How to raise NPC trust in Crimson Desert: what works, what it unlocks, and tips

The short answer: trust goes up when you greet people, chat with them, give them gifts they like and finish their requests. Gifts are the fastest because there’s no daily cap. Requests give the biggest single jump. Greeting and chatting are free but slow. At 100 trust, merchants sell you contracts that put their stock in your Greymane camp, and most other NPCs give you a one-time reward.

How trust works

Trust is tracked separately for each NPC, on a scale from 0 to 100. Two beggars standing next to each other have their own meters. You can check anyone’s trust by pointing your lantern at them or catching them in a sword glint. The meter has a green side for actions they like and a red side for things they don’t. According to the Steam trust guide, stealing in plain sight or bumping into people can lower trust.

What raises trust

Action	Trust	Limit
Greet	+5	Once per NPC per in-game day. Guides say about five NPCs a day count
Chat (share Knowledge)	Varies	Has a cooldown, shown in the menu after it raises trust
Gift	Usually +5 to +25 per item	No daily cap
Complete their request	About +50	Once per request

Greet. Walk up to almost anyone and pick Greet. You’ll see “Your actions are liked” in the top left and get +5. Game Rant works out that a merchant takes about 20 days of greetings to max out this way, so it’s best for people you pass anyway.

Chat. Update 2.04.00 (the Charting the Unknown patch) split the interaction menu into Interact, Chat and Gift. Chat is where you share Knowledge, the info you collect while exploring, and it earns trust. After any action raises trust, the menu now shows how long until that action can raise it again, so you don’t waste visits. The same update added books that teach you what residents like. Read them before you spend valuable items on gifts.

Gift. Open Gift and hover over items. The box on the left shows how much trust each one is worth, and anything greyed out won’t be accepted. Different types of NPC like different things. These are the picks the Steam guide and All Things How agree on:

• Merchants: copper pouches you loot from bandits. Each Light Copper Pouch is worth only +5, but you get them all the time. Recipes and books give more but don’t come back, so Game Rant suggests keeping pouches for merchants.
• Beggars: a single coin is worth +50. Give two coins with a short pause between them and greet them to reach 100 almost instantly.
• Children: insects (+10) or apples (+5).
• Herbalists and apothecaries: any herb.
• Scholars: collectible bottles. The giant scholars at the research center want hides instead.
• Fishermen, wandering freeswords and most townsfolk: cheap cooked food like Grilled Meat.
• Miners: thin leather, pickaxes or lanterns.

Since hotfix 2.04.03 you can pick several items at once in the Gift menu. That caused a crash to the title screen, which hotfix 2.04.06 fixed.

Requests. Finishing a request (a side quest) for someone gives a big one-off boost. The Steam guide and All Things How both put it at +50. Vendors are the NPCs most likely to have a request, so do it before you start gifting them.

Gear that helps

Both guides recommend the Bunny Mask, a leather helmet that adds +2 trust to every greeting and gift. Put a Solidarity Abyss Gear in its socket and the bonus goes up to +5 per action. Its stats hold up for a leather helmet, so you don’t give up much by wearing it.

What 100 trust unlocks

• Merchants: prices drop as their trust goes up. At 100 they sell a supply contract or trade agreement. Use it from your inventory, and that shop’s stock gets added to the matching vendor at your Greymane camp. Game Rant’s example is Dahlia, the Hernand innkeeper, whose contract adds dishes to Ronnie’s food shop at camp. Innkeepers, grocers, equipment shops, tailors, furniture shops and provisioners all have contracts. Some vendors also unlock extra stock.
• Livestock NPCs: maxing Bremer, Ibano, Willian and Ben adds cows, goats, sheep and pigs to buy at your ranch.
• Everyone else: a one-time gift that depends on who they are, such as dye from dyers, herbs from herbalists, insects from children, or rare materials like Mercury, Brimstone and Rubber from scholars. Patrigio, the wandering merchant, gives you The Claw, the fishing rod that reels fish in for you.
• Dogs and cats: pet them (up to five times a day) or feed them, and at 100 they become pets that pick up loot for you.

Some armor is locked behind trust too. Stefan Lanford gives Damiane a White Bloodwind chest piece at 100. Here’s where to find him after the epilogue.

Trust in Charting the Unknown

• Festivals. NPCs whose trust is high enough come to camp festivals, and talking to them there raises trust faster than usual. Some of them can be recruited. See how to recruit more comrades through festivals.
• Romance. Once an eligible NPC is at 100, Interact > Flirt opens a second trust meter. Gift and Chat can each raise it once per in-game day, and at 100 you can propose. Flirting as one character lowers that NPC’s trust with your other two characters, so pick who does the courting. There’s more in the Charting the Unknown overview.

Bugs to know about

• Gifting crash: fixed. Giving several items at once used to send you back to the title screen. Hotfix 2.04.06 on November 4 lists it as fixed. Until you’ve updated, give one item at a time.
• NPCs vanishing at 100 trust. Players have reported this since launch. Named NPCs needed for quests, like Ben and Kamu at the ranch, were fixed in patch 1.02.00 according to the marked answer on Steam. Players still report generic NPCs, like beggars, guards and some camp Greymanes, disappearing after they hit 100, and someone said it happened to them this week. It isn’t on Pearl Abyss’s known issues list. To be safe, claim the reward as soon as an NPC reaches 100, and think twice before maxing a non-vendor you still need. Vendors aren’t affected, according to the Steam guide.

Tips

• Keep a stack of copper pouches and some cheap cooked food on you. That covers most NPCs you run into.
• If you meet a random NPC out in the world, try to get them to 100 in one visit. They may not be in the same spot next time.
• Max the vendors whose contracts you’ll actually use first. Not every NPC is worth the effort.