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What does your lineage do in Nightingale?

Tracing your lineage back through two generations is an interesting part of Nightingale's character creation,

The lineage of the player character in Nightingale, including their parents, grandparents and great grandparents.
Image credit: VG247/Inflexion Games

The survival-crafting adventure, Nightingale, mixes Victorian era aesthetics with fantasy survival; and in aristocratic high society, your lineage is everything.

However, with Earth left behind and the Faewilds beckoning, what use does tracing your ancestry really have?

Here’s what you need to know about this confusing aspect of character creation.

What does your lineage do in Nightingale?

As part of your Ancestry in Nightingale, you’re allowed to pick a family tree of preset faces to determine your lineage.

After picking an “Archetype” for your character’s face in the “Basics” section of character creation, your Lineage allows you to further customise your appearance by picking parents, grandparents and great grandparents for your character.

While you still have many different options for granular customisation later on in the process, this allows you to weave traits from different presets into the face you’ve chosen.

Once your lineage is full of ancestral faces, you can then move onto the “Inheritance” section of character creation, where, basically, you choose whether you look more like your mother or father’s side of the family.

The inheritance screen of Nightingale's character creator, showing how a player's lineage affects their appearance.
Image credit: VG247/Inflexion Games

The toffish create-a-characters in Nightingale definitely aren’t lookers, so it’s easy to create an aristocratic monstrosity if you’re not careful.

But if you’re more diligent, you can add a nice little piece of backstory to your adventure. However, if you’re not too fussed, you can also just press the dice icon at the bottom of the screen to roll a random preset to add to the mix.

Either way, whether you’re interested in filling out your character’s past or not, as mentioned, remember that you can still fiddle with all of the regular sliders you’d expect from a character creator later on in the process. This means you don’t have to agonise too much over who your great grandad is, both from the perspective of not wanting it to affect your character’s face too much or wanting to create a unique look to show off to other explorers in Nightingale.

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