The In Vino Veritas quest in Romestead is one of those objectives that sounds simple until you realize the items you need are locked behind one of the game's toughest early biomes. Venus wants a drum and a lyre donated to your altar, along with grapes and beer, and the reward is access to the Wine Dolium, a structure that produces a potent healing item indefinitely. The catch? Both instruments only spawn in the desert, and the desert does not go easy on unprepared players.
What is the In Vino Veritas quest?
This is a Venus god quest that requires you to donate four items to your altar: grapes, beer, a drum, and a lyre. Grapes and beer are farmable at your settlement, but the two instruments require a trip into the desert biome. Once you complete the donation, the Wine Dolium unlocks, letting you produce wine as a healing item as long as you keep a grape farm running and have an automated watermill grinding grapes into paste.
Wine produced at the Wine Dolium is a potent healing item with no production cap, making the altar upgrade and this quest one of the better early investments in the game.
Romestead Guide: How to Get Drums and Lyres
How do you reach the desert biome?
Head down the large paved road from your starting area and follow it until the terrain shifts to desert. Before you enter, clear out the fortress entrance that guards the biome's threshold. This is not a casual stroll, the desert is packed with difficult enemies, and going in with starter gear is asking for trouble.
Getting your hands on tin to craft bronze equipment before making this trip is strongly recommended. Bronze weapons and armor make a noticeable difference against the enemies you will encounter inside. Check out the Romestead beginner's guide for a full breakdown of professions, resource chains, and how to progress your gear before tackling harder biomes.
Do not rush the desert without upgrading your gear first. The enemies near the fortress entrance and inside the biome hit harder than anything in the starting zones.
Where exactly do drums and lyres spawn?
Both items are found exclusively at Satyr camps scattered across the desert biome. These are small points of interest occupied by Satyr enemies. There is no single guaranteed spawn point for either instrument, so the approach is to work through as many Satyr camps as you can find while clearing the area.
Drums appear as destructible objects that physically resemble drums. Smash every crate and breakable object at each camp, then check your inventory. Lyres follow the same logic but tend to appear inside crates rather than as standalone world objects. The drop is not guaranteed from any one specific camp, so persistence across multiple sites is the strategy.
After clearing a Satyr camp, do a full sweep of every crate and destructible before moving on. Both instruments can be easy to miss if you are focused on combat.
Romestead Guide: How to Get Drums and Lyres
What should you do once you have both items?
Head back to your altar and donate the drum, lyre, grapes, and beer to complete the quest. The Wine Dolium unlocks immediately after. To keep wine production running, you need an active grape farm and an automated watermill processing the grapes into paste. Both are worth setting up before you make the desert run so production can start the moment you return.
Upgrading your altar as soon as possible is also worth prioritizing. The upgrade adds teleportation between your original settlement and any secondary town you have established closer to the desert, which cuts down travel time significantly for future runs.
Why is the Wine Dolium worth the effort?
Wine is a potent healing item with no production ceiling as long as your supply chain stays active. A grape farm feeding an automated watermill means a steady flow of healing with minimal manual input. For a game where desert and late-game biomes keep the pressure on, having a reliable healing source that does not require constant foraging is a real advantage.
For more on tackling the game's toughest encounters after completing this quest, the Romestead boss locations guide covers all 4 bosses, their spawn triggers, and where to find them across the map. For everything else, the full Romestead strategy guides collection has you covered.