No Rest for the Wicked Guide | How to Beat The Caretaker and the Tusk

Here’s a guide on how to beat The Caretaker and the Tusk in No Rest for the Wicked.

Game Guide by Imdeadfrfr on Jun 13, 2026

When your progress takes you into the ancient, shadowed depths of the Temple of Day and Night within the Marin Woods, No Rest for the Wicked becomes a horrifying bottleneck of operational difficulty. The sanctum is guarded by The Caretaker and the Tusk, a very deadly dual-boss encounter specifically designed to break your traditional defensive rhythms and punish reckless spacing. This battle is the ultimate mechanical end-game test, requiring full split-screen spatial awareness and perfect stamina management to survive.

No Rest for the Wicked, The Caretaker and the Tusk, NoobFeed

The moment you step into this stone arena, you are immediately faced with the task of balancing two diametrically opposed threat profiles, occurring at the very same time in the very same space. The Caretaker is a thin figure in robes, wielding a huge staff, and uses magical teleportation, broad swaths of blight, and destructive localized shock waves. His companion, the Tusk, is a gargantuan, mutated warthog tearing across the floor on pure physical momentum and unstoppable charging parameters.

Winning this crazy battlefield requires a total elimination of nervous panic and a very methodical way of picking off the threats one by one. Trying to attack both bosses at the same time will quickly result in your character getting completely blindsided by a blind-angle charge while you attempt to maneuver through the lines of magic projectiles. This all-inclusive tactical guide includes tips on how to suit up for operations, down the rampaging beast first, and survive the Caretaker’s final spell-casting rotations cleanly.

Configure a High Mobility Sustainability Loadout

But it is absolutely vital to conduct a meticulous inventory audit before you step into the grand chamber of the temple to make sure you don’t get pinned down. This fight is very reliant on constant repositioning and sprinting away from overlapping area-of-effect zones, so entering with a heavy plate loadout can be very punishing. You can maximize your active movement velocity and defensive invincibility frames by swapping your gear pieces to fit into a light or fast medium weight class.

With the two of them combined they have a huge health pool and you should be hitting the crafting tables in Sacrament to coat your main hand weapons with glowing flame or frost oils to effectively chip away at them. The Tusk has a huge weakness to sustained elemental fire properties, so you can easily stack a lingering damage-over-time status effect with consecutive quick strikes. Or, you could just equip a utility rune like Blink. Blink is a near-instant repositioning tool, and when you’ve completely emptied your baseline stamina pool, it’ll use focus to get you out of tight corners.

No Rest for the Wicked, Bossfight, NoobFeed

And your quick-use consumable slots need to be packed full of premium cooked dishes that actively boost your internal stamina regeneration figures too. Normal health items are good for raw recovery, but eating a meal like fish salad will refill your green energy bar almost instantly during frantic running sequences. Keeping this passive stamina multiplier active throughout the duel means your character won't freeze in place from total physical exhaustion mid-dodge.

Dismantling the Rampaging Tusk First Momentum

The only real universal agreement on how to cleanly survive the first phase of this encounter is to totally ignore the Caretaker and aggressively hunt down the Tusk first. The giant warthog is the primary source of disruption within the arena, thus permanently removing it streamlines the mechanical flow of the fight. The beast's most-loved opening move is the Charged Ram, a straight-line dash where it aims its huge tusks straight at your chest.

To take advantage of this aggressive charging routine, you should purposely place your character to stand close to the solid stone perimeter walls of the temple chamber. Wait for the beast to dig its front hooves into the dirt and charge towards your location and then make a sharp last second sideways dodge roll. The Tusk will be moving forward fast enough to run right past you and smash it's skull directly into the solid rock wall putting it in a long three second stun.

As soon as the warthog enters this self-inflicted wall-stun state, charge it and hit it with your most powerful charged physical attacks or high-damage weapon rune abilities. You also need to watch out for its Travelling Ground Stomp, where it jumps into the air and stamps its feet up to five times in a row. The last stomp in this sequence creates a clear circle of purple shockwaves, which means you need to back off immediately or be subject to massive posture destruction.

Avoiding the Everlasting Environmental Teleportation and Waves

As you are busy controlling the warthog’s position along the walls, the Caretaker will use instant teleportation to keep popping up at random angles around you. Often he will blink and immediately cast Ground Wave, sending a straight ripple of cracked earth shooting across the center of the room. Luckily this one projectile moves in a strict straight line, so you can easily dodge the incoming damage with a simple diagonal step to either side.

The Caretaker's Ground Slam is a far more insidious threat. This is a high-impact ability where the Caretaker slowly lifts his magical staff into the air to gather dark purple energy. The resulting down smash releases a giant radial shockwave, which can easily take up almost half the available floor space in the temple. The visual tell for this move is purple target lines glowing across the masonry, giving you a clear window to sprint to the opposite side of the room.

If both the Caretaker and the Tusk are attempting to channel their own shockwaves simultaneously, you have to totally abandon any and all offensive aspirations. Just lock your whole camera angle on following the overlapping purple threat circles and do back-to-back backflips to find a clean patch of stone. Don't walk along the torn up earth trails the boar's charges leave behind, as the terrain is rough and cuts your movement speed down to a crawl and consumes more stamina.

Punishing the lone caregiver and isolating

Once the Tusk's health bar is completely depleted and the massive beast hits the dirt, the entire dynamic of the battle shifts dramatically in your favor. The wild physical charges are no longer in the equation and the single Caretaker is incredibly easy to track and predict. But don't relax your guard entirely during this final stretch, as he will immediately ramp up the sheer frequency of his spell-casting rotations.

No Rest for the Wicked, Combat guide, NoobFeed

He’ll often start to cast a specialized Summon spell, summoning spectral plague creatures who run across the stone floor in tight, linear paths. These summoned phantoms won't actively follow your movement and only travel a short distance before vanishing, so you can safely ignore them by keeping yourself in a close-range positioning loop. If you run straight into the Caretaker's hip while he's channeling these summons, you can stay completely safe, while countering with melee attacks constantly.

You still have to respect his big staff swings, which have wide horizontal arcs meant to bat away aggressive melee players. Wait until he’s run out of his basic two-hit swinging combo and then commit your remaining focus points to a devastating critical skill strike. Keeping a very disciplined, reactionary pace and not getting greedy on his post-teleport frames will easily allow you to drain the rest of his life pool.

Protect Your Exalted Rewards and Grow Your Inventory

Once and for all. The Caretaker’s personal health pool is destroyed and he dissolves cleanly into a cloud of dispersing dark mist, in a dramatic death animation. Successfully puring this ancient temple chamber rewards your character with a veritable bounty of exotic upgrade materials, Boar Tusks, Basic Hides, and pristine Human Bones. Most notably, the combined loss gives the one-of-a-kind headgear piece for the Caretaker’s Habit, and a highly sought-after Plague Ichor component.

This ichor should be immediately returned to the Watcher living in the central keep of Sacrament in order to unlock an additional gear or item inventory slot permanently. If you increase your carrying capacity you can farm the next high level zones for a long time without having to constantly dump valuable loot. If you can perfectly position yourself in space and focus on taking out the Tusk first, dodging the purple shockwave boundaries, you will easily defeat this legendary duo.

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