Crimson Desert: how to dye clothes and customise your character

The customisation options are one of Crimson Desert’s best features, but it’s a bit confusing how it all works. Whether you want to dye your armour or get a fresh haircut and some tattoos, the game doesn’t do a great job of explaining how you go about it so let VGC break it down for you in this guide.

How to dye weapons armour in Crimson Desert

You can dye clothes pretty much straight away in Crimson Desert thanks to the dyehouse run by Theoric to the southeast of Hernand. The only problem is, you won’t have any dye to start with.

Theoric sells a couple of dyes if you choose the “buy” screen instead of “dye”, but there’s another step you need to take before those dyes show up when you enter the customisation screen.

Once you’ve bought, crafted or found a dye, you have to press “use” on it in your inventory. This essentially learns it like a recipe, and you’ll see the colours become available the next time you attempt to dye your clothes.

If the dye doesn’t show, however, that’s because that specific dye merchant doesn’t deal with that colour. There are various dye merchants dotted around Pywell, and each of them specialises in a different set of colours.

There are ten different dye specialists in total, including:

• Hernandian Dye
• Demenissian Dye
• Pailunese Dye
• Calphadean Dye
• Pororin Dye

Finding them in the various towns and cities allows you to use their dyes. They’re usually on the outskirts of a location, and you can spot them easily with their brightly coloured fabrics hung out to dry.

The easiest way to use all the dyes and merchants you’ve found is to follow the Greymane faction questline and upgrade the base at Howling Hill.

Follow the questline along and you’ll eventually find a Greymane called Oliver, who will join your camp as a dye merchant.

How to find dye

You can find bottles of dye all around the world. Most of the time, they belong to someone else, so you’ll need to don a mask to be able to steal them when you find them — check our guide on how to do crimes in Crimson Desert for a detailed breakdown.

Dye can also be made by using insects and flowers. You can find dye recipes around the world just like meal recipes. You have to use a cauldron to craft dye, not a cooking pot — you can find a cauldron in Hernand, in the building just north of where the rock, paper, scissors minigame is.

Even if you don’t have the recipe, you can select “improvise” on the cauldron and play around to find new colours. Here are some dye recipes I’ve found for examples of the ingredient mixes:

• Dark Yellow Dye – 10 Dunbaria, 3 Beetle, 1 Longhorn Beetle, 2 Stag Beetle.
• Bright Yellow Dye – 10 Dunbaria, 3 Beetle, 3 Longhorn Beetle.
• Rich Purple Dye – 15 Lavender, 5 Blue Lavender, 2 Longhorn Beetle, 1 Stag Beetle.
• Deep Red Dye – 10 Peony, 3 Rhinoceros Beetle, 3 Stag Beetle.
• Dark Red Dye – 10 Peony, 3 Rhinoceros Beetle, 1 Longhorn Beetle, 2 Stag Beetle.
• Red Dye – 10 Peony, 3 Rhinoceros Beetle, 1 Longhorn Beetle, 1 Stag Beetle.
• Rich Red Dye – 10 Peony, 3 Rhinoceros Beetle, 2 Longhorn Beetle, 1 Stag Beetle.
• Bright Red Dye – 10 Peony, 3 Rhinoceros Beetle, 3 Longhorn Beetle.

With that logic, you should be able to produce some dyes by experimenting with 10 flowers and a mix of insects.

How to change hairstyle and get tattoos

As with the dye merchant at Howling Hill, this is just a case of following the Greymane faction questline and upgrading your base camp.

Eventually, you’ll unlock a barber called Eric, who allows you to change your hair, beard, and eyebrows. You can also get face and body tattoos here.

If you switch to the two secondary characters, these can both be customised in the same fashion.