Ever since the trailer sneak peeks, knowing how to soar across the sprawling map of Pywel in Crimson Desert has been on every eager player’s mind. The massive world is best explored by discovering it yourself from a play to find out standpoint, because the flight skill, like most other abilities, comes naturally through story progression.
However, if patience is not your strong suit and you want to take to the skies right away, we have everything you need to know about unlocking the flight ability and how to use it in Crimson Desert.
Beware for some spoilers and prepare to be a little disappointed.
How To Unlock Flight Skill In Crimson Desert
To fly, you need the crow wings, but unfortunately, Kliff does not come equipped with either the ability or the cloak by default.
In the Skills menu, you will find this ability in the Health tree. Most abilities can be unlocked by spending Abyss Artifacts or by observing someone perform them. Flight, however, is one of those skills that requires meeting a specific prerequisite before you can learn it.
In this case, that prerequisite is completing the Traces main quest, which revolves around a series of subquests taking place on the Axiom Archive and the Ethereal Path Abyss.
This questline culminates in the Woman in White subquest, which becomes available right after completing Abyss Without Balance. In it, you need to speak with White Crow the Witch, who hands you the crow cloak and compels you to jump from the sky island.
The crow cloak automatically unlocks the flight skill as part of this sequence. After this, you can further enhance the ability by spending Abyss Artifacts in upgrades like Swift Flight and Aerial Roll.
Fortunately, all this unfolds relatively early in Crimson Desert, so you will not have to wait too long.
How To Fly In Crimson Desert
The dive from the Ethereal Pathway Abyss during the Woman in White quest serves as a good primer on flying in Crimson Desert. While you are free-falling in the air, you can press X or Square depending on your controller, and doing so will bring out the crow wings and put you into flight mode.
Now then, not to put a damper on your excitement, but flight is unfortunately more akin to gliding rather than true soaring, and you cannot gain height.
To make matters worse, this ability is even more limited by the fact that you can only stay in this form for so long because it utilizes stamina, which drains fairly quickly early on while controlling Kliff in the air. Once it runs out, you will exit this mode and return to falling through the sky again.
Fortunately, stamina does not stay depleted permanently like it does in Tears of the Kingdom. It refills shortly after a brief delay once you exhaust it or deactivate flight mode, letting you get back into the air without too much waiting around.