Winter Festival Guide

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The Winter Festival is one of Neverwinter’s big seasonal events that usually runs through the Christmas holidays and new year. The event takes players to the beautiful town of Twilight Tor where they can take part in different winter themed activities. You race for glory, drop gifts all over town, and skate-fight demons on a lake. It’s fun, and it’s not for nothing either, there are plenty of unique rewards to choose from! In case you are a bit overwhelmed with all the currency and items and want to know what you can realistically get, this guide is going to help.

Tutorial

Twilight Tor can be found on the overworld map and any character entering it for the first time can go through a set of tutorial quests in the zone. Start the event at your main contact Mayor Vario Cepheid next to the big main campfire and follow his lead. This can get a little repetitive if you’re doing it on many toons, so you only want to do them on your mains. All daily quests are instantly available so it’s luckily no requirement. You have to be level 15 though to be able to claim your daily Parcel.

Rewards and Currencies

Starlight Parcel

The main activity to do each day is claiming your free Parcel form the ZEN market. Pick up the quest “Star Stuff” from Mayor Vario Cepheid and turn it in at the Giftmaster, which is located north-west of the main campfire, right at the race track. It gives you a voucher to claim one free gift. As stated in the tooltip, the more Parcels you open, the better the rewards (items can be looked up at the Giftmaster). The event runs for 22 days. Granted you do the Festival every day, you have at least two shots at a very nice reward per character at the end.

The Parcel is why you need to bring as many alts as possible to Twilight Tor. Claiming it, and your Star of Fortune, is a one-minute task and you are going to walk away from the Festival with useful stuff. The “ZEN Market Consumables” include Wards and Scroll of Mass Life for example, you’ll get more Retraining Tokens than you can use throughout the year, and some items from the higher reward tier sell for a nice amount of AD. The “grand prize” has always been the Forgehammer of Gond, which got even more relevance with the workshop system in module 15.

Starlight Bag

Usually it doesn’t stop with 22 Parcels though since you’ll additionally get a few Starlight Bags in gift groups (see below). These also add to the total of Parcels opened, but their contents are bound.

Gift Parties

Each opened Parcel always returns one Gift of Simril. When opened in a party, it will give the other members Lights of Simril, event refining points, and possibly a Star of Fortune or Starlight Bag. Throwing these gift groups is absolutely recommended. It’ll net you a nice amount of RPs and add to your count of Parcels. And depending on what you want, you can just buy rewards for the currency or flip your Stars for more gifts and Lights for more RP.

An annoyance throwing gift parties are scammers that pretend to have a gift but never share one. This seems to be especially bad during the first event days. Try to do this with friends or your guild if possible.

Star of Fortune

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You get one Star per day from the daily quest “Omens of the Stars” at Mayor Vario Cepheid. The Festival runs for 22 days, that’s 22 Stars. Although you occasionally get them from your gift parties as well, it’s still hard to get enough stars to buy all rewards. So you probably have to decide between the Star of Simril Companion (14) and the Twilight Yeti Mount (18), or pay for additional stars in the ZEN market (Bounty of Simril). Items of previous years like the Royal Winter Sled have been moved to the ZEN Market as well by the way. We’re not sure whether this will happen with this year’s stuff as well. But you might want to grab the Yeti or Simril Companion just in case. Otherwise you may have to pay for them in the future.

Light of Simril

FawnHere comes the grind! After the initial 325 Lights from the tutorial quests, dailies only net you an abysmal seven more. Even if you trade in all your Stars of Fortune for Lights (220 per) during the Festival’s Zenith (the last week of the event is called “Zenith”, in which all Lights are doubled), you probably can’t buy all unique collectibles the store has to offer. So these are rewards you have to work for a little bit. To make sure surplus Lights don’t go to waste the devs added Refinement. Players can also buy Blacklead Boxes to help getting the Demon Sled ( see below).

Lights drop from Gifts, but the most effective way of farming them is the most boring one: fishing. It’s best to fish all day any day, score minimal points in any other event (Demons on Ice, Twilight Run) to snatch the 15 Lights there, and come back to your hole asap. To be most efficient you need to the “Ash Fishing Rod” from the Lightcrafting vendor. You have to fish a bit and trade in resources, but overall it shouldn’t take to long to get the rod. Just know that none of the items offer great reselling value though, simply because they’re dated.

Campaign Currency

Since 2016 fishing also nets campaign currency. You will randomly get special items like Treasure of Tiamat that you can trade in for Mod 1 to 5 campaign currency at the “Well-Traveled Stranger”. He is located on the terrace north of the main campfire. You can farm as much as you like and get most currency you need for the campaigns (not all though). I’m not sure this is really better than simply doing the dailies, but it’s certainly a nice additional incentive in case you’re fishing anyway.

Flakes of Blacklead

The Flakes are used to craft a Demon Sled and you need 200. You get at least four from the Demons on Ice event, two for Underdark Skirmishes and one from Heroic Encounters. Depending on what content you usually run on your mains, you might need to specifically farm for this. You can also buy a Crate of Blacklead for Lights of Simril or trade for Blacklead at the Lightcrafting vendor.

Beacon of Simril

This artifact is another unique element in the Winter Festival. Like the Illusionist’s Mask it can be upgraded to epic with reagents earned from the event. The dailies hand out all the stuff for purple quality, you can however also buy additional Spirit of Simril for Stars of Fortune. Upgrading the artifact by the way works with regular refining points. You do not need special ones from the event.

Lightcrafting

Lightcrafting formerly was an event profession. With the workshop update of module 15 the tasks have moved to a new vendor near the fishing area instead. The store is mostly used to get the purple fishing rod, but you can also trade for additional Flakes of Blacklead or some refining points for example. Nothing is particularly great to be honest, but it’s worth noting that it’s one of the rare sources of the group buff consumable Hero’s Feast. All the stuff you need to trade for the rewards is obtained by fishing.

Farm Advise

Now that you know all possible rewards, what’s actually worth going for? You should definitely bring as many characters to the Winter Festival as possible, even those that you do not actively play or only exist as invoke and inventory slaves. Claim your daily stuff and throw gift parties, trade your Stars of Fortune for more gifts, and repeat. That way you maximize the parcels you open and also amass a nice amount of refining points. Those are bound of course, but you can still move enchantments to the alt, refine and send them back. You can obviously also farm the unbound/account-bound rewards like weapon transmutes for other characters.

On your mains you want to additionally aim for the Star of Fortune stuff since the rewards might not be around forever. The rest highly depends on what you like. Most items are cosmetic with little to no actual gameplay relevance. If you like the looks, by all means go for those sleds and scarfs! It requires some farming, but you normally won’t have to work your butt off. Fishing in the meantime can be an “ok” source of campaign currency and RPs (Illuminated Box) for lower level toons, but it’s a pretty repetitive task.


I hope this will help you to figure out what you can get and want to get from the festival. In case you have any questions or additions, make sure to post them on our social channels, in the comments below, or on our message board! Happy holidays and see you at the telescope!

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j0Shi

j0Shi plays the Neverwinter MMORPG since the open BETA in 2013 and is a regular contributor to the blog and the whole UN:Project. Originally a Guardian Fighter, he has built up ALTs of all classes and plays on BIS/near-BIS level.

16 thoughts on “Winter Festival Guide

  • December 19, 2016 at 6:23 pm
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    Good article, it covers most of the bases. Don’t forget that you can also use stars to buy gifts of simril to use. In fact, the best use for the stars is probably buying gifts of simril because you can use them in to get startlight bags and increase your chances of getting past event items and zen market items.

  • December 14, 2017 at 3:06 pm
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    I was hoping to get the epic mount for 14 stars since I am still rocking a blue one lol… I was decided to do it on all my alts so they have a fast mount. Is this a bad idea then?

    • December 14, 2017 at 3:08 pm
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      Not at all. Did anything in the guide made you believe it is?

  • December 14, 2017 at 3:11 pm
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    Oh, not your guide, the comment of the guy on top of me saying the best is to get gifts of smiril. Your guide was very helpful actually thanks a lot

  • December 14, 2017 at 4:44 pm
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    You guys need to update the guide with the Royal Sled, Epic quality 500 power/Defense + 250 Power/defense for party members within 50′.

    It costs 14 Stars, which is a really easy way to snag an epic mount just for showing up at the party

    • December 14, 2017 at 11:51 pm
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      That’s why we hinted at *wip* at the top. We have not yet incorporated all changes from this year. This will be done today. Cheers!

  • December 14, 2017 at 10:40 pm
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    Royal Sled, Epic Quality? So 110% speed?

    I have a F2P friend who will be very pleased to hear that. We’ve been waiting ages for me to help him get the Siegebreaker Griffon from the Siege of Neverwinter in the New Year!

    But two Epic are better then one!

    Great guide, j0Shi, as always. I’ll send my mate the link as well.

  • December 15, 2017 at 2:13 am
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    I’d like to highlight that gift parties give out a nice amount of RP now that Lumens aren’t specific to the Beacon of Simril. I also suspect that they’ve replaced the enchants with Gemstones in the loot table and forgot to update the tooltip.

    Regardless, out of a party of five people, each with six gift lanterns or so, I got 18k RP. Another bonus for gift parties. ^_^

  • December 15, 2017 at 2:15 am
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    You can probably spare those 14 stars for the mount, gift parties can go on for ages and give tons of stars. I did a gift party yesterday using only 6 stars (for gift lanterns) to start with and got 10+ back in return.

  • December 19, 2017 at 6:33 am
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    “Granted you do the Festival every day, you have at least two shots at a very nice reward per character at the end”… i have only been getting one per day…. where is the second one please

    • December 19, 2017 at 9:24 am
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      It hints at the fact that you can claim 22 gifts over the event days, and the best rewards start dropping after 20. So you have at least two (22 minus 20) shots at the highest reward tier on each character.

  • December 24, 2017 at 5:45 pm
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    just got winter festival in chinese server, found a faster way to fish. when the loading bar runs to near end, walk/jump/cast to interrupt the process, it will save u 0.x secs each time. if u like gambling, u could try to interrupt earlier, at the risk of losing the fish.
    this acticle doesnt cover the Bait, which is better?

  • December 30, 2017 at 2:52 am
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    I upgraded my beacon to purple, but now I have a bunch of lumen that it won’t allow me to use to upgrade it any further. Did I miss something?

    • December 30, 2017 at 6:42 am
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      No. The event items only allow you to upgrade it to epic. After that, the normal refining process takes over.

  • January 2, 2019 at 12:56 pm
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    I am kinda curious about the climbing of the telescope….master the jump secret….whats that all about? I am on top of it right now trying to figure the secret out….

  • January 2, 2019 at 11:41 pm
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    It’s not actually a secret, hidden area, Dave. Nor is it actually a plateau: it’s actually a ledge on the cliff/ridge on the far side of the lake. If you manage to land on it, two large torches light up, but there’s no achievement or Fanfare. It’s just an Easter Egg. And it’s much easier without a mount, even the 140% speed Yeti

    I managed it for the first time this year. It’s pretty easy with a GWF, especially with Bravery slotted. SW can also do it and GF with ITF (especially SM GF with that speed passive – Steel Grace?).

    With DC and CW I couldn’t do it, but with TR MI with the speed buff passives and going into Stealth for extra speed and tumbling when I got there. WK couldn’t quite do it. OP had no chance at all and my HRs fell flat on their faces when they dodged.

    My TR also climbed up the mountain to the lighted trees I coudl see, and it was st the side of the sled run. She then wandered all arounf the mountains and also got onto the sled run and into the Demons on Ice area. There are some tiny gaps that let you climb through the collision barriers, but it’s ,much easier with Shadowy Disappearance onto a piece of land on the other side of the collision. She also got onto the ledge by climbing across the top of the range of little peaks.

    She also got half way up the telescope, but fell through the gap between the barrel and the main lens.

    It was quite a laugh for a while, but I soon got bored with it.

    It’s a bit daft to have an Easter Egg that only half the classes can find.

    🙁

    There is also a hidden speed chevron area in front of the telescope, but that does not seem to help you jump anywhere, although you do get the speed buff.

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