Winter Convergence 2022 Guide

Good Morning Friends! The Winter Convergence is upon us and all of Aeternum is feeling the chill of the Winter Warrior… or whatever this storyline actually is. Like much of New World’s story the winter event has the most loosely strung together of themes where basically two Yeti are duking it out… one wants to freeze the entire world and the other wants to protect us from this fate. What it means for the players is one of the most detailed events that take place in the game and features activities that everyone can participate in. This is the second time we have seen the Winter Convergence event and a number of things have been added to improve things. They seemingly have learned a lot from the recent Halloween event and carried forward some improvements.

Daily Presents

In the center of every town that can be held by a faction, you will find the Winter Convergence tree, as well as the entire town decked out in holiday-themed kitsch. One of the key benefits of this event is that you can go up to every tree in every settlement and collect a package each day. The first three packages will include bonus rewards that are effectively the same as the turkey bags that we just had from the Thanksgiving event. Essentially you are going to get some cash, Winter Tokens, and a chance for the various crafting patterns to drop. This is also how you are going to get your Diamond Gypsum for those who are level 60.

Town Board Quests

Every town has new projects that involve upgrading the tree through doing seasonal activities like crafting ornaments or baking cookies. As the town upgrades its tree, the daily rewards will keep getting better with higher token drops and a better chance at patterns. If nothing else they are a very easy way of getting some bonus town reputation each day.

Lost Presents

Scattered around Aeternum along its many roads will be piles of lost presents. You can reclaim these for faction with the Winter Wanderer, and then redeem them for Winter Tokens at the Winter Villages located in Monarch’s Bluff, Everfall, Brightwood, and Weaver’s Fen. Each package nets you 5 faction points so it isn’t a great way to complete the event, but it is the sort of thing you casually collect as you are roaming around and doing other activities.

Floating Packages

I remember when I first encountered a floating package last year I thought it was a bugged spawn. Essentially you will see a glowing pile of packages rotating in the air and if you shoot these down you get a whopping 250 faction with the Winter Wanderer. I am sorry that it is super hard to see in the screenshot, but keep your eyes on the skies and be watching for these. Well worth your time and worth me breaking out a crappy green bow I had in my inventory to shoot them down.

Gleamite Meteors

I’ve not seen one of these this year, but given that I see the ability to trade these in on the Winter Village shops I assume they still exist. Essentially if you hang out in lower-level zones at night time and watch the skies it is possible to see a meteor streaking across the sky. I found this video from last year showing what it looks like so you will know what to watch out for. Essentially when the meteor lands it destroys everything surrounding the impact crater and spawns a number of Gleamite nodes that can be mined for resources you can turn in at the Winter Village as well as some faction with the Winter Wanderer.

Winter Village and the Winter Wanderer

As I said above there are four Winter Villages that you can find spread throughout the world Monarch’s Bluff, Everfall, Brightwood, and Weaver’s Fen. They all for the most part function the same with a few carts in the town that let you trade lost presents and other doodads associated with the holiday event into friendly Yeti helpers in order to gain winter tokens. The Winter Wanderer himself will have a few quests for you. I believe since I did the original series in 2021 I don’t have access to those in order to do them again. However listening to a friend of mine talking about the event, makes me think they are still available. This year he has a new quest to hunt down the Winter Warrior and stop him in his tracks, which is a big boss fight that hops from zone to zone and is marked on your map similar to how the Halloween Boss and Turkulon were.

Winter Convergence Shop

Doing things associated with this holiday gives you a reputation with the Winter Wanderer aka a faction called the Holiday Regent. This works similarly to leveling your other factions, and there are various breakpoints, each unlocking different tiers of items available. At the highest tier which I reached last night, you have a number of somewhat ugly holiday-themed skins as well as a bunch of item-level 600 crafting patterns for every gear slot. You can also get a number of other skins like a replacement for our boring tent, and some extremely festive musical instruments.

Crafting Patterns

One of the really cool things from this year is a number of item-level 600 patterns for pretty much every slot. The huge benefit of this style of the pattern just like the ones that came from the Halloween event is that they can be crafted by anyone without a base skill requirement. The negative is that the materials required for these patterns are going to be extremely costly if you can’t craft them yourself. Each item tends to sell somewhere in the neighborhood of 150-300 coins each so the Great Axe that I crafted yesterday would have cost me around 10,000 coins worth of materials if I was not already capable of making them myself. The benefit with these patterns however is since you crafted them… they operate much like a named item and do not suffer any expertise drain for not having leveled your expertise to 600. A huge boon over the Halloween-themed patterns is it seems like you can choose your primary stat, so you can tailor the item to fit your specific build needs. If you can afford it, this is a fast way to catch up on your gear at level 60.

The Winter Warrior

As I said before the Winter Warrior now spawns in various locations around the world and is marked on your map. This is a large raid encounter and requires a significant number of players in order to take it down. There seems to be some sort of a breakpoint on these each day where the first handful of them reward you 5 Warrior’s Hailspikes and the subsequent kills only reward you 2. At least that seemed to be the case for me… it could simply be RNG. Each one of these can be handed in at the cart in the Winter Village for 10 Winter Tokens, so this becomes the most efficient way to not only farm reputation for the holiday event but also rewards.

Join the Zerg

It is almost guaranteed that your server will have some sort of semi-organized zerg going on while this event is active. Getting everything is going to require copious amounts of farming and as a result, I think this is going to be the case for the majority of the event. Essentially look in your recruitment channel for discussion of WB or World Boss and what zone they are heading towards. Once you are running with the train stay on the sequence as long as you like. Word of warning, however, the Winter Warrior can spawn in multiple locations in every zone in the game, so it is going to pay off significantly if you already have all teleports unlocked. I did not have any of the ones in Brimstone Sands since I had not ventured out there yet, so I took a bit last night and unlocked all of them to make the farming more efficient.

Ice Caves

I guess one last thing I will mention in case the 2021 quests are in fact available. There are a number of Yeti Ice Caves that have spawned around Aeternum and these stay up year-round and were brought into the game after the first Winter Convergence. These are marked on the map with the silhouette of a Yeti, but one of the easiest ones to get to is in Windsward due east along the coast. The lower-level quest will involve going around and killing the Yetis guarding these caves and I believe they are all somewhere in the 25-35 level range. I believe you can farm these caves for reputation but since I capped mine last night I was not able to test this theory.

All told it is a fun event with a lot of stuff going on, and some pretty tasty rewards that can be had if you are diligent in farming over the next few weeks. In theory, this map link should provide you with the locations of all of the Yeti Caves, Winter Villages, and possible Gleamite meteor spawn locations. For me, I am mostly planning on farming the Winter Warrior whenever it suits my fancy and trying to get most of the permanent rewards from the event. Even though the cosmetics are fairly ugly… I am very likely to spend time trying to farm them.

Hopefully, this guide helps players who are unfamiliar with the event get started. If you have any direct questions feel free to drop me a line below or reach out over social media.