The Master Save: Blood of Dawnwalker's Most Important Save File

If The Blood of Dawnwalker has one piece of universal advice, it is this: make a manual save before A Deal with the Devil, and label it. The community calls it the master save, and it is the difference between a game that gives you one ending per thirty days and a game that gives you all of them from a single month’s work.

Why This Exact Moment

The finale is the game’s one true point of no return. Once A Deal with the Devil commits, the open world closes, side quests freeze, and the run funnels into an ending sequence whose credits return you to the title screen — there is no post-game free roam. Everything you might want to change afterward — the finale’s ally, the Xanthe branch, the mercy decisions’ fallout — has to be changed by reloading.

The Crake and Lacra guides converge on the same instruction from opposite directions: complete both ally chains first, then make the master save, because both must be complete for the key to work. A master save made over an unfinished chain only branches into the endings that chain’s absence allows.

What One File Unlocks

From a single master save, reloading lets you:

• Run both finale versions — Lacra’s night assault and Crake’s daylight assault — with their endings, The Patricide and The Knyazmaker, each in under an hour of replay instead of a full month.
• Compare the mercy decisions — spare-or-kill Xanthe, the Ambrus drain, the ring handover — and watch how each rewrite plays in the epilogue’s character fates.
• Test the departure option — the game’s built-in last exit — without gambling a run on what waits down that road.

The ending differences guide lists everything that changes per branch; the master save is how you see it all without NG+ bookkeeping.

The Discipline

Three rules keep the master save alive:

1. Manual, not autosave. The autosave will cheerfully overwrite your branch point the moment the finale starts. Make a dedicated manual slot and resist reusing it.
2. Label it with the date and build. Two months into a completionist project, “Manual Save 3” tells you nothing. “Day 27 — all chains done — master” tells you everything.
3. Save after the prep checklist, not before. The finale checklist — Boyars cleared, healing stocked, skill points spent — is part of the file’s value. A master save that still owes three days of errands branches into stress.

What It Cannot Fix

The master save reaches backward only to the moment it was made. The prologue medicine, the toast dialogue, the early court decisions — all of it is already baked in. That is the game’s thesis: consequences are load-bearing, and even its most generous mercy — the master save — only rewinds thirty days, not the whole story.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where exactly is the save point? Before starting A Deal with the Devil, with both ally chains complete and the prep checklist empty. The endgame guide walks the full sequence.

Can I have multiple master saves? Yes — the discipline scales. Some players keep a pre-finale file and a mid-month checkpoint; slot management is personal preference.

Does reloading for endings affect achievements? Achievements trigger per completed run-through; branching via the master save is the standard, designed way to collect them, as the ending checklist assumes.

Is the master save needed on NG+? Yes — NG+ resets the board like a fresh run, and the same save discipline applies to its month.