How to beat Tenebrum in Crimson Desert

How do you beat Tenebrum? Crimson Desert isn’t shy of throwing a few super-difficult boss fights at you. These difficulty spikes can be frustrating, especially if you want to get back to the easy life of fishing and going on a bit of a ramble. Tenebrum is the perfect example of this; it isn’t necessarily the difficulty that surprised us, but how obscure the solution to the fight was.

Some bosses in Crimson Desert, like the Reed Devil, for instance, are hard because of how ferocious they are; hammering you with flurries of attacks, giving you little time to react, and generally being a menace. Tenebrum is just a weird cloud of… something. And like most weird clouds of something, it takes something unorthodox to beat it.

How to beat Tenebrum

Before the boss fight begins, there are a couple of puzzles to solve. The first is on the underlevel, where you are presented with a 3×3 grid of buttons. Each button activates or deactivates the buttons next to it, and the goal is to have every button on the grid lit up at the same time. The combination of button presses is:

• Middle
• Top Left
• Bottom Right
• Top Right
• Bottom Left

Once this has been done, you can activate the machine above using the handle. Head back up the stairs, where you’ll then be tasked to insert four batteries. You’ll see the four batteries on the minimap. Use your Axiom Force to pick up each battery and place it next to the square hole adjacent to each one, then use Force Palm to blast them into place.

Now, the boss fight. It isn’t much of a fight, really, as you can’t attack Tenebrum with your weapons, and it moves around too much to get close to. The game instructs you to ‘find a weak spot’ but in our experience, this just doesn’t work. Here’s what you need to do.

Tenebrum can only be damaged by your Force Palm ability, but to do that, you need to be close to it. You can fly indefinitely during this fight due to the high winds, but we found that Tenebrum would blast us away whenever we got close. The best way to beat Tenebrum is to climb atop one of the columns, wait for Tenebrum to pause in the center before its AoE attack, using that opportunity to fly over and Force Palm it from above.

This fight is frustrating not only because of the lack of information, but because if you die (or get blasted away from the arena), you have to do everything again, even the puzzles. Take your time, wait for the right moment to strike, and you’ll take Tenebrum down. If you need to take some time away from this boss fight, make sure you read our how to fast travel guide so you can get back quickly.