The Minor Realm Cards in Nightingale offer various ways to buff your character or the realm itself, such as increasing the yield of harvesting and mining, improving your maximum health and damage output, or increasing the chances for rare items to drop. It’s not all about buffs, though – there are often trade-offs built into the cards, so you’ll have to consider whether the benefits of the buffs are worth the cost of the debuffs. On this page, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about where to find Minor Realm Cards in Nightingale, how to craft them, and how to use them at the Realmic Transmuter.

Minor Realm Card Locations¶

As you explore the wilderness in your first realm of Nightingale after the tutorial, it won’t be long before you start to find Minor Realm Cards. There are a few different ways of acquiring them, which we’ll detail below. If you want to see a complete list of all Major and Minor Realm Cards in Nightingale, including details of the buffs and debuffs they apply, be sure to check our All Realm Cards page.

Loot Chests¶

The most common method of finding Minor Realm Cards in Nightingale is by looting them from chests. You’ll find these scattered throughout the wilderness, but most often within POIs (points of interest) such as ruins and abandoned buildings. The chests can be well hidden depending on how they manifest in your particular procedurally generated world, so it’s worth exploring every nook and cranny before you leave one of these locations.

There’s no shortage of chests to discover, and the more you explore a realm, the more you’ll find. If you want to maximize the amount of Minor Realm Cards that you find without having to craft them yourself, leave no stone unturned before you move on to another realm.

Complete Fae Towers and Sites of Power¶

As you progress through the story in Nightingale, you’ll encounter more ways to find Minor Realm Cards by completing Fae Towers and Sites of Power. These aren’t always shown on your map as you first spawn into a realm, so you’ll need to explore it thoroughly. However, most of these sites are obvious enough since they consist of Fae Ruins or abandoned buildings. You won’t always be able to gain access immediately, though, and this is probably a good thing while you’re a relatively low-level character.

As you improve your Hope and Gear Score, you can start entering Fae Towers and Sites of Power to confront the more powerful enemies there. Some of these sites will even have bosses that you need to kill, and this provides another way to loot Minor Realm Cards. You won’t necessarily get more powerful cards by looting bosses, though, so don’t worry if you’re not strong enough to take on bosses just yet. You can get plenty of cards just from looting chests for a good chunk of the early game.

Craft Minor Realm Cards¶

It’s important to note that most Minor Realm Cards that you discover will be destroyed after you use them once, but only when you replace them with another card. That said, if you really like a particular card but want to experiment with others, there’s no need to worry. You’ll eventually be able to purchase recipes for all the Minor Realm Cards from Essence Traders, which can be found in any realm. You should always be able to see the location of these traders on the map, so you can reliably visit them whenever you want to purchase more.

As you progress through the game, you’ll unlock more recipes for Minor Realm Cards. Once you have the recipe, you won’t need to purchase it again. All you need to do is craft the Enchanter’s Focus table, the recipe for which you’ll acquire early on either by purchasing it from the Essence Trader or earning it as a reward from Puck.

To craft the Enchanter’s Focus table, you’ll need x1 Lumber (from the Saw Table), x2 Ingots (from the Smelter), and x5 Glass (also from the Smelter), so keep in mind that you’ll need at least two other crafting stations before you can properly make use of it.

Outside of purchasing Minor Realm Card recipes to craft from Essence Traders, you may also be lucky enough to find the recipes out in the wilds, so you’ll always benefit from exploring if you want to save on spending Essence Dust!

How to Use Minor Realm Cards¶

Once you’ve found a Minor Realm Card that you want to use, you’ll need to look for a Realmic Transmuter in order to make it active in your current realm.

Where to Find a Realmic Transmuter¶

Fortunately, Realmic Transmuters are present in every realm that you visit, and they’re always marked on the map, just like Essence Traders. Realmic Transmuters are large Fae structures that look a bit like the spacecraft machine from Contact (1997). In any case, these aren’t portals to another dimension, but they do impact your world in significant ways as you use them to apply Minor Realm Cards to your realm.

You can only use one Minor Realm Card at a time currently, but it may be possible to use multiple cards at once with future updates. When you interact with a Realmic Transmuter, you’ll see all your available Minor Realm Cards on the left side of the screen, and you can drag them to the empty slot on the right side to see more details about what they do. You can then confirm whether you want to use it by clicking “Apply”.

Can You Remove Minor Realm Cards?¶

If you ever get tired of using the same Minor Realm Card, or you no longer think the trade-off of the buffs for the debuffs is worth it, you can remove the card by returning to the Realmic Transmuter and inserting a Cleansing Card instead, which can be crafted at the Simple Enchanter’s Focus crafting station. However, as mentioned above, you can only ever use a Minor Realm Card once, so when you remove it, you won’t be able to get it back without crafting it again or randomly finding it out in the wilderness. So, be sure that you really want to remove it before you commit!