number of them in Hogwarts and around Hogsmeade, and they’ll always reward 500 Galleons. Your only other viable option at this point is to sell gear. Now here’s the thing. Gear rarity is the only thing determining the game’s sell value. That means you could have a level five orange item and a level 20 green item, and the orange is always going to sell for more – 200 galleons, to be precise.
This is important as you’re exploring the world because at some point your bags are going to be full and your only two options are to leave the item in the chest or destroy something in your inventory. When in doubt, only ever destroy green items. The item you pick up to replace that will be at a minimum a green, so you’re not missing out.
With these two things in mind, you should be able to scrape together enough galleons to make necessary purchases, and I want to stress that because you can waste a lot of money on pointless things when you could really stretch your galleons and make them work for you.
Merlin Trials
Since gear is one of the only ways to make money early on in the game, let’s take a few minutes to give ourselves more flexibility in carrying items and selling them by completing Merlin Trial challenges. In the open world, you can quickly expand your inventory by a few slots.
You can expand your inventory the first time by completing two Merlin Trials and the second time by completing six more Merlin Trials, giving you eight additional inventory slots, a 40% increase over the default 20 slots.
You can’t continue to complete Merlin Trials for additional slots, but challenge tier three requires 10 more Merlin Trials to unlock, which may be too difficult for the early parts of the game.
Remember to have Malo sweet leaves with you to activate a Merlin Trial, but don’t buy the plants from the shop. Just buy the seeds for 200 galleons and plant your own after the first harvest. You’ve already made up the loss and now have a way to consistently get more.
Room of Requirement
Since we are in the room of requirement, there are a lot of little things we should talk about. First, since you are now rolling in dough, I highly recommend you spring for a large potting table from TOS and Scrolls. This allows you to begin planting combat plants, but also allows you to grow smaller plants. Once you’ve capped out on combat plants, don’t sleep on these plants either. They are super powerful even without any talent upgrades. My personal favorites are the Chinese chomping cabbage and the venomous tentacular, both of which deal considerable amounts of damage in combat.
You can even upgrade the tentacular to break shields once you unlock the third tier of talents in the room of requirement, which is even more valuable on the hardest difficulty because Stuy, the perfect ortego counter, doesn’t break shields again. And I know I’m a broken record here, but don’t ever buy these plants outright, buy the seeds. One harvest and they’ve paid for themselves, and those seeds are good from now on and you can plant them whenever you want.
Don’t ever buy plants outright, buy the seeds. One harvest and they’ve paid for themselves, and those seeds are good from now on and you can plant them whenever you want.
Remember when using the room of requirement that each type of conation has a maximum limit. The goal should always be to try and reach that limit so you have the most amount of supplies rolling in. At some point, you might cap out on how many combat plants you have because your inventory is limited, and that’s when you switch to growing herbs for potions, all of which can be accommodated in those large pots.
If you’re short on moonstones at the start, go ahead and remove some of the stock decorations that come with the room of requirement. This will net you an okay amount, but if you have the coin, you can spring for the material refiner from Homes and Scrolls that produces 10 moonstones every 10 minutes. Get three of these running and you’ll never have an issue conjuring again.
Finally, and I say this playing exclusively on the hardest difficulty in the game, don’t forget to brew Wiggenweld potions constantly. You’ll need them, a lot of them. Hogwarts Legacy is challenging, and you don’t want a pointless death to slow you down, so keep up with brewing these in your spare time. Keep an eye out for hork lumps while flying across the highlands, as you’ll need a healthy supply to keep brewing Wiggenweld potions.
Lock Picking
Switching gears, let’s talk about locked rooms and buildings in Hogwarts Legacy. This one is simple. Don’t worry about them until you get the Caretaker’s Lunar Lament quest. This happens after the first trial and is a main quest, so you quite literally can’t miss it.
Ladwind Moon, Hogwarts’ caretaker, gives you a quest that ultimately teaches you Alohomora. We’ve seen a lot of comments from people confused and frustrated, thinking they missed some key part of the game, and that’s simply not the case. If you want to unlock Rank 2 and Rank 3 locks, then you’ll need to continue collecting Demiguise statues for our friend Mr. Moon.
And oh yeah, don’t worry about the dozens of locked doors you’ve run by before this point. You’ll get there, I promise.
Manual Saves
One thing you might have to worry about is running into a game-breaking bug. They exist and can completely block your progression. That’s why I always recommend utilizing the manual save slots in your game.
Don’t rely on autosave to bail you out, because if the stars align in the worst possible way, you could be stuck in your progression. We recommend saving to a manual file once every play session. That way, you’re never too far behind should you have to use it. Likewise, if you want to revisit any of the four seasons within Hogwarts Legacy, the only way to do that is by loading up a manual save from within that season. At the time of this article, there is no way to toggle the seasons once you beat the game, which is a huge shame.
Hopefully, that changes, but for now, you’re stuck in whatever season you’re currently progressing in.
Bandit Camps
One of the best things you can do early on is start clearing bandit camps. These are quick, combat-focused pieces of content that not only sharpen your skills as a witch or wizard but also reward you with an all-important trait.
Now, these are randomized, so you can’t hunt down exactly what you need or want, but get in the habit of clearing these out when you see them because you never know what trait you might receive as a reward. I personally put these off until much later in the game, at which point it was almost a bit pointless. I cleared a large chunk of the content, and those traits I unlocked would’ve been a huge help in some more challenging aspects of the main story. They take no time to complete, allow you to experiment with spells and combinations in a real combat scenario, and reward something incredibly valuable, so don’t pass them up.
If you do the work now, by the time you unlock the loom, you’ll have a nice treasure trove of traits ready to socket into your gear.
If you do the work now, by the time you unlock the loom, you’ll have a nice treasure trove of traits ready to socket into your gear. Since you’re opting to take on some dark wizards, I recommend you focus on completing the dueling feats that pop up whenever you engage in combat.
These might seem pointless, but they actually tie directly to a challenge. Now, rewards are cosmetic, but there’s no denying that’s a huge part of this game. Plus, you’ll need to complete a large portion of the field guide if you want to take part in the OWLs experience, the House Cup feast, and technically beat the game.
Talents
Finally, let’s talk talents. This is one of the most important aspects of Hogwarts Legacy, but there’s a very real catch. You can’t unlock everything in the game, at least not at this point. There is word and rumor that a respect potion was found in the game files, but it’s unclear if that was just a clever way for devs to test out their systems or if it’s something the team planned to implement.
Either way, let’s plan for the worst and really be strategic about our options. You heard us talk a bit about talents in our wish. I knew sooner, tips and tricks video, and while I definitely recommend you go check that out, I think we need to go a bit deeper. First, be sure to unlock spell knowledge in the core tree. This will allow you to expand your spell pages, which you can swap in real time during combat. This will prevent you from having to go into your menus and move around spells, which is just a pain.
Second, consider picking up swift again in the tree. This enhances your dodge roll and gives you a short-distance teleport while on the ground. This is both a solid defensive pick, and also helps you get around the world much faster, especially in areas like Hogsmeade that are no-fly zones.
After that, you really need to think about what aspect of Hogwarts Legacy you want to embrace and lean into that. If you’re someone that doesn’t really care about combat and really wants to walk around the world and collect everything they possibly can, well then Revelio mastery is probably for you.
If you care about combat, I recommend focusing on talents that directly benefit your play style. For example, nothing in the stealth tree appeals to me personally because I have zero desire to play this game in stealth, so I choose not to waste my points.
That doesn’t mean the tree isn’t strong, though, and if popping an invisibility potion and taking out an entire group of enemies with petrius totalis is something you enjoy. By all means take the talents in the spell talent tree. You also want to consider what spells you use and if the benefit is worth the point.
A perfect example, in the beginning of the game, I really thought Incendio was a spell I would use a ton during my playthrough, but as I unlocked other things I realized that the limited range of Incendio didn’t work for my play style.
Since I had already used a talent point to enhance that spell, it was essentially a wasted point, as I really don’t use Incendio in my core rotation.
Those little conversations with yourself will guide you as you pick the right talents for your play style by focusing on enhancements that match the way you want to play. They’re guaranteed to get the most out of the game.
So there you have it. If it’s not crystal clear, I definitely made some mistakes during my first dozen or so hours with the game, but hopefully, now you know better than I did, and you won’t fall into those same pitfalls.
